March 5, 2007

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March 5, 2007

Feb. 6, 2007

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FROM CSID:

CSIDs 8th Annual Conference Registration Form:

The Rights of Women and Minorities in Islam and the

Muslim World

Early Registration discounts end on April 13.

We look forward to seeing you on April 27.

CSID-Mars Hill Forum Event on Interfaith Dialogue: Monday, March 26, 2007 The Bible, the Quran, and the Universal Struggle for Freedom

EVENTS:

Call for Papers: fifth annual multidisciplinary Middle East & Central Asia Politics, Economics, and Society Conference
Report – Elections in the Arab World: Progress or Peril?
Report – Engagement or Quarantine: How to Deal with the Islamist Advance

ARTICLES:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

CSIDs Eighth Annual Conference

The Rights of Women and Minorities in Islam and Muslim Societies

Friday, April 27, 2007

Jack Morton Auditorium George Washington University

805 21st Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20052

Foggy Bottom-GWU Metro (Orange and Blue Lines)

Registration Form

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Registration includes continental breakfast, banquet dinner, and coffee breaks. Registration includes the Banquet Dinner, but does not include lodging or lunch. Payment must be received by Friday April 13 to qualify for pre-registration rates.

To register online click here: https://secure.entango.com/donate/6gHYxfvsaMJ

Otherwise, please mail registration form with payment to: CSID Conf. Registration- 1625 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Suite 601, Washington, D.C. 20036

For further information, please visit our website www.csid-online.org and contact CSID Conference Coordinator, Sherif Mansour, at: sherif@islam-democracy.org or call (202) 265-1200.

Mars Hill Forum #122 Monday, March 26, 2007

The Bible, the Quran, and the Universal Struggle for Freedom

Rev. John C. Rankin, President,

Theological Education Institute (TEI),

Hartford, CT

Dr. Radwan Masmoudi, President,

Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID),

Washington, DC

Moderator: Dr. Joseph N. Kickasola,

Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA

Location: The Union League Club, 38 East 37th Street (at Park Avenue), New York City.

Date and Time: March 26, 2007, 7:00-9:00 p.m., hors d’oeuvres beginning at 6:15 p.m.; forum 7:00-9:00 p.m.

Tickets: $50.00 per person (discount rates available for students and groups contact the TEI). RSVP: tei@teinetwork.com or 860/246-0099; mail checks to the TEI, 150 Trumbull Street, 4th Floor, Hartford, CT 06103
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Call for Papers:

2007 MIDDLE EAST & CENTRAL ASIA

Politics, Economics, and Society Conference

September 6 – 8, 2007

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

SALT LAKE CITY, USA

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: MARCH 30, 2007

The fifth annual multidisciplinary Middle East & Central Asia Politics, Economics, and Society Conference will be held during September 6-8, 2007. Since its inception in 2003, the conference successfully has brought together academics (professors and advanced graduate students), analysts, policy makers, and NGO workers interested in the two regions of Middle East and Central Asia/Caucasus in order to network and share research interests.

This year, the organizers expect to accommodate as many as 150 research papers from around the world divided into nearly 40 panels. There will also be two plenary presentations, one of which will be delivered by Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, the author of the Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

The three-day event may also include a presentation by an Ambassador to the US from one of the two regions. Other attractions include two complimentary meals, an evening of Middle Eastern & Central Asian music and art, a book fair, and the screening of recently released films and documentaries on the Middle East and Central Asia.

PANEL THEMES: The conference encompasses and encourages interdisciplinary social science and humanities approaches to analysis and problem-solving. Panel themes may fall within, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:

State/Society Relations

Religion & Politics

Islam & Islamism

Civil & Inter-State Conflict Prevention & Resolution

Human Rights & Minorities

Identity Politics

Post-9-11 International Affairs

The Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative

Terrorism, Counter-terrorism & State Violence

Terrorist Funding and the Role of Grassroots Organizations

Authoritarianism & Democracy

Challenges of Post-Communism

Problems of Economic & Democratic Transitions

Nuclear Non-Proliferation

Natural Resources & Conflict

Economic Development & Sustainability

International Financial Institutions & Regional Policy

Oil & Natural Gas Trade & Conflict

Nation-building Projects in Iraq & Afghanistan

Politics of External Actors (US, Russia, EU, Pakistan, China, etc.)

