Tons of Fishing
Web Directories And resources!

Pakistan's Imran Khan, former cricket champion and founder of the Justice Movement (Tehrike-Insaaf), makes a cogent case for Islamism as the best way out of this neocolonial rut. His own conversion to serious public service followed his gravitation toward a deeply existential Islam. This spiritual passage into civil Islam was not, however, a categorically anti-Western passage. Khan remains dialogically open to the nonimperialistic aspects of Western culture. This should come as no surprise, for just as there has been a Tocquevillian awakening to the importance of civil society in the West, Muslim reformists are recognizing "that formal democracy cannot prevail unless government power is checked by strong civic associations"., by civil Islam.

As the failure of Western development schemes is laid bare, all Islamic regimes fall under the shadow of this reform Some inoculate themselves by fostering a militant fundamentalism such as Saudi Wahhabism. Though President Suharto of Indonesia was always wary of Islamic politics, he too saw the need to defuse the Muslim pro-democracy movement of the 1990s through an eleventh hour alliance with ultraconservative Thus he cultivated the very elements that now pose a terrorist threat. Likewise, Pakistan is presently reverting to Zia-like Islamism. In such cases the real threat to democratization is not the chance that Islam will contaminate politics, but that an already corrupt and militaristic politics will contaminate Islam.

Beena Sarwar explains that "when the state declares some aspect of social power to be Islamic or traditional, it creates a political constituency in those who get that particular scrap of power. And once they have it they will defend it in the terms it came wrapped in, even if the 'tradition' is new and the 'Muslim law' even newer." This was illustrated all too well by the recent order of a Pakistani jirga (tribal court) that a man's alleged crime-insulting the dignity of a higher-status tribe by having illicit sex with one of its members-be compensated by the legally administered gang-rape of his sister. Four men, including one of the jurists,15 took turns doing the court's bidding, after which the girl was made to walk home naked in full view of dozens of villagers. Although there is no precedent for this sentence,16 few in today's Pakistan dare resist such rulings.

Women's rights are especially at risk in the face of invented "traditions" that use Islam as a front. Educated Muslim women are fighting back by forming their own Koranic study groups. This feminist wing of civil Islam-which does battle on two fronts, opposing both fundamentalist misogyny and Western sexism-made its global debut at the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing. While chauvinistic interpretations of the Koran were given a drubbing, Western feminism was also targeted as an instrument of neocolonial globalization. This double-edged contest typifies civil Islam's domestic and foreign stance.

Like most Islamic rulers, Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf is fighting on those same two fronts, but very much on the opposite side. His recent constitutional revisionism includes a rule that only college graduates can run for high public office. That voided the candidacies of many leading political activists, such as the head of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy, Nawabzada Nasrulla Khan. There was also an attempt to disqualify Imran Khan for failing to file proof of his Oxford graduation. The ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML) appeared to suffer a startling setback in the country's elections of October 2002, as voters registered their chagrin over Musharrafs Washington ties. Qazi Hussein Ahmed-leader of the rising Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), an alliance of six Islamic organizations-declared this a revolution against . imperialism and Westernization. Paradoxically, however, nothing cements the PML's . alliance so much as this MMA challenge. The October elections provided just the democratic gloss that Musharraf needed to paper over his constitutional ravages and to leverage Washington for still more support. The tactic worked: By mid-November . treasury secretary Paul O'Neill was praising Musharraf for his antiterrorist efforts and promising to forgive $1 billion of Pakistan's debt to the United States.

This lesson in political image control was not lost on Sheik Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, king of Bahrain, who decided to allow a parliamentary election for the first time in almost thirty years. America welcomes this move insofar as it stabilizes the political environment of a vital . naval base. It is a risk-free venture, since the new house of Parliament cannot act without the consent of the other house, which the Sunni king appoints. Shiite groups therefore organized an election boycott, but that did not prevent the archglobalist Thomas Friedman from lauding the elections as a democratic beachhead in the Arab world.

Civil Islam must be prepared to fight the Musharrafs and the Friedmans alike. So too, like Muslim feminists, it must combat both radical fundamentalism and blanket Bernard Lewis reduces modern Islam's field of choice to those fire-and-ice options, but in fact the traditions of Ataturk and Khomeini have struck a symbiotic bargain. While secular elites choke basic liberties, what remains of public discourse is shunted into fundamentalist mosques. America does its part by promoting some of the most repressive regimes on Earth, and by withholding the modicum of support that civil Islamists need to

Nothing, not even radical fundamentalism, puts America's client regimes so much on edge as civil Islam-hence the local and global ferment when Turkey's new Islamist-oriented Justice and Development Party (AKP) claimed a sweeping victory in the November 2002 elections. The AKP was forged out of the remnants of the Welfare Party that formed the first Islamist government in 1997, only to be ousted by the staunchly Kemalist military. With Turkey's . application at issue, the military will probably exercise restraint this time. The country's flagging economy too badly needs the . boost, and America is in no position to object so long as Turkey offers itself as a military springboard into

Thus the West finds itself in the curious position of securing the new Islamist government. Just ten days before the elections, Turkey's chief prosecutor tried to outlaw the AKP-the party's leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, having already been banned from public office-but the tide had turned both domestically and geopolitically. Knowing its victory was less an endorsement of Islamism than a vote against corruption, the AKP is in no position to spurn the West. Far more than the political establishment it displaced, this reform party promises full support for the human rights and democratic reforms mandated at Copenhagen for . applicants.

