The Pitfalls of Steamrolling the Muslim World - III
By Frankie Martin and Hailey Woldt
American University
Washington, DC
Kurtz makes other perplexing claims in his essay. He accuses Ahmed of being an “apologist” for Islam in his later work, including in the reviewed books Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World, and Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization. In contrast to his earlier work like Resistance and Control in Pakistan where Kurtz believes Ahmed to examine the role of violence in Muslim society adequately, it is Kurtz’s contention that Ahmed then went soft and sanitized Islam’s dirty laundry for Western audiences, coining terms like “Islamophobia” and appealing for Western tolerance of certain practices which Kurtz implies should not be tolerated.
To illustrate this, Kurtz uses an example from Islam Under Siege in which Ahmed argues that contrary to common American beliefs that Afghan tribesmen fire rifles into the sky because they are violent terrorists, firing into the sky is simply a mark of celebration at birth and marriage. Kurtz sees this as contradicting Ahmed’s earlier discussion of the violent political culture of Waziristan in Resistance and Control in Pakistan, and darkly wonders if there is “not some connection between the resort to terror tactics, on the one hand, and societies characterized by violent tribal rivalry and demonstrative gunfire, on the other?” This is sloppy scholarship. Any decent study of the area will show that the prevalence of guns and their use in celebration has less to do with terrorism and more to do with terrain and the necessity in living in such foreboding environment.
Kurtz is in effect saying that the violence that often occurs between and within tribal groups in Waziristan naturally compels people in the area to resort to terrorism, which would explain how Al-Qaeda gained such a foothold in the area. Kurtz thus implies that terrorism has nothing to do with the failure of Muslim leadership or US foreign policy, but an inherent violent tendency and with it a total incompatibility with modernity. This phrenological approach to foreign policy reflects the widely discredited and outdated view of Muslim tribesmen simply as violent and savage “natives.”
If Kurtz is right in his assessment that the entire Muslim world is now Waziristan and the West has been reduced to Wana, the old British administrative headquarters in Waziristan, what does this say about the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims and the religion of Islam itself? Even Kurtz’s title “Tribes of Terror” condemns the entire Wazir and Mahsud tribes, and by extension all the world’s Muslims, as being terrorists. What appears at first glance a penetrating analysis of an anthropologist’s work is actually a thinly guised condemnation of a religion practiced by 1.3 billion people around the world.
The Failure of Muslim Leadership
Kurtz also accuses Ahmed of not being critical enough of Muslim societies and the religion of Islam itself. “Muslim society will have to reform far more profoundly than Akbar Ahmed concedes if the worst is to be avoided.” This is a stunning statement because Ahmed has been relentless in his criticism of Muslim leaders for years.
Kurtz seems to have missed the chapter in Islam Under Siege titled “The Failure of Muslim Leadership.” Ahmed chastises Muslim leaders for failing to tackle corruption, poverty, and public health issues, for using Israel as a crutch to justify repression, and for stifling democracy in favor of wielding dictatorial power in places like Egypt, Sudan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan. Many of the problems of the Muslim world, Ahmed commonly notes, are being caused by rapid urbanization, lack of resources like food and water, disease like malaria and AIDS, tribal and ethnic conflicts, and challenges to traditional cultures brought by globalization.
What Ahmed didn’t do in either Islam Under Siege or Journey into Islam is call for a reform of the religion of Islam itself, which Kurtz seems to be demanding. This begs the question, is Kurtz demanding a reform of Islam, or another word, the kind of “reformation” so often demanded by commentators in the West of Islam? If so, who will do this? In Islam followers have a text they see as divine. Besides, to reject religion would be to reject one’s identity, and there will never be a neat split between church and state because in Islam the two are intertwined. Who will be the Muslim to stand up and say that this passage or that from the Qur’an should be discarded? What is needed instead is a kind of Islamic renaissance. Islam must rediscover its own traditions of knowledge, wisdom, and compassion. There must be a debate within Islam about how to proceed in the twenty-first century, not reforms pushed by the West which have no meaning in an Islamic context.
Islam vs. Tribalism
There is indeed a tension in the Muslim world between tribal, cultural beliefs and Islam, which Kurtz rightly notes in his essay. Customs like honor killings and female circumcision so often blamed on Islam in the Western media, are tribal beliefs common in Asia and Africa that pre-date the coming of Islam; indeed many Christian tribes practice the same customs.
Islam emphasizes total equality, in contrast to tribalism which defines itself on the basis of common lineage and opposition to the “other.” “An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action” said the prophet Muhammad in his final sermon, as recorded in the Qur’an. God created people in different nations and tribes, the Qur’an also says, so that they may “know one another.” The Prophet began his political career as a peacemaker in tribal disputes and reached out to other tribes, including Jews in Medina, and stressed knowledge and compassion over violence. “The ink of the scholar,” he said, “is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.”
