Is Islam a Threat to the West?

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1 THE KHAYAMI FOUNDATION Is Islam a Threat to the West? Conference, Chatham House, London 1-2 June 2005 Rapporteur: Susannah Tarbush Opening Address Speakers: Chair: Dr Ahmad Ghoreishi, on behalf of Mahmoud Khayami, the Khayami Foundation Rt Hon Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Chatham House Professor Bulmer-Thomas began by saying: It is a sad reflection of the world we live in that the question that forms the title of the conference - Is Islam a Threat to the West? - has to be asked at all, even if answer is no. He was confident that no mainstream politician would answer yes, but felt that politicians efforts since 11 September 2001 to reduce tensions between Islam and the West had not succeeded, and that the conference would address an important issue. Professor Bulmer-Thomas expressed Chatham House s gratitude to the Khayami Foundation for sponsoring and helping to run the event. Dr Ahmad Ghoreishi As Mahmoud Khayami was unable to attend the opening session, his address was read by Dr Ahmad Ghoreishi. In his address Mr Khayami said it was a great honour for the Khayami Foundation to cooperate with Chatham House in organizing the conference. Few people could question the importance of the topic for discussion by this gathering of distinguished scholars and personalities. As a proud Muslim, Mr Khayami particularly hoped that the deliberations would go some way towards correcting the reputation of the religion of Islam, by helping

2 provide world public opinion with an image that is free of distortion and negative discrimination. Mr Khayami stressed the independence of the gathering from any government, political entity or religious association. The thoughts and ideas to be presented would be solely those of the distinguished participants. He expressed his conviction that the overwhelming majority of the world s 1.2 billion Muslims seek nothing other than to live in peace and tranquillity, with their pride and dignity intact. Further, he believed that advances in science and technology need not in any way conflict with the teachings of God. Instead they could, and should, help promote closer cooperation and understanding among people of all faiths. Mr Khayami said the Khayami Foundation was proud to have played a role in helping promote this important debate, and it is my hope that we will continue to do so in the future, to help to promote a better peace and prosperous world for all. Rt Hon Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Lord Robertson, the former NATO Secretary General, said that no decent human being, could answer the question Is Islam a Threat to the West?, other than by saying no. But he reiterated that the question was being asked provocatively, in order to raise a number of issues which had come to the fore. In the west of Scotland where Lord Robertson grew up, and where he fought six parliamentary elections, the religious divide was between the majority Protestants and minority Roman Catholics. Muslims were categorized in my youth only into Protestant Muslims and Catholic Muslims. He said that Britain has changed dramatically in his lifetime, and the increase in the Muslim population, and in the awareness of Islam both as a faith and as a way of life, had become serious factors in Scottish and British society. With dwindling attendance at both Protestant and Catholic churches, and the decrease in their political clout, the more disciplined voices of Islam had become a new and more potent factor. While the influence of Islam was not new, the strength of Muslim feeling on issues, and the radicalization of the young, was a more recent phenomenon. The Catholic Church had always been vocal in its political articulation of its views on issues such as abortion or Roman Catholic schools, but the Muslim view was regularly characterized as being quiet, polite and without force. This has all changed, Lord Robertson observed. In his view, this new Muslim assertiveness had failed to take account of the ways in which Britain, in particular, had taken a stand in support of Muslims, especially in the international field. Lord Robertson cited Britain s closeness to the great nation of Turkey which straddles the Europe-Asia faultline, the European north-south divide and the Judaeo- Christian/Muslim knife-edge.

3 He pointed out that Britain had long been a champion of Turkish membership of the EU. As in the case of Turkey s membership of NATO, the addition of Turkey to the EU would show that nations of different cultural and religious make-up can share common objectives. He warned against the danger of being seduced into the profoundly dangerous notion that just because we worship differently, or not at all, we are congenitally at odds. In the first 46 years of its existence NATO did not fire a shot in anger. When it first did so, in 1995, it was to save the Muslim Bosnians from the ethnic cleansing machine of Slobodan Milosevic. Four years later, the West and NATO intervened militarily again, and without a UN Security Council resolution, to save the Muslim Kosovo Albanians from Milosevic s next ethnic cleansing operation. In as Lord Robertson has repeatedly told Al-Jazeera TV - he went to Skopje month after month with the EU s foreign policy chief Javier Solana to resolve the argument between the majority ethnic Macedonians and the minority Muslim Macedonian Albanians over a balanced constitution. Once more we were faced with yet another Balkan bloodbath and for the first time we managed to avoid it and once again the soldiers of NATO were called on to help resolve a crisis where the rights of Muslims were in contention. Lord Robertson described as dangerous nonsense the view of some commentators (including certain Al-Jazeera reporters) that the situation in Iraq proves some new and permanent divide between the Islamic and the Western worlds: Some fashionable pundits talk of Iraq being proof of some clash of civilizations. Saddam s victims were, first and foremost, his own people, especially the Shia Muslims, whom he persecuted pitilessly. Under Saddam, Muslim Kurds had faced gas attacks, Muslim Iranians had been bloodily engaged in a hellish war and the Kuwaiti Muslims country had been raped and pillaged. Saddam s displacement was still controversial, and Iraq was still in need of healing, but let nobody say his fall represents an attack on Islam or the Muslim world. Lord Robertson regarded the Chatham House conference as timely, its participants as heavyweight and the issues raised therein as being of profound and huge importance. He doubted that it would come to firm, detailed conclusions, but the deliberations would add to the great and united human search for a way forward on a serious issue for all of us. Discussion The editor of The Muslim News, Mr Ahmed Versi, asked Lord Robertson about the perception that the Americans had used the war on terror against Islam, Muslim states and Muslims, and that domestic measures such as anti-terror legislation had created a sense that the US and Britain were targeting the Muslim community. Lord Robertson described this perception as dangerous and very wrong. There were elements among the Muslim population who held an extreme position and resorted to apocalyptic terror. To target them, and those who harbour them, was not an attack on Muslims any more than the British targeting of the IRA at the height of its power was an attack on Catholics.

