Muslim Societies Need to Deal with Their Own Failure
Western ability to deal with Islam is one thing but ...
Guardian,Friday September 28, 2001
There is a recurring delusion that most problems in the world could be solved quite easily if the west would look beyond its narrow interests, try harder, and make up for the mistakes and crimes of the past. That western countries should indeed try harder, and would make a large difference if they did, is indisputable. Yet to see the exclusive key to a better future in changes in western policies is to ignore the irreducible responsibility of the non-western majority of mankind. If you are a westerner, it is cultural imperialism to suggest that all the critical moral and political decisions are in the hands of the west. But when, for example, Muslims argue the same way, they collude in turning themselves into moral passengers.
The attacks on the United States are properly seen as a signal to the west that it must change its behaviour, not just by striving for more efficient technical ways to increase security, but more fundamentally. But that signal was for everyone. The present situation illuminates the fact that the Muslim world is in a disarray that cannot be explained simply in terms of wrongheaded western policies, evident although such policies are.
The linked crises of Muslim societies bump from west to east and east to west along a dangerous transmission belt. In Kashmir, few care much about Palestine, except in a rhetorical sense. In Palestine, few have time for Kashmir. In Afghanistan, Afghans care little about anything except Afghanistan - witness the fact that Afghans are notably absent from the lists of suspected hijackers, whereas Osama bin Laden, obsessed with the Holy Places, seems to have little real interest in the plight of Islam in South Asia.
But it is precisely this situation that allows the different crises to play into each other. Each region has players from outside whose interests complicate and worsen the local situation. Bin Laden is at that point where the very distinct problems of the secular Arab Middle East, the Arabian peninsula, ex-Soviet Central Asia, and Islamic South Asia intersect.
The connection that cannot be disputed is that of failure, whether real or perceived. It is not original to suggest that Islamic countries have found it harder to adjust to what they see as failure than have other non-western societies. Religion and tradition suggest to them that they should have a superior, rather than a middling, position in the world. While Japan, Russia, China and India have all to some extent succeeded in catching up with the west, Muslim societies have not made comparable progress.
The most familiar failure, which does not need much rehearsing, has been that in the secular Arab Middle East. The new republics gave their citizens poor government and, in addition, could not muster the industrial and military strength necessary to confront a US-supported Israel. When realists like Sadat and, later, Arafat, emerged to offer peace in return for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, the Israelis responded according to their own halting timetable; American pressure was less than it should have been and, in the fumbling, the opportunity was lost. Weakened governments now maintain a sort of truce with their disappointed peoples, on the basis of anger at both Israel and the US.
The failure in the Arabian peninsula arose out of the combination of oil wealth with monarchical oligarchies and puritanical forms of Islam that extended to their regimes no automatic legitimacy. Oil leverage did not make Saudi Arabia a great power, and made only a limited difference on the question of Palestine, but Saudi Arabia's wealth allowed for much meddling abroad. Saudi Arabia, in effect, exported its troubles.
When Russia attempted to extend its colonial control of Muslim central Asia into Afghanistan, it set in motion a process which ultimately bound together Muslim failures in both West and South Asia. That has culminated now in a western threat to Afghanistan that also threatens to undermine the foundations of the Pakistani security state.
Pakistan's main difficulty is not the existence of a vehement street opposition, nor differences of religious belief among its elite. It is that the Americans are asking Pakistan, as the historian Professor Ian Talbot puts it, "to throw 20 years of strategy into the dustbin". Pakistani life has been dominated since partition by a vain search for a way of maintaining strategic equality with India. This has provided the rationale for its foreign policy and the legitimisation for the overwhelming role of the army and the intelligence services in domestic affairs.
After defeats in war and the loss of Bangladesh, the perplexed Pakistani security elite found a new strategy for Afghanistan-Kashmir. As the Russians flailed away, Pakistan moved into Afghanistan, with the Taliban as its instrument and ally, in pursuit of what was called "strategic depth". Influence in Afghanistan and the use of its facilities to train fighters in Kashmir, along with the acquisition of nuclear weapons, was in some way supposed to compensate Pakistan for India's otherwise vast superiority.
The debate now evidently going on behind the scenes between the American and Pakistani governments is in part about preserving this unhappy strategy, by ensuring that a government beholden to Pakistan survives in Kabul, whatever happens to Bin Laden.
There are Pakistanis who wish that their country would reconcile itself to the fact that it cannot ever be more than a distant number two to India in South Asia. If it continues to bankrupt itself to match India, where are the resources to be found to feed and educate a country which by the middle of this century will be the world's third most populous nation? How can Afghanistan ever recover if its biggest neighbour insists on viewing everything that happens there through the lens of conflict with India?
There are Saudis who accept the fact that oil wealth alone does not entitle them to a leading role for which they have neither the population nor the sophistication, and that exporting extreme forms of their style of Islam can only bring them trouble. There are Egyptians and Syrians who understand that the roots of failure in their societies cannot be explained away by raging at US support for Israel.
There must be many Muslims everywhere who understand, too, that defining success so exclusively in terms of physical power - and then not achieving it - must shape the mentality of the dangerous minority who will then seek any remedy for Muslim weakness.
Turkey and Iran, while far from free of this preoccupation - and with military establishments to prove it - may be in different ways pulling away from it. Real power, including real military power, springs out of many different kinds of success: intellectual, social, cultural, and political.
What needs special emphasis in these new and charged circumstances is that the problem of Muslim failure is not the same as the problem of the failure of the west to deal with Muslims always wisely or well.