An even better example of civil Islam's democratic propensity is the fledgling Kurdish government that has emerged in northern Iraq since 1991 when a no-fly zone was put in place following the Gulf War. In an area 250 by 125 miles, bordered by Syria to the west, Turkey to the north, and Iran to the east, civil liberties have taken shape here as never before in Iraq, or indeed in the Arab world. The Bush administration boasts that its blueprint for a new Iraq would offer a democratic model for the Islamic world,20 but such a model already exists in the Kurdish zone.

Although Saddam Hussein easily qualifies as the antithesis of that model, it was his place in the global economy that enabled his petrol-driven regime to crush the median institutions that would normally buffer centrist oppression. As Bryan Turner points out, standard Orientalist depictions of Asian society have overlooked such mediating social structures in Asian Ironically it is Western and especially American influence that has done most to corrode these structures. Globalization has only accelerated this process, while Islamic resistance has been compelled to go global, setting the stage for the civilizational clash that Barber and Huntington warned of in the early 1990s.

America's impending war with Iraq, however, is not so much a case of civilizational clash, like its war on Al Qaeda, as a disciplinary action against a refractory globalist puppet-a hired thug who decided to stake out his own turf. Despite their deep hatred of Saddam, Kurds have understandably been slow to join this war dance, since it could remove the protection they presently enjoy in northern Iraq. They have not forgotten how the former President Bush left them in the lurch after encouraging their ill-considered revolt. Only after a million of them fled into Turkey and Iran did the United Nations establish the safe haven that now doubles as a regional prototype for civil

The . Seal of Approval

Those who think Iraqi Kurds would be protected by an .-engineered "regime change" in Baghdad should consider how little protection Turkish Kurds have received under America's cold war aegis. Since 1984 there have been forty thousand Kurdish casualties in Turkey's undeclared ethnic The end of the cold war removed America's only excuse for not applying humanitarian pressure on Turkey, but the only real pressure has come from the European Union, which has induced the Turkish parliament to extend some rudimentary rights to the Television and radio stations, for example, are now allowed to broadcast up to forty-five minutes a day in Kurdish and other regional languages. This limited but effective engagement stands in contrast to America's record of highly invasive but ethically nugatory "realism": roughly two hundred military aggressions since World War II,25 plus countless economic machinations. Jeane Kirkpatrick defended such habits on the ground that authoritarian regimes, unlike "totalitarian" ones, would reform themselves in time. But as Stephen Kotkin points out in Armageddon Averted (2001), it was ultimately the Soviets who reformed themselves.

Today similar tactics keep the oil flowing but seldom result in significant reform apart from economic restructuring on globalist terms. Using the war on terrorism as its pretext, Bush foreign policy pushes the geopolitics of oil to new extremes. In the same week that Colin Powell arrived in Indonesia to fete the partial renewal of military aid to one of the world's most virulent military machines, the administration played its antiterrorist card on the judiciary by attempting to block a lawsuit filed in the United States by the International Labor Rights Fund against Exxon Mobil on behalf of eleven Acehnese victims of assault, torture, and murder. The company claims it bears no responsibility for the actions of security forces guarding its

Would Exxon have dared use that line if these facilities had been on . soil and the victims had been Americans? The message this double standard sends to the global South raises the question of why it is only Muslim extremists who are effectively fighting globalization with more than words. Islamism is a categorical failure only for those, such as Daniel Pipes and Azar Nafisi, who see the New World Order as a categorical Nothing personal here. The same judgment would come down on any serious resistance to globalization. Pushed to its logical conclusion, this globalist reflex leads to the apotheosis of order that Stanley Hoffmann deplores in Henry Kissinger and a new generation of realists. Licensed by 9/11, these empire builders are prepared to put human rights on permanent hold. Like Michael Ignatieff, Hoffman laments that Clinton-era gains on the Palestinian issue have been sacrificed on the altar of antiterrorism. Meanwhile the sympathy that the world showered on America after 9/11 has been answered with cold, unilateral contempt-this at a time when the United States, lacking the magnetic attraction of cold war polarity, needs international support more than