Regional Organizations & Cooperation

Post-Communist Velvet Revolutions

Xinjiang & Uyghur Nationalism

Kurdish Nationalism

Azerbaijan-Armenia Dispute

Chechnya & Russia

US-Iran Relations

Turkey-EU Relations

Palestine-Israel Conflict

Culture, Gender, & Ethnicity

Impacts of Globalization

Civil Society, NGOs & International Development

U.N. Millennium Development Goals

Media, Cinema, & Film

Literary Studies and Language

Migration, Refugees, Displaced, & Diaspora

The Role and Impact of Organized Crime

Energy Security & Pipeline Issues

Methodological Approaches to Regional Studies

Teaching Middle Eastern and Eurasian Studies

APPLICATION: If interested in presenting a paper or organizing a panel/workshop in the 2007 MECA Conference, please submit:

YOUR FULL NAME
INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION
E-MAIL, POSTAL ADDRESS, and TEL.
PAPER TITLE (and Panel theme and paper titles if applicable)
300-WORD PAPER ABSTRACT
ONE-PAGE-MAX ACADEMIC RESUME
Indicate willingness to serve as a session MODERATOR and/or DISCUSSANT
Whether, if accepted, you will need a US visa to attend the conference.

Kindly save the above in NO MORE THAN 2 PAGES TOTAL in A WORD FILE and name your file as: Your last name in capital letters, a hyphen, followed by your first name (e.g. your 2-page Word application should be named: LASTNAME-Name.doc). As the Subject of your email type: MECA 2007 Proposal. Applications should be sent by March 30, 2007 to: Middle-East@utah.edu. Updates also will be posted on: http://web.utah.edu/meca/

Saban Center Middle East Memo #11, February 12, 2007

Tamara Cofman Wittes, Research Fellow

Andrew Masloski, Research Assistant

Saban Center for Middle East Policy

http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/wittesmemo20070212.htm

The Saban Center for Middle East Policy’s newly launched Project on Arab Democracy and Development hosted a day-long symposium on January 16, 2007 entitled “Arab Elections: Progress or Peril?” The Project on Arab Democracy and Development is headed by Tamara Cofman Wittes, a Saban Center Fellow and the Brookings Institution’s leading expert on U.S. democracy promotion policy in the Middle East. The symposium convened a group of experts in two panels to assess how Arab regimes, Islamist oppositions, pro-democracy activists and outside actors mobilize around elections and seek to influence the process of political change. The symposium sought to identify lessons and opportunities for the United States and other outside actors to develop better policy responses to Arab elections to advance democratization.

Women, Elections, and Democratic Growth: The Kuwaiti Experience

The symposium began with a keynote address by Dr. Rola Dashti, a pro-democracy activist and former parliamentary candidate from Kuwait. Dashti is the chairperson of the Kuwait Economic Society. In her presentation, Dashti argued that the Kuwaiti parliamentary elections of June 2006 marked the first time in the country that women were permitted both to vote and to run as candidates for office. She laid out the ways in which elections can serve as a positive force for democratic change by speaking about her own experiences as a female candidate and voter in the Kuwaiti elections of the summer of 2006. She argued that the democratic process has the ability to transform societies and governments. While elections can function to help authoritarian regimes consolidate their hold on power, she noted that they are also an opportunity for opposition parties to gain significant ground and for ordinary citizens to change the dynamics of politics in their countries.

According to Dashti, nearly as many women voted in Kuwait as men. Dashti cited voter turnout figures showing that 58% of women who were registered to vote, all of whom were newly enfranchised, cast their ballots. By comparison, of registered men, just 73% voted. A law passed before the elections ensured that 100% of all eligible Kuwaiti women were registered to vote, while only 80% of men eligible to vote actually registered, despite the several decades during which voting had been open to men. Given this disparity in registration and turnout, Dashti noted, the total number of Kuwaiti women that voted was nearly equal to the total number of males turning out to vote, indicating a strong democratic impulse among Kuwaiti women and undermining the position of those who argued that women had little interest in politics.

