| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Vali Nasr Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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What is the impact of this witch's brew that is created by all of these factors -- the external interventions and so on -- with regard to radicalizing the Islamic parties and groups and moving them away from what might have been a moderate trajectory? Is that why everything hits the fan, because of the sequence that you've just described?
Exactly. Actually, in my opinion, there are three key events that account for ascendancy of fundamentalism. All three events happen to converge on Pakistan in some way, even though it usually goes under our radar even when we discuss fundamentalism. You can always have ideologies out there, but the question becomes, "Why do ideologies, all of a sudden, become triumphant and ascendant?" I mean, Mawdudi and the Jamaat-e-Islami may have been in Pakistan a long time, but why did Islam become important not only in Pakistan, but globally?
The three events are the Iranian Revolution, the Afghan war, and the rise in the price of oil and its implications for the Saudis. These three events had the following impacts. The Iranian Revolution made fundamentalism a viable ideology for opposition -- one that can successfully overthrow a regime.
The corollary is the October Revolution in Russia. Had the Germans not shipped Lenin back to Moscow, had the czar's army not been at the front, maybe communism would have remained a quaint phenomenon of Viennese cafes of the 1920s. But certain circumstances came together to produce the Russian Revolution, and after that, you were dealing with a new reality. So the Iranian Revolution may have not been inevitable; the Shah may have acted differently, Khomeini may have acted [differently]. Once it happened, it had a cataclysmic impact, and you could see that even moderate fundamentalists were saying "Look at Khomeini; he's the model."
Then you had the Afghan war, which in large measure was like the Spanish Civil War for the Left. In other words, they came from all over the Muslim world. They came and fought. They came and fought sometimes for ten, twenty years. Somebody like Osama bin Laden has never really held down a job. He went to Afghanistan when he was seventeen, got military training; never really psychologically left Afghanistan. That's what I'm saying: there are a lot of Islamic versions of Rambos -- highly trained, professional guerrilla fighters who are not going to be absorbed back into an economy easily. And there are tens of thousands of them that remained in Afghanistan.
It was also a watershed event because fundamentalism was successful in rolling back a superpower. So if the Iranian Revolution was successful in rolling back a regime, Afghanistan pushed the buck further by rolling back a superpower. It made fundamentalism much more of a triumphant phenomenon.
The third side of this is that ever since 1974, when oil money came to Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia began to universalize it's own brand of Islam, which is Wahhabism, which is a particularly conservative hard-line and literal reading of the religion. It is called Wahhabism because the majority of Muslims, for the longest period of time, viewed this as an "ism" outside the mainstream, it was so hard-line.
But since 1970s, with the backing of Saudi money, it has become much more mainstream. Many of its sensibilities have become mainstream. It's almost like if you were to think of Southern Baptists spending a lot of money to make the Quakers buy into their values and presuppositions. So the impact was that the Saudis began to bankroll conservatism across the Muslim world, which made it much more receptive to fundamentalism.
Now all three of these phenomena, which account for fundamentalism more than anything you can find in the Koran or the scripture, converged on Pakistan. It bordered on Iran and was directly impacted by the Iranian Revolution. It fought the war in Afghanistan. In other words, many of the people who participated were Pakistanis, as well as people on the border. In other words, they lived the Afghan war. Saudi money was lavishly spent in Pakistan as well. So the convergence of all of these happen within Pakistan, which at the same time was a weak state with internal problems, with a fertile ground for fundamentalism to spread. Everything snowballed in the late nineties to produce, if you will, the second generation: a much more violent, intolerant, extremist version of Islam, which was a product of the Afghan war and the investment in the Afghan war.
With this insightful, broad picture of the changes in Islam and its relation to global events, I want to ask you now, how should U.S. foreign policy address, after 9/11, these complexities?
Again, you've raised a number of very important issues. The first is that there are, obviously, key issues still that animate political opinion in the Muslim world, and maybe push it in the direction of fundamentalism, like the Palestinian-Israeli issue, or the Iraq issue now; or, if you will, those wedge events. We need to handle those clearly, methodically, rapidly, and get past those.
More basically, we ought to follow the policy we followed in Europe in the case of communism. To understand that we're dealing with an ideology that has been ascendant, but it is not religion; it's ideology. The worth of an ideology is what it delivers to the population. The worth of an ideology is that a population buys into it because it doesn't understand or see any other viable alternatives. So if we want to modify or defang fundamentalism, we need to present Muslims with political environments in which they can evaluate other options, environments in which fundamentalism and what it promises, and what it asks in terms of sacrifice, will not appear high on anybody's list.
Thirdly, also try to increasingly separate moderates from radicals. In our own society, we're tolerant of people who hold very conservative views on abortion and who vote accordingly, but who refrain from engaging acts of violence against abortion clinics or gynecologists. We deliberately separate those. Or, we've separated those who participate in violent and militia movements from those who are, simply, anti-U.S. government.
