Amb. Hume Horan on the US and Islam in the Modern World

["Tim Ewers" <tewers@uidaho.edu>]

The following is a very thought-provoking piece germane to our current
endeavors in the Middle East.  I thought many of you would be interested
given the dialog developed here after the Sept. 11th attack.  Shahab, I
would also be interested in your thoughts on the following ...


THE UNITED STATES AND ISLAM IN THE MODERN WORLD

The months that have passed since September 11, have prompted much
reflection among Arabists: "Why have young, male, Arab Muslims
figured so prominently in the terrorist annals of the past quarter
century?"  There was the hanging of Col.Higgins in Gaza, the
assassination of Defense Attache Bob Perry in Amman, that of
Ambassador Cleo Noel and his Deputy, Curt Moore, in Sudan, the murder
in Beirut of USN diver Stethen, two bombings of the US Embassy in
Beirut, the murder of Mr. Klinghoffer aboard the Achille Lauro, the
blowing up of the Marine Barracks in Beirut, the 1993 attack on the
World Trade Center, the  blowing up of the USS Cole, the blowing up
of our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam, and then...the
awfulness of September 11.  And this is by no means all!

There are superficial reasons for the anger that some young Muslims,
raised in the sterile hatcheries of the refugee camps, or the
religious schools of Saudi Arabia, feel toward us. Often mentioned is
our support of Israel. But this issue deserves a closer look.
 Palestinians' grievances against Israel, have their match in the
half century of neglect and oppression they've endured from
supposedly  "brother" Arab regimes.

Once, when I appealed to Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud for more
help to UNRWA, he replied only "You Americans created the refugee
problem. You solve it."  In response, I asked could he imagine, if a
catastrophe had driven half a million Canadians into ND, ID, and MN,
that three generations generations later, these populations would
still be held in refugee camps?  How differently the half million
Jews driven from Arab lands in 1948 were received by Israel, compared
to how the half million Arabs, driven from Palestine in 1948, were
received by their Arab neighbors!

Nor does America get much credit for what it actually does for the
Palestinians. For half a century, we have provided a plurality of
UNRWA's funding.  For half a century we have led international
efforts to advance the "Middle East Peace Process." Last year,
President Clinton devoted two weeks of his waning Presidency to
sketch out the outlines of an imaginative agreement--one that the
Palestinians would not even accept as a basis for discussion. And we
rarely hear of US efforts to succor Muslims in Somalia, Kosovo,
Kuwait, and Bosnia.

For Arab governments,  the Palestinian issue--among other things--is
something of  a convenient distraction.  By "Waving the bloody flag"
Arab governments can distract their subjects from  misrule,
oppression, and misery at home.

Yet even if the Palestinian-Israeli dispute were quickly solved by
exterior Diktat, we would still be the target of alienated young Arab
Muslims. Why?  Because the Arabs' dispute with Israel is only a
symptom of a deeper problem, one that cannot be solved by shuttle
diplomacy, special envoys, or conferences at Wye Plantations.

This deeper problem exists at two levels: superficially, it has to do
with the failure of Arab political and intellectual institutions to
address the needs of their young populations.  How can being a
citizen of Syria, or Lebanon, or Egypt, or Algeria, or Sudan give
young Arabs the sense of patriotic identity that we get from being
citizens of the USA? Arab states have little emotional hold on the
loyalty of their populations; most Arab regimes are corrupt and
morally discredited. This very much applies to Saudi Arabia, that has
shored itself up externally by its tie to the USA, while at home,  it
both placated and suppressed opposition by giving "power of attorney"
for social affairs to the reactionary, xenophobic `ulama. What
personal attachment, moreover, can Saudi Arabians--60 percent of whom
are under 18--feel for their rulers?  The King and leading Princes,
are all in their seventies, and must seem as remote from most Saudis
as say, George Washington is from us.

Young Arabs, moreover,  are failed by their intellectual leaders.
Where are the Arab Reinhold Neibuhrs, Christopher Dawsons, Karl
Barths, Martin Bubers? Where are the intellectuels engagés who can
help a young Arab make coherent, responsible sense of  a troubling
modern world?  They scarcely exist in the Arab world. The few that
even try, are threatened, jailed, or flee to exile.  Accordingly,
many young and sensitive Arabs--especially members of the educated
elite-- are bereft of moral and intellectual leadership from their
own religious institutions. Jellyfishes, they are drawn to the rocks
of Ousama bin Ladin's "Village idiot philosophy."