Dashti asserted that the presence of women, both as candidates and as constituents, compelled all the candidates for parliament to consider seriously issues of particular concern to women. She related one example of a voting district where a woman married to a non-citizen ran for office with a single-issue campaign: enabling women to pass their citizenship on to their children. The level of popular support for her policy initiative forced all of her competitors in that electoral district to agree with her stance on this issue. Dashti noted that although this woman failed to win elected office, she was able to change the policy agenda of the successful candidates merely by running.

Women’s activism and participation throughout the elections had a ripple effect in other areas of Kuwaiti political life. For example, it has opened up the diwaniyya, a traditional element of politics in Kuwait, which had previously been an exclusively male domain. A diwaniyya is an evening gathering, at which people discuss issues of political, economic, and social importance. Before the 2006 elections, Dashti noted, some Kuwaitis had questioned how women could effectively participate in politics without attending any diwaniyya. In the run-up to the elections, therefore, Dashti and other women candidates and activists began to attend diwaniyyas, and even held some of their own. By the end of 2006, Dashti related, the women were even welcomed at the Emir of Kuwait’s high-profile diwaniyya that was held at the beginning of Ramadan.

Addressing the question of how to further democratic transformation in Kuwait, Dashti said that it was important to build on the fact that there was a high voter turnout during the last elections. Bringing people to the polls is not the most significant problem, she asserted; how to influence for whom they vote and what issues motivate them should be an important focus for Kuwaiti pro-democracy activists. She acknowledged that in other countries of the region, however, generating public participation remained a challenge.

Dashti argued that grassroots mobilization is crucial to the success of a democratic movement. People in the region must call strenuously and consistently for democratic development and reform in their own countries. Barring this, she said, there is little that outside forces can do to assist in bringing about such change. Dashti stated clearly that, despite the chaos in Iraq and Lebanon, there is no “ideological crisis” when it comes to democratic development in the region. Rather, she believes, the Arab world faces a “grassroots crisis”‚Äö√Ñ√Æa failure to mobilize enough people within the region to demand political reform.

Dashti emphasized the need for the pro-democracy movement in Kuwait and elsewhere to undertake an honest internal assessment so that it can build on the gains of the past few years and ensure its long-term impact. Lasting changes, she said, will begin to take shape only when elite figures within the pro-democracy movements stop regarding democracy as an issue-franchise reserved for them and their narrow circle of supporters. Dashti suggested that this “grassroots crisis” was due in part to the need for generational change in the leadership of these pro-democracy movements. The younger generation, Dashti said, is ready to deepen and broaden the democratic credentials of the liberal movements in the Arab world. However, older leaders must give up their hegemony over these movements and make room for these younger activists and the grassroots members they bring with them.

Lastly, Dashti argued, it is important for pro-democracy movements to capitalize on the use of new technologies. Blogging and other internet-based phenomena, she said, have proven instrumental in facilitating dialogue and activism in many of Arab countries. Also, the use of mobile telephone text messages has proven particularly useful for political communication and organizing rallies and other forms of political mobilizations in the Gulf region.

What Do Elections Accomplish for Governments and Oppositions?

Ellen Lust-Okar discussed why authoritarian regimes hold elections, noting that elections can help regimes to consolidate their control. She observed that elected parliaments can help autocratic rulers by acting as a channel for distributing state resources to citizens. Parliamentarians thus become dependent on the regime for the resources their constituents need, and citizens seek out personal relationships with their members of parliament to gain access to goods and services, diverting discontent and demands away from the state apparatus. As long as a regime possesses sufficient resources to distribute, its citizens will vote for the candidates or parties with sufficiently close relations with the regime to allow them to deliver. Indeed, citizens are likely to will prefer such well-connected candidates and parties to those candidate or parties with whom they may actually agree in terms of the issues and their political beliefs. Members of parliament who cause trouble for the government, such as by discussing government excesses, pressing demands for reform, and so on, are unlikely to be re-elected, as they will be unable to provide their constituents with access to state wealth. Elections can therefore assist the regimes by serving as low-cost means of managing patronage and containing dissent.

As a result of the role that autocrats create for parliaments, Lust-Okar argued, they cannot serve as useful political platforms for opposition parties. Instead, she noted, elections can actually harm political opposition groups because the regime uses their failure to win votes to paint them as weak, ineffective, and unrepresentative of popular views. Compounding this problem, elections that take place under authoritarian regimes provide a veneer of democracy, while undermining both local and external demands for political reform and greater political freedoms.