4 There was an obligation for all those who were part of a community to dissociate themselves from a violent minority among them. Suicide bombings, such as those seen recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, must be denounced by everyone who wished to live in a civilized and unified world. There is unfortunately too much of a silence about those people, especially in Iraq, whose sole objective is to start a civil war in that country, whose targets are not the alleged occupiers or those who were responsible for the invasion of Iraq, but fellow Muslims, Lord Robertson said. He warned that if the world as a whole, or if leaders of communities, remained silent this situation would continue and worsen. When Britain faced a terrorist menace, it required all the resources of all the communities who were under threat to renounce the terrorists and their deeds: Lord Robertson said that such action was now more urgent and necessary than ever. Session I Coexistence vs Confrontation: What Role for Religion? Speakers: Chair: Ayatollah Sheikh Ahmad Al-Bahadeli, Najaf The Rt Rev Riah Abu El-Assal, Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem Dr Salah Eddin Kuftaro, Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro Foundation Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Chatham House Ayatollah Sheikh Ahmad Al-Bahadeli In his presentation Abiding by the Principle of Dialogue: Agreeing to Disagree, Ayatollah Al-Bahadeli outlined the Islamic principles of dialogue from theoretical and practical perspectives. He stressed the obligatory nature of dialogue in Islam, and highlighted the conditions and need for dialogue at the present time. The Holy Qur an states: O People! We have created you from a male and female and made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another. Ayatollag Al-Bahadeli said that the Islamic religion had an opinion on every subject, which people can interpret in a right or a wrong way, and had made dialogue obligatory except in certain cases such as fasting and jihad. Muslims look to the Prophet Muhammad as an example in relation to dialogue with non-believers, as well as dialogue with the Ahl al-kitab or People of the Book. The Prophet had resorted to fighting only in order to defend Islam and Muslims. Ayatollah Al-Bahadeli called on religious leaders to demonstrate and promote the positive role of faith in enhancing peaceful coexistence and preventing confrontation. He acknowledged that some contemporary sources of religious opinion had tried to divert the message of religion into one of aggression and brutality. They used inappropriate interpretations of holy texts, and restricted the right of life to specific human beings on the basis of race, religion or geography.

5 The Ayatollah regarded religious intransigence, which relegates religion to a tool of brutal domination, as one of the most dangerous threats to our existence today. It gave rise to a host of complex issues: intransigence, terrorism, organized crime, ethnic cleansing and persecution of the weak by the strong, at individual, community and national levels. The Najaf school of thought had warned against such religious intransigence since the beginning of the last century: Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Na ini, the prominent Marja at-taqleed or Source of Emulation, stressed in his book Tanbih al-umma wa Tanzih al-milla that religious despotism was the worst kind of despotism. Indeed, political despotism may be born out of religious despotism. Intransigence and religious extremism were not the monopoly of any one religion, but were global phenomena present in all religions and even in political groupings. This was due to a variety of political, economic, intellectual and social factors, as well as to economic and cultural misunderstandings. One particularly damaging factor was the way the written text was interpreted. Some Western schools of thought, as well as some extreme Islamic groups, bore responsibility for this: It is strange to see that a number of thinkers and media personalities in the West are in tune with Muslim extremists in wanting to prove the extremist interpretations of the faith, the Ayatollah remarked. This issue further complicated the problem. Many among the religiously minded younger generations were exploring a more direct link to the literal, and thus often limited, interpretation of religion and faith, particularly the violent interpretations. This development required deeper study. Ayatollah Al-Bahadeli believed that certain policies of the powerful countries, and the practices of some of their satellites in the treatment of their citizens (often with the connivance of the West), combined with the failure of development programmes, and the existence of economic and cultural gaps, had contributed to feelings of helplessness and provided fertile ground for religious extremism among the young. These young people may have chosen religious justification because such justification was powerful and backed by spiritual authority. The problem of religious extremism had been significantly aggravated by the use of indiscriminate or excessive force against Arabs and Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. There had also been insults and humiliations, such as the enactment of anti-terror legislation that sometimes violated human rights, abuses of human dignity in prisons and military camps, and the imposition of double standards on human rights in Arab and Islamic regions. Some of the new security policies introduced after the terrorist actions of September 11 were understandable, but their excessive application could only increase hatred of the West. Although counter-terrorism required the use of force, it did not solve the problem of terrorism. This could be done only by treating its causes, drying out its arteries and reducing frustration. Religious institutions needed to strike a balance: they must uphold the aspirations of the downtrodden, who have lost their pride and dignity, thereby safeguarding the soul of religion as an ally of the downtrodden, while refraining from abusing their sentiments or exciting them for political or personal gain. Such a balance should be obtained through dialogue and non-violence, in order to achieve the empowerment of the people. We support the promotion of such a

