Issue No. 603
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12 - 18 September 2002 Issue No. 603 Heritage |
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Countering misconceptions
Misperception and distrust have often characterised the relationship between the US and the Arab and Muslim world since the 11 September attacks. Omayma Abdel-Latif talks to Shireen Hunter, director of the US Center for International and Strategic Studies, on how this might be countered
The end of Political Islam, winning the hearts and minds of Muslims, the clash of civilisations, failure of Middle- East studies, these are but a few of the items that have made the headlines in the year since the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington. Over the course of that year, Professor Shireen Hunter, director of the Islam Program at the Washington-based Center for International and Strategic Studies (CISS), a prestigious American think- tank, has not had an easy task in countering the misinformation that has often circulated in the media and elsewhere on Islam, the relationship between the West and the Muslim world and the likely outcomes of the current war on terror.
Shireen Hunter
Author of numerous works on Islamic affairs, notably The Future of Islam and the West: Clash of Civilizations or Peaceful Coexistence? (1998) and Central Asia Since Independence (1996), Hunter has been bombarded with requests to explain the attacks, 11 September acting as a catalyst to expose the misperceptions that have often dominated the relationship between the Muslim world and the United States.
Despite these misconceptions, however, Hunter does not think the relationship is beyond repair. "I think the Muslim world is very large, Islam being, with Christianity, the only truly universal religions, and the US is also the most important country in the world, and it has vast interests in the Muslim world. I think both sides have too much at stake in the relationship to say that we have to end dialogue and just accept what has happened," she says.
"Both sides owe it to the innocent lives that have been taken -- and there were a lot of Muslims among them -- that they should continue dialogue," she says. This is why she believes that the campaign launched by the US administration to show the good side of America to Muslim and Arab societies is "a positive step". Yet, she still believes that the US should do more to foster the relationship, noting that "the failure of this administration to properly address the Palestinian question and the peace process has limited the success of a very positive campaign that has been trying to offer a more accurate image of America to the Arab and the Muslim world."
Hunter has taken issue with many of the themes stirring debate over the past year. In an attempt to rebut claims of the failure of Middle-East studies in the United States to predict the dangers posed by the Islamists, Hunter has expressed her disagreement with the views of Martin Kramer, editor of the US journal Middle East Quarterly and a former director of the Moshe Dyan Center for African and Middle Eastern Studies, for example.
Middle East studies, Hunter explains, is a very large field, and people working in it hold different views and different perspectives. Countering Kramer's views, Hunter says that "scholars of Middle East studies have been saying that if you don't address social, economic and other grievances, then extremist elements are going to find fertile ground. However, some people don't want to accept this interpretation, wanting to attribute everything to an abstract notion of Islam instead."
For the past 12 years, Hunter has been warning against mistakes made by the US administration in Afghanistan, leading to the Taliban's coming to power and the outcomes of that. "I don't think that scholars are to be blamed for the so- called failure to predict the 'dangers of Islam'. But by the same token you cannot manipulate the Islamic factor in one place, complaining of its negative effects in another," she says. As far as the actions of the US administration over the past year are concerned, Hunter believes that one of the major problems has been "a greater tendency towards unilateralism," a setback to building a viable system of international law and regulation.
"I understand that in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy it was important that certain actions be taken against Al-Qa'eda, but we have to be very careful not to lose the gains made over the past hundred years for creating an international system based on law and justice in doing so. Unfortunately, however, this has been the picture that has emerged in the year since the attacks."
How much would Hunter agree with the view of some Western commentators that 11 September has put an end to Political Islam?
"I never like to write the obituary of an ideology one hundred per cent," Hunter responds, adding that in 1962 one American professor wrote that Islam no longer played a role in the social and economic development of the Arab World. But "after 1967 we saw the emergence of the Political Islam movements, and after the Islamic Revolution in Iran everybody thought that all the other countries of the region were going to fall one by one."
"I believe we might witness the eclipse of the most violent elements in the movement, of what some have wrongly called the Jihadist groups, but to say that Islam, as a component of the various elements that shape the societies, politics and cultures of Muslim countries, is going to cease is just premature. The history of the rise and fall of the Islamic movements is not linear either in terms of time or geography. For example, no one could have predicted the first Islamic revolution would take place in Iran."
Today, she says, "there is a certain trend towards moderation and the development of a liberal version of Islam, and we have seen this in Iran with the coming to power of President Khatami and his reformists. The problem I would like to refer to is that many scholars tend to lay the blame for the violence between societies and the state on religious factors, whereas such violence could be deeply rooted in socio-economic aspects as well."
Explaining why certain black-and- white views tend to get more than their fair share of the debate in the West, Hunter says that this is one of the consequences of a pluralistic society. All views, however simplistic and one- dimensional on the Muslim world, get attention, and these attract people looking for simple answers.
She points out that this search for simple answers has impacted negatively on the Muslim world after 11 September. Muslims in Europe and the US were the targets of racist attacks and demonised in the media. Muslim communities in Europe are the latest focus of Hunter's research, many European countries having large Muslim minorities. In Europe, Hunter says, such communities suffered a similar kind of backlash to that they suffered in the US after 11 September, but, she says, the majority feeling in European countries is that "Muslims are here to stay," and the younger generations are trying to integrate within European societies without losing their own cultural identities.
Does she have anything positive to say about the "clash-of-civilisations" theory put forward by Samuel Huntington, which stresses conflict between the West and Islam?
In reply, Hunter says that in every theory there is a kernel of truth, but it is dangerous to reduce international relations to a conflict between civilisations, particularly on Huntington's model, which is not supported by historical evidence.
In the Balkans, for example, the Christian West fought for Muslims in Bosnia against the Serbs, and in other areas Muslim countries have sided with non- Muslim countries. "As to whether Islam by nature is against liberal democracy, which is Professor Huntington's basic theme, the answer is that any system of law, any social, economic or political system that is based on the supremacy of divine law is going to be in conflict with liberal democracy, which is based on the supremacy of individual. But in this sense one could also say that Christian civilisation is against liberal democracy. There are debates in the Christian world about abortion and birth control, and these are symptomatic of a conflict between God's law and man's law, and this is not something that only the Islamic world is grappling with."
It would be truer to say, she adds, that "there is an intra-civilisational debate within both civilisations, but that it takes a rather more acute form in the Muslim world. However, it is not something that is particular to Islam. Unfortunately, it is of course much easier to come up with slogans like 'the clash of civilisations' or 'the end of history', rather than trying to explain the complexities of historical process."
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