Jarrett Blanc examined the challenges for democracy-building of holding elections either under conditions of conflict, or in societies emerging from conflict. Using the examples of Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, he said that pre-eminence of the conflict as a political issue means that the elections’ success can only be measured by how far they facilitate a termination of the conflict. Under the best circumstances, elections can force warring parties to reassess the effectiveness of military force as a tool for political domination. If connected to a peace accord, elections can also accelerate the shift to non-violent conflict resolution.

Blanc emphasized that U.S. policymakers often have little discretion regarding the timing of elections in conflict-ridden areas, making debates over sequencing moot. Much more important, he argued, is determining whether or not free and fair elections can be held. For example, although Hamas participated in, and ultimately won, the most recent Palestinian Legislative Council elections, there was little evidence to suggest that it used its weaponry to affect the electoral outcome. In such a case, a fair political contest was possible despite the environment of conflict and the participation of armed groups in the political process.

Nathan Brown spoke about the role Islamist movements in many Arab states play in the electoral process. Many Islamist groups participate in elections because the process provides a relatively open area within which they can publicize their platforms. Also, those Islamists that win election to the legislature find themselves in a relatively protected political space, where they can raise and debate issues that might otherwise be too dangerous for them to discuss publicly without the cover of parliamentary membership.

At the same time, Brown noted, elections can be dangerous for Islamist movements because those constituents who elect Islamist candidates expect them to deliver on their promises to extract benefits and concessions from governments over which they in practice have very little influence. Islamists who serve in parliament thus tend to focus on pragmatic, achievable goals. At the same time, Islamist leaders outside of formal politics continue to focus on broader issues and can take a more oppositional stance. These different incentives can cause Islamist movements to fracture, thereby weakening the anti-regime opposition. A final danger for Islamists is that participating in elections and entering parliament risks legitimating the regime and its form of governance. In conclusion, Brown argued, these mixed incentives for Islamist movements mean that different Islamists groups can make end up making different choices over time, which belies the notion that their ideology dictates a consistent pattern of behavior.

Pro-Democracy Advocates and Elections: What Is To Be Done?

Sherif Mansour focused on the ways in which opposition elements in Egypt attempted, but failed, to use the elections to expand on their demands for democracy. The Mubarak regime never intended for the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2005 to empower opposition parties, Mansour noted. Instead, the electoral changes were a superficial concession to the Egyptian people in the face of growing demands for reform. Mubarak attempted to use the elections to preserve the political status quo.

Once the pro-democracy movement demonstrated its ability to attract popular support, Mansour argued, the regime fought back to close the Pandora’s box that it had opened. Not only did the regime actively interfere with the parliamentary elections, but it launched a containment plan to reverse what few gains were achieved by opposition parties. The Egyptian regime’s backlash against democratic demands was enabled by a more permissive international environment. Chastened by Islamist successes in the Palestinian territories and Iraq, the Western nations that had formerly been so aggressive in their calls for liberalization began again to embrace the stability of Mubarak’s Egypt. Mansour concluded that the outspoken support of Western states for Egyptian democracy is crucial to the resuscitation of the internal reformers’ cause.

Les Campbell spoke of the dangers inherent in Arab elections, but warned against abandoning support for elections in an effort to prevent radical change. Elections, he argued, empower moderate political opposition groups and serve to moderate Islamist parties by drawing them into the electoral process. Seen in this light, every election held in the Arab world during the last ten years has been positive for the long-term growth of democracy. Even when elections have brought Islamists to power, he argued, this step served to bring Islamist movements closer to the norms of competitive politics.

Still, Campbell argued, too much emphasis on elections can be as problematic as rejecting their importance. There must also be an emphasis on the “framework issues,” those rules that govern the political context within which elections occur. Campbell concluded by encouraging Western aid groups not to abandon liberal parties or to let up the pressure on Arab regimes to reform.

Almut Wieland-Karimi argued that, while elections are an important step on the road to democracy, they receive too much emphasis in the media and from policymakers. There are many Arab countries in which elections have been held to appease external pressure, despite the fact that internal conditions hardly favored an open, or even moderately open, political contest. In countries that do not enjoy the rule of law, and that do not have laws that regulate the political parties of the establishment let alone the opposition, she said, it is bad policy to ask people to go to the polls.