6 balance because the religious text is in its essence against exploitation, injustice and poverty; the religious text is against the persecution of nations and peoples. Ayatollah Al-Bahadeli said: We see the role of religion as advisory, as cautionary, as concerned with building capacity and not based on violence and force. Religion calls for the uniting of all efforts towards dialogue, even within the same culture or religion, for the avoidance of tensions between different religious denominations, and for the averting of civil wars that take from a given religion, sect or nationality any excuse for conflict, as the history of Europe shows. Important lessons could be learned from conflicts such as the Lebanese civil war, in which people were killed because of their religious identity. The Ayatollah stressed how important it was for religious representatives not to become part of the problem. The school of Najaf calls for a culture of forgiveness and peace, for the peaceful resolution of problems, and for dialogue and understanding in order to avert violence and destruction. The Najaf School viewed free elections as the best means of facilitating powersharing and the formation of government, of writing the constitution and building the institutions of law which emphasized the power of law over the law of power. Ayatollah Al-Bahadeli said dialogue, especially that between faiths, would help limit the notion of a clash of civilizations. He called on religious leaders to take up the concept of dialogue effectively, and to do all they could to spread harmony and cooperation. They should call upon all commonalities, to rely on God and what we have from our holy texts which emphasize brotherhood and peace, taking the spirit of faith in its essence and realizing that different religions are different paths and stages to reaching God. The Rt Rev Riah Abu El-Assal Bishop Abu El-Assal hoped that people would go beyond the coexistence referred to in the title of the session, to learn the art of co-living. He described his mixed identity, as an Arab Palestinian Christian Anglican who was also an Israeli citizen, as giving room for both confrontation and coexistence but also enabling him to serve as a bridge. As an Arab, he shared, with some 300 million Arabs, a homeland, a language, a culture and a history, and the pains and hopes of a whole nation. As a Palestinian, he shared the aspirations of a people struggling for independence, the pain of being a refugee facing occupation, oppression and humiliation, the separation wall and the hopelessness of the Palestinian nation. In the minds of others, he was first and foremost an Arab Palestinian, and as long as people continued to believe that all Arabs were Muslims and all Palestinians terrorists, you carry the label even if you were to become the next Pope. On the other hand, Christian Arabs were often suspected of being Western. People tended to forget that Christianity came to the Arabs some 700 years before Islam. As an Arab Palestinian Christian, not Jewish by nationality or faith, he was not counted as an equal citizen in Israel. He believed that people in the Middle East were predestined to learn the art of coliving. They were called on and challenged to join hands, pool resources, and to reshape and rewrite the history of their peoples. If this were realized, it would have

7 an impact on future relationships between Christianity and Islam, as well as between Christianity and Judaism, and Islam and Judaism. Bishop Abu El-Assal recalled a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in February 2003, at which Mr Blair had tried to convince him that the war on Iraq would lead to peace in the Middle East. He had replied that the shortest way to Baghdad was through Jerusalem, and that once peace came to Jerusalem it would come to the whole world. To achieve coexistence and co-living required much collective common sense, courage and humility. There was a need to support and advocate acceptance and recognition of the Otherness in the Other, be it in his national, ethnic or religious background. In considering Islam through the eyes of Christians, Bishop Abu El-Assal said that many Orientalists had traditionally viewed Islam with suspicion, causing many to fear and misunderstand it. No wonder, then, that many related to it today as a problem rather than as a challenge. There are some in the world who cannot live without enemies, he said. If they cannot find them, they create them. With the collapse of communism many wish us to view Islam as the new enemy number one in the world. People were scared and suspicious of that of which they were ignorant. True Islam was not known to many in the West. Hence the suspicion, bias and prejudice against it and its adherents. Bishop Abu El-Assal pointed out that Muslim power structures that were indigenous to the Middle East and rooted in its customs and mores were generally more tolerant of religious pluralism than their European counterparts. Until the time of the Ottoman Turks, the ascendancy of Arab Islam heralded periods of greater peace and tolerance than that which ensued under Western Christian or Jewish rule. Islamic fundamentalism and fanaticism had caused more harm to Islam and Muslims than to those of other faiths. The bishop then considered Christ and Christianity in the eyes of Muslims. There had been a jahiliyya meaning ignorance, darkness, blindness about Christ, as Bishop Kenneth Cragg has pointed out. This weak position of Christianity was one of the main reasons for early Muslims right to claim that Islam came to reform the Christian distortion of God and Jesus. Islam had never reached an effective understanding of Christ s teachings, nor come to realize the existence of the true Gospel of Christianity. What was, and continues to be, in need of reform, was definitely not the Gospel of Christianity, and certainly not God or Christ, the bishop said. The bishop examined the factors shaping Christian-Muslim relations including the Crusades, the missionary enterprise, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the establishment of the State of Israel. He said that many evangelical Christians viewed the establishment of Israel as a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies, thus causing us Middle Eastern Christians a real embarrassment and placing us on the side of collaborators against the majority of our own people. These and other local and international factors had influenced relations between Middle Eastern Christians and Islam today. From the introduction of the new religion, Christians were called upon to give an account of their faith. Christians sought not so much to convert Muslims as to persuade them that Christianity was a religion that demanded respect. The bishop said that before we judged others we needed to consider where we had failed, locally and internationally. He asked how many of the negative recent developments were the result of the double standards some Western governments

8 had applied to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and to what extent economic interests were part of the dirty game of nations. Intellectual and doctrinal differences between Islam and Christianity showed mere diversity of thinking, which enriched the human civilization that brought the two faiths together. The aim of history was not that a certain nation should impose itself on other nations, but to seek harmony and co-living. Respect for the human experience, viewing the other compassionately, knowledge gained through moral and intellectual honesty: surely these were worthier, if not easier, goals at this present time than confrontation and hostility. And if in the process we can dispose finally of the residual hatred, the offensive generality of labels and stereotypes, as well as the myths of the past, then so much the better. Dr Salah Eddin Kuftaro Dr Kuftaro said that God had honoured the children of the Abrahamic family, with their forefather Abraham and with heavenly revealed messengers conveyed by the great messengers, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Their messages of faith, moral values, justice and peace were united in their genuine essence. Through the passage of time, and thanks to Islam, the Muslim community had experienced civilized coexistence with the followers of other religions. This was a wonderful example to follow and represented the implementation of the tolerance and fraternity for which each of these religions called. Sadly, there were a few tragic incidents in this period, instigated by motives alien to the teachings of religion, such as egotism and personal interests and the desire to occupy land. Dr Kuftaro described as utterly shameful today s bloody conflicts in which the majority of victims were innocent people, and of which the underlying causes included the occupation of land, and extremism or misunderstanding of a divine message. He said it was essential to point out that religion prohibits the shedding of the blood of innocents. As the Qur an addresses the Muslims: As for those (of the unbelievers) who do not fight against you on account of (your) faith, nor drive you forth from your homelands, God does not forbid you to show them kindness and to behave towards them with full equity: for, verily, God loves those who act equitably. Struggle or jihad was permitted solely for the defence of one s self, land or sanctities. However, certain states exercised killing, destruction and organized terrorism: atrocities were committed against the weak in defiance of international law, and supported only by the law of the jungle. Dr Kuftaro said that the real problem lay with only a few of the descendants of Abraham, having commenced only in the last century when Palestine was occupied. Today Iraq was suffering in a similar manner, with a lack of security and stability, a broken infrastructure, and the killing and maiming of civilians. This sad situation pushes the region to ever more violence, war and hatred, not to mention the undisciplined religious influence among the ranks of its youth. Religion had two edges: The edge we seek is moderation, tolerance and respect for others. The edge we reject is fanaticism, extremism and scorn for others, which is the