Unable to depend on unconditional cold war allies, the United States looks all the more to its client states for loyalty. These correctly take Bush administration policies as an American seal of approval for hard-line tactics. Thus Egypt feels secure in its "republonarchy" ("Gomloukiya"), as Saad Eddin Ibrahim dubs it. Ibrahim's Cairo University professorship and dual . citizenship did not shield him in his pro-democratic activism. He was arrested on charges of embezzling funds from the European Union, receiving donations without government permission, and harming Egypt's international reputation. Although the European Union insisted that no embezzlement had taken place, the 63-year-old reformist was convicted and sentenced to seven years at hard labor, which could be a death sentence for a man of his age and poor health. His only real "crime" was encouraging voter registration and assisting the European Union in monitoring

At first the . State Department simply went on record as being "deeply disappointed" by the court's Thomas Friedman's response was well stated, if more than a little naive: "'Disappointed?' Fm disappointed when the Baltimore Orioles lose. When an Egyptian president we give $2 billion a year to jails a pro-American democracy advocate, I'm outraged and expect America to do something about it. I'm also frightened because if there is no space in Egypt for democratic voices for changes, then Egyptians will only be left with the mosque...."31

True enough. But this show of outrage hinges on a degree of surprise that is inconceivable in view of America's stance toward Islamic states since the early cold war era. Washington still keeps its silence concerning the fact that not one of the twenty-two members of the Arab League is a Is it beyond Friedman's neoliberal imagination that Bush could be calling the shots with Mubarak, even as Mubarak calls the shots with the Egyptian courts? And can his fellow neoliberals-turned-hawks be unaware that part of the current leadership crisis in Iraq stems from the absence of suitable replacements for Saddam, given the fact that most of the country's best intellectuals were long ago liquidated, with Washington's tacit blessing, for having been affiliated with the Left?33

Had the United States shown half as much concern over the plight of women within its spheres of influence as it did over Left ideology, the condition of 50 percent of the Saudi population could have been much ameliorated. The sordid truth is that Iraqi women enjoy privileges and opportunities far beyond the reach of their Saudi This is one of many reasons why the Iraqi regime is no friend of Al Qaeda. While Bush propaganda depicts Saddam as a rabid Islamist, jihadists more realistically view him as a secularist;35 and for many years that helped him keep his . stamp of approval.

America's animus against Islamic politics is even more pronounced in Central Asia, where Islamism functions to destabilize atavistic regimes. When it is considered that these ruling structures were left over from Soviet days, and in Central Asia did not undergo the reforms associated with glasnost, it becomes obvious that a destabilizing force is not necessarily a bad thing. To snuff out Islamic oppositionalism is to reinforce the residual Stalinism that plagues the region to this day, and ironically is more ingrained here than in present-day Russia, where apparatchik kleptocracy is more a problem than old-style despotism.

Human Rights Watch reports that Uzbek president Islam Karimov, having repeatedly extended his term of office, now publicly questions the efficacy of democracy, human rights, and freedom of the press. His crackdown on "Islamic extremists" is aimed at all Muslim opponents, including peaceful The situation in Turkmenistan at least provides comic re lief from the usual banality of evil. Saparmurat Niyazov is better known as Akbar Turkmenbashi, or the Great Leader of All Turkmen. Streets, factories, airports, all kinds of public works, and even one city have been named for this de facto president for life. Not satisfied, the Great Leader has arranged to have the month of January renamed Turkmenbashi.

Meanwhile, Kazakstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev shares something of the Bush family commitment to privatization: according to his own prime minister, he put away $1 billion of a payment from Chevron into a secret Swiss bank account, while his daughter owns most of the country's news media. But most importantly he holds the winning cards on terrorism and oil, the two most pressing concerns of American power politics. Narzarbayev has been an ardent supporter of the pro-West Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), which holds the line against Russia's ambition to cultivate a "Big Brother" unilateralism in the region, even to the point of resurrecting the limited sovereignty principle of the Brezhnev Confident of solid . support, Narzarbayev is presently intensifying his crackdown on independent media (thus serving his daughter's media interests) and on the opposition Democratic Choice of Kazakstan (DCK).38

There was one grand exception to this pattern, or so it seemed in better times, before the Americans arrived. After its independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan stood apart from its neighbors by virtue of its relative tolerance for a free press and political opposition. This was because the Kyrgyz Republic (to use its formal name) did not follow other former Soviet republics in making an ex-first secretary of the Communist Party its new president. Rather it chose a respected scientist, Askar Akayev, whom Al Gore once described as "a democrat to the bone."39 This made for good press, but it was the country's assiduous compliance with IMF directives that in 1998 made Kyrgystan the first former Soviet republic admitted to the World Trade Organization. Akayev collected still more points by providing a base for two thousand Allied troops when the United States took the West to war in Afghanistan.

American backing made Akayev feel secure enough to move up the realist food chain: arresting his leading political critic, Azimbek Beknazarove, and cracking down on independent news media. When this shocking reversal ignited demonstrations, the police opened fire, killing several protesters and provoking even larger demonstrations. Thanks to that surge of popular resistance, and no thanks to America's growing influence, charges were dropped against Beknazarove, who returned triumphant to parliament in June Protesters are now turning to the more formidable task of ridding the country of its aspirant czar.

