Muslims and Liberals

The Daily Star – Lebanon
August 26, 2005

My wife was griping about having to pay $2.58 a gallon to fill up her gas tank. The significance of her complaint began to sink in when I heard about the rocket attack against U.S. warships at Jordan’s Aqaba port and then received a phone call from a friend in Amman. Munim Nasr had encountered several Saudi jihadis on their way to Iraq. They told him that Iraq would be their “second victory over the Crusaders.” “Second after the Crusades?” I asked.

 “No,” he replied, “after the American [military] pullout from Saudi Arabia” in April 2003. Osama bin Laden had cited the presence of U.S. troops in “the land of Mohammad” as the first of several reasons behind the attacks of September 11, 2001.

These Saudis bragged that “terror is winning the global war on terror,” and cited Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza as more proof of their success. They said that after Iraq they would go after American troops and bases in Bahrain and Qatar and demand elections throughout the Persian Gulf. Democracy would bring “Islam to power” there as it has in Iraq.

Last week, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Arab Islamist party, called on Egyptians to participate in Egypt’s upcoming presidential election. The Middle East is facing an Islamist tsunami, which will take time to recede. Nothing fuels this wave more powerfully than foreign intervention or domination. It began in the Muslim world during the colonial era but tapered off under mostly secular post-colonial governments. Now it’s rising again, partly because many Muslims believe they’re confronting American and Israeli “hegemony.”

In May 1995, I bumped into a closed-door meeting of Arab youths at Amman’s Amra Hotel. The 30 or so members of the “Historical Society” came from several countries, and according to a participant they discussed what to do about “American hegemony” in the Arab world. One irate delegate proposed “burn[ing] the oil wells.” In October 1991, when a Desert Storm T-shirt still hung at a boutique window in Jeddah’s Mahmal shopping mall, three Saudi college students told me that the Americans needed to be expelled from the Middle East, otherwise, they would not be able to get rid of their own “corrupt and repressive” governments, which America was “baby-sitting.”

I told my wife to be thankful for the $2.58 gas price, and that I didn’t know if we would be driving two cars when the jihadists hit the oil-rich Gulf, chanting: “Yankee, go home!”

U.S. President George W. Bush says: “The establishment of a democratic constitution will be a landmark event in the history of Iraq.” Well, Iraq did adopt a democratic constitution in 1925 and had 10 parliamentary elections and nearly 50 cabinets. And look, where it has ended up.

Iraq was stitched together by the British, who combined disparate ethnic and sectarian patches to serve their colonial interests. Hence the country is teeming with Shiite and Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen – but has few “Iraqis.” This reality was further confirmed this week in the draft constitution, which, if it is approved, will divide Iraq along sectarian and ethnic lines.

The chimera of a unified Iraqi state held together because Iraqis weren’t asked or allowed to choose their identities. Today the American invasion, Iranian and Saudi jihadist intervention, and power struggles among Iraqi elites have sent them groping for their basic identities, which remain religious and ethnic. No wonder they’re voting and fighting along denominational and ethnic lines.

Iraq previews the Islamization of most other Arab lands, including the oil-soaked Gulf, through a two-pronged process: anti-American, and perhaps sectarian, violence and elections. The first may have been foreshadowed by the missiles of Aqaba, and the second by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s embrace of the electoral process.

The Bush administration must change gears and think about bringing about d?tente with moderate Islamists, who make up the bulk of Islamist movements. America sold grain to Soviet communists and buys toys and furniture from Chinese communists. It may as well start working on a strategy to buy oil from Arab Islamists so it can be spared a recession, if not depression.

The next time U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stops in Egypt to meet with Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu al-Gheit, she may as well have Muslim Brotherhood leader Mehdi Akef over for a cup of coffee. The brotherhood renounced violence a long time ago.