On the morning of September 11, political scientist Dr. Agha Saeed of the American Muslim Alliance was at his hotel in Washington, DC preparing for a meeting with President Bush. He was there with a delegation of fellow Muslim-Americans to talk with the President about the role of Muslims in American politics. Alas, thanks to a different group of Muslims and their appointment with 72 virgins in Paradise, the meeting with Bush was canceled.
Like all other Americans traveling on business during that first horrible week, Dr. Saeed was stranded. Five days later, he managed to get a seat on one of the first flights out of Baltimore. All he had to do was make it through the airport. Tall, dark, and, well, Muslim-looking, he was immediately surrounded by five FBI agents. The agents, Saeed says, were very polite. “They asked what hotel I had been staying at and what my business in Washington was. I told them I was there for a meeting. They asked with whom. I said, ‘With the President of the United States.'”
Credits: Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover American Muslim Alliance President Agha Saeed is dedicated to helping mainstream Americans understand their Muslim neighbors — and vice versa. Credits: Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover American Muslims pray at the Islamic Center of Fremont. Credits: Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover
It was a Kafkaesque moment. “I looked at the FBI agent. He looked at me, trying to gauge whether I was for real. One of the other guys disappeared and then came back. Maybe he made a telephone call.” The whole thing took only four or five minutes. Then Dr. Agha Saeed flew back to his home in Hayward and, like other Americans, began to learn how to live in a new and suddenly vulnerable America.
Two weeks later, Saeed and company were back in Washington to talk with President Bush. This time, the President kept the appointment. Their conversation, oddly enough, was little different from the conversation Saeed had planned to have before the terrorist attacks. The delegation’s members spoke about political participation, civil rights, and economic concerns. The majority of Muslims in this country are small businessmen, and many find Bush’s pro-business, anti-tax policies very appealing. (Though Saeed will not say how he himself voted, his organization endorsed George Bush, and Bush won the Muslim bloc handily.) The only part of the White House discussion that reflected the changed world after September 11 was some urgent talk about hate crimes.
Civil rights issues were and continue to be very much on the mind of Saeed’s constituency. If American Muslims had long felt like members of a silent and invisible minority, the events of September 11 changed that forever. Suddenly America’s seven million Muslims feel like they are members of the most visible minority there is. Now everyone wants to talk them: journalists, academics, inquisitive neighbors, and friendly folks from the FBI and the INS. The government has detained some six hundred people from the Mideast (most of them noncitizens) in connection with the attack on the World Trade Center, and the FBI recently announced plans to question five thousand more.
Dr. Saeed understands the fears all this attention has engendered. A professor of political science who teaches at both UC and Cal State Hayward, Saeed is disturbed by what he calls “the shrinking of cultural and civic space” that his community has experienced since September 11. But he says that the bigger danger to Muslims, both here and abroad, is the growing body of opinion among American intellectuals that Islam itself is somehow to blame for the terrorist attacks. Although President Bush has repeatedly said that the war on terrorism is not a war against Islam, a significant number of influential intellectuals — including Bernard Lewis, Thomas Friedman, Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Salman Rushdie, and V.S. Naipaul — are publicly warning that the secular West and the Islamic East are on a collision course.
Is there is something inherently violent and backward about Islam, something that is propelling the world toward what Samuel Huntington has called “a clash of civilizations”? Saeed doesn’t think so. As president of the American Muslim Alliance, his goal is to educate Muslims about America and to educate Americans about Islam before the sword-rattling culture warriors both East and West get the clash of civilizations they’ve been asking for.
The office of the American Muslim Alliance in Newark is located in a post-industrial landscape of big-box stores, residence hotels, and corporate offices, separated by weedy vacant lots. The office building that houses this far-flung outpost of Islamic culture could be anything: a bank, a doctor’s office, or, as is actually the case, a warren of computer start-ups populated largely by the sons and daughters of South Asia come to America to seek their fortunes. The office itself is small and hand-me-down, with donated computers and mismatched office furniture. “We hope to win the prize for surviving the longest period of time on the least amount of money,” quips Saeed, who works for the AMA thirty or forty hours per week pro-bono.