9 trademark of those who misunderstand religion and make themselves the custodians of mankind in the name of God. Peace and religious coexistence could not be achieved through meetings and speeches alone, but required the practice of justice and the restoration of rights. Our religious, moral and human imperative was to demand meetings and dialogue with political decision-makers and think tanks of all political affiliations, so that we could stress that peace and coexistence were the only solutions to our crises. Dr Kuftaro said that it was necessary to define terrorism properly, and to study the internal and external causes of the escalation of extremism in Muslim societies. Adopting a medical metaphor, he said that such extremism might be treated in an intensive care unit by exterminating the malignant tumour, and by a purification and liberation of thinking. It could not be treated by killing the patient or by tormenting him and desecrating his beliefs in prison camps. Dr Kuftaro asked the Western media, institutions and centres of study not to view all Muslims through the prism of terrorism and extremism: We do not judge the Jews of the world through Sharon nor the Christians through President Bush. In the same way, we should not judge Islam and Muslims through the actions of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, the members of which do not exceed a few hundred, at a time when there are millions of Muslims who want to live in peace and stability, as other peoples do. There were many moderate Islamic revivalist institutions. They should not be declared guilty, nor should we demand that they be closed. They were free from, and condemned, extremism and fanaticism. They absolutely rejected the killing of civilians anywhere in the world. God says in the Qur an: Whoever kills a human being unless be it (in punishment) for murder or for spreading corruption on earth it shall be as though he had killed all mankind. Dr Kuftaro cited Syria as a wonderful state of coexistence among the followers of all religions, whatever their sect or grouping. Pulpits and places of worship should be used to contribute constructively to the call for peace, justice and respect for others, and to abide by truthfulness. All clerics should be examples for others to follow. Dr Kuftaro appealed to world decisionmakers and rulers to realize that coexistence, communication and fraternity among the children of the Abrahamic family could only be achieved through equality, mutual recognition, respect and the implementation of the just peace that he hoped would be their first priority for the Middle East. Dr Kuftaro hoped that everyone, especially clerics, would then accept a better and more normal existence among those who were at present in conflict. Discussion Ayatollah Al-Bahadeli was asked whether it was really possible to have dialogue before there was a solution to the root of the problems, the Israel-Palestine issue. He saw dialogue, as opposed to conflict, as part of problem solving. He insisted there was no alternative to dialogue, even if it had to last for years. The Ayatollah was asked about the Iraqi constitution and whether Islamic law and the Shariah should be the principal source of legislation, or one of the sources. He said

10 the constitution was still being drafted, and that generally the Shariah was one of the most important sources of legislation. After being drafted, the constitution would be voted upon in a referendum and it would be up to the majority to decide. When asked about the looting of off-licences owned by Christians, the Ayatollah replied that the school of Najaf recognized that Christians were allowed to possess alcohol, and that religious leaders in Najaf had ordered the return of looted goods. On the question of whether women could become Ayatollahs, he replied we have many women Ayatollahs. There was no clear law forbidding a woman to lead prayer. Bishop Abu El-Assal said that although there was a religious dimension to the Arab- Israeli conflict, the root cause was a conflict over a piece of land that both communities claimed as their homeland. If the politicians recognized the rights of the Palestinians in their homeland there might be a way to peace, but so long as others in the West continued to deny the Palestinians the rights accorded to the Israelis, there was no hope. In order to bring about an end to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, we needed to search for justice: a time would come when the two communities would have no alternative but to shake hands and accept each other, and then join hands and bring about new relationships in the Middle East. The bishop said that the missionary enterprise had had an impact on the relations in the indigenous community between Christians and the majority. Those who were influenced by some of the Western missionaries became very much like them. Those who came and preached the gospel in the Middle East did not always attempt to make people better Christians, but in many instances endeavoured to form them in the likeness of the missionary. Those missionaries who had come with a political agenda had caused a lot of harm by creating confusion over identity. This crisis of identity had contributed to the emigration of the majority of Palestinian Christians. Sixty years ago Christians made up around 20 per cent of the Palestinian population, but the figure had dropped to around 1.5 per cent, a situation the bishop described as catastrophic.

11 Session II Who Threatens Whom? Perceptions of the Other Speakers: Chair: Professor Tariq Ramadan Professor Francois Burgat, Institut de Recherches et d Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman and Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies Dr Rosemary Hollis, Chatham House Dr Hollis noted that the title of the conference, Is Islam a Threat to the West? was deliberately provocative. The conference was not intended to consist of nice sugary polite speeches about how all religions can live in harmony, and it s not the fault of religion, it s the fault of the politicians. Rather, it aimed to tackle head on the concerns over Islam that are manifest in the West. This particular session was designed to investigate who threatens whom with the possibility that it was Islam that was under threat and the perceptions of the Other. Dr Hollis said that the two speakers were extremely well equipped to address this topic: both had examined the subject of Islam and its place in the current global context. Both had experienced the problems and travails of the perceptions of Islam by non-muslims even as they had studied perceptions of the West by Muslims. Professor Ramadan s current CV described him as resigning Professor of Islamic Studies at Notre Dame University and Luce Professor at the Kroc Institute in South Bend, Indiana. In July 2004 his visa to teach at the University of Notre Dame was revoked by the State Department on the orders of the Department of Homeland Security. Professor Tariq Ramadan Professor Ramadan said it was necessary to build bridges, to establish a true dialogue and to find what was needed from the West and from the Islamic world in order to arrive at a better future, and an improved dialogue. Some refered to a clash of civilizations, others to a clash of ignorances or a clash of fundamentalisms. Whatever term one used, there were mutual negative perceptions, and what could be understood as a potential fracture at the psychological, political, academic, cultural and religious levels. Dr Ramadan approached the subject mainly at the psychological level, but psychology was part of reality, as were perceptions. He examined the high level of mistrust between two worlds and between people in two different civilizations. When someone spoke as a Western Muslim and tried to build bridges, the reaction was, Can we trust him?. There was a feeling on both sides that a threat existed: the Islamic world perceived the West as a threat, and in the West Islam was seen as a threat. It was necessary to understand the complexity of the perceptions within both worlds, to see how the perceptions became a reality and how they could be dealt with and transcended. Muslims in the Islamic world, and even Western Muslims, saw themselves as the dominated culture of civilization and of religion today. The Islamic world perceived

