The Pitfalls of Steamrolling the Muslim World - V
By Frankie Martin and Hailey Woldt
American University
Washington, DC
Kurtz, quite elatedly it seems, believes he discovered a crack in our “Panglossian façade” and a glimpse into the “true” Muslim world in an incident that occurred at India’s Aligarh University, a nineteenth century school modeled on Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
In the context of our three models, Aligarh stands for an Islam that respects the West and its culture but retains its Muslim identity. It stands for democracy, integrated economies, trade, women’s rights, and human rights. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who founded the country of Pakistan working within the law, is emblematic of this model, as is Ahmed himself. Early Muslim leaders after the first waves of colonial independence, from Sukarno in Indonesia to Nasser in Egypt, also represent this kind of Islam.
During our trip to Aligarh we attempted to distribute our questionnaires in the usual way but were surrounded by a mob of hostile students, who railed against President Bush as a “terrorist” and yelled their support for Muslims like Ahmadinejad of Iran and Osama bin Laden. Their intensity took us aback because we had just come from Deoband where we were greeted very hospitably.
In contrast to the orthodox Deoband students, the students who confronted us were mostly dressed in Western clothes and studying not shariah law but engineering and economics. One moment the conversation surrounded Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and the next the students were praising bin Laden and condemning Western culture and globalization, the very phenomenon they were studying to be a part of. We encountered anger everywhere we went but that calmed down after listening and engaging with the people we met. This encounter was different because emotions did not diminish, and the students here did not seem at all interested in filling out our questionnaires, literally the only time on the entire trip where this happened. This real experience, enough even for Kurtz, saddened us deeply. Ahmed’s belief in Aligarh’s viability and message seemed to be withering at the roots. “I felt like a warrior in the midst of the fray,” he writes in Journey into Islam, “who knew the odds were against him but never quite realized that his side had already lost the war.”
Aligarh vs. Deoband
The incident at Aligarh tells us much about the present state of the Muslim world. Deoband is gaining ground in part because Aligarh has failed. Reaching out to the West, Muslims believe, has compromised Islam and given them nothing but corruption, poverty, repressive governments, and foreign occupation. Even the modernist leaders we just mentioned, Sukarno and Nasser, had quite dubious credentials when it came to democracy and human rights. The Aligarh students themselves — a few were actually dressed traditionally as to resemble Deoband — complained that however well they learned the language of Western economics and high finance they could never get jobs because no one would hire them because of their Muslim names in India and around the world. They feel persecuted and discriminated against by Hindus, many of whom see Muslims, they told us, as lower than the untouchable caste in Indian society. The students said they had no leaders to look up to and, as if things weren’t bad enough inside India, they believed the United States was waging a war to eradicate Muslims all over the world. They felt that the “doors of globalization were slammed shut in their faces.”
Kurtz correctly connects the Aligarh model to the problems Muslims are having integrating in Europe. The West could be seen, actually, as the “front line” of the Aligarh model. But as we have seen from recent terror plots, including the British attempt by doctors to launch a wave of suicide attacks in London and Glasgow, there are major problems associated with integration. More and more Muslims are following Deoband and attempting to isolate themselves from Western influences, even inside of the West itself. Ajmer, the other town in India we visited and our third model, that of mystic humanism and inclusiveness, is also being sidelined by Deoband.
Again, the reasons are not hard to see, and are covered by Ahmed expertly in Islam Under Siege. When Muslims are faced with humiliation, dishonor, poverty, instability, corruption, and anarchy they may not pray for God to put compassion in men’s souls, as a Sufi might, or write letters of complaint to newspapers or wait for the next free and fair election, as someone from Aligarh might. They want to take action and restore justice to society. They do not want to work within the system, which they see as contaminated. They want a new system. More and more of this need is being expressed in conservative terms that have disturbed the West, which generally likes their Muslims to be in suits, not beards.