Wieland-Karimi argued that western audiences and policymakers tend to focus too much on the “free and fair,” procedural aspect of Arab elections: whether or not people are allowed to cast their ballots free from interference and intimidation. An equally important component is the degree of political pluralism in the electoral process, whether real opposition parties exist and are allowed a genuine chance to compete. She argued in conclusion that a commitment to cultivating greater pluralism in Arab politics is a useful focus for Western democracy assistance.

Conclusion

Although regimes have proven adept at manipulating elections to their advantage, opposition movements and pro-democracy activists can still gain from participating in the electoral process. Local pro-democracy activists must struggle to encourage wider public engagement with electoral politics and with democratic movements. The United States and other Western states can help by continuing to pressure regimes in the region to allow greater participation by the citizenry in elections as voters, candidates, and as grassroots activists. No single election will shift a state from autocracy to democracy, but elections are now a regular part of the Middle Eastern political fabric. They should not be discounted or ignored. Instead, they should be treated as opportunities for incremental change. Cooperation between internal and external democracy advocates can make each new election more meaningful than the last.

Tamara Cofman Wittes: Research Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, The Brookings Institution.

Rola Dashti: Chairperson, Kuwait Economic Society; former parliamentary candidate for the National Assembly, Kuwait.

Ellen Lust-Okar: Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University.

Jarrett Blanc: International Affairs Fellow, the Council on Foreign Relations.

Nathan Brown: Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University.

Sherif Mansour: Fellow, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy.

Les Campbell: Senior Associate and Regional Director of the Middle East and North Africa team, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

Almut Wieland-Karimi: Executive Director, Washington, DC office of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.

ENGAGEMENT OR QUARANTINE: HOW TO DEAL WITH THE ISLAMIST ADVANCE

http://www.carnegieendowment.org/events/index.cfm?fa=eventDetail&id=900&&prog=zgp&proj=zdrl,zme

Click here to watch video provided by the Heinrich Böll Foundation:

http://www.boell.org/dossiers/islamists/video.cfm

Panel 1: Islamists between Exclusion, Cooptation and Engagement

Amr Hamzawy, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Emory University

Radwan Masmoudi, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy

Moderator: Marina Ottaway, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Amr Hamzawy elaborated three reasons why Islamist movements are key to Arab reform. First is their mass constituencies, won over by their religious message, which resonates with considerable segments of Middle Eastern populations, and by their social activism; their success is facilitated by the fact that their counterparts on the political scene, ruling establishments and liberal leftist movements, suffer respectively from a crisis of legitimacy and debilitating political weakness. Second is the dynamics of their opposition status and their clear desire to participate in the political system, both to capitalize on their popularity and to avoid repression. Third is their potential impact. Hamzawy pointed out that the starting point in debate tends to be that Islamists will impede democratic reform, whereas it is in actuality the regimes that impede democratic reform. Islamist reformers face the two challenges of how to build alliances for reform and how address their internal differences in a democratic fashion (which will lead to diversity within the Islamist spectrum with a positive impact).

Carrie Rosefsky Wickham described the trend in Islamist movements toward embracing moderation and democratic reform, pointing out that in many countries Islamist leaders have become reforms chief advocates. She first elaborated on the strategic dimension of this shift, pointing out that leaders realize the potential benefit their mass constituencies will earn them in elections. There are other benefits to moderation. Adopting more flexible positions widens international opportunities for leaders; running for and winning office gives them a wider, often non-Islamist, constituency; and strategic moderation deflects the suspicions of the ruling regime that Islamists seek to radically alter the political system. Yet, Wickham emphasized that this shift toward moderation also denotes a real qualitative change. There is a critical mass within Islamist movements that adopts a centrist approach to Islam and challenges the revivalist agenda. She elaborated evidence of this change, such as the de-emphasis on sharia and the increased focus on defense of the family, an Islamic frame of reference, and the public good, as well as on popular sovereignty and elected institutions. Wickhams research found that value change hinged on sustained dialogue with other groups, often in the form of safe spaces and consensus across party lines. However, Wickham also pointed out that Islamist leaders are constrained by their members not to go too far in their moderation, leading to vagueness and contradictions within movements.

