The Pitfalls of Steamrolling the Muslim World - VI
By Frankie Martin and Hailey Woldt
American University
Washington, DC
So how does Kurtz think the US should fight the war on terror? His essay reaches an appropriately convoluted conclusion. To fight Muslim extremism, he suggests, the United States must “reintroduce somehow the Aligarh University tradition of liberal learning and merit-based employment (independent of kinship ties) to the Muslim world.” This makes total sense and supports our conclusion in Journey into Islam, but his use of the word “somehow” illustrates he has no idea how to do it, which means he either didn’t read Journey into Islam closely enough or disagreed with its conclusions.
Kurtz is right to note that there are “simmering tensions between modernity and Muslim social life.” Globalization has hit traditional societies worldwide like a freight train, and there is a considerable backlash against it. There needs to be a way to temper some of the shocking changes that globalization and modernity have brought to the Muslim world so Muslims may reap the benefits of globalization without giving up who they are. Far from being predisposed to reject anything coming from the West including education and development with terrorism as Kurtz implies, Islam has a rich history of synthesis with the West, as exemplified in the Aligarh model. If all Aligarh represented was pure Westernization, Muslims would not have initially embraced it so warmly. That globalization gurus like Thomas Friedman identify globalization so intensely with Americanization could help explain the resistance it has met in the Muslim world.
It was because Aligarh represented an equal synthesis between East and West that it had success. There were always more conservative Muslims who opposed Aligarh, but they were in the minority. The majority of Muslims took pride in Aligarh, as it meant that Islam could go toe to toe with the West, learn from it, and still retain its identity. “Philosophy will be in our right hand and Natural Science in our left: and the crown of ‘there is no God but Allah’ will adorn our head,” said Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who founded Aligarh University in 1875. “I want you to dive deep into European literature and science,” he once told his students, “but at the same time I expect you to be true to your faith.”
It is ironic that Kurtz seeks to promote the very same Islamic model that he is helping to eradicate with his views on Islam. Kurtz does not seem to envision this synthesis but a total supremacy of Western culture over Islam. It is this position that puts Muslims in a purely defensive mode and strengthens not Aligarh but Deoband, which preaches that Islam is under attack and in danger of being eradicated by the West.
Today, Aligarh has failed, driven in part by those in the West like Kurtz, who actually says in his essay that the West’s goal should be to “assimilate Muslims to Western values.” In this, Kurtz is echoing not Sir Evelyn Howell, who translated the great literature of the Pashtun tribes, but Lord Thomas Macaulay, a Secretary of Education in the colonial administration of British India. In 1835 he wrote in an infamous minute that a “single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” In the same minute he also saw no problem in admitting that he had “no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value.”
Muslims in the twenty-first century do not want to be assimilated to Western values as Kurtz desires; they want to retain their Muslim values, which often overlap with Western values in any case, and be modern. Any trace of Lord Macaulay, which Muslims constantly see in the Western media, will be stiffly resisted. This balance is possible as we have seen recently in Malaysia, which has seen great economic growth and developed internally with markets restricted for a time to the West. Indeed Mahatir Mohammed, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia was cited to us as a top role model by Muslims all over the world for being modern without surrendering Muslim values. Muslims living in Europe — and also the United States, Canada, and Australia — should be welcomed as much as possible by Westerners in an effort to show that their culture is respected. This would lessen their sense of besiegement in their new home and would enable them to more effectively embrace life in the West.
Kurtz is right that the best hope for the United States may be to strengthen the Aligarh model. But we do that by showing Muslims that we respect them and at the same time funding primary schools, universities, and economic development programs in the Muslim world, not by bombing Muslims into submission or forcing them to submit to our ways. It is imperative that we also reach out to the Deoband model. Conducting ourselves smartly as Ahmed did in Waziristan in tribal societies like Iraq doesn’t necessarily have to mean giving up American hopes of democracy as Kurtz believes. But we have to start from square one, and first we have to learn about Muslim culture on its own terms, administer intelligently and compassionately using the best lessons from the British Empire when we must and permit the debate over the future of Islam to continue internally. We must also reevaluate our policy towards decidedly non-democratic leaders like President Musharraf and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the second largest recipient of US aid. It is only then that democracy will have any hope of flourishing in the Muslim world.