The trend of “political Islam” can also be explained by this phenomenon. Conservative movements are gaining ground among tribal peoples in Pakistan, Nigeria, and Middle Eastern countries like Jordan as well as in cosmopolitan cities like Istanbul, New Dehli, and Jakarta. This helps explain why historically Sufi areas like Somalia and Afghanistan, the birthplace of the great mystic poet Rumi, are today the backyard of Deoband.
Despite his picking up the pessimism in Ahmed’s discussion of the Aligarh model, Kurtz’s use of this tense incident in our journey does not constitute the “gotcha” moment he believes it to be. Far from contradicting our supposed “Panglossian façade,” the incident at Aligarh, and the position in which the Aligarh model now finds itself worldwide, actually strengthens our position as tested authorities on the subject. In the context of our models, we need to reach out to Deoband while also strengthening Aligarh and Ajmer. The modernists and Sufis are still around — we met many on our trip and their stories are presented in Journey into Islam — but they are on the ropes.
The Road Ahead
At what point, we wonder, will proponents of the steamroller in Pakistan and elsewhere realize how wrong they have been and attempt a change? It is precisely this line of thinking that has gotten the United States bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and stifled in Lebanon and Palestine with its support of the Israeli bombardment in 2006, which greatly strengthened Hezbollah. It has also led the United States to support the disastrous Ethiopian invasion and occupation of Somalia. That invasion, which the US supported with naval bombardments, air strikes, and Special Forces ground troops, has been an unmitigated disaster, as an Iraq-style insurgency has arisen to challenge the US-backed government. America’s decision to support the steamroller over a more effective and nuanced policy toward the tribal Islamic group that had taken control of much of the country — providing the first glimmer of stability in 15 years of anarchy — has unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe that has recently surpassed Darfur as the worst in Africa. It is also this mentality that led the US to push for a war with Iran, a drumbeat that has lessened substantially with the recent NIE intelligence assessment that Iran concluded its efforts to build a nuclear bomb in 2003. Still, incredibly given the above catastrophic failures, it appears that some Bush Administration officials are still pushing for war, which would radicalize the world’s Shia inciting wave after wave of suicide martyr attacks — including in neighboring Pakistan, a nuclear power — and further bleed the United States of lives and resources.
The next president of the United States will have to take urgent steps to repair this kind of damage. They can start by shifting a great deal of American aid from military expenditures, which only exacerbates the problem, to development projects and educational aid. For an example take Pakistan, which has received over $10 billion from the United States to fight the war on terrorism, which it has used to buy tanks, planes, and helicopter gunships used to subjugate tribes like the Wazir and Mahsud without success.
If half that money, let’s say, were put toward educational programs, especially curriculums that stressed the place of knowledge, or ilm, in Islam and provided an alternative to narrow minded madrassas, which are often the only choice for parents wanting to give their children an education, Muslims would applaud America. This would be tangible proof, in addition to symbolic efforts, that Americans do not hate Islam and wish to engage with its followers. This may just counter the harmful effects of the global Western media, or push coverage in a more positive direction and in turn influence Muslim media, which tends to mirror, in reverse, Western media.
To combat anti-Americanism and to further our interests abroad, Americans must become more engaged with the Islamic world. There is willingness on the part of even the most conservative Muslims, as we wrote about in Journey into Islam, to engage with the United States. There exists a great unsatisfied demand for dialogue. American diplomats need to be in the markets, mosques, and madrassas of Islamic countries making connections with political and religious leaders, showing respect for local cultures, and lending an empathetic ear to Muslim grievances. The United States has been unable to meet that demand, or, perhaps even worse, realize that it even exists.
In tribal societies we operate in we need to play the part of administrator and mediator, not choosing sides in tribal wars, or “transcend the game” as Kurtz rightly calls it. A State Department official just back from Iraq recently told us that in dealing with the tribes in Iraq two things were required: the ability to drink massive amounts of tea and the ability to listen. Whether our very late policy of acknowledging and working with tribal leaders and embedding anthropologists with US military units — which has itself provoked a storm of controversy — will pay off is unclear. But this path of reconciliation is one we must pursue. We must not lose the masses of the Muslim world.
(To be continued)