12 globalization as being mainly Westernization. This gave rise to a sense of threat. There was also a perception in the Islamic world that it was subject to economic imperialism. There was a similar feeling of threat within the West. When the West dealt with people who were dominated, or perceived themselves to be dominated, this generated mistrust. Professor Ramadan said that the war on terrorism was seen by the great majority of Muslims in the West and in the Islamic world as a war against Islam, rather than merely as a war against extremists. One element was the move to liberate Iraq, and the perception that there was something wrong in the way in which the Iraqi people were treated. He went on to speak of Western security policy, whether Homeland Security in the US or policies in Europe. American and European Muslims saw security policy as a kind of institutionalized discrimination which was destructive of mutual trust. Professor Ramadan recognized that a security policy was necessary, but he criticized the way in which all Muslims were regarded as a potential threat. Europe had not gone through the same experience as the US, but the way it was dealing with Muslims was also seen as a discriminatory policy in the name of security. Muslims were being perceived as the new enemy: Yesterday it was communism, today it s the Islamic world and the Islamic civilization. Muslims were playing the role of helping the West define itself against someone else. He asked how mutual trust could be built in the face of such a perception, with Muslims seen as the new enemy from outside, or as an alleged fifth column inside. Professor Ramadan warned that one problem is not that far-right parties were gaining strength, but that the terminology of far-right discourse was becoming more widely acceptable. He examined the revealing discussion about Turkey joining the European Union, in which the implicit discourse was that there were all these Muslims entering Europe, forgetting that millions of Muslims were already European. In relation to European Muslims he asked: What about us? Are we within, or still outside?. Professor Ramadan identified this as a problem, with Muslims being within, geographically speaking, and yet outside, psychologically speaking. He warned that the perception of Muslims as the new enemy of the West did not help Muslims to be self-critical. If Muslims were self-critical within the Islamic community and civilizations, they were perceived as playing the role of the enemy and were liable to be accused of working for the Bush administration or the West. From the Western point of view, terrorist attacks were a fact, and Islamist extremism or radicalism was perceived as a threat. This could not be denied. Professor Ramadan said it was necessary to understand the fear engendered by the attacks in the US and in Spain, but while this fear must be taken into account, it was dangerous to use it as a new ideology of fear and as the basis of policy. In the last election in the US, this fear had been played on in order to gain votes. Professor Ramadan examined the perceptions that Muslims don t like the West, and its values and civilization and that they have a problem with democracy. There was a lack of self-confidence within both the Western and Islamic worlds. In the West, this led to questions such as Who are we? What do we stand for? What are our values? To be obsessed by the fact that democracy is fragile can make it fragile the shift in Madrid three days after the terror attacks showed democracy to be strong, because a government can be changed, but also fragile in that emotions had led people to change the way they would vote.

13 Professor Ramadan looked at the way Western Muslims were being dealt with. There were suspicions within Europe and the US over what was occurring within their Muslim communities, because of a lack of trust. Rather than facilitate representivity of the communities, they were controlling them. Some voices in the US were saying Muslims were invading Europe and that Europe would be an Islamized continent. What did this mean? Turkey, of course, symbolized the perceived invasion. The new visibility of Western Muslims was leading to the perception of a silent invasion. Professor Ramadan said there was also a threat at the more philosophical level. When he met Muslims in Europe, the Arab world or Asia, they told him Muslims had universal values that they wanted to see respected. There was no single set of Western universal values: the term Western universal values was a contradiction in terms. Muslims also had universality and wanted to engage in dialogue on an equal footing. Professor Ramadan said the West should have a dialogue with Muslims, because Islam was a great civilization. At a philosophical level people were saying they did not want an interactive monologue, but a real and deep dialogue, because they had a universal message. Christians have a universal message. Jews have a universal message. Buddhists have a universal message. And Western civilization is presenting its universal message, but the Islamic world is doing exactly the same. So we have to decentre ourselves from that in order to enter this dialogue. Professor Ramadan said the ideology of threat, and the new way of dealing with it, were being approached more with emotions than with a critical mind. Emotion was communicating without informing. And there was a lack of hearing. Out of emotion you are building mutual walls between the civilizations. These walls existed at the local, national, international and, regrettably, academic levels. He urged a return to the principle of causality, whilst stressing that to understand is not to justify. We have to condemn terrorism, but we must also explain and understand what is happening. One has to be against terrorism, but if you say all terrorists are the same you don t have to explain. You have to say what happened on 9/11 is unacceptable and not explainable. However, a national resistance movement could be morally unacceptable, and condemnable, but at the same time intellectually explicable. Professor Ramadan said it was his understanding there was no fracture between the Islamic and Western worlds, but that there were fractures within both worlds. Within the Muslim world there were people it is impossible to talk with because of their radical views, and if you are nuanced you are no longer a Muslim. In the West there was a fracture between the far-right understanding of you are with us or against us and those who rejected this. My point is not to speak about two worlds, but trying to find people in both worlds ready to build bridges and come together. In order to do this, it was necessary first to understand that we have common universal values, and that universality is not a characteristic only of the West or of Islam. There needed to be a respect for diversity. Professor Ramadan called on both sides, Western and Muslim, to know who they were and to be self-confident in what they believed. Out of this self-confidence could come self-criticism. Yes, Islam is a great message, but not all Muslims are great. This self-criticism was very important. It was also necessary to be decentred, so as to be capable of seeing the reality of another from that person s viewpoint. We have to open the door for something which is going to be very demanding and very

