Foreign Policy Research Institute,
Vol. 8, No. 4, September 2003
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THE AMERICAN ENCOUNTER WITH ISLAM:
A REPORT OF FPRI'S HISTORY INSTITUTE FOR TEACHERS
Foreign Policy Research Institute
A Catalyst for Ideas, www.fpri.org
Footnotes
The Newsletter of FPRI's
Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education
On May 3-4, 2003, the Foreign Policy Research Institute held its tenth
History Institute for Teachers, a program chaired by Walter A.
McDougall, Pulitzer prizewinning historian. Forty-two teachers from fourteen
states participated in a weekend of lectures and seminars, featuring seven
outstanding scholars. The papers from the conference will be published
in the Winter 2004 issue of Orbis, due out in December; condensed
versions of selected papers have appeared as FPRI bulletins.
THE AMERICAN ENCOUNTER WITH ISLAM:
A REPORT OF FPRI'S HISTORY INSTITUTE FOR TEACHERS
by William Anthony Hay, Rapporteur
Most analyses of terrorism and Islam following the September 11 attacks
have stressed the thousand-year conflict with Christianity and the
West. Although Muslims define themselves and the Christian West in terms of
religion, Western countries view relations among themselves and with
Islam in national terms as British, French, Germans, or Americans.
Understanding America's distinctive encounter with Islam is thus
crucial to appreciating both the American and Islamic perspectives on the war
on terrorism.
September 11 focused American attention on terrorism as never before.
What factors motivated Al-Qaeda campaigns against the United States?
Despite Osama bin Laden's rhetorical invocations of the Crusades and
the late-medieval Spanish expulsion of Muslims from Andalusia, resentment
toward America derived from more recent events. What makes America's
relationship with the Islamic world different from Europe's? Where
does America's encounter with Islam fit in the clash of civilizations?
These were the questions that this year's History Institute was designed to
address.
ISLAM AND THE WEST Islamic leaders use the word "Crusade" to describe
a particular set of historical grievances. Edward Peters, who teaches
medieval history at the University of Pennsylvania, examined this
meaning's origins. The Crusades were devotional military pilgrimages
from Western Europe designed to regain and control the Holy Land. They
occurred sporadically along the periphery of the Islamic world, and
Arabs only identified them as a single enterprise after they ended and were
largely forgotten. Mongol invasions that included the sack of Baghdad
in 1258 and successful Muslim resistance to it were more significant to
Muslim rulers and people of that era.
Current images of the Crusades date from the nineteenth century, when
Arab societies absorbed an expanded Western historiography that shifted from
triumphalism to ambivalence to criticism. Skeptical interpretations
from the Enlightenment gave way to a different view shaped by critical
scholarship and romantic interest in the Middle East. France
appropriated the Crusades to its heritage, and French intervention in Algeria in
1830 provided a prism for interpreting them. Popular images disseminated in
literature and the arts defined understanding of the Crusades.
Christian Zionism also had an influence, particularly in Britain. New Western
interpretations of the Crusades spread to the Middle East first through
Christian Arabs and others there who could read Western languages. The
Crusades became a theme in Turkish political debate by the late
nineteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire's collapse fed Muslim fears of the
West. The rise of political Islam and the establishment of a Jewish state in
the twentieth century encouraged historical parallels and a formerly
marginal event, the Crusades, became the foundation of Western conflict with
Islam. Western historiographical changes absorbed by Arab thinkers and
politicians thus enabled the polemical invocation of the Crusades as an
assault on the Islamic world.
Jeremy Black, a scholar of international relations at the University of
Exeter and a Senior Fellow of FPRI, developed further the themes that
Peters raised. Viewing the past in its own terms shows a very
different scene from what is often depicted as a clash of civilizations.