More fundamentally, though, all Arab Muslims--and not just young,
educated males--are challenged cosmologically by the modern world.
>From the start, Islamic society was seen by its members as a "City of
God" upon earth. Islamic society was built upon the perfect teachings
of God's own revealed dictation, the Qur'an. In a spirit reminiscent
of Leviticus, instructions for even the minutiae of everyday life
were Divinely vouchsafed. Islam's immediate rapid expansion, its
political and cultural triumphs, were incontrovertible evidence to
Muslims that God had provided mankind with His perfect and final
instruction, for the present and evermore. And Arabs considered that
God's having revealed the Qur'an to them and in their own language,
was a sign of especial divine preferment.

Fom a secular standpoint, Mohammed's task was inconceivably
difficult. He was the Prophet, the bearer of God's final
revelation--but given Arabia's political anarchy, its social and
intellectual disorder, he had also to found the Islamic state.  He
needed to establish the political and legal institutions that could
protect, and give lasting expression to his teachings.  As a
religious figure, Mohammed was probably closer to Moses than to
Christ.

In Sunni Islam, both the secular and religious sides of Mohammed's
mission came to be equally sanctified--and in theory have remained so
to the present. Muslims were supreme in wordly affairs because they
were right,.and they were right because.....It was not until the
eighteenth century that this comforting, complacent alliance began to
break up.  That breakup has continued--and accelerated--accelerated
ever since.

For Christianity, on the other hand, the relationship of politics to
revelation was very different. The Christian revelation came to pass
under the Roman imperium, and Rome's established legal and political
institutions.  Early Christianity tended to accept them as givens. It
expected an early return of the Messiah, and looked for its center in
the spiritual, other-worldy aspects of Christ's revelation.
 Christianity's development, accordingly, was not constrained by
divine prescriptions for the practical organization of man's life
upon earth.

So how should a young Arab Muslim today answer the great question,
"How then should I live?  How can I reconcile the Qur'an's assurance
of divine favor and worldly power, with daily proofs that we Muslims
are falling behind?  And falling behind not just to the USA and
Western Europe, but even to its despised `step-child' Israel?  Where
today are the happy, successful, and above all, POWERFUL states of
Islam? How can God allow His people to be so confounded?   Are our
tribulations a punishment for our flawed practice of His teachings?
 I resolve, therefore, to become ever-more-and-more intensely and
rigorously observant."

Alas!  This prescription will never bring relief to the sense of
political or moral abandonment of many young Arabs. They are trapped,
so to speak, at the bottom of a well, and try to escape by excavating
downward--to China.  The solution only makes the problem worse.
 Their anger and frustration at the West grows, and particularly
toward its standard-bearer, the USA. Our worldly success, our mere
existence, threaten to refute those beliefs and traditions that give
meaning to the lives of Arab youths.

The longer-term solution to the tribulations of Arab Muslim
civilization must be found in the inner resources and recuperative
powers of Islam itself. And here we encounter a problem: the passive,
rigid, uncreative way in which Islamic culture has been transmitted
across the generations. Modern Arab societies lack a tradition of
self-criticism, of rational analysis.  Without the ability
successfully to analyze the doings of the world around them, or even
of their own societies, the Arab public ego has become defensive and
insecure. Public discourse is dominated by a Zeitgeist that
attributes any bad news to the workings of various exterior,
malevolent powers: British intelligence, the Zionist conspiracy, the
CIA.  Never to one's own shortcomings. Such an alibi absolves Arab
egos from any blame or responsibility for every set back. But
multiplied across any number of instances, Arabs come to feel
themselves impuissant, the playthings of unseen but always hostile
forces.

It is hard for us to help. We Westerners face the uncomprehending,
wounded pride of a great civilization.  Nor is there any ecumenism in
Islam. It is inconceivable, for instance,  that anywhere in the
Islamic world, the head of a Divinity School would establish
professorships in Buddhism, women's studies, and the role of religion
in international conflict--as Father Bryan Hehir did at Harvard. A
Muslim might try to proselytize a Christian or a Jew. But for him to
engage in a genuine dialogue with them, would suggest that their
faiths contained some fraction of truth not found in the Qur'an, and
from which Muslims might benefit for the more perfect worship and
understanding of God. Sad to say, in the Islamic world, the
foreigner's extended hand receives no response; indeed, the gesture
is likely to be rebuffed or misconstrued. I'll not forget King
Feisal's polite but frosty dismissal of my naive suggestion--as a
young charge in Jidda in 1973--that much benefit might accrue to both
the West and to the Arab world, were Saudi Arabia to send some young
Islamic scholars to divinity schools in the USA.  A Royal advisor
afterwards reproached me for raising the question: "You were asking
His Majesty to mingle truth with falsehood!"

