A GOOD REPORT

’’Aaa milainGay seena-chakaan-i chaman sey seena chaak
Aur zulmat raat kee, seemaab paa ho Jaae Gee’’
.......................................................... ...........................ALLAMA IQBAL
tr:
The ones full of passion & commitment would soon all come together
And the Night would make haste,-- nimble of foot as that of mercury




Crossing the Civilizational Divide:

One Journey Inside Islam


Juliana Geran Pilon | 31 May 2007



World Politics Review Exclusive


’’Majorities want U.S. forces out of Islamic countries,’’ declares a survey on Muslim public opinion just released by WorldPublicOpinion.org. Its lead researcher, Stephen Kull, informed Congress on May 17 that ’’very large majorities believe the United States seeks to undermine Islam’’ (an average 8 in 10), and ’’spread Christianity in the region’’ (an average two-thirds of Muslims). That’s the bad news, which therefore dominated the headlines. But there was plenty of good news in the report as well. Overwhelming majorities throughout the Muslim world endorse globalization as ’’a good thing’’ -- no fewer than 92 percent do so in Egypt. The same goes for democracy (two-thirds of those surveyed throughout the Muslim world say they favor it) and support for human rights, including the freedom to practice any religion. Vast majorities, moreover, consider attacks on civilians (including, specifically, Americans) ’’completely inexcusable’’ as well as attacks on civilian infrastructure even if no civilians are killed. Can it be that the ’’clash’’ among our civilizations has been overblown?



That is certainly the opinion of professor Akbar Ahmed, who holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C., a former High Commissioner of Pakistan to Great Britain. He argues for compassion and dialogue as the only way to avoid a tragic clash among civilizations of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His new book, ’’Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization,’’ published by the Brookings Institution, is a fascinating personal account of his travels last year into the heart of Islam, spanning the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. Through in-depth discussions with high-level officials and religious figures as well as ordinary people, Ahmed offers a nuanced picture of a complex world that alternately fears and misunderstands America, yet seems eager to engage with us if given a chance.
In addition to invaluable personal encounters, Ahmed administered questionnaires to about 120 people at various sites (universities, hotels, cafés, madrassahs, mosques, and private homes) in each country, including queries about what respondents read, what changes they had noted in their societies, the nature of their daily interactions, and their personal views on contemporary and historical role models. The latter was especially revealing, since role models offered an important clue to the ideological perspectives of the respondents.



For example, Osama Bin Laden was the second most popular role model in Indonesia -- a finding consistent with the WorldPublicOpinion.org survey, which found no more than one-fifth of Indonesians reporting a ’’negative’’ view of the elusive Saudi. Ahmed embarked on his journey fully aware of the malaise that engulfs the Muslim world, especially among the young who felt they were being denied many of the fruits of globalization, and in frustration had ’’turned in anger to role models who promised them some hope of redeeming their honor and dignity. That is why,’’ concludes Ahmed, ’’so many young Muslims in the age of globalization prefer bin Laden to Bill Gates.’’




The young are of particular interest to Ahmed, which is one reason he did took along on his journey not only his wife and two daughters, one of whom had just obtained a doctorate in anthropology at Cambridge University, but also four young American students. He summarizes their reception as follows: ’’By creating goodwill and exemplifying public diplomacy at its best, these young Americans were true ambassadors of their society because they had taken the trouble to visit Muslim lands, were committed to building bridges, and were raising the right questions.’’



After visiting a college in Jakarta, for example, one of his students writes: ’’They were sweet, funny kids who wanted to take pictures afterward and ask questions about the U.S.’’ Yet three quarters of them chose as their role models Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and their ilk. Where, he asked, are the moderates? The student concluded that ’’moderates are viewed as people who are unwilling to stand up for anything.’’ But this turned out to be wrong: ’’From what I’ve learned on this trip, moderate Muslims are practicing the compassionate and just Islam that is taught in the Quran without rejecting modernity and the West. They are, as I learned, hardly weak.’’
One of those moderates is N. Syafi’i Anwar of the International Center for Islam and Pluralism in Jakarta. His headquarters has been bombed by hardliners, in protest over his defense of toleration and opposition to what he calls ’’the creeping shariatization’’ in his home country. His counterpart in Kuala Lumpur, Ismail Noor, head of the Altruistic Leadership Center, also told Ahmed and his American students that fanaticism is on the rise. Both Anwar and Noor agree with Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesia’s first elected president, who issued a call in the summer of 2006 ’’for a spiritual regeneration within Islam itself.’’ While extremists within Islam are the principal target of their criticism, they believe that Western media, as well as Western politicians, lawmakers, and commentators, do not help the situation by creating the impression that Islam as a whole is fundamentally and irrevocably a violent religion.