Radwan Masmoudi laid out what he considers to be two givens in the political systems of the Middle East: that the currently ruling regimes are unsustainable and that Islamist parties will become increasingly important. Thus, it is crucial for outsiders to support the peoples democratic aspirations and to build relations with Islamic parties. He asserted that it is impossible to entirely separate religion and politics and that a democratic system in the Middle East will necessarily reflect the Islamic character of its society. He spoke about the historical context of todays Islamism, saying that at the end of the colonial era leaders saw religion as a handicap. With the failure of the oppressive secular elite it was only a matter of time before there was a resurgence of religion. Today, Islamists are the main opposition groups. Their slogans resonate with the same masses that overwhelmingly support democracy, especially the youth. The main impediment to reform is the regimes, whose repression and failure to provide for their populations lead to an extremely dangerous mix of anger, lack of education, and large numbers of unemployed youth. While Masmoudi agreed that Islamists are more moderate once in power, he also acknowledged that precautions should be taken against the monopolization of religion for political purposes. The lack of a clergy in Sunni Islam serves as a check on this danger, but it can be further averted through the promotion of several Islamic parties in each country to allow for competing interpretations of Islam. In addition, secular groups should have a better understanding of the relationship between religion and the state and not let themselves be perceived as anti-religious.

Panel 2: The Local Agendas of Islamist Advances

Khaled Hroub, Cambridge Arab Media Project

Maha Azzam-Nusseibeh, Chatham House

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Lebanese American University

Najib Ghadbian, University of Arkansas

Moderator: Kirsten Maas, Heinrich Boell Foundation

Khaled Hroub discussed the politics of struggle and ongoing strategizing of Hamas in Palestine. There are moderate and extremist elements in all movements and when movements are under siege, extremist elements prevail. Within Islam as a whole, there has also been moderation and extremism. In the Golden Era of Islam one saw toleration of atheism and even homosexuality. Extremism is also bred by exclusion. Hroub elaborated on several cases in which formerly excluded extreme movements are now participating in the political system and interacting positively with secular groups. He also said that external pressure on Islamist movements is actually counterproductive since it leads them to adopt a siege mentality that hinders evolution toward moderation. Hroub spoke about the two forces within Hamas that have existed since its inception: a nationalist liberation force and an Islamist force. He feels that the movement has reached a major turning point in which the nationalist liberation force is currently taking the lead. Three documents illustrate this: the recent election platform, the national unity government program, and a speech by Prime Minister Ismail Haniya to the Palestinian parliament. These documents appeal to a much wider constituency, touch on a broad number of issues, emphasize citizenship, and present Hamas as the leader of the Palestinian nation. Hroub feels that the policies of Israel, the United States and Europe have blocked the natural evolution of the movement toward moderation, which would be a great opportunity for the region at large. Moreover, Hamas will play a crucial role in forming the Palestinian consensus and it would be overly optimistic to expect peace between Israel and Palestine without the movement.

Maha Azzam-Nusseibeh discussed the effects of bringing religion into politics in the context of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. She asserted that the Islamist advance has been a significant development not only in foreign policy, but also in local politics, identity and culture. Like other movements, the Brotherhood has over the past decade come forward with more moderate positions. For example, the Brotherhood has stated its support for the rights of women and Copts to hold public office and the necessity of political parties as the institutionalization of God-given differences. She cautioned that the Brotherhood does not accept Western democracy wholesale, and that the West must come to terms with the fact that its coming to power would mean the development of a different kind of system with an Islamic character. She explained that calls for sharia can be seen as a search for justice amidst repression, lack of respect for human rights and rule of law. The Brotherhood calls for sharia as insurance against the tyranny of the regime, but believes that Islam is open to reinterpretation and allows for secularism that does not contradict religion. Islamic beliefs are generally strongest in the social realm, yet even here are being challenged, as Islam allows for greater diversity of views than is generally accepted. Finally, as Islamism becomes more entrenched, it brings with it stronger barriers against violence; one sees the increase of theologically based arguments against violence, and that Islamists increasingly see violence as a threat to their Islamist project.