14 difficult: a true and deep dialogue of civilizations. Professor Ramadan acknowledged that it was very demanding to go from interactive monologues to a critical and demanding interactive dialogue. Professor François Burgat Professor Burgat recalled a discussion at Chatham House ten years earlier when the question posed was Is Islam a threat for democracy? Now the question has become Is Islam a threat to the West? and he was afraid that next time the question would be Is Islam a threat to humanity?. With reference to Professor Ramadan, he cited French attorney Laurent Levy who wrote that by labelling your enemy Ramadanist, Ramadanian or friend of Ramadan, you succeeded in exploiting some kind of irrational reaction. Professor Burgat himself had been subjected to vicious attacks on the internet because he was Ramadan s friend. Professor Burgat said when one looks at the question, does someone threaten the other? we do not know the answer, but we do know that one side perceives there is a threat that comes from Islam. It used to come from the fundamentalists, it used to come from the Islamic militants, but slowly, year by year, it comes from Islam as a whole. He said that in trying to deconstruct and rationalize the reasons for the problem in our relationship with Islam, he would make two points: there are the historical fears and there are the fears which are on the current political agenda of major political activists. He called them the Sharm al-sheikh club, the people who gathered at Sharm el-sheikh in 1996 for the first anti-islamic terrorism summit. The members of the Sharm el-sheikh club have on their political agenda a goal of instrumentalizing, using and exploiting the inherited difficulty of the West in handling Islam. Professor Burgat said this difficulty of the West in handling Islam had come about because in moving away from the period of colonial domination, the position of the party who was dominated was easier than that of the one who dominated. He asked why it was so difficult to have a rational approach to what Islam meant. For the West, Islam signalled the end of the Western monopoly in expressing universality. The West had to admit that another symbolic system could produce something which was a serious competitor in the field of expressing universality, and this was a very painful and disturbing admission. Islam was the culture of the other, the neighbour who gave you your cultural identify at a time when the relationship was is moving away from one of simple domination. In 1913, no one in Paris was afraid of Islam. Professor Burgat lamented the fact that while the brains should be dominant over the gut, a bunch of people, and they are not the weakest people on earth benefit if they can label their opponent, him who resists, as an Islamist. Returning to the Sharm al- Sheikh summit, he identified several groups within the new conservatives of today. The first part of the team was the Arab Pinochets who criticize their opponents ideologically, applying the Islamic concept of taqfir which means you disconnect an individual from all his rights as a member of a legitimate community so you can torture or kill him. Professor Burgat used the term to Guantanamize an enemy, meaning to deprive him of any of the guarantees of civil rights that he deserves as a human being belonging to a legitimate community.

15 The second part of the Sharm el-sheikh gang was Likud intolerants. They want the West Bank, peace, and a smile on the face of each Palestinian at each checkpoint in front of each colony. This influential group also criminalized its opponents using ideology, claiming that they do what they do not because they are subject to repression but because they are fundamentalist Islamic militants who are against freedom, liberty and peace. The third group was the US-Euro Neo-cons. They relied on their religious, Christian belonging to criminalize the other. France had a different trend of neoconservatives, who did not all rely on religion as their primary belonging. Some of them rely on their primary belonging or supposed primary belonging as secularist, so there are secularist militants in France who use the concept of secularism to criminalize any kind of relation between a political activist and the vocabulary of his religion. Professor Burgat referred to a political trend within the Islamic world that the West had created and helped strengthen day by day, a trend that saw the West as antagonistic: The problem is that we are not facing this trend in a way which could lower its credibility in the Arab political landscape. We are fuelling day after day the legislative of the radical trend. In his criticisms of the media, Professor Burgat said that it was difficult to get Tariq Ramadan on prime time TV, but the worst ambassadors of the worst trend of Islamic militancy frequently were. He said that on prime time TV in France there were two kinds of intellectuals: les intellectuels negatifs, as Pierre Bourdieu labelled them, who fail to speak to the brain rather than the gut; and the new concept of the native informant. Yet if the history of the French Revolution had been written exclusively by those aristocrats who fled from France, it would be very different. We needed their story, but it could not be considered the main source. There were European native informants who gave credibility to the essentialist approach of Bernard Lewis, or who supported the banning of Tariq Ramadan in the US. Professor Bourgat played on the term la maladie d Islam to produce les malades d Islam, those who function within the limits of an essentialist approach of the entire history of the Muslim world as an explanation of the difficulties of violence in which we are deeply involved. Discussion One delegate noted that although the 9/11 report had called on moderate Muslims to speak out and criticize people like Osama bin Laden, and Al-Qaeda, none had done so. He asked whether in France there were moderate voices criticizing Al-Qaeda. Professor Burgat said he could give reasons why moderate Muslims might feel uncomfortable when asked to unilaterally condemn a phenomenon that no one has taken the time to deconstruct. While we all wanted to condemn 9/11, we also wanted to know what had brought about this radicalization of a fringe of the Muslim world. He considered the process of radicalization that led to 9/11 to be the result of three main factors: the new world order in the 1990s with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from international affairs and rise in the unilateralism and interventionism of the US; the reliance of this new world order on the Arab Pinochets ; and the Sharm al- Sheikh syndrome, which he defined as a link between US interventionism in the new world order and the illegitimacy of the regime of the local order. A dictator is allowed to stay in power because he is supported by the new world order.