Cultural relations occur along a continuum of conflict or cooperation usually
defined by syncretism. The fault-line between Islam and Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth century ran from Spain to Kazakstan and later
expanded through oceanic commerce to include Sumatra, India, and the
Horn of Africa. Internal divisions, however, outweighed conflict between
Islam and the West. Muslim Khanates often allied with Russia, while France
cooperated with the Ottoman sultans as part of their struggle against
the Habsburgs. Britain later adopted the same divide-and-conquer approach
in India. Wars among Islamic polities killed more Muslims than fighting
with Western powers during the early modern era, and no sense of mutual
antipathy united the West and Islam against each other. Local rivalries
eclipsed outside threats until the later nineteenth century. Thus, the
old story of the West against the Rest must be revised.
Western powers did not pose the main threat to Islamic polities until
the nineteenth century, and Western dominance cannot be assumed for earlier
periods. European powers often fought at a disadvantage with
non-European adversaries. Black cited the wars in North Africa that followed the
Reconquista of Spain, in which neither Spain nor Portugal successfully
imposed their will on Morocco. After defeating Portugal's King
Sebastian in 1578, the Morrocans led by Abd al Malik declined to counterattack
Portuguese coastal enclaves and turned instead to what they considered
the more important regions around Timbuktu. Not until 1844 did Europeans
operate successfully in Morocco. Similarly, a narrative that emphasizes
the Ottoman wars with Europe overlooks conflicts with Safavid Persia,
which imposed a major drain on Turkish resources and limited their
effectiveness on other fronts. Europeans and other Christians were not
the only non-Muslim groups ruled by Islamic polities; the Mughal
invasion of India provided a greater extension of Muslim rule over non-Muslims
than the Turkish occupation of the Balkans. Early Western encounters with
Muslim polities, especially in South Asia, involved trade rather than
war and remained peripheral to those regions. Only later did Western
powers become predominant globally, and even into the twentieth century local
conditions defined relations with European powers. Decolonization after
1940 set the context for Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic movements against the
West. Only since then did the view emerge of the West and Islam as
cohesive entities locked in conflict. This interpretation does not
accurately reflect historical experience.
Black stressed the role of contingency and choice in understanding
international politics. Geopolitics thus holds particular importance
as the context for decisions. Teaching about encounters between Islam and
the West should convey the complexity of relationships. Christian and
Muslim states were not always at war with one another, their commercial and
cultural exchanges frequently brought mutual advantage, and conflicts
among Christian states or Muslim states affected their destinies more
than any clash of civilizations. Historical study involves the application
of intelligence to developing a critical understanding of the past, and
developing effective foreign policy requires a similar approach to
current events.
ISLAM IN AMERICA Philip Jenkins of Penn State University argued that
teaching about Islam's development within the United States requires an
appreciation of that faith's diverse traditions. Despite some recent
studies on Muslim slaves from West Africa and Moriscos who joined the
Spanish conquistadors, colonial North America did not provide a
conducive environment for practicing Islam. Immigration during the nineteenth
century brought Islam to the United States. Arabs worked with the U.S.
Army during attempts in the 1850s to establish camel- mounted cavalry
in desert regions. Muslim traders left traces in such unexpected places
as Ross, North Dakota and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. These immigrants mostly
came from Lebanon and Syria, and their presence introduced Shiite Islam,
along with Alawite and Druze sects, that shaped the practice of Islam in
America. The United States had a widespread Muslim presence by the
1940s, with 52 registered mosques and a governing organization established in
1952.