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb began her discussion of Hezbollah in Lebanon by explaining the movements unique character and context and that it precariously balances Arab, Islamist and Shiite communal agendas. Within Lebanons divided political system, Hezbollah emerged as both an Islamic movement and Shiite party for the theretofore largely unrepresented Shiite community. Hezbollah chose political participation because it needed to legitimize its resistance and entrench its position, needs that only increased with the recent withdrawal of Syria. Saad-Ghorayeb asserted that Hezbollah thus represents an exception to the thesis that participation leads to moderation. Since its participation in government is aimed at preserving its armed status, its moderation in fact serves a radical end. She also took issue with the term moderation, as many political leaders find it offensive and it is too simplistic to describe the many different facets of Islamist political movements. The prospects for Hezbollahs disarmament are dim, as it has led all Lebanese parties to agree that the confrontation with Israel requires such extraordinary measures, and has successfully argued that the profound weakness of the Lebanese state obviates the argument that it should monopolize the means of coercion. The fact that Hezbollah will not disarm is a reality recognized by all Lebanese actors as well as the United States. In fact, Hezbollahs armed status is preferable in the eyes of many Lebanese political actors, since its disarmament would raise the greater threat of its enhanced political participation.

Najib Ghadbian described how, in the past few years, the Muslim Brotherhood has moved to the forefront of the Syrian opposition despite its illegal status within the country. Several reasons account for this shift, among them the rising popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood within Syria, the increased religiosity of society as a whole, the perception that it represents the Sunni majority, and its charismatic current leadership. As shown in a series of recent documents, the Brotherhood has moderated its discourse. It no longer calls for the establishment of an Islamic state in Syria, but instead for the use of Islam as a frame of reference. In addition, the Brotherhood has since the mid-1990s renounced the use of violence and urged President Bashar al-Assad to institute modest reforms such as the release of political prisoners and the lifting of emergency laws. Finally, the Muslim Brotherhood has called for a modern democratic state characterized by parliamentarism, pluralism, separation of powers, rule of law, and citizenship as the basis for all rights and duties. The Brotherhood has allied with the secular opposition, joining opposition groups in drafting the Damascus Declaration and most recently allying with the newly created National Salvation Front.

Panel 3: Recognizing the Importance of Islamist Organizations while Doubts Persist: Options for External Actors

Mark Perry, Conflicts Forum

Nathan Brown, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Discussants: Najib Ghadbian, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Khaled Hroub, Maha Azzam-Nusseibeh

Moderator: Helga Flores-Trejo

Mark Perry spoke about the work of the Conflicts Forum, which seeks to address the continuing need for dialogue with Islamist groups. It began in 2004, expanded its work in July 2005, and began holding briefings in Washington, D.C. the following October. Many policymakers welcomed the knowledge of Islamist groups that it brought, having gained the sense that non-differentiation among groups was increasingly untenable. Perry voiced the opinion that the United States has come to an impasse in its promotion of democracy in the Middle East. He feels it is necessary for Western actors to change their language and perception, immersing themselves in Muslim societies, understanding political actors and talking with them. Perry warned against marginalizing and thus radicalizing Islamist movements, noting that the extremist Salafists and Takfirists are now targeting leaders of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood for coercion and assassination because they agree with the positions of Western actors such as the United States. Perry asserted that it is the inability of the United States to differentiate between movements and talk to them that is endangering moderate leaders and pushing more moderate Islamism into radicalism.

Nathan Brown synthesized some of the main lessons of the days conference discussions. He pointed out the two basic assumptions, that political reform gives openings to Islamists because of their mass constituencies and that Islamists have successfully captured the political reform issue. He asserted that the first main lesson is that these are complex movements that go beyond the electoral realm to encompass complex religious or national agendas. The second lesson is that they are ideological movements that take ideology seriously, yet also maintain space for strategic ideological flexibility. The third lesson is that there has been real fundamental change in the beliefs of Islamist movements, but there remains significant ambiguity and division within them; often it is not clear even to members where they come down on critical issues. A fourth lesson is that incumbent regimes themselves impede reform by treating Islamist movements as a security challenge. Brown then questioned the degree to which external actors can constructively influence Islamist movements, since their evolution occurs in response to internal and not external impetuses and their very appeal comes from the fact that they do not curry favor with the outside world. He suggested that external leverage is far greater and more effective with the ruling regimes, where external actors can first of all communicate clearly that they are not afraid of Islamists, a dynamic that regimes have so far exploited extremely effectively. External actors can also support the development of institutional safeguards in political systems. Brown concluded that although engagement has real positive effects, among them increasing our knowledge of Islamist movements, teaching them how to speak to an international audience, and sending a message to regimes that the U.S. considers them real political actors, it may not be the most important question.