Kurtz accuses Ahmed of putting what seems “war-like and problematic” in Islam in the “tribal basket,” separating out a supposed “pure and peaceful Islam.” This is true to a degree; Ahmed does isolate many cultural customs that he doesn’t believe have a textual basis in Islam, but he is doing so speaking as an Islamic scholar, a Muslim the BBC has dubbed the “world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam.” He is a scholar whose work on both Muslim tribes in Pakistan and the religion of Islam worldwide should be seen as constituting a whole. For Kurtz to say that as an anthropologist Ahmed is okay but as an Islamic scholar he is nothing more than an “apologist” who doesn’t understand his own religion is absurd. If we can’t turn to the “world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” for insight into the religion and the people who practice it who should we turn to? Stanley Kurtz?
Kurtz’s analysis also smacks of a kind of smug Orientalist paternalism. According to Kurtz, apparently, Ahmed’s anthropology is the work of a great scholar but as soon as he discusses Islam he is somehow tainted by being a Muslim himself. Would Kurtz apply the same principle to European academics like C.S. Lewis, a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature, or Max Weber, a sociologist, who commented with authority on their own Christian traditions? Indian scholars and statesmen like the philosopher and first president of India Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Jawaharlal Nehru wrote extensively on their own Hindu religion and culture while scientists like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud wrote of their own Jewish culture and traditions. Did anyone accuse Einstein, who many Jews wanted to be the first president of Israel, of distorting Judaism?
Religion of Peace?
In his discussion of Islam, Kurtz falls into a familiar pattern. Commentators in the West, who have seen Islam as an existential military threat for a thousand years, have focused not on Islam’s emphasis on knowledge which gave the world great advances in math, science, and medicine, making possible the European renaissance, but instead on quotations from the Qur’an extolling violence, including the oft cited “kill the infidel” lines. However, these passages come in the context not of pre-emptive war but of defending Muslims from attack. The Prophet of Islam, unlike Jesus Christ, was a head of state, and all states must have a policy to defend their citizens in case of war and conduct affairs of state. The Prophet clearly led armies into battle. But Christianity too had to look seriously at the just war when it was named the official religion of Rome by Emperor Constantine. In this, Islam is no different from Christianity — where major church figures like St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Bernard of Clairvox have all justified holy war in self-defense, to fight evil, or to restore justice to society — or Judaism, in which God calls upon Jews to slaughter the men, women, and children of the Amalekites, a rival tribe who frequently attacked them. In fact Islam explicitly lays down precise and in many ways remarkable rules of war including protection for prisoners of war and a total prohibition on killing women, children and all vegetation in battle. Judaism and Christianity, like Islam, have a core of compassion and faith in God which will lead to self betterment. But a concept of a “just war” exists in all three, and can even be found in non-Abrahamic religions like Hinduism and Buddhism.
American commentators including Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer, author of Religion of Peace? Why Christianity is and Islam Isn’t insist on ringing alarm bells about the imposition of a new Islamic caliphate imposed by hostile Muslim hoards. Independent of all other factors or motivation, this line of thinking goes, terrorism will not cease until Islam itself is eradicated or radically transformed because it inherently predisposes its adherents to violence. The Qur’an thus becomes a blueprint for terror and hatred, as Bill O’Reilly stated when he compared the Qur’an to Mien Kampf on his television show as examples of books which compel their followers to pursue an evil ideology.With this as their source material all good Muslims, to echo Pat Robertson, should be inclined to terrorism because slaying non-believers is in the Muslim DNA. In truth this is amusing because in contrast to St. Augustine’s dictum of cognite intrare (‘lead them in’ — i.e. ‘force them to convert’), the Qur’an says precisely the opposite: “There is no compulsion in religion.” This is not to say that Christianity is an intolerant religion, but simply that a more nuanced, knowledgeable approach is needed when writing about Islam.
This presupposition that Islam is an inherently violent religion still underlies much of our debate in the United States after 9/11, a position that Kurtz also seems to embrace. Under this simplistic analysis it is the Islamic religion itself that is, and always has been, the problem. It is the violence inherent in Islam, extended here by Kurtz to include a synthesis of tribal beliefs and Islam, that is to blame for terrorism and predestines Islam to clash with the West. It is this implicit assumption that has informed the work of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis, two of the biggest influences on US foreign policy after 9/11. To writers like Lewis, who Kurtz lauds in his essay, the inherently violent nature of Arabs and other Muslims meant that Americans had to speak to them in a language they understood — which turned out to be the mixture of intense violence, humiliation, and torture — that has characterized our disastrous policies toward the Muslim world in Iraq and elsewhere. (To be continued)