African-American varieties of Islam developed separately from those
brought by immigrants. Noble Drew Ali created the New Jersey-based
Moorish Science Temple in 1913 based on a combination of mysticism and
heterodox beliefs on the fringes of Islam, but he later vanished in
1929. Wallace Ford, who may have been of Syrian or Lebanese descent, drew on
Alawite and Druze traditions in establishing the Nation of Islam in
Detroit in 1930, which found wide support. Like the Moorish Science
Temple, the Nation of Islam adopted doctrines at variance with orthodox
Islam that included secret scriptures, black racial supremacy, and
incarnationism or the idea that man could be god. Ford later
disappeared as well and was succeeded by Elijah Muhammad. After Muhammad's death
in 1975, his son brought the movement in line with mainstream Islam and
gradually abandoned heterodox ideas, leaving Louis Farrakhan with a
minority of followers from the original Nation of Islam. These
divisions make it important to distinguish between self-identified Black Muslims
and those African-Americans who practice Islam. Heterodox groups like the
Nation of Islam served primarily to introduce Islam widely among
African-Americans and popularize it as an religion not considered
wholly foreign.
Immigration since 1965 changed the demographics of Islam in America
while increasing the number of mosques. South Asia and different parts of
the Arab world now provide more Muslim immigrants than earlier sources in
Syria. Jenkins noted that many Arab Americans are Christian. This
change heightened diversity among American Muslims and their tensions with the
wider society. Education, charities, and proselytizing are the main
issues Muslims face today. Wahabi-oriented foundations supported by
Saudi Arabia dominate education and the training of clergy, creating tensions
with Shiite and other Muslim traditions. Charity, one of the five
pillars of Islam, raises other problems as Muslim organizations face
accusations of providing conduits to finance terrorist groups. Prisons are another
point of contact with the wider society where proselytizing brings
conflicts, especially where militant clerics become involved. Jenkins
described Islam as an established part of American life with the
potential to assimilate further despite its being seen as foreign. He compared
it with attitudes toward the Roman Catholic Church in the late nineteenth
century that gradually changed. Americans need to see American Islam
as a more complex and evolving phenomenon than portrayed by the media.
RELIGION AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT Is the Arab-Israeli conflict a
religious war? If so, what does that mean for the United States? Adam
Garfinkle, editor of The National Interest, stated that religious
conflicts involve metaphysical issues that cannot be compromised. He
defined the current Arab-Israeli situation as a nationalist conflict
between two comparatively recent nations.
Conflict differs from open war, and contacts are often sustained in the
midst of conflicts. Garfinkle noted periods of relative quiescence
between Arabs and Israel (for example, 1957-67), which involved some
violence without major fighting. Reconciliation between Arabs and
Israelis is a different issue from containing violence, and peace
cannot be defined solely in terms of reconciliation. A "peace of the
generals" is easier to negotiate than reconciliation between rival communities.
The meaning of religion in this context must also be clarified.
Religion can be many things from a cosmology or a normative code to a social
contract, and a sacred narrative is often connected with those other
meanings. Discussing religion in such terms leads to culture, the
physical artifice of which is a civilization. Arab Muslims describe Islam as a
religious civilization, and Christian Arabs concur with them on the
identity of Arab civilization. Interpreting a conflict in religious
terms means that political and other decisions will be described in those
terms.
Thus, the distinction between religious and national conflicts fades,
and the Arab-Israeli conflict engages many countries that would not
otherwise be involved. Regimes, often secular ones, that lack democratic
legitimacy use this struggle to bolster their own standing. Non-Muslim states
such as India that might otherwise have common interests with Israel adopt a
different view to avoid antagonizing Islamic groups. Garfinkle noted
that the United States has no choice whether others define the conflict
through a religious prism, and the revival of identity politics accentuates
religion's role.
What does this mean for U.S. policy? American mediation should avoid
exacerbating religious aspects of the conflict and strive for a peace
of the generals that makes reconciliation possible. Jerusalem's status is
one issue that draws religion directly into the conflict because it
brings together religious and secular questions. Diplomats must first solve
less contentious matters that ease tensions and avoid setting goals too
high. A gradual effort to secure a modus vivendi will allow the protagonists
to tackle the most difficult issues later.
AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND ISLAM Religion can envenom disputes to the
point where they are impossible to resolve, and FPRI President Harvey
Sicherman argued that diplomats consequently try to distance themselves
from it. How has this affected American relations with Islamic
polities? Sicherman, who formerly worked with the State Depoartment, said that
diplomats typically focused on what their interlocutors did rather than
what they said. In dealing with Muslim states, the United States tried
to avoid Islam, ignore it, and harness it before returning to a more
sophisticated effort at containing its impact on relations. He
discussed these changes in American policy through four case studies: Saudi
Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and the current war on terrorism.
Americans realized that Saudi Arabia had a very different culture
rooted in a distinctive brand of Islam that had the potential to create
tensions. Geopolitics established common interests, however, that led to a
special relationship based on cooperation. Differences were thus respected and
kept off the agenda. This approach worked well into the 1970s, but a
challenge to the Saudis from Shia militants that decade and a 1979
siege of the great Mosque in Mecca led Saudi authorities to defer
increasingly to Wahhabi clerics, and to support an expanded competition with Iranian
Shiism for the allegiance of Muslims overseas. Iraq's invasion of
Kuwait in 1990 forced Saudi Arabia to accept a foreign military presence that
alienated many of its subjects who saw it as a defilement of the holy
places. Those critics became supporters of Osama bin Laden and Al
Qaeda.
Following the Iraq war, the Saudis, in cooperation with the United
States, have tried to return to the earlier model of an "over the horizon"
presence rather than a resident garrison. America now pays closer
attention to Saudi-sponsored clerics who preach against the West and
Saudi financial aid that reaches terrorists.
The United States paid little attention to Islam's role in Iran under
the Shah, and the Islamic Revolution in 1979 that overthrew him came as a
surprise. Muslims resented the Shah's combination of radical
modernization and appeals for legitimacy to a pre-Islamic Persian
history. Ayatollah Khomeini saw Shia Islam as a vehicle for purifying the faith
from outside influences, and his regime defined itself in terms of
jihad. The hostage crisis in 1979 blocked any rapprochment with the United
States, and religion could not be ignored in dealings with Iran.
Khomeini's anti-American rhetoric expressed the regime's policy and
Iran became the leading state sponsor of terrorism. Thus far, attempts to
put the relationship on a more pragmatic basis have failed.
Afghanistan involved an American effort to harness jihad against the
Soviet Union in the 1980s. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
profoundly shocked the Muslim world, and Washington provided money and weapons for
the Mujahideen who drew foreign recruits. The war combined Shia
resistance to outside attacks on Muslim ways, Wahhabi rigorism, and
Sayyid Qtub's view that impious rulers must be overthrown in order for true
Islam to be achieved. (Bin Laden had been a student of Qtub's brother.)
These points underpinned the concept of jihad conducted by a vanguard elite,
a doctrine that resembled Lenin's organizational theory. The Soviet
withdrawal in 1989 created a victory myth to the effect that the
mujahideen had overthrown the Communist Bloc, and veterans from the
Afghan jihad then turned their attention to the West and secular regimes
within the Islamic world.
In waging the war on terrorism after September 11, Americans understood
that Al Qaeda had a religious motive. The Bush administration took
care, however, not to declare Islam the enemy. While some argue that
Washington should target "extremist Islam," secular governments outside the
Muslim world make such distinctions at their peril. It remains wiser to
target behavior (terrorism by groups or governments) regardless of religion.
This formulation avoids a confrontation with Islam per se while facing
the threat from non-Muslim terror groups. American policy focuses on
deeds, but now also recognizes that rhetoric can incite deeds and must also be
reckoned as an act. The United States will no longer ignore religious
rhetoric that has political consequences.
