Muslims and Liberals

Middle East Policy
2004

What went wrong in Iraq? Bernard Lewis, the author of the book What Went Wrong? and other promoters of the Iraq war got it all wrong when they thought that Muslim societies need to be and can be remade in the Western image.

Few American intellectuals have argued this point as forcefully as Richard W. Bulliet in The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. America’s policy toward the Middle East, the author says, is driven by hubris, which has blinded its political and intellectual establishments to the cultural realities of Muslim societies. Cultural insensitivity characterized the American missionary campaign in Muslim lands prior to World War II. It was a colossal failure. That blinding hubris now threatens to undermine the so-called “war of freedom against tyranny” (p. 119) in the Middle East, of which Iraq is supposed to be the first phase.

Bulliet’s refreshing insights into Muslim societies derives from extensive fieldwork in the Middle East that began a half-century ago. His substantive research on different facets of Islamic civilization has produced several titles that are both highly readable and intellectually nourishing. A professor at Columbia University, the author says U.S. policy in the Muslim world betrays a naive aspiration to be loved by others. The problem is that those who proclaim that aspiration want Muslims to love them “for our values” without entertaining the “thought of loving them for their values” (p. 116). This mindset stems from the notion that the West has found the ultimate recipe for happiness and fulfillment, not just for Westerners, but for all humanity. This Orientalist perspective was the hallmark of the Middle East studies program launched during the Cold War. The avowed purpose of the program was to win “hearts and minds” in the Middle East, where Soviet communism had posed an ideological challenge to America. The Americans who participated in that program seldom bothered to inquire about the values and aspirations of Arabs and Muslims and were firmly convinced, as Daniel Lerner famously put it, that “what the West is… the Middle East seeks to become” (p. 104).

That jingoist attitude continues to underpin most of American intellectual analysis of Muslim-world events and shapes the U.S. government policy toward the Muslim world. Mainstream American intellectuals view Islamic values as pernicious for Muslim well-being; Bernard Lewis discovers “the dead hand of Islam in every [Muslim] failure” (p. 55). (Lewis personally lobbied President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, an act which, the historian believed, would help spread Western democratic values among Arab Muslims.)

But the American quest “for love in all the wrong places” (p. 95) looks hypocritical, as it accompanies an overriding drive for political and economic domination. To the Muslim world it conjures up European colonialism; the colonialists also presented themselves as do-gooders to their colonial subjects. In the same vein, the American invasion and occupation of oil-rich Iraq has been labeled the “liberation” of Iraqis from the rule of a ruthless dictator and a prelude to the democratization of the Middle East. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1898, recalls the author, he also proclaimed that he was “liberating the Egyptians from the tyranny of their rulers” (p. 68).

Hypocrisy apart, the campaign to transform Muslim societies into Western-style secular democracies betrays the denial of a basic sociological reality. Freedom is, of course, a universal human aspiration, but its expression has historically been mediated by local cultures, and cultural norms and values are largely the products of the environment. American establishment intellectuals spurn just about all non-Western cultural values. They refuse to recognize that the Enlightenment and liberalism evolved from a specific cultural environment. And they assume that American or Western institutions (e.g. secular government, church-state separation) should be introduced in Muslim societies for their own good, if necessary by force of arms. So even though Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter proclaimed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,” the George W. Bush administration and its neoconservative mentors are professedly committed to fostering secular democracy through military aggression.

What eludes their Orientalist antenna is the starkly different roles that Islam and Western Christianity have played in the social and political lives of their adherents. In the West, Catholic theocracy and early Protestant fundamentalism presented religion in the role of an impediment to human freedom. Islam, on the other hand, has been “a bulwark against foreign and domestic authoritarian rule” (p. 72). It has galvanized Muslims into struggles to repel the Crusaders, roll back colonial rule, resist foreign aggression and overthrow regimes that are subservient to alien powers or interests.

Islam, too, provides the cultural resources to sustain economic and political institutions that are meaningful for Muslims. Muslim modernizers such as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) in Turkey and Reza Shah (1878-1944) in Iran saw their reforms flounder because of their failure to appreciate the vitality of Islamic values and institutions. They sought to speed economic development by Westernizing Muslim cultural symbols and norms. But their Westernization campaigns, instead of bringing prosperity, blocked freedom and democracy, the core values of Western modernity.

Bulliet underscores this point by quoting a group of “unquestionably secular” Arab intellectuals who put out the “Arab Human Development Report” in 2002. The report’s authors, who are among the Who’s Who of the Arab intelligentsia, deplored economic backwardness and called for “democracy and human rights” in their countries. But they emphasized the need to adapt economic and political reforms to their indigenous cultural tradition.

“Culture and values,” they wrote, “are the soul of development. They provide its impetus, facilitate the means needed to further it, and substantially define people’s vision of its purposes and ends…. [T]hey help to shape people’s daily hopes, fears, ambitions, attitudes and actions …. [V]alues are not the servants of development; they are its wellspring” (pp. 121-22).

The report explains further that democracy, in order to be meaningful in Arab societies, has to resolve the “differences between cultural traditionalism and global modernity” and strike “a balance” between individual liberty and popular institutions (p. 122). In other words, economic and political reforms in Arab and Muslim societies can use outside support, but these reforms have to evolve from within, mediated by local institutions. The Arab intellectuals’ plan for Arab freedom and well-being in effect rebuffs that of the neocons and the Bush administration who would teach Arabs Western-style democracy at gunpoint.

While Professor Bulliet has made a powerful case for the value of Islam in Muslim life, his “case” for an “Islamo-Christian civilization” could have been developed more fully. He argues that Islam and Christianity should be able to evolve as a common civilization because the two faiths share many common values and are “siblings” in the Abrahamic religious tradition. But in real life sibling relationships are often marked more by conflict than harmony. The religious history of Europe (until after the Holocaust) has been dominated by Protestant-Catholic, Christian-Jewish and Muslim-Christian conflicts and tensions. Today the American-Israeli-Russian “war on terror” has, for all practical purposes, pitted the Judeo-Christian civilization against Islam. The forces and strategies that may foster a rapprochement between these religious “siblings” remain to be explored.

The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization is an insightful analysis of what ails Islamic civilization, what makes it tick, and how Americans could handle it for their own good and that of the Muslim world.