Akayev himself is assisting the protesters by flaunting his nepotism and crony capitalism at a time when most of the country is in deep depression. Living standards have collapsed since the Soviet era, especially in the south, because most of the country's $2 billion in foreign loans have been corralled by a few families, businesses, and bureaucrats near Bishkek in the north. While Akayev's wife cornered the market on government appointments, his sonin-law emerged as a business mogul, pushing out the less-privileged competition. At this critical moment, President Bush decided to invite Akayev to Washington, presumably as a reward for playing host to coalition forces, but also putting a . stamp of approval on Akayev's general performance.

Getting Past Fukuyama and Huntington

In August 2002 President Musharraf posted his infamous constitutional amendments, discussed above, allowing him to dissolve the parliament at will and personally appoint the prime minister, supreme court justices, cabinet, military chiefs, and all top bureaucrats. To test the water, he made these plans known in advance, but predictably the . State Department made no comment.

Musharraf had convinced Washington that peace in Kashmir and the permanent de-Talibanization of Afghanistan were almost exclusively in his hands. Only he could rein in the Muslim terrorists who operate with impunity out of Pakistan. To prove his seriousness he made sure his court rendered a prompt death sentence to Omar Saeed Sheikh for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. It was of small importance that domestic support for Musharraf had plummeted, for the army would now decide most matters, including who could run for elections. That is to say, no serious opponents, such as the former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, would be on the ballot. But pro-Taliban fundamentalists were welcome.

Human rights activist Hina Jilani asks why the country even bothers to hold The obvious answer is that it pleases Washington keep up appearances. Ahmed Rashid points out that the army and the ISI adroitly sponsored their nominal adversaries, the mullahs, in the general elections of 10 October 2002. This sends Washington the message that the alternative to Musharraf would be the Talibanization of Pakistan and the re-Talibanization of Afghanistan. This oppositional facade inspired Washington to declare the election "a milestone for democracy," even as the European Union called it "seriously flawed."42 Thus the American public can go on believing the United States is doing a fine job of promoting democracy by holding Islamic politics at bay. Like a weed killer that kills everything that grows, current antiterrorist policies root out both civil and uncivil Islamism.

On the surface these adventures in "nation building" radically depart from the professed doctrines of post-cold war globalism. With the cold war safely behind, neoliberals concluded that commerce alone would best advance their interests. The best cure for bad geopolitics would be no geopolitics. Obviously that notion is hard to sustain after 9/11, but the ensuing "war on terrorism" is informed by strategies cut from an equally totalistic mold. Fukuyama et alia believe that the best cure for extremist Islamic politics is no Islamic politics-complete political It follows that the war on terrorism should not be directed against terrorists alone, nor even against radical-Islamists alone, but against all Islamists,44 which is to say all Muslims "for whom religious identity overrides all other political values."45

For any devout Christian, no less than a devout Muslim, religious identity trumps other values. This is seldom regarded as a democratic defect in the West, and likewise Islamic identity has often proved a formidable force of democratic reform. One civil Islamic model took shape in Iran in the early 1960s under the banner of the Freedom Movement, which fervently opposed the Shah. It was this version of Islamic governance-aimed at a republic run by Shiite experts, not a theocracy run by clerics-that the revolution of 1979 first realized. That was before Khomeini declared all supporters of democracy the enemies of Islam. The Movement's broad base of support, especially among students, ensured that "safavid" mullahs would ban it and do their best to crush it.

Now it is back, however, and the mullahs are restless. It is no comfort to them that Iran has the youngest population in the world, three-quarters of Iranians being under Attending Friday prayers is not the younger generation's idea of fun. For that they look to the West, and especially to America. President Bush unwittingly came to the aid of the mullahs with his State of the Union message in January 2002. By casting Iran as an "axis of evil" nation, Bush put pro-Western reformists on the defensive. President Khatami, as Whit Mason notes, can at best pass for an Iranian Gorbachev, but never a Yeltsin. Mason nonetheless senses in Iranian cities a republican spirit reminiscent of Barcelona's on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. He fails to mention, however, one crucial difference: the Spanish republicans were not just anticlerical, but officially antireligious. By contrast, Iranian reformism is very much a civil religious

So too is Pakistan's. Even such an uncompromising critic of Western culture as the late Sayyid Abu al-ala al-Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-i Islami (JI), granted that there is no essential disagreement between Islamism and Western democratism on issues such as legal equality and freedom from oppression. JI has long stood in defense of civil liberties and as a bastion of prodemocratic Like the Egyptian fundamentalist Yusaf al-Qardawi, most Islamists resist only the blanket import of Western culture. They recoil from Western consumerism and its political appendage, the bread-and-circus "democracy" that thrives under the auspices of corporate globalization. To that extent civil and uncivil Islam stand as one. But they are profoundly at odds where cultural dialogics is concerned-a vantage advanced by President Khatami of Iran and by Anwar Ibrahim, the ill-fated former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, in the days before Mahathir's full crackdown on Islamic reformism.