Saeed is a tall man, large and professorially rumpled, with caramel-colored skin, thinning curly black hair, and the harassed, somewhat harried manner of an untenured academic. He is an eloquent speaker, the sort of man who speaks not only in complete sentences, but in outline form — “Point one; point two; Point two is divided into four parts” — all in a clipped Pakistani accent. Raised in an upper-middle-class family with intellectual and left-leaning political connections, Saeed came to the United States as an undergraduate in the 1970s. His undergraduate degree was in philosophy, but he went on to get an MBA and spend ten years in the business world before his wife convinced him that he really was an academic at heart. He subsequently studied at the Harvard School of Government and has a PhD in rhetoric, specializing in political theory and discourse, from Cal.
Like many leaders in the Muslim community, Saeed has spent much of his time since September 11 traveling to appearances at town meetings, radio stations, and conferences trying to answer the question that has been on most Americans’ lips for the last three months: “Why?”
It’s an obvious question, and yet Dr. Saeed says he’s seen few serious attempts by the mainstream media to answer it. “To address the question of why this happened is often seen as an attempt to justify what happened,” he says, “though of course, it’s not.” Like most scholars, Saeed sees the roots of our current crisis in the Muslim world’s reaction to modernity itself. The question of modernity, including its expression in technology, democracy, rationality, and the idea of individual rights (including women’s rights), has been a hot topic in the Muslim world for over 150 years. Some Orientalists, like Bernard Lewis, see the Muslim world’s rage against the West as a “rage of impotence,” the natural reaction of a premodern people who have yet to acquire the cultural prerequisites that lead to prosperity: capitalism, democracy, a large middle class, etc. Saeed finds that to be simplistic, to say the least.
“The Muslim world has had at least three different reactions to modernity,” he says. “The first one assumes that there is no problem with modernity and that it is above critique.” Historically, he adds, you see this in the careers of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern state of Turkey; the former Shah of Iran; and to a lesser extent Nasser in Egypt.
“The second school of thought rejects modernity completely. This rejection is not so much based on Islam as it is based on cultural tradition, which is comfortable, convenient, familiar, and also has the advantage of guaranteeing privilege within the existing status quo.” While relatively few national-level intellectuals or statesmen embrace this extreme view (even Osama bin Laden uses cell phones), many of Islam’s premier religious scholars can be classed in this camp because of their social conservatism. These include Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini; Sayyid Qutb, cofounder of Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood; and Sayed Mowdoodi, a Pakistani religious scholar who was one of the leading Islamic thinkers of this century. Interestingly, not all of these men were anti-Western. Throughout his life, Mowdoodi, for instance, found communism a greater threat to Islam than capitalism and was a staunch ally of the United States.
The third reaction to modernity comes from Muslims who neither accept nor reject modernity in total, but instead wish to pick and choose from among its offerings. “The intellectuals located in this third tradition, such as Edward Said, Iqbal Mohammed, Franz Fanon, and to a certain extent Noam Chomsky, engage in a simultaneous critique of First World and Third World.” Saeed sees himself as belonging to this latter group. He believes that people in the Muslim world have a right to create their own cultural and political institutions based on a combination of Islam and modern democratic institutions, including respect for human rights.
But how far can this hybridization of modernity and Islam go? Is there, for instance, really such a thing as an Islamic democracy? Many commentators have looked at the Muslim world, with its long history of autocratic regimes, and have concluded that Muslims are simply unable to create and sustain democratic institutions. Saeed thinks this analysis fails to take into account both the existence of pro-democratic forces within the Muslim world and the role the West has played in quashing democratic reform throughout the Middle East.
Western democratic theorists have often connected the rise of universal democracy in the West to the Christian tradition that recognizes the inherent worth of each individual and his or her equality before God. Saeed notes that a similar tradition exists within Islam. “There is an essential and absolute principle of human equality in Islam, expressed in the saying of the Prophet that ‘An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab has superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black, nor a black has superiority over white.’ It is also expressed in the way that people are asked to go to prayer: rich and poor together, shoulder to shoulder, no man higher than another — though women and men pray separately.
“At the same time,” Saeed notes, “the ideas of equality and social justice in Islam do not equal communism. It does not have a notion of a classless society. In the time of the Prophet, there were classes, but there were also instruments of wealth sharing, hospitality, kindness, and engagement with your neighbor. There is a saying that goes, “You cannot be a good Muslim if your neighbor goes to bed hungry.”
During his lifetime, the prophet Mohammed ruled as both supreme religious and political leader over a loose coalition of Arab tribes. After his death, the Muslim world was ruled by four of his closest companions: the first four caliphs, known as the khulfa-e-rashadeen or “the rightly guided ones.” These men oversaw a vast expansion of the Muslim empire. After the death of the fourth caliph, the empire fractured, and according to Muslim belief, the behavior of the region’s rulers moved further and further from the ideals of the prophet and the khulfa-e-rashadeen.
One of the most interesting proto-democratic features of the early Islamic period is the notion of baya, or consent of the governed. “At that time,” Saeed says, “there was no vote. Back then, the way you either endorsed or refused a person as your leader was with a handshake. If you failed to take the appointed leader’s hand, then it was understood that you had not accepted them as your leader. Women had the baya as well, though it was slightly different since women weren’t allowed to shake hands with men. Instead, they would be given a piece of cloth and the leader would hold one end and the woman would hold the other, and that would be their way of giving the baya. You could not force people to give the baya and there was no punishment for not giving it.”
Another proto-democratic institution, according to Saeed, was the tradition of shura or consultation. “According to the Qu’ran, Muslims must consult among themselves on all important matters. There was a consultative body under each of the first four caliphs — a council of elders drawn from different parts of the empire, with each tribe or region represented.” The first four caliphs also had a form of independent judiciary — independent, that is, from the state. They were, Saeed says, like a religious Supreme Court whose job it was to interpret the Qu’ran and the laws evolved from the Qu’ran. Like the Supreme Court, they operated as a limitation on the power of the state. “From the seventh to the ninth century, judges were not paid by the state. It wasn’t until the ninth century that judges were put on the state exchequer,” a change, says Saeed, that caused a storm of protest. “Mansur Halaj, a major Sufi mystic, objected very strongly. He said it is wrong for a judge to be paid by the state because then he cannot be independent.
“There was also a constitution, in the form of the Qur’an, that limited what a ruler could and couldn’t do. The Qu’ran also talks about the obligations and responsibilities of the governed — what are the conditions under which the people are obliged to obey their leader and what are the conditions under which people should refuse to obey him.
“I am not suggesting that these are modern democratic institutions. These are institutions which evolved in a rural and nomadic society. It isn’t modern Western democracy in its final form, but it’s a start.” According to Saeed, these traditions provide a cultural foundation for democracy to flourish.
There are, Saeed says, mass popular movements for democratic reform in almost every Muslim country. The three main forces behind these movements are democratic political parties, pro-democratic intellectuals and scholars, and — particularly in south Asia — hugely popular, politically minded poets. Saeed says that these forces have been given short shrift by the United States, which for years has been less interested in sponsoring democracy than in securing allies in the fight against communism or in securing access to resources like oil.
“In a traditional Islamic society in most places in the world, there is a four-part structure of checks and control. You have the King or ruler. You have the religious scholars. You have the Sufi or the mystic, and finally the poet. The King was to be kept in check by the religious scholars. The Sufis were a check on the scholars and the King. Finally, it was the job of the poet to comment on the work of the other three. It is a saying of the Prophet of Islam: ‘One of the boldest and highest form of jihad is to speak truth to the King’ — or as we say now, to speak truth to power.”
The tradition of the political poet continues today, Saeed says, giving his native Pakistan as an example. “The Marxist scholar Tariq Ali has said that Pakistan has been very unfortunate in terms of the caliber of its political leaders, but it has been blessed in its poets. I am thinking now of poets like Habib Jalib and Faiz Ahmad. These poets were explicitly political — and enormously popular. When these people gave poetry readings, hundreds of thousands of people came. They had to give their readings in soccer stadiums. It is a phenomenon which simply has no counterpart in the West.”
Saeed has experienced this phenomenon personally. Though he was born in Queta, he was raised in Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan. Saeed’s own father was a businessman and poet, a combination that may be rare in these climes but is more common in Pakistan. Saeed says his father spoke seven or eight languages and knew 15,000 couplets by heart. Thanks to his family’s connections, young Agha Saeed grew up around intellectuals, poets, writers, and thinkers, including a Muslim philosopher of nonviolence who was known as “the Frontier Gandhi.” This relatively idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end when the elder Saeed was placed under house arrest for his opposition to the military dictatorship of Pakistani strongman Zia al-Haq. Saeed’s father, like most relatively well-to-do Pakistani businessmen, depended on government patronage. His alienation from the powers-that-be devastated the family’s fortune.
Having seen first-hand the price paid by Third World people fighting for democracy, Saeed is frustrated by the invisibility of these people in the eyes of the West. “When Westerners look at these societies, we tend to see everyone as cut from the same cloth. ‘Everybody over there is dictatorial! You’re oppressing me now, but I am just waiting for my turn to oppress you.’ But that’s not how it really is. There are thousands of people who have genuinely invested their lives in building an open society, in fighting for it, in paying a price for that.
“Am I saying that these societies are democratic? No, they are not. Do they have the potential to become democratic? Yes, they do. Are they trying to become democratic? Yes. Has the West always sided with the people working for democracy in those countries? No.”
Saeed has his own experience with this phenomenon. In Berkeley in the 1980s, he and some friends started a group called the Pakistan Democratic Committee to oppose United States-sponsored dictator Zia Al-Haq. When Zia visited San Francisco, Saeed organized a protest. Part of his disagreement with Zia, beyond the mere fact of his being a military dictator, had to do with Zia’s support for the radical Islamist mujahadeen in Afghanistan, support that Saeed and his fellows saw as dangerously destabilizing for Pakistan itself. In time, the Pakistan Democratic Committee attracted the eye of the American government. Late one night Saeed’s uncle, who was visiting from India at the time, answered a late-night knock at the door. Coming to investigate, Saeed took one look at his uncle’s terrified face and knew it was police. A knock on the door in the night from the state security police has a whole different meaning to people who’ve grown up in the Third World, where such a visit is often the prelude to an untimely disappearance. Saeed didn’t disappear, of course, but his organization, made up of immigrants insecure in their status and fearful of being sent back to Pakistan, did.
Saeed’s more recent attempts at political consciousness-raising began when he first got involved with the PTA at his child’s school. (His daughter is now fourteen.) Though he had become an American citizen in 1982, he says that it was not until he became involved in the public schools that he began to truly feel like a citizen. Shortly afterward, he created the American Muslim Alliance as a way of providing civic education to new immigrants from Muslim countries. Though not a lobbying group, the AMA has become a prominent institution within the Muslim-American world, and Saeed has become one of that community’s most visible leaders.
Sometimes that visibility has been uncomfortable. Two years ago, for instance, senator-to-be Hillary Clinton called Saeed to say she was giving back a $50,000 donation that a group of Muslim Americans, including some AMA members, had made to her campaign. Seems someone in New York had unearthed an old quote of Dr. Saeed’s supporting the right of Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation. Describing his comment as support for terrorism, Republicans used it to discredit the Clinton campaign. In the end, the donors got their money back and the American Muslim Alliance got several weeks of press. “It was good deal, really,” he muses now, “you couldn’t buy that much coverage for $50,000.” Still, Hillary’s rejection stung and fueled the long-standing frustration that Saeed and other American Muslims feel about making their voices heard as a part of America’s political dialogue. “I cannot tell you the number of years I have spent holding press conferences where no one — except the obligatory reporter from the People’s Daily World — showed up.”
If there are many forces, unrecognized by the West, that are actively working to establish democratic institutions in Muslim countries, there are also massive and entrenched interests opposing them. Unlike most Western observers, however, Saeed believes that most of these anti-democratic forces are secular rather than religious. “It is the feudal structure and authoritarian elites in most of Muslim countries who have been the greatest impediment to progress towards democracy. Another stumbling block is the proletarian military that has evolved in so many of these countries — in Egypt, in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and in Turkey. They stage coup after coup, destabilizing one government after the other, or demanding the right of intervention and control from any elected government. In Turkey, for example, the army has a constitutional right to intervene any time it sees fit. That right is now being contemplated in Pakistan.”
It may almost go without saying that many of these anti-democratic forces operate with the active support of the West. “It is very important to note that the United States, England, and France never tire of speaking of democracy,” Saeed says, “but they insist that any democratically elected government must be pro-Western or else it must be aborted. This happened in Iran in 1953, when Mossadeq had the temerity to suggest that the oil in Iran actually belonged to the Iranians. It has happened in Pakistan. When the Islamic party Gemat Islam came to power in Algeria, at the local level, elections were canceled, people were put in jail, parties were banned, leadership was harassed. A civil war ensued which has gone on to this day. And our attitude in the West is, ‘Thank God, democracy has been saved!’ The Western powers say, ‘Well, if these people had been allowed to come to power, women would have been denied the right to vote.’ But the army has now denied the right to vote to both men and women, and now there is no democracy at all.
“This insistence by the West that any democratic election and any entity emerging out of that must be pro-West has become a real stumbling block. In the end, it begins to seem to people in the Muslim world that the demand for democracy on the part of the West isn’t really about democracy at all. It’s really a demand for compliance with Western goals and ideals in total.”
But isn’t it possible that Islamic extremists might come to power through a regular election and then overthrow a democratic system? Possibly, Saeed responds, but that scenario disregards the powerful, almost spiritually transformative effect democracy has not only on voters but on the people they vote into office.
“Once people have been exposed to democracy, to being asked ‘What do you think?’ and ‘How do you feel?,’ they like it and they want more of it. That is the democratic impulse. Democracy not only changes the people who do the voting, it changes the people who are voted into power. If you come into power democratically, you have a certain kind of legitimacy. People put you into office and they can take you out of office. By participating in that process, you are automatically affected by it. It affects your thinking, your relationships. You operate in a certain environment and you evolve along with it.
“There is nothing about being religious which prevents that from happening. Throughout Europe there are Christian democratic parties and no one suggests that being Christian keeps you from being a democrat. Most mainstream Muslim organizations are perfectly capable of being Muslim and democratic. I may not agree with their policies, but their capacity for democratic participation is very much intact. Parties that evolve out of undemocratic historical experiences, like the Taliban, can often become tyrannical. But parties that evolve out of a democratic process are different. They learn to play by the rules. And the more they play by those rules, the more those rules become established and entrenched.
“I think you can see this in Iran. The Iranian government, although they are in violation of many human rights, have held elections every five years since the revolution. They have not missed a single election and, by Third World standards, the elections are very open and fair. And with every election in Iran, there has been an improvement in their policies, a gradual softening of some of the harsher aspects of the earlier regime. I think this is because they are holding their elections on time, every time. For God’s sake, look at this country. When democracy was instituted in the US, only a third of the people had the right to vote and those were all white men — this despite having a constitution that said everyone is equal! It took 130 years of democratic evolution for that to change.
“The point is, do you believe in democracy or do you not? Sometime I think the West really doesn’t — or perhaps they believe in it for themselves, but not for others.”
Maybe so. Despite lip service given to the idea of promoting democracy abroad, there does seem to be a growing sense among many Western commentators that the Islamic world just isn’t ready for democracy. In part, this is because of a basic unwillingness among American intellectuals to even contemplate the idea of a religiously based democracy.
American intellectuals have been locked in a cultural battle-to-the-death with Christian fundamentalists in this country for more than a hundred years. The residue of that battle is one of the reasons why the media’s use of the word “Muslim fundamentalist” has been so effective in raising the hackles of people on the left — and in stilling their opposition to the administration’s more bellicose policies. When Saeed announced at a recent conference that 99 percent of Muslims could be described as “fundamentalist,” many in the audience reacted with audible gasps of despair.
But, as usual when dealing with cross-cultural analogies, a lot gets lost in translation. According to Saeed, the word “fundamentalist” is misleading when applied to Muslims. When most Americans use the word “fundamentalist” they are referring to those who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. But the word carries political baggage as well. When someone says he or she is a Christian fundamentalist, one can safely guess their political agenda: anti-abortion, anti-feminist, pro-military, pro-death penalty, pro-capitalist.
Unlike fundamentalism in America, fundamentalism in the Muslim world has no fixed political meaning, according to Saeed. “The fact that 99 percent of Muslims believe that the Qu’ran is literally true has not stopped them from interpreting that truth in different ways: socialist, capitalist, humanist, and traditionalist. Take, for example, this injunction in Islam: ‘How much have you spent in God’s name? Tell me whatever is more than personal need.’ There has been a huge debate on this aya between socialist Muslim scholars and capitalist Muslim scholars. One says this means socialism, the other says it does not mean socialism. Because people believe the Qu’ran to be literally true does not mean that it has a single political meaning. In fact, what the Taliban were trying to do was to create a fixed meaning for the Qu’ran and that’s why so many Muslims found them offensive.”
Fair or not, Islam has generally been portrayed in the West as an extremist religion. In spite of President Bush’s repeated assurances that Islam is a religion of peace, that reputation for violent intolerance lingers. There is, after all, that troubling concept of jihad, which various figures in the Middle East from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Osama bin Laden have been calling down on America for the last twenty years. Being on the receiving end of such declarations has made Americans understandably wary, especially after September 11.
Saeed says Americans have misunderstood the concept of jihad. “Jihad does not mean ‘holy war,'” he says, “It means ‘effort’ or ‘exertion.’ There is a famous saying of the Prophet of Islam: ‘If you see injustice being done and you can stop it, stop it. If you cannot stop it because of a physical threat to yourself, then verbally oppose it. If you are too weak even to verbally oppose it, then at least maintain an internal sense of its wrongness in your heart.’ So jihad is a moral exertion of act, word, or belief to maintain truth and justice.”
Jihad has two dimensions: internal and external. “The primary one,” according to Saeed, “is jihad against yourself — against your own greed, fear, lust, or desire for power. And then there are various types of external jihad. One of the highest forms of jihad is to speak truth to the tyrant king, because when there is tyranny, truth is suppressed. There are all kinds of social jihads — against poverty, ignorance, prejudice. And finally, there is also a military component of jihad. The important thing to realize about that is that it is only permissible as a defensive act. It cannot be an aggressive act. Also, a paid army cannot fight jihad. Jihad has to be done for a specific period of time, under a decree, called a fatwa, issued by a qualified scholar. It must be for a specific purpose, with termination conditions built into it. It can’t be against noncombatants — older men, women, children, the sick, or anyone who is not a part of the conflict. And you must agree to negotiate if the other side offers to make peace.” (Saeed says the attack on the World Trade Center — which was specifically aimed at noncombatants — obviously doesn’t qualify as a jihad activity, something most Muslims scholars in the world have agreed on.)
The notion of jihad isn’t the only concept in Islam that troubles Westerners, though. There are also those unfortunate paragraphs, scattered throughout the Qu’ran, calling on Muslims to wage war on the infidels — “to kill them wherever you shall find them; and seize them, and lay in wait for them with every kind of ambush.” Verses like this are used by terrorists to support their acts of terror and by anti-Islamic forces in the West to support their claim that Islam is a naturally nasty system of belief.
Saeed says it’s important to understand the context of such quotes. “You must read the quotes in context. You have to read the line immediately before and immediately after, and you have to understand them in the context of the larger message of Islam. If there is an injunction that says, ‘After the holy month of Ramadan, go and kill infidels,’ you really have to ask yourself how often in the last fifteen hundred years has that happened? Virtually never. The point is, you need to look at how Islam is really practiced and if the practice over fifteen hundred years has remained peaceful, then there is some error in the reading of the uninitiated person who is just thumbing through the book, finding a paragraph and saying, “Aha! I have found an incitement to violence!'”
The point is not, Saeed says, that Muslims have never been violent. The question is whether that violence is directly related to Islam. Christians, he notes, despite being supposed devotees of the Prince of Peace, have a long and bloody history. “Who has a worse history of bloodshed?” Saeed asks. “Who has created the biggest weapons of mass destruction? Muslims did not invent them. Who has used them most brutally in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Christian Americans. But does that mean, therefore, that Christianity is bad? Of course not. Just because someone does something that is terrible, it does not follow that you can then look at his religion and say, ‘Aha, it’s his religion that is at fault.’ People do what they do for a complex set of reasons.”
If Islam itself is not to blame for the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, then what is? What accounts for terrorists like Mohammed Atta and other members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network? New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman blames three factors: poverty, autocratic regimes, and what he calls “a religio-political” discourse. Saeed agrees that the pervasive poverty in the Muslim world provides a rich breeding ground for terrorists. The fact that many of the terrorists were not poor themselves is of little consequence. After all, the middle classes in impoverished countries have always been a good source for revolutionaries. He also agrees that domestic oppression, in the form of military dictatorships or feudal aristocracies, adds to people’s frustration and their sense of having little or no control over their own destiny or the destiny of their countries.
Friedman and Saeed part company, however, on Friedman’s third point. Saeed does not believe that religio-political discourse in the Muslim world is a cause of terrorism. It is, rather, a natural part of the culture of the region. Terrorists use it, but so does everyone else. Even the Al-Saud family justifies itself on religious grounds.
What Friedman neglects to mention, according to Saeed, is the role that the Middle East’s colonial history plays in the rise of terrorism. The United States is the inheritor of that legacy — and to the extent that it perpetuates the inequities of the colonial era, it becomes a lightning rod for terror. Saeed says that the United States’ self-serving energy/foreign policy and its role in propping up corrupt dictatorial regimes in the region is an ongoing source of tension.
More serious, and trickier for most Westerners to comprehend, is the problem of Israel. Saeed says that he and most other Muslims recognize the right of Israel to exist. “The wheel of history has moved such that most people have said, ‘We are willing to recognize Israel in its 1967 borders. You took the land illegally, immorally, but still you will be allowed to keep it.’ That’s what the UN resolutions said. That has been settled and accepted. But the Israelis are not willing to accept a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.”
Creating a viable Palestinian state would go a long way toward lowering temperatures in the region, but, given recent events in the Holy Land, Saeed isn’t optimistic. “I have rarely been so personally depressed as I have been in the last week, since Israel bombed Arafat’s office. My fear is that they are actively planning to overthrow Arafat, perhaps to kill him. In overthrowing Arafat, Israel will be overthrowing the last secular option for Palestine.”
Secularism does indeed seem to be on its last legs throughout the Middle East, and Saeed is convinced that the perceived failure of secularism in the Muslim world and the ideological vacuum left behind is one of the main causes of terrorism. Disappointed by the failed promises of Marxism and unable to compete with more developed countries in the game of global capitalism, many Muslims feel a sense of rage and desperation that tips many young men over the edge into terrorism. This desperation is particularly acute in Palestine, where it is amplified by the daily oppressions and indignities of occupation.
“The PLO is a secularist organization of both Muslims and Christians. Arafat has been a secularist all his life and I have supported him. But now the people look at him and say, ‘What has he delivered? We have gone from misery to misery.’ This feeling is shared throughout the Middle East. There is a feeling that secularism has failed, Marxism has failed, Arab nationalism failed, Arab socialism has failed. What ideologies of resistance and self-preservation are left?”
The answer, of course, is religion — the last great hope of desperate people everywhere. Does this mean that religion is to blame for terrorism after all? Saeed says no: What it means is that the very forces that create terrorism — poverty, domestic oppression, foreign domination, the failure of secular ideologies of liberation — twist religion to the purposes of terror, co-opting its power to succor and substituting a violent political message for its message of peace.
“When all other avenues of public protest are denied and the mosque becomes the only place where people can talk about their concerns, then this creates the politicization of religion. This was precisely the reason that Professor Hamid Algar, from the department of Near Eastern Studies at Berkeley, was able to predict ten years before the Iranian revolution that the ulama [an informal council of religious leaders] will come to power and that Khomeini will lead them. He wasn’t looking into a crystal ball to predict this. He was following a very clear trend. The cultural space for dissent was being shrunk. There was only one institution left where some kind of public discourse could take place, and that was the mosque. Therefore the mosque becomes the birthplace for political revolution, and the leader of the mosque becomes the leader of the movement.”
Ironically, says Saeed, many Muslims view the success of Israel and the United States as flowing not from the modern, secular nature of these societies, but from their religiosity. “They perceive the strength of the Israeli state in religious terms,” Saeed says. “They say these people have succeeded because they have been true to their belief, and what lies at the core of that belief is rabbinical Judaism. It is the same for Americans. They know that wherever American guns and ships and businessmen have gone, American Christian missionaries have gone as well. If you were to look from the Muslim point of view, when the West says, ‘We are not Christians, we have gone beyond that,’ that simply does not add up. When Muslims look at Israel or America, they do not see secularism. They see Judeo-Christianity and they feel assaulted by it.”
This will strike many as bizarre, almost hallucinogenic — the result, perhaps, of a deeply religious people’s inability to envision a world where God is not the center of the universe. Even Saeed seems to suffer from this trait. He often refers to avowed atheists — Stalin and V.S. Naipaul, for instance — as religionists. When once reminded that they were atheists, he brushed the suggestion aside, saying that Stalin had been raised as a Christian and that Naipaul had been raised in a Hindu household. It was as if religion was a skin that could not be shed.
And that is, in fact, what Saeed believes. He views religion and culture as being permanently intertwined. “T.S. Eliot said, ‘Religion and culture are not one thing. But they are also not two things.’ Then what are they? They are different sides of the same coin. The religion of yesterday becomes the culture of today. So that is how otherwise secular people are culturally Jewish and culturally Christian and it is not apparent to them. The question is asked by Stewart Hall: ‘Who discovered water?’ and he said ‘I’m not sure, but definitely it was not the fish.’ They are so surrounded by it that there is no conception of discovery. Similarly, here, people are enveloped within their religious culture. Even if they say, ‘I am not religious,’ they are unaware of how much of it they have imbibed and practice. It is the outsider who sees this culture as being deeply Christian and, at times, deeply Jewish.”
At the same time, it is difficult to see how this shadow religiosity applies to the political situation in the Middle East. To most American intellectuals, it seems transparently obvious that the United States’ interest in the Middle East is primarily secular. We are there for the oil. What could be more secular than the West’s need to secure access (and a good price) to the resource that forms the foundation of our material prosperity? There are also political reasons for our presence in the Middle East, of course — the results of deals made and coalitions built at the height of the Cold War. Those agreements still hold sway. But they too, for the most part, were about oil, about keeping the world’s largest supply of oil out of the hands of our old ideological enemy, the Soviet Union.
It is an odd coincidence, though, that many in the current administration, including the President and attorney general John Ashcroft, are Bible-believing Christians. Bush, after all, was “saved” by Billy Graham himself. (Graham son’s is now beating the drum against Islam.) Is it possible that our secularism is blinding us to the existence of religious motivations in our own leaders — motivations we consider beneath our notice because they are founded in a worldview we consider antique? Like believers in the Muslim world, might not Western intellectuals suffer from the same God-shaped blind spot? Religious Muslims cannot envision a good and just political system that is not motivated by the fear and love of God. We cannot envision a good and just political system that is.
Mightn’t we both be wrong?
At heart, Agha Saeed is a political man, but he is also a God-fearing man and a practicing Muslim. These latter traits are rare and, if truth be told, not much respected in American intellectual circles. But the fact is, Saeed’s ability to understand the mind of the masses of religious people in the Muslim world may give him a leg up in predicting the course of events in the Muslim world.
The first thing, he suggests, is that American intellectuals give up on the hope that — given the right sort of educational system — religion will just disappear in the Middle East or even that it will be relegated to the private sphere, as it is in the West. The central planners of the Soviet Union, with its large Muslim population, nourished the same hope for almost a century. They backed up those hopes with the force of the state, imprisoning religious leaders and destroying mosques (and Christian churches) in an attempt to make it so.
“The thing that surprises intellectuals in the West is people’s need for belief and for acting on that belief,” says Saeed. “It is odd that it should surprise them, because the first thing many Americans did after September 11 was go to church. And this is why, after seventy years of de-Islamization, people in those formerly Muslim lands are returning to Islam. This is going to be an increasingly important reality in that region, and the West had better learn to deal with it.”
Rather than trying to suppress religion or limit its role in public life, Saeed suggests the West should have faith in the ability of democracy, its most treasured institution, to absorb the religious parties in the Middle East and turn the religio-political dialogue into a democratic conversation about how to build the best society possible. That, after all, is the question at the heart of both religion and politics.
