This Rand report
The Rand Corporation, a non-profit political think-tank, has published a report entitled Civil Democratic Islam, a proposal for how the West can deal with the Muslim world in a way that suits its own interests. The report divides up the Muslim world into Fundamentalists, Traditionalists, Modernists and Secularists, and its conclusion is essentially that the West should support the Modernists first, and the Traditionalists in order to defeat Fundamentalists.
The issue these people don’t seem to grasp is that, when any faction within the Muslim community appears to have been supported by non-Muslim outside interests, they are automatically held with suspicion by the community. The people they describe as fundamentalists would, of course, immediately attack them. A further issue it completely neglects is that western foreign policy is usually driven by its intentions to exploit, not to advance the interests of members of the societies they exploit. If such interests are best served by a superficially religious regime like that of Saudi Arabia, so be it.
Apart from the decidedly dodgy classifications in which they conveniently drop Muslim writers and scholars, the report contains a number of factual inaccuracies. For example, in its glossary on page (xv), it alleges that the Hanafi school is “more liberal on most matters”, while the Hanbali is “more conservative”. This is just plain untrue. The Hanafi school has a number of positions which are more restrictive than any of the other schools, and the Hanbali is more liberal on some of the other schools including the Hanafi. The reason the Hanbali school is associated with fundamentalism is its well-known literalist doctrinal fringe. Some, but not all, of the Wahhabis are Hanbalis (Nasir Albani took Hanafi positions on many issues, coming as he did from a Hanafi Albanian background).
There are other factual inaccuracies here: for starters, they bundle Khaled Abou el-Fadl, a notorious heretic, into the same “modernist” category as Mustafa Ceric and Fethullah Gulen, who are orthodox Islamic scholars. On page 43 they allege that “[the] failures of Islamic governance in Iran should be publicized widely, as these facts are not generally known to Islamic audiences, who are thus inclined to believe the simple assertion that shari’a law deters crime and that a more strict application of Islam and Islamic law will solve the problems of society”. In fact, the failure of the regime in Iran is extremely well-known among Muslims; in fact, it is regarded with horror, particularly due to the personality-cult surrounding Khomeini himself, the secret-police apparatus which is little different from those in secular régimes like that of Syria, the propagation of Shi’ism through finance, and the repression of Sunni Muslims within Iran. There is a story circulating among Muslims that I have personally heard, that due to an accident following his death, his shroud unwound and his private parts were exposed, a sign of disgrace. Furthermore, the antics of his fan club in London was a cause of much controversy in the UK after the Salman Rushdie affair.
But the most ominous aspect of this report is its potential for ill consequences in the Muslim world itself; specifically, the “modernists” they want to support could easily turn out to be the repressive regimes that display the least rhetorical hostility towards western powers and interests. It could, for example, add to the repression against religious Muslims, especially women, in countries like Tunisia and Turkey. If they really wanted to bring Muslims “on side”, they should encourage the spread of Islamic knowledge and the breaking down of barriers preventing Muslims from learning about their religion. Currently, nearly all of the countries in which genuine Islamic knowledge is available have imposed restrictions on foreign students; this includes Syria, India and Saudi Arabia.
Western governments (particularly that of the USA) also need to recognise that their interference in the Islamic world causes quite rightful resentment, some of which may lead to wrongful terrorist action. Currently such thinking is denounced as “appeasement” or, on certain right-wing blogs, “idiotarianism”, something characteristic of a nation convinced of its own greatness and the needlessness of considering the rights of members of other nations. If this report is implemented without great caution, it may well have the desired effect of turning some Muslims against others, but it will also greatly increase anti-western hostility.