Nowhere, however, is that civil Islamic difference so pronounced as in Indonesia. When the Islamic extremist Abu Bakar Bashir, founder of the Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah, pressed the Indonesian legislature for a constitutional amendment to make Islamic sharia the law of the land, it was the country's two major Islamic parties that most forcefully blocked the proposition. So too, most Muslim leaders were fast to endorse tough security laws following the terrorist bombing of 12 October 2002 in Bait. Nor do Muslim moderates think much of Bashir's goal of a pan-Islamic state uniting Malaysia, Indonesia, and the southern Philippines. If Bashir's brand of Islamism gains popularity, it will be because Indonesia's president Megawati failed to tap the moral resources of civil Islam. That is the position of Azymardi Azra, rector of the Syarif Hidayatullah Islamic State University. In his opinion Megawati must marshal the support of moderate Muslims while toughening her opposition to terrorists. Up until the BaIi tragedy her government had done Jihadic Islamism will be the winner if she now yields to Washington's push for a general war on Islamism.

As Azra attests, terrorism must be fought within rather than against Islamic politics. Even in Aceh, Indonesia's most intensely Islamic province, religious leaders oppose the cruel and unusual punishments associated with some forms of It was to forestall political development that Suharto's New Order disempowered the country's ulema (traditional religious teachers); and it is political corruption, not democracy, that is threatened by the resurgence of the ulema. By the same token, the best means of combating Islamic terrorism is not-as the Bush administration insists-intense remilitarization (and of course re-Pentagonization).

Any effective antiterrorist strategy, Sidney Jones argues, must remove the conditions that fostered Islamic extremism in the first And in Indonesia civil Islam is the only mechanism capable of expunging the corruption and repression that fuel extremism. The real enemy is the politics of resentment that cloaks itself in the trappings of Islam. The real choice, therefore, is not between Islamism and secularism, but between civil and uncivil Islam. If the former treats the state, in effect, as "one nation under Allah," that is no more anti-democratic than the principle "one nation under God."

Fukuyama just doesn't get it. He fails to see that maligning the politics of Islamic identity does a favor for the terrorist cause by blowing the bridge between "us and them";52 and although Huntington avoids such neoliberal hubris, the gap between the two is not so wide as has been supposed. Their contest can better be described as a fraternal tug-of-war between Eurocentric optimism and pessimism. Both would offer the West as a model for global emulation wherever possible. They differ greatly, however, as to the scope of that possibility. Huntington is grimly reconciled to the West's cultural insularity, given what he considers the incorrigibility and very real danger of the cultural Other, and especially the Islamic Other; whereas Fukuyama holds out hope for an ever widening zone of posthistorical globalization. His brand of globalism is always glad to lend a hand in liberating the Other from itself. Such "neoliberalism" is just another name for neocolonialism.

Initially the Bush administration sustained Clinton's economic globalization while embracing Huntingtonesque isolation in other respects. That changed on 9/11, when the Islamic Other paid its epochal visit on the symbolic centers of globalist trade and security. Needless to say, this was not a good day for Fukuyama's end-of-history teleology, but neither was it a good day for Huntington's cultural isolationism. As Karen Armstrong puts it, the inescapable lesson of that fateful day was that we now live in one world: "So if, like the Bush administration, we try to isolate ourselves, the world will come to us-in terrifying ways."53

Conclusion: The Core Problem

These new terrors render old lines of defense obsolete or woefully inadequate, and old lines of foreign policy undecidable. One tragic error of twentieth century international relations was its rigid bifurcation of realist and idealist strategies. Our current crisis demands that the two be brought into a workable relationship-my term for this merger being "moral realism."54 By rejecting the ends and means of corporate globalization, on the one side, and Bush/Rumsfeld militancy, on the other, moral realism affords an alternative to isolationism and imperialism alike. So too it moves beyond the antipodes of cultural isolation or imposition. With Amartya Sen it recognizes that respect for basic freedom is hardly the monopoly of the West. This allows us to see Islamic tolerance as an especially fertile field for democratic

The very opposite view is taken by the Bush administration, which imposes cultural norms with the same unilateral fiat it applies to military decisions. Islamic militants are among the beneficiaries of this cultural closure. When Bush, mirroring the theocrats' "Great Satan" view of America, vilified the entire Iranian nation, he gave the clerics temporary respite from their demographic dilemma: the fact that 70 percent of Iranians are under age thirty, and on the edge of revolt. This put at risk five years of arduous diplomatic bridge-building with Khatami's moderate Islamism. Similar dialogic opportunities are being wasted throughout the Muslim world.