POLITICAL ISLAM John Calvert, a political scientist at Creighton
University, examined political Islam and its view of America. Along
with non-political manifestations of the faith that focus on devotional
activities, Islam can also be interpreted as an ideology to sustain
social and political activities. "Islamism" developed in response to Western
imperialism: Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949) founded the Muslim Brotherhood
in Egypt and Abu Ala Mawdudi (1903-1979) developed an Islamist program in
South Asia. The imperialism to which they reacted involved more than
direct military and economic control over Muslim societies. Elites
within the Muslim world who aligned with the West, adopted its ways, and
advanced its interests provide another aspect of Western influence typified by
Anwar al-Sadat. Western culture, particularly consumerism and business
culture, is another. Islamists believe that their weakness and
vulnerability derive from the lapse of their societies from original
authentic Islam.
Islamist thought is either gradualist or radical. Al Banna and Mawdudi
represent the gradualist approach that aims to win popular support by
persuasion and filling needs unmet by the state; hence, the extensive
charitable efforts by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Radical Islam
follows the model of "revolution from above" articulated by Sayyid Qutb
(1906-1966), a philosopher executed by the Egyptian government for
subversion.
The Iranian Revolution is a Shiite example of radical Islam, and
insurgencies in Syria and Algeria provide Sunni examples. Al Qaeda is
the most famous case, but it differs from other radical Islamic movements
in three ways. Firstly, it targets Americans rather than focusing on local
collaborators before engaging outsiders. Secondly, Al Qaeda targets
civilians instead of governments or officials; September 11 was a
symbolic declaration of contempt for America and the West. Finally, the
transnational character of Al Qaeda indicates alienation from Muslim
countries as well as from modern Western cultures.
Qutb played a key role as the source of these ideas behind political
Islam and particularly Al Qaeda. A teacher and writer in Egypt who drifted
from nationalist opposition to the British into political Islam, Qtub left
an extensive set of writings that set the agenda for Islamism. He argued
that man had compromised the sovereignty of God, and Muslims
accordingly must form a vanguard to conduct jihad. The greater jihad is the
struggle against one's own impurity and base desires, while the lesser jihad is
for the expansion of Islam. Qutb stressed both of these in justifying
rebellion against Muslim and foreign governments. He had studied in
the United States, and his view of the West amounts to a form of
Occidentalism that relentlessly criticizes America as a polar opposite of Islam.
Calvert described radical Islam as a middle-class phenomenon with
educated adherents who often adopt Western dress. It reflects the frustrations
of young men lacking upward mobility or the financial standing to marry.
Many facets of Western culture, particularly consumerism and the role
of women, touch directly on their frustrations, giving Qutb's critique
personal meaning. Radical Islam must be understood in context, and not
confused with Arab nationalism or other movements.
MAPPING AMERICA'S MIDDLE EAST Eric Davis, director of the Center for
Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University, addressed the question of
how teachers can present the American Encounter with Islam. Teaching
comparative politics introduced Davis to the rigid views and
stereotypes about the Middle East that many students hold. Given the large amount
of information available to students, the real challenges lies in finding
the right interpretive perspective. What questions should teachers ask and
what methodological prisms help answer them? Viewing Islam as a single
phenomenon that does not vary according to time or circumstance and
associating it with traditional societies defined as "less developed"
than the contemporary West offers stereotypes teachers must avoid. Davis
urged teachers to use an historical approach and comparative analysis to show
different facets of Islam and how its relation with America has changed
over time. As an example of this approach, Davis described the
evolution of American views of the Middle East. That changing mental picture
reflects developments in American history as much as in the region
itself.
Puritan views of scripture and America as a new holy land defined early
attitudes, and missionary efforts brought the first direct encounters.
Trade was another contact point. Aesthetics dominated
nineteenth-century views through design and literature such as
Washington Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra." Mark Twain described how
tourism combined the recreation of biblical journeys with study of the exotic.
Museums disseminated this perspective to a wider audience. Only after
World War II did Americans associate the Middle East with violence and terrorism.
Nationalist opposition to the West and Arab-Israeli wars reshaped attitudes, and
the debate surrounding Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations"
illustrates how this influenced scholarship. Davis reiterated the need
for critical analysis that engages information by asking the right
questions and offering different perspectives in the classroom.
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