Many of these themes were elaborated in the discussion that followed, which touched on the varying character and degree of U.S. influence in Middle Eastern countries, the use of engagement as a form of pressure on regimes, and the need to go deeper into the complexities of different types of engagement.

Synopsis prepared by Meredith Riley, Junior Fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project.

Thursday, March 1, 2007.

By Ken Silverstein

http://harpers.org/PartiesOfGod.html

Among the precepts of the Bush Doctrineas loyalists to the current president call the set of foreign-policy principles by which they, and no doubt he, hope his tenure will be rememberedby far the most widely admired has been his stance on democracy in the developing world. The clearest articulation of this stance can be found in a November 2003 speech at the Washington headquarters of the United States Chamber of Commerce, when Bush sharply denounced not just tyranny in the Arab states but the logic by which the West had abetted it. Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safebecause in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty, he said. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. Saying it would be reckless to accept the status quo, Bush called for a new forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. At least in its rhetoric, this was nothing less than a blanket repudiation of six decades of American foreign policy.

Since the presidents speech, democracys cause has suffered a series of setbacks in the Middle East. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has been arresting government critics and has rejected calls to hold elections for even a toothless consultative council. (The kingdom has no parliament.) In Egypt, which receives $2 billion per year in American aid, President Hosni Mubarak was reelected two years ago in a landslide, nine months after his regime jailed his primary challenger, Ayman Nour, on the spurious charge that he had forged signatures for his partys registration. Political repression has also increased in Jordan, another recipient of vast U.S. financial aid. The government has imposed new restrictions on free speech and public assembly, a crackdown designed to squelch overwhelming domestic opposition to the regimes close alliance with the Bush Administration.

Notwithstanding President Bushs new forward strategy of freedom, the United States has marshaled nothing more than a few hollow demurrals against the antidemocratic abuses by its allies, and it maintains close partnerships with all of Americas old authoritarian friends in the region. When reaching out to opposition figures, it has chosen pro-Western elites such as Nour in Egypt or Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq, both of whom are more admired in Washington and London than they are at home.

Above all, America has refused to engage with Islamic opposition movements, even those that flatly reject violence and participate in democratic politics. It is true that many Islamists long rejected the concept of elections, which the more radical of them still argue are an infringement on Gods sovereignty; others rejected democracy because they believed, with good reason, that elections in their countries were so flagrantly rigged that they offered no realistic path to change. (Of course, Islamic groups that did seek to campaign in elections were frequently barred from doing so by dictatorial regimes.) But since the 1990s, growing numbers of Islamists have concluded that reform from within can be achieved gradually, through electoral politics.

Today, there are dozens of active Islamic political parties, both Shiite and Sunni, with diverse political and ideological agendas. Their leaders are certainly not liberal democrats, and some, like Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, maintain armed wings. But it is not entirely accurate to describe them, as is frequently done in the United States, as fundamentalist or backward or even necessarily conservative. The new Islamic movements are popularly based and endorse free elections, the rotation of power, freedom of speech, and other concepts that are scorned by the regimes that currently hold power. Islamist groups have peacefully accepted electoral defeat, even when it was obvious that their governments had engaged in gross fraud to assure their hold on power. In parliaments, Islamists have not focused on implementing theocracy or imposing shariah but have instead fought for political and social reforms, including government accountability.

And increasingly the Islamists have numbers on their side. Were democracy suddenly to blossom in the Middle East today, Islamist parties would control significant blocs, if not majorities, in almost every country. Hamas swept to victory in the Palestinian elections of 2006, in a vote among the freest ever seen in the Middle East. [1]The Shiite group Hezbollah, which, like Hamas, is designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization, picked up parliamentary seats in Lebanons 2005 national balloting and entered the cabinet for the first time. Egypts Muslim Brotherhooddespite being officially banned, and despite massive fraud and violence against supporterswon eighty-eight seats in parliament two years ago, making it by far the largest opposition bloc. The Islamic Action Front, Jordans major Islamic party and a wing of the local Muslim Brotherhood, is generally considered to be the countrys best-organized political movement and won 15 percent of the parliamentary seats in the most recