The Pitfalls of Steamrolling the Muslim World - IV
By Frankie Martin and Hailey Woldt
American University
Washington, DC
Dismissing the simplistic theory that the religion of Islam itself is to blame, we are left wondering, what is the cause of the instability and violence in the Muslim world? Why are young Muslims today so angry, and what can the United States do about it?
Seeking answers to these questions the authors of this piece joined Dr Akbar Ahmed, currently the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, on a tour of the Muslim world, which culminated in the book Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization, the third book Kurtz examines in his review essay.
The study was sponsored by the Brookings Institution, American University, and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. We traveled to eight countries in the Middle East, South Asia, and Far East Asia. We met, interviewed, and distributed surveys to over a thousand Muslims from a full range of society from students to merchants to politicians like Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. As field assistants, we also had spontaneous encounters in homes, colleges, and in markets and street corners.
During our field research in the Muslim world we identified three models of Islamic expression, based on towns in India we visited. These models have been in play not since 9/11 but since the nineteenth century. Ajmer, the mystic Sufi form of Islam characterized by an inclusiveness and tolerance of other belief systems, Aligarh, a university built in the nineteenth century designed to synthesize Islam and the West, and Deoband, the most orthodox center of South Asia, akin to the Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia and the ideological center of the Taliban movement.
We observed these models in the field wherever we looked, and classifying the Muslim world as such helped us make sense of it. The models form the thesis of Journey into Islam, a book to which we both contributed essays and research after we returned. It is our conclusion that it is the Deoband model that is currently ascendant to the exclusion of the other models because people feel Islam is under attack. They are going back to a “pure” form of the religion that provides what they believe to be a blueprint for a just society — seventh century Islam under the Prophet Muhammad and shariah law. It should be noted that only a tiny percentage of Deoband followers are violent, but almost all feel Islam is under attack. For the vast majority of Muslims this does not mean that the solution is the imposition of a worldwide caliphate, as hysterical media commentators and politicians often say in the West, but a desire to live their lives in peace in a religious way without interference from both the West and restrictive local governments.
The Real “Muslim Street”
The reasons for this ascendancy of Deoband were not difficult to see. We encountered the Muslim world awash in turmoil. Muslims we spoke to were extremely angry and confused. They feel humiliated, disgraced, and dishonored. They see many problems in their societies from foreign occupation to poverty and sectarianism, and feel powerless to solve them. “We see injustice everywhere,” a high school student told us in Karachi, Pakistan, “we just don’t know what to do about it.”
When we would first enter mosques and madrassas there was a tangible tension. People questioned us sharply, “Why did you invade Iraq? Why are you torturing prisoners in secret prisons and at Guantánamo Bay?” At first the atmosphere would be tense and cold. I know many wondered if we were not college students but CIA operatives. At first we attempted to answer their questions, but before long we realized that what they wanted us to do more than anything else was listen to them. They feel Americans don’t listen and don’t care about the problems of the Muslims. They think America is engaged in a war not against terrorism but against the whole religion of Islam. Some professed allegiance to Osama bin Laden or told us of their desire to join the insurgency in Iraq — and others emphatically had the opposite view, saying that bin Laden didn’t speak for them. Although many Muslims were enraged by US foreign policy and wanted political solutions to festering problems such as Palestine, Kashmir, and Chechnya what angered them the most, we were surprised to discover, was their belief that Americans hated Islam and thought it was an evil religion.
Their “proof” was not necessarily the wars in Muslim nations in which the US was engaged but media images coming from the West which they said confirmed for them the hatred Americans supposedly had for Muslims. In this age of global media, Muslims see themselves depicted as fanatics, terrorists, and extremists, and are outraged. In surveys distributed to hundreds of Muslims during our trip a strong majority of respondents named “Western negative perceptions of Islam” as the number one threat to the Muslim world.
Once we began to listen to Muslims we met, however, and leant an empathetic ear to their grievances, there was a perceptible warming of tensions, even amongst the most conservative Muslims. This was repeated, again and again over eight countries. Muslims, especially the youth, were thrilled we had taken the time to visit them and learn from them. We were asked for our autograph numerous times and have remained in email contact with some of the people we met on the trip. Pictures in Journey into Islam showing both of us embracing smiling Muslim students reflect accurately the mood after nearly all of our meetings. Some of the most prominent pictures in the book come from the seminary at Deoband itself.
One of our most difficult encounters came in our interaction with Aijaz Qasmi, the head web editor of Deoband’s website and a key ideologue. He served as our guide for the day in Deoband and told us of his most recent book, Jihad and Terrorism, which argued that jihad was justified as self-defense against “Israeli and American barbarism” in mainly Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. He also professed to us his belief that killing innocent Americans and Israelis was justified in Islam as self-defense. After spending a day in Deoband talking and debating the issues, he joined us for the week in Delhi. Through showing respect to him in his own village and framing the political discussion within his own culture and ideas, he began to approach the situation from a very different perspective. He did not suddenly begin to agree with American policies, but he acknowledged that violent jihad was not the best approach. He also offered to translate into Urdu Islam Under Siege, another book reviewed by Kurtz, whose main thesis involves dialogue among civilizations. His translation will finally be distributed to hundreds of madrassas in South Asia, a major step in changing “hearts and minds” in the key area for the war on terror. Yet Kurtz fails to mention this incident, despite its centrality to Journey into Islam and as a key point of our defense of Ahmed’s approach to the war on terror. If terrorism is encouraged by some Muslim leaders, surely changing the minds or presenting alternative perspectives to such influential Muslims should be at the forefront of US policies.
In February 2008 scholars from over 6,000 madrassas gathered at Deoband to condemn terrorism. At a speech convening the conference, the head of the Deoband school said that the killing of innocent people of any religion was prohibited by the Qur’an. This is exactly the kind of discussion within Islam that we should seek to promote.
Our journey demonstrated to us the need to go beneath the surface, to dispense with stereotypes, and have an open mind in order to understand what was actually going on. We back from our fieldwork with Ahmed and wrote Journey into Islam aware of the enormity of the problem but also optimistic that the United States could have better relations with the Muslim world if it only reached out more to Muslims in public diplomacy efforts, consulted more anthropologists and social scientists to better explain Muslim tribal dynamics, and launched substantial initiatives like allocating more money for aid and education.
Duped by the Muslims?
To Kurtz, however, our photographs in Journey into Islam were not an indication that Muslims wanted dialogue with the West but the exact opposite. In Kurtz’s analysis we are painted as naïve college students who had the wool pulled over our eyes, tricked by clever Muslims intent on convincing us, and in effect the United States, that everything was amicable and they were not a threat to America. It is ironic that we, who dealt with hundreds of Muslims and were involved in heated and frank discussions, should be mistaken in our experiences gathered in over eight nations. We, who traveled through the length and breadth of the Muslim world and conducted our research in the field, are being challenged by a scholar who writes from the safety and comfort of his own office. We visited places American diplomats would not dream of going. We find the suggestion that we were somehow duped by being greeted so warmly as patronizing and fatuous. We may have been students but we were above all field workers with questionnaires and surveys to conduct. Because he has no idea of conditions in the field, Kurtz seems to think having hundreds of bearded orthodox Muslims smile for the camera is a task easily accomplished by two American college students. When was the last time Kurtz was in a rural madrassa?
Kurtz writes that Muslims we talked to were “gentled” by constant coverage of our trip in Middle Eastern media — which was not so constant, we turned up at most places quite anonymously — and at any rate also traveled outside the Middle East to Indonesia, Pakistan, and many other countries. Kurtz also accuses Journey into Islam of having a “Panglossian façade” with assurances that “fall flat.” In Candide, you might recall, Pangloss is the blindingly optimistic tutor to Voltaire’s cynical protagonist, whose optimism is contradicted by his own horrific life experiences. Although we are impressed with Kurtz’s use of words like “Panglossian,” this insinuation that we are idiots for believing — based on extensive research in the field — that dialogue with the Islamic world can reap more benefits for the United States than incessantly bombing Muslims is incredibly short-sighted and ill-informed. Letting loose the steamroller in the Muslim world is not “realism,” it is bad policy. (To be continued)