Kurtz dismisses educational and developmental assistance to the Muslim world, saying that it is precisely this assistance that has driven what he dubiously dubs the “Islamist revolution.” During the colonial period, he says, many Muslims saw education as an ‘infidel plot.’ A blanket statement like this, although true in some cases, is a distortion of the facts. Many Muslims, and other colonized peoples throughout the European empires including Christians and Buddhists, resented education and developmental assistance if it was seen to not be helping them but be actively working to destroy their way of life. An example of this would be the more hard-line European missionary schools and hospitals, popular especially in Africa, whereby people who benefited from the services had to totally renounce all native custom and become European Christians. If education was seen to be improving their lives and was not a threat to their way of life the people largely embraced educational initiatives. The Muslim world does desire developmental assistance, but it has to be done properly with respect for local culture and religion.
This kind of developmental assistance to the Muslim world would allow the debate to continue within Islam, which is where it needs to take place. Notice that none of the models we have discussed wants to transform Islam, drop passages from the Qur’an, or secularize the religion like critics of Islam in the West like Kurtz, seemingly, or former Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, desire. Adherents of Aligarh, Deoband, and Ajmer read the same holy book and receive guidance from the same Islamic figures like the Prophet Muhammad. In this context it is not hard to see how attacks from the West on the Prophet and the religion of Islam harm American efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of all Muslims no matter their philosophy. Muslims must internally counter their own extremists, and we should create the conditions whereby that becomes more plausible.
The Challenge of Our Generation
Throughout the journey, we gained through Ahmed an unprecedented insight into the Muslim world. Though we went into many dangerous environments — our hotel in Karachi was bombed and a US diplomat killed immediately before our arrival — we put our trust in Ahmed to keep us safe and he reciprocated, putting his trust in us. He never tried to influence us or convert us to Islam. In reality we spoke much more about the problems in Islam and the weaknesses of the Muslim world than its strengths. Ahmed actually called on us repeatedly to better understand our own American tradition and the wisdom of the founding fathers more than anything else. It allowed us to rediscover our own tradition at a time when we believe it is in danger of being compromised.
What we found when we viewed America from the outside was a country that was in danger of losing sight of the ideals that made it great in the first place. For many of the Muslims we spoke to the perception they had once had of a open, free America with democracy, human rights, and the best medicine and education in the world had been transformed into a dark fortress that builds walls around itself, tortures people, incarcerates people indefinitely without trial, spies on its citizens, and launches one disastrous war after another. These Muslims were angry about many problems in their societies, but they were also angry this horrific vision of America had replaced their prior belief that America was a beacon of hope and democracy to be emulated in a dangerous world. Our conclusions in Journey into Islam are focused on ways to improve US relations toward the Muslim world but are also prescriptions for America to rediscover its own ideals, which will actually greatly assist its ability to deal with the world of Islam.
In this paper we hope we have established that ultimately knowledge and scholarship based on integrity and research should be judged on its own merits and not by the religion of the author or the color of his skin. How to deal with Islam is the most defining issue of our times, and we, as young Americans, are disturbed that writers as influential and knowledgeable as Kurtz—who has a PhD from Harvard, writes for the National Review, and is ironically a Senior Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Policy — could be getting it so wrong. In our trip to the Muslim world the perception that in the West Islam is seen as a hateful, violent religion was cited by a majority of Muslims as the number one threat to the Muslim world. In this environment, Kurtz’s views on the religion, which are the same, actually endanger Americans because Muslims see supposed evidence that that their worst fears about Americans and Western culture are realized.
Instead of taking practical steps to strengthen the Aligarh model, in the end Kurtz advocates the steamroller which he figures may just well be needed in Waziristan, and by extension the entire Muslim world, to settle the “problem once and for all.” Kurtz, like his namesake in Heart of Darkness,wants to have it both ways. You cannot call for reform in Islam and at the same time exterminate the brutes. That he does this using Ahmed’s own data from Resistance and Control in Pakistan is the height of hypocrisy and demonstrates how dangerous preexisting prejudices and ideology can be in their ability to twist and distort serious scholarship. “I love your anthropology,” Kurtz seems to say to Ahmed, “but it’s a shame about your religion.”
We have shown that a different approach to Waziristan, leaders like Baitullah Masud, and indeed the entire Muslim world, is necessary if the United States is to emerge from the global quagmire in which it is currently engaged. We are living in dangerous times and we must understand these issues rather than slip back into what we believe to be old-fashioned prejudice. Our generation simply cannot afford this. Policies like those ascribed by Kurtz have devastated the reputation of America today and if continued they will devastate our very future. As young Americans concerned about the future we cannot allow failed policies with dubious origins to continue to blight the coming century.
(Frankie Martin is a 2006 graduate of American University and Dr. Akbar Ahmed’s research assistant at American University. Hailey Woldt is a senior at Georgetown University and research assistant to Dr. Ahmed. Both Martin and Woldt accompanied Ahmed to the Muslim world on a trip which resulted in Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization (Brookings Press, 2007).