Civil Islam is the missing dialogic link between America and that world. Though it hardly registers in Western media coverage, Muslim civility is a growing force of change at the grassroots level in such diverse cultural climates as Indonesia and Egypt. The most popular Islamic preacher in Indonesia, Abdullah Gymnastiar, talks mainly about practical and personal issues to his rapt television audience. Even Egypt, where Islamic extremism has competed with the government in its hostility toward moderate reformism, shows similar signs of transition. Many young Egyptians are turning away from the revolutionary Islamism of the 1980s toward a more personal and ethical faith, closely akin to the call of the great Arab poet Adonis for an Islamic subjectivist revolution. There is a growing consensus that violence in general, and terrorism in particular, are very un-Islamic. Many former Egyptian militants have publicly renounced their prior activities and condemned Osama bin Laden's tactics, especially after 9/

Promising as these developments are, the Egyptian case presages a reverse danger: the untimely forfeiture of modern Islam's political nature, and hence its oppositional Political extremism, unfortunately, is giving way to a programmatically apolitical politics. Not surprisingly the personalization of Islam that is sweeping Egypt-pushing cassette sales of the country's leading televangelist, Amr Khaled, over those of the hottest pop stars-has been most entrenched within the affluent classes. This privatization leaves the most explosive public issues to fester unattended. It is a safe bet that less privileged classes will not reach out to Amr Khaled for guidance. And the moderate political leaders they might have turned to, such as Professor Ibraham, will have been

Indonesian Islam is less inclined toward this pendulum swing into apolitical civility. Even the affable and business-mined Gymnastiar is political enough to condemn . Middle East policies and to underscore his disaffection by refusing all invitations to visit the United States. When he recently met Colin Powell he took the occasion to brief him on the axial principle of civil Islam: while Christians ground their faith in love, Muslims center theirs around fairness. That, he stressed, is America's core problem in its dealings with the Islamic world in general: Washington's manifest unfairness is a veritable factory for blowback.

This is producing, in terms of culture clash, the equivalent of a new cold Yet despite events such as the Cole attack and 9/11, radical Islamism is still a basically defensive reflex. In the view of Adonis, author of the shockingly prophetic poem "The Funeral of New York," the geocultural battle lines of this war are internal to the West. They are drawn, that is, in terms of a different kind of civilizational clash: the widening gap between the richness and breadth of American culture, on the one side, and the poverty and narrowness of American foreign policy on the other. This rift traces largely to America's bad listening skills, such that only Islamic terrorism gets a hearing. The real enemy is not so much Islamism as our own cultural myopia. More even than the first cold war, this one is all about us.

Notes

1. John F. Burns, "America Inspires Both Longing and Loathing in Arab World," The New York Times International, 16 September 2001

2. Seumas Milne, "They Can't See Why They Are Hated," Guardian Unlimited, 13 September 2001, online: ./comment/story/0,3604, 551036,. The Journals line of argument is part of an Orwellian rewrite of the Palestinian crisis whereby the recent spate of terrorism is understood without reference to three decades of Israeli occupation and oppression. See David Crossman, "Fictions Embraced by an Israel at War," The New York Times Opinion (Oct. 1, 2002), online: .com/2202/10/01/ opinion/.

3. Abdul Haq, interviewed by Anatol Lieven, "Voices from the Region: Interview with Commander Abdul Haq." Carnegie Endowment Publications (interview conducted on 11 October 2001), online: .org/files/publications/ .

4. Max Boot, "Everything You Think You Know about the American Way of War Is Wrong," E-Notes (Foreign Policy Research Institute), 12 September 2002, via fax and email.

5. This is all the more astonishing in view of the fact that since 1998 American intelligence had received a barrage of warnings concerning an impending attack on . targets, including the World Trade Center, by Al Qaeda operatives. See James Risen, ". Was Aware of bin Laden Threat before September 11 Attacks," The New York Times, Politics, 19 September 2002

6. From a tape broadcast on the Arab network Al Jazeera, he was known to be alive and plotting as of November 2002. See David Stout "Voice on Tape Is bin Laden's, . Intelligence Says," The New York Times International, 18 November 2002

7. Micha Odenheimer, "Vicious Circles Closing in" [interview with Thomas von der OstenSacken], Ha'aretz English Edition, 4 October 2002), online: .com/hasenpages/ ?itemNo=215930; and Tim Judah, "In Iraqui Kurdistan," The New York Review of Books, 26 September 2002, online: .com/article/15688.

8. See Michael Hirsh, "Bush and the World," Foreign Affairs, September/October 2002)

9. Salman Rushdie, "Yes, This Is about Islam," The New York Times, Opinion, 2 November 2001,

10. The Koran does not mention death by stoning, but the Old Testament repeatedly recommends it; today's Christian Reconstructionists advocate it for crimes such as adultery and heresy. Meanwhile the seventy thousand- to eighty thousand-strong World Church of the Creator, centered in East Peoria, Illinois, promotes random brutality to blacks and other racial "enemies." See Nicholas D. Kristof, "Hate, American Style," The New York Times, Opinion, 30 August 2002, online: .com/2002/08/30/.html. Civil Islamic leaders might well send this message to Bush before he expands his war on Islamism: Let the society that is free of religious barbarity cast the first stone in the coming culture war.

11. Farish A. Noor, "Negotiating Islamic Law," The Far Eastern Economic Review, 19 September 2002),

12. Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 13.

13. See John L. Esposito, "Introduction," in Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism, or Reform? ed. John L. Esposito (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997), pp. 2-3 (1-14). Negatively understood, this dynamic can be seen as the complete abnegation of development theories, both liberal and Marxist, which construed modernization as a singular, world-historical phenomenon. See Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 207.

14. Binder, Islamic Liberalism, xviii. Suharto's turn can be traced to December 1990, when he shocked Western admirers of his anti-Islamism by authorizing the formation of the Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI). See Robert W. Hefner, "Islamization and Democratization in Indonesia," in Islam in an Era of Nation-States, ed. Robert Hefner and Patricia Horvatich (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997), p. 75 (75-127).

15. Abdul Sattar Qamar, "Top Judge Acts on Teenager Publically Gang-Raped by Order of Tribal Jury," Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 2002,

16. Beena Sarwar, "Brutality Cloaked as Tradition," The New York Times, 6 August 2002,

17. See Stanley Kurtz, "Root Causes," Policy Review 112 (April and May 2002),

18. See Romesh Ratnesar, "Do We Still Need the Saudis?" , 28 July 2002,

19. "The Political Landscape Transformed," The Economist, 4 November 2002,

20. "Double Talk on Democracy," The New York Times, Opinion, 6 October 2002,

21. Bryan Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 23.

22. John F. Burns, "Kurds Savor a New, and Endangered, Golden Age," The New York Times International, 28 July 2002,

23. Ian Urbina, "Poetic Injustice: . War Interests in Turkey Hinder Democracy," In These Times, 8 November 2002,

24. "Turkish Parliament, Looking to Europe, Passes Reforms," Associated Press report in The New York Times International, 4 August 2002, online: .com/2002/08/04/international/europe/. To be sure, these tactics can cut both ways. For decades Turkey played its cold war card to stanch criticism of its domestic policies, and in 2000, when a . congressman pushed for a resolution condemning Turkey's 1915 slaughter of Armenians, Turkey killed the motion by threatening to close NATO bases and to seek a rapprochement with Iraq and Iran. See Mark Mazower, "The G-World," London Review of Books 23, no. 3 (8 February 2001),

25. Marc Cooper, "The Last Defender of the American Republic?" LA Weekly, 5-11 July 2002,

26. "Oil Diplomacy," The New York Times, Opinion, 19 August 2002,

27. See Daniel Pipes and Azar Nafisi, "The Future of Islamism in the Muslim World," Policywatch, 10 February 1999,

28. Stanley Hoffmann, "America Alone in the World," The American Prospect 13, no. 17 (23 September 2002),

29. Daniel Swift, "Justice Denied in Egypt," The Nation, 12 August 2002,

30. Later, under rising media pressure, Washington announced a freeze on additional . assistance to Egypt in protest of Ibrahim's treatment. Note that this freeze has no effect on the $2 billion in aid that Egypt already gets annually, making it the Arab world's biggest welfare recipient. The New York Times calls this action "commendable," but clearly it is tantamount to an assurance that the present $2 billion is not in jeopardy so long as Egypt continues to rubber stamp . policies. See "The Right Message to Egypt," The New York Times, 20 August 2002, online: .com/2002/08/20/opinion/. It is telling that Western diplomats, far from promoting democratic processes, tend to place their bets on Egypt's heir apparent, Gamul Mubarak, the president's son. See Jane Perlez, "Egyptians See . as Meddling in Their Politics," The New York Times International, 3 October 2002,

31. Thomas L. Friedman, "Bush's Shame," The New York Times, Opinion, 4 August 2002, online:

32. Shlomo Avineri, "Failed Democratization in the Arab World," Dissent, fall 2002, online: .org/articles/fa02/.

33. "Tariq Ali on 9/11" (interview by Doug Henwood on 20 September 2001), Left Business Observer 98 (October 2001),

34. Nicholas D. Kristof, "Iraq's Little Secret," The New York Times, Opinion, 1 October 2002,

35. Daniel Benjamin, "Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda Are Not Allies," The New York Times, Opinion, 30 September 2002,

36. See "Profile of the President Islam Karimov," Human Rights News, 7 March 2002,

37. See Sergei Blagov, "Russia Mulls a New Unilateralism" , 27 July 2002,

38. See Aldar Kusainov, "Narzarbayev Presses Crackdown Against Political Opponenets," , 27 July 2002, online: .org/departments/articles/; and for a crisp overview of the Kazakh situation, see Robert G. Kaiser, "Kazakh's Season of Repression," The Washington Post, 22 July 2002, A01.

39. Robert G. Kaiser, "Difficult Times for a Key Ally in Terror War: Kyrgystan's Politics, Economy in Turmoil," The Washington Post, 5 August 2002, A09.

40. Ibid.

41. See Ahmed Rashid, "Is Terror Worse Than Oppression?" The Far Eastern Economic Review, 1 August 2002,

42. Ahmed Rashid, "A Fine Fix," Far Eastern Economic Review, 24 October 2002,

43. This strategy is premised on the popular notion that Islam is inherently stultifying and undemocratic. Few in the West know anything about civil Islam, which does not make the evening news, and even fewer would have heard of the ninth century "Mutazilism" that interpreted the Koran as a metaphorical and historical body of literature rather than a literal and static dead end. Almost everyone, however, knows about the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. For a useful corrective to Fukuyama see Sage Stossel, "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Islam," The Atlantic Online, 12 December 2001, online: /flashbks/.

44. Graham Fuller defines Islamism, or political Islam, "as the belief that the Koran and the Hadith (Traditions of the Prophet's Life) have something important to say about the way society and governance should be ordered...." See Fuller's "The Future of Political Islam," Foreign Affairs 81, no. 2 (March/April 2002), p. 49 (48-60).

45. Francis Fukuyama, "Has History Started Again?" Policy, winter 2002, Not surprisingly Fukuyama cites consumerism as one of the values most threatened by this deplorable religious reaction.

46. This is the source of the campus resistance that erupted in November 2002 when a popular reformist professor, Hashem Aghajari, was given a death sentence on bogus charges. Sensing the force of this demographic tide, Ayatollah Khamenei has ordered an appeals court to review the case. See Nazila Fathi, "Iran to Reconsider Death Sentence," The New York Times International, 18 November 2002, online: .com/ 2002/11/18/internaional/middleeast/.

47. It is arguable that such a civil religious option could have helped Spanish republicans win the loyalty of the general population, just as civil Islam is the best bridge between traditional Islamic politics and modern democracy.

48. . Nasr, "Islamic Opposition in the Political Process: Lessons from Pakistan," in Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism, or Reform? ed. John L. Esposito (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997), p. 137 (135-56).

49. John McBeth, "Weak Link in the Anti-Terror Chain," Far Eastern Economic Review, 24 October 2002,

50. See John McBeth and Banda Aceh, "The Case for Islamic Law," Far Eastern Economic Review, 22 August 2002, online: .com/articles/2002/0208_22/. In Malaysia, however, the situation is quite the opposite. Here the Islamic PAS Party seeks to enforce a hard-line version of hudad, the Islamic criminal code, in the two states where PAS dominates. This would undermine the moderate sharia that now applies to personal matters such as divorce. Again it is the local particulars of political culture rather than Islam as such that render Islamic justice reformist or repressive. Regarding PAS, see S. Jayasankaran, "A Malaysian Duel over Islam," Far Eastern Economic Review, 22 August 2002,

51. Until recently the Asia director of Human Rights Watch, Sidney Jones is now the director of the International Crisis Group, which has just released her report on the terrorist threat in Indonesia. Her conclusion is that the worst threat lies in the extremism that repressive antiterrorist action would generate. See Jane Perlez, "Indonesia Preacher Is behind Radical Network, Report Says," The New York Times International, 11 August 2002, online: .com/2002/08/11/international/asia/11WEB. .

52. Fukuyama is hardly unique in this error. Western leaders and media pundits typically understate the terrorists' political motivations while overstating their religious determination. See Eric Rouleau, "Politics in the Name of the Prophet," Le Monde diplomatique, November 2001, online: ./2001/11/09prophet.

53. Karen Armstrong, "The West Has to Understand the Causes of Muslim Rage," The Independent, 7 August 2002, online: ./books/reviews/ ?story=321984.

54. William H. Thornton, Fire on the Rim: The Cultural Dynamics of East/West Power Politics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), chap. 8.

55. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 238-40.

56. "Kinder, Gentler Islam," The Economist, 29 June 2002, pp. 44 and 46. A similar critical drift in Saudi Arabia has been far less effective, but there is hope that the shocking fall of average Saudi income from $24,000 to $7,000 will rectify that. See "Palpitations at the Kingdom's Heart," The Economist, 24 August 2002,

57. Putting aside the deeper theological question of Islam's core principles, it is sufficient to note the oppositional nature that Islam took on during its anticolonial and postcolonial resurgence. Clifford Geertz points out that Islam, in its cultural and political rebound, also gravitated toward a scripturally centered identity. See Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 64-5.

58. Update: Ibrahim was recently released. While Washington focused its attention on Iraq, President Mubarak laid the diplomatic foundation for a smooth transfer of power to his son, Gamul Mubarak, by sending him as the leader of an official delegation to the White House. Since Gamul is being packaged as a progressive, Cairo found it efficacious to stage Ibrahim's release as a sample of the essential goodness of the Mubarak dynasty. See Jackson Diehl, "Gorbachev on the Nile?" Washington Post, 10 February 2003, A21.

59. See William H. Thornton, "Cold War II: Islamic Terrorism as Power Politics," forthcoming in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 35, no. 2 (March 2003): 205-11.