To facilitate a better understanding of Islam’s complexity, Ahmed identifies three different strands within it, which he calls the Ajmer, Deoband, and Aligath models. Ajmer refers to all those Muslims inspired by the Sufi and mystical tradition within Islam. Deoband includes the mainstream radical Islamic movements, whether the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia or the Musllim Brotherhood and Hamas elsewhere in the Middle East. Aligath conveys a broad but distinct modernist Muslim response to the world, whose followers include the former shah of Iran and other secularists, as well as socialist leaders and pro-globalists. Some, notably the poet Allama Iqbal, manage to synthesize the different and often contradictory views of the three models, touching a vast number of ordinary people, as does the mystic poet Rumi. Poetry’s ability to cross linguistic, cultural, and international borders was demonstrated more than once during Ahmed’s trip.



Most striking, however, was the impression made by the young Americans, notably at a deeply conservative madrassah in Deoband, India, whose pious students consider it their religious duty to take action ’’designated as Jihad . . . for securing justice for the suppressed,’’ and are deeply hostile to ’’Amerika’’ for its ’’oppression.’’ A crowd that learns English and how to use the Internet in order to ’’spread the word of Islam’’ was no small challenge for Ahmed’s students. Hailey Woldt, a young blonde American University undergraduate, and one of her colleagues took a deep breath as they walked past a class of five hundred white-robed and white-capped readers bent over their Qurans, proceeding to hand out Ahmed’s questionnaires to the English class. The two Americans fully expected to be met with outrage and ’’cries for blood.’’ Their surprise was not small when the polite students first patiently completed the questionnaires, then ’’asked [them] for words of wisdom to be written on the board.’’ Rising to the occasion, Hailey wrote: ’’Learning and education are the most important things for world peace. Let us continue to work for peace with all. Salaam alay kum.’’



Salaam alay kum is Arabic for ’’peace be with you,’’ the standard greeting. Unexpectedly, the message she had written on the board ’’gave rise to shouts of delight and friendship. We parted as friends -- two Americans, a Muslim professor, and students of the most conservative madrassah in India.’’




The moral of the story is not merely that people-to-people diplomacy will solve world problems. It will take a great deal more sophistication to appreciate the enormous complexities of this ancient civilization, still deeply rooted in tribal traditions, plagued by authoritarian political and economic structures, ill-understood by a largely indifferent outside world. Both demonizing the entire Muslim population and underestimating the challenge of integrating it into the modern world are naïve and short-sighted. Taking exception to the global picture popularized by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Ahmed writes: ’’From a traditional society’s point of view, the world is not flat but uneven, with valleys, ravines, and mountains. Culture, custom, and ideas inherited from the past are highly prized marks of identity and therefore determiners of behavior. They define how people judge one another, and they include notions of honor and dignity.’’ Honor and dignity are prized by all human beings throughout the world. It behooves us all to remember this simple truth. And nothing conveys the sense of being appreciated like making an effort to learn about another’s culture and heritage.



If an important part of the answer to the current disconnect between Islam and the United States lies in fostering learning and education, that goes for both sides of the civilizational divide. It will not happen overnight, but the effort has to be undertaken. When people express admiration for Bin Laden as well as for democracy, it behooves us to expose the contradiction. But that requires first that Americans understand the receptivity of many in the Islamic world to the value of human rights and religious tolerance. The moderate voices within Islam must be heard and enhanced. It may turn out that the journey inside Islam also will become a journey within our own hearts.



Juliana Geran Pilon teaches politics and culture at the Institute of World Politics. Her newest book is ’’Why America is Such a Hard Sell: Beyond Pride and Prejudice’’ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).




Photo: The Darul Uloom madrassa in Deoband, India.

flag objectionable content