What should we do to get around this historical and cultural impasse?
 And what could Muslims themselves do to rejoin the modern world on
terms consistent with Islamic revelation? Some thoughts follow.

For their part, Muslims must try to escape from the flies-in-amber
position that history has placed them in. What was revealed
ever-so-long ago as canonical for Islam's secular and spiritual life,
 has become its prison. Could it be that Islam, like other religions,
dazzled and overwhelmed by the Deity's transcendent force, has
elaborately wrought to tame and to confine it?  To make a cage for
God, in which he can be safely observed by mortals? To transform
religion into a sort of divine "containment chamber"? A simple rule
book, a mechanical code of works that promises salvation?

The `ulama and their trade union--their company shop--will fight any
move that could threaten the lucrative monopoly that they have
enjoyed for a millennium and more. But meanwhile, the world is
changing ever faster about them.  The latest catastrophic failure of
militant, political Islam, may represent the death throes of a
crusade that went badly astray. Who now remembers the Mahdi or  the
Assassins in Alamut?  After September 11,  and after the Taliban's
destruction in Afghanistan, will many young Muslims still want to
emulate Ousama bin Ladin?

One may hope that the Taliban's destruction will clear the way for
Muslims to look again at where they are  headed. Already, one sees
young Muslims not refuting, but simply ignoring the dysfunctional
aspects of their tradition. Many sincere, pious Muslim men and women,
are making their own "right reason" accommodation to modernity. They
are acting as many Catholics do, who have taken their own stance on
birth control--despite Papal claims to infallibility in faith and
morals.

With the Qur'an widely accessible to more-or-less educated Muslims,
might Sunni Islam be ready for its own "Protestant Reformation"?  God
in Islam has always had a personal, direct relationship to His
believers.  "I am closer to you even than the artery of your neck."
says the Qur'an.  Might Muslims--from the ground up--be ready to
break from the orthodoxy fastened upon them so long ago? Is the
present moment right for the appearance of a chastened, realistic,
more flexible Muslim approach to the 21st century? If  individual
Muslims can strike out for themselves, and if necessary, re-open the
 "Gates of Ijtihaad," there may be hope for their community's
reconciliation with our time. Such an effort might more easily take
place in the Muslim diaspora--in Indonesia, or India, or even the
 USA--than in Islam's heartland countries.

And for our part, I'd propose first, that we all stop using "Allah"
in English, when we mean "God." A reader or listener might conclude
that the God of Muslims is  horrific, a Moloch, or something drawn
from Aztec mythology.  If we can't agree that we worship the same
God, and that He listens to all our prayers--the prayers of Jews,
Christians, and Muslims--we'll never agree on the smaller
issues...such as the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Second, we and our allies should peremptorily put a stop to the
Arab-Israeli confict.
It has wasted already too much time, talk, lives, and money.  It has
been too much of a distraction.  The so-called "Peace Process," has
proven to be little more than a diplomatic perpetual motion machine.
It provides excuses for all to keep things on hold. The outlines of a
settlement are clear, but betwen Arab anti-Semitism, and Jewish fear
of Arab revanchism, no agreement is likely to be reached or to hold,
unless we guarantee it. If, however, we committed ourselves to
maintaining the security of both sides, Arab and Israeli leaders
could then turn to their populations, and say with a shrug, "What
could I do against the might and desire of the United States?"

Third,  our foreign policy should more forcefully, and consistently
reflect America's ideals.  When Secretary Powell denounced  the
Taliban's oppression of women, was I the only listener to think he
would have made just as much sense if he'd said  "Saudi", whenever
"Afghan" was mentioned? Our government wants, it says, to reach
Muslims' hearts and minds, to reach "The Street."  But how to do it?
There is a lesson for us in the political landscape of the Middle
East.  Where governments are hostile to us, we are often popular with
"The Street." And vice versa. The reason may be that in one case we
are seen as a government, as an accomplice to the unpopular local
power, while in the other, as a liberating civilization.

We are unique in world history: relatively unsconstrained by
traditional considerations of the balance of power. For the moment we
face no credible adversary. We are free to make fuller use of the
source of our appeal.   We should seize this millenarian moment, and
work for an international community that better reflects our ideals,
which are neither of the East nor of the West, and whose appeal
transcends most cultures.

Hume Horan
US Ambassador (ret)
Washington, DC
Thanksgiving Day, 2001