16 Professor Ramadan said that the perception that we have to condemn without explanation puts us in a very uncomfortable situation. After 9/11 when he was invited to New York and spoke to Muslims, he said that it was unacceptable for someone to say a Jew or Christian can be killed because they are a Jew or Christian. He noted that strong voices in the Islamic world had condemned 9/ll and the attacks in Bali and Madrid. They were from the Ulema and the scholars, and the real problem was to bring them to the foreground to be heard. Condemnation was not the only solution, and it needed to be accompanied by mutual criticism. He wanted to tell both sides to stop playing the victim: Muslims are not victims. And Americans, you are not victims of this new terrorism. You have to deal with it on a critical level and be self-critical as to your policies. He recalled being told in the American Embassy we know your position on terrorism, but what is your position on the Iraqi war? He told them he condemned it and that it had been a wrong decision. It was not about just condemning terrorism when you were critical towards Western policies you were a threat. A critical mind is not what we want today in the political game. The only people that are accepted today are those who say you are right. In reply to a question on European Muslims, Professor Ramadan recalled that the first reactions he had from both sides when he spoke about European Muslims was that they are Muslims in Europe and not European Muslims. Muslims thought we are Muslim and this is not our environment, while from a Western viewpoint the phrase European Muslim meant Muslims were Islamizing Europe. But Muslims were not only being integrated into the social landscape and cultural reality, they were integrated. Does it mean that we are not going to integrate the cultural roots? No. The problem we have with the third and fourth generations is that they are confusing their religious belonging with the cultural input. They have to make a choice. This is the new personality: understand that your cultural belonging is richness, don t experience it as a torture. He found that Muslims in France were completely different from Muslims in Britain, and this was good. They are really British, or they are really French, and sometimes they don t laugh at the same jokes. That s great. This is the future. But we have common values and understandings of what European culture is all about. This is a way we can build confidence; we have to accept a diversity of European cultures. He was working to build partnerships and mutual trust, but the ideology of fear and those who supported it opposed this. He declared he would never stop talking about the oppression of the people and would never stop saying the Palestinians were oppressed, even if the price of this was being denied entry to the US. Professor Ramadan pointed out that he also came under attack in the Islamic world because of his criticisms of it. But there is one reality that we have to take into account: that out of these facts, we are building perceptions and that these perceptions are part of the reality, distorting the way you are looking at reality. Yes, we have prejudices, we have suspicions towards each other. Let us also tackle this. It s the philosophical and psychological entrance to solve the facts. This is my perception. Professor Burgat clarified his comments on native informants and said we needed the testimony of those who fled the French Revolution because they were part of

17 history, part of the story. But he did criticize those who gave the monopoly in representing the Muslim world to Fuad Ajami and others who did not give a balanced view of a complex situation. Session III What Went Wrong? Is Freedom the Answer? Speakers: Chair: Professor Vitaly Naumkin, International Center for Strategic and Political Studies Ambassador Elizabeth McKune, Media Outreach Center, US Embassy, London Lyse Doucet, BBC Ms Doucet opened the session by asking how we had got to where we were now, and whether it was a clash of civilizations, a clash of cultures, a clash of religions or as Professor Ramadan had put it in Session II a clash of ignorances. And how did we get from here to somewhere different? Freedom had become one of the bywords, clichés, slogans, answers in our post 9/11 world. President Bush used it constantly, whether in relation to the Israeli - Palestinian conflict, democracy in Egypt or problems with Syria and Iran. All the questions of the world seemed able to find a solution in greater freedom. But what did it actually mean, and was it really a solution to get us out of this problem, however one defined the problem? Professor Vitaly Naumkin Professor Naumkin examined the various senses in which Western intellectuals were asking with increasing frequency What went wrong? Some meant that something had gone wrong in relations between Muslims and the world, particularly the West. Others meant that Muslim communities were lagging behind in their development, and sought a clue in their civilizational specificity. Professor Bernard Lewis, author of the book What Went Wrong?, meant by the question a clash between modernity and Islam, which he restricted to the Middle East. He identified the lack of freedom as a phenomenon that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world. But Professor Naumkin asked whether this lack of freedom was characteristic of the Muslim world alone. Symbolic Choice Theory, which was normally applied to ethnic conflicts, could help in understanding the relationship of the Islamic world with the West. The roots of attitudes of growing resentment lay in myths and symbols which formed mythsymbol complexes. Myths were associated with the deep-seated fear of extinction, in this case exacerbated by globalization. Donald Horowitz had described how the fear of group extinction led to feelings of hostility, and then to group violence, which in its turn begat new myths and new fears. A vicious circle was established which became ever more difficult to break. Symbols gained their meaning from emotionally laden myths, which according to Murray Edelman have the role of giving some events and actions a particular meaning typically by defining enemies and heroes and tying ideas of right and

18 wrong to people s identity. So a Muslim beating his wife had become a widespread myth in Western societies, justifying hostility to Muslims. On the other hand prostitution and moral decay had become symbols embedded in Muslim perceptions of Western culture. However, Professor Naumkin was still far from thinking that there were no serious discrepancies between the liberal concept of human freedom and the norms accepted in many (but not all) Islamic communities. The attitude to women is the most revealing example, but sharp differences on this problem exist within Islamic communities. No Islamic country had provided a convincing example that a state built on the Shariah could be prosperous and make its citizens happy. But neither had liberal democracy so far created a model of convincing attractiveness in the Islamic world. Professor Naumkin asked: Is it possible in principle to create an intercivilizational, transnational morality that would be shared, among others, by people from both the Muslim and the Western world? He did not think it absolutely impossible. One key issue for Muslims was how they should exist in societies where they were a minority. Professor Naumkin distinguished three types of residence. In the first case the Muslim-populated territory (for example certain republics of the North Caucasus) was part of a larger state. In the second, Muslims were dispersed in territories where they had not been living earlier, for example Muslims in Europe. The third type was the temporary stay of Muslims, such as students, in non-muslim societies. Professor Naumkin said: It is precisely the character of interaction between Muslim communities and the secular state with a prevailing Muslim population that creates reality from which various misperceptions and myths derive their power. Something inevitably went wrong when even analysts could not overcome the power of myth. Some analysts were captive to a mythology of a sort of Muslim inferiority complex, which Paul Berman illustrates by an analysis of the sayings of Seyyid Qutb. These mythologies were particularly powerful when the debate is about democracy in the Muslim world. Muslim hostility towards democracy was another mythology that was not supported by reality. Despite their resolute rejection of secularism and their non-acceptance of democracy as a Western novice to Islam, even fundamentalist and Salafi groups often appealed to democracy in their quest for power. An example was the election in Algeria, which the FIS would have won had the military not intervened. In Uzbekistan local Islamist groups addressed the norms of democracy human rights and civil liberty to protest against repression. The Iranian regime rejected the liberal notion of democracy, yet functioned through recourse to many of its institutions and norms, including elections and a parliament. Professor Naumkin supported the view of Olivier Roy that Islamists contributed to greater democracy and secularization in the Islamic world by their references to civil society and democracy, their alliance with Islamic forces and their criticism of authoritarian and repressive regimes. The problem was that these regimes were closely associated with Western societies, and were regarded as instrumental to the spread of Westernization and liberal democracy. This is what created the negative myth of democracy within Muslim societies. There were a number of other examples of how myth and misperceptions had played a role in creating hostilities. Professor Naumkin said that Islam, or to be more exact Muslims, might represent a danger to Europe, to the extent that Europe provoked and fanned hostility. Each of the two sides felt not so much the opposition and incompatibility between