We need to follow policies that would prevent fundamentalism from having a complete hold -- an unrivaled hold -- on public opinion. We should not contribute to an environment in which we say "Okay, here's the Muslim world. Fundamentalists speak for the Muslim world. Hence, they're all fundamentalists." The best we can do for fundamentalism is to just hand over the reigns of power and the right to speak for a billion people to fundamentalists.
So in a way, if I follow your logic, then what we are now doing in Pakistan may be just the opposite of what we intend. In the short term, we're supporting a regime that is aiding us in the fight against al Qaeda, which is sort of cleaning up the mess that was created by all that you've just described. But in the course of doing that, we're latching on to a military ruler who seems to be even more rigid than Zia in clamping down on all of the forces that might lead to democracy, which would then create a framework in which moderate Islamists might emerge.
Absolutely. In fact, the tragedy with Pakistan is that Pakistan, as I said, was a relatively open society. Instead of being nudged in the direction of building on democratic institutions that were present, as corrupted and as inadequate and stillborn as they were --but at least they were there and there was something to build on -- we're moving in a direction of a military government.
In the short run, we might say there is no choice; we need to fight al Qaeda. It was neither political institution nor military institution that we could rely on. We have to do it. But we have to be cognizant of the fact that we don't want this to be a long-run strategy. What appears to be happening in Pakistan, unfortunately, is that we're applying our Arab model there.
What we did in a lot of the Arab world is that so long as you contain your governments and follow basic premises of American foreign policy, we will give you funding and we'll turn a blind eye to your violation of human rights. And then we ended up in a Catch-22 situation with this, because our policy began producing violent anti-American movements. The only people we could rely on to suppress those were the same brutes who were the causes of it. So we keep giving more and more money to Egypt and to Morocco and Jordan in order to suppress the very forces that are caused by the presence of these people in the first place, and we shy away from pushing them to open up the system.
This seems to be the direction Musharraf is going in. "Okay, I'll crack the whip." Every time pressure increases on him, he delivers something. So first he supported the war, then when it came close to the time of elections and he banned Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from participating, he delivered an al Qaeda cell in Karachi. So all criticism of his violation of democratic procedures was suspended in Washington.
Musharraf is, basically, becoming a Pakistani Sadat. He may end up being very popular here if he ends up handing over Osama bin Laden at some point, but he is, obviously, systematically dismantling democratic institutions in Pakistan by gerrymandering the constitution, by gerrymandering elections. And what we have to be prepared for in twenty years, we may be facing sort of an Egyptian version of Islamic Jihad in Pakistan, and we have to think very clearly about what that means in a country with nuclear weapons.
One final question. Looking back at this intellectual journey that you've taken, and your background, I would conclude that you really don't subscribe to Huntington's theory of a "clash of civilizations." That in fact, that creates a rigidity with regard to our perceptions as to what the Islamic world and the West may have in common. Is that a fair assessment?
It is a fair assessment. I did study with Huntington at one point when I was at MIT. I have a great deal of respect for his work. I think there are many elements that he touches on that are true. It's at the level of taking anecdotal evidence, and then sort of enshrining it as a theory that then explains everything -- that's where the problem is.
There is no doubt that some in the West view the rest of the world as "the other." That there are those in the Muslim world who view the West as a "bogie." But this is not the beginning and end of the analysis. There's a lot of diversity on both sides, and there's a lot of politics that happen on both sides.
The problem with Huntington's approach is that it essentially removes politics from politics. In other words, there's no more politics. We're all guided by what we're born into and that decides all politics, which is to say that the U.S. will behave always in a particular way, irrespective of what its interests are, which I don't think is true. And it also presupposes that fundamentalists or Muslims will always behave in ways which are prescribed by culture, rather than interests.
Huntington misses on a point, that the reasons the Muslims are behaving in this way is not cultural. It's because the methodology that Khomeini put forward offered an enormous amount of political dividend. The approach he took against the United States popularized him in the Muslim world, allowed him to galvanize power and consolidate power in Iran, enabled him to achieve many things. Whereas, fundamentalism has yet to face a defeat for fundamentalists to recalibrate and respond differently. But fundamentalists, just like Americans, when they are operating in a political environment, look at what works and what doesn't work, whether fists raised in the air with slogans work, or they don't work.
We're seeing this in Turkey right now. The leading candidate for prime minister in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was put in jail for being an Islamists a number of years back. He wants to be Prime Minister of Turkey. He knows it's possible through the elections, so he came out and said, "I never was an Islamist. I support joining the European Union, and I don't want to change anything in our relationship with the United States." He is actually now more pro-American than the secular Leftist Party that's in power.
So Huntington's theory, basically, is so high-level, it's such an overarching framework of analysis, that it basically is close-circuited. It has no room for any kind of political analysis. And, ultimately, the way out of here will be through politics. In other words, there has to be a reward and retribution environment in which Muslims will begin to make political choices that would make it inclusive in mainstream global politics.
On that positive note, I want to thank you very much for spending this time with us in helping us understand this very complex world that we're facing today. Thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
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