19 fundamental values as vulnerability to the onset of the alien other woven into the process of globalization. For the world of Islam this was the onslaught of secularism and Westernization. For Europe, above all, it was the growth in the number of migrants from the countries of the Muslim world, quite apart from terrorism. The realization of vulnerability and preoccupation with security formed an emotional background against which myths and fears proliferated. To overcome these myths would be an indispensable element of effort aimed at bringing cultures together and organizing constructive mutual interaction, Professor Naumkin concluded. Ambassador Elizabeth McKune Ambassador McKune, who has lived and worked in the Arab world for almost two decades, admitted that when she was told of the topic What went wrong? Is freedom the answer? in the context of Is Islam a threat to the West? she had wondered whether these were not the wrong questions to ask. Why pick freedom to presumably solve the problem of assumed Arab backwardness which the question implied, and why not something else, such as more education? And did something go wrong in the Arab world? No Arab instigated the 20th century s world wars, both of which caused horrific suffering. She concluded that What went wrong? was probably a reference to the writings of the renowned Middle Eastern scholar Professor Bernard Lewis. It was he, not Samuel Huntington, who first introduced the phrase the Clash of Civilizations, understood in part as a clash between Christianity and Islam. In his article What Went Wrong? published in the Atlantic Monthly several years ago, Lewis wrote that in the course of the twentieth century, it became abundantly clear that things had gone badly wrong in the Middle East and indeed, in all the lands of Islam. Compared with Christendom, its rival for more than a millennium, the world of Islam had become poor, weak and ignorant. The primacy and therefore the dominance of the West was clear for all to see, including every aspect of the Muslim s public and even more painfully his private life. Ambassador McKune thought another public figure had made a better statement, beginning: In many nations of the Middle East, democracy has not yet taken root. And the questions arise: Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Those were the words of US President George W. Bush at his presentation before the National Endowment for Democracy in The principles he articulated were integral to US policy towards the Middle East. Bush has said: The best hope for peace in the world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. Ambassador McKune turned to the three Arab Human Development Reports commissioned by the UN Development Programme to show what Arabs themselves thought on the subjects of reform, freedom, justice and democracy. The US was not spared criticism in these reports, the first of which was published in Any positive developments in the Arab world were vastly outweighed in the reports by pages and pages of shortcomings and deficits in Arab countries, described in detail by a team of Arabs from different places in the Arab world and from many different political persuasions. Their criticisms were in many ways more stinging than many non-arab analyses of the current situation. The reports described three

20 principal deficits in the Arab world: in freedom, in women s empowerment, and in human capabilities and knowledge. Regarding the freedom deficit, the Arab authors cited figures and surveys indicating that in the Arab world, political participation was limited, civil society constrained and the media, at best, only partly free. The authors wrote that no Arab thinker today doubted that freedom was a vital and necessary condition (though not the only one) for a new Arab renaissance. Did Arabs desire democracy? A World Values Study showed that the answer was a resounding yes. Of nine regions surveyed, Arab countries scored highest in judging democracy to be the best form of government. The reports offered three solutions for the three deficits: build Arab capabilities and knowledge, use human capabilities to reinvigorate the economies and promote good governance. Ambassador McKune said that promoting freedom and democracy were top foreign policy goals of the US government. At the same time the US was, as President Bush had stated, mindful that modernization was not the same as Westernization. Representative governments would reflect their own cultures and would not, and should not, look like the US. She said that US support for reform, democracy and freedom in the Middle East took several forms. It extended support to government and non-governmental organizations through government-to-government dialogue, bilateral assistance and reform leadership programmes. In the policy dialogue with governments, the administration at times expressed its views publicly, as over the detention of Ayman Nour, leader of the Al Ghad party in Egypt. In other instances, it supported reformers through private, but frank and direct, conversations with its counterparts in government. There was no uniform approach to reform in every country. On the multilateral level, working with its G8 partners, the US had created the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative to build partnerships with people in the region who were working for greater liberty. The flagship of this bold new policy was the Forum for the Future, described as an unprecedented international venue to amplify the voices for reform that are redefining the region. On the bilateral level the primary programme is the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI). To use the popular phrase, the US has talked the talk and is walking the walk in relation to the MEPI. As of March 2005, the US had committed $293 million to the MEPI, which funds more than 100 programmes in 14 countries. As with the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, the focus of MEPI was to support the expansion of political opportunities, as well as democratic, economic and educational reform and empowerment of women. Supporting freedom in the Middle East, and throughout the world, was in everyone s interest. The US and its partners were talking the talk and walking the walk through economic assistance programmes, expertise and goodwill. Ambassador McKune concluded by saying that the US recognized that victory in the war against terrorism could only be finally achieved if we address the underlying causes of strife and conflict. When people are free to express their economic and political interests, they seek resolution of differences through peaceful means, not through destruction and terror. In this sense, the answer to the question was yes, Freedom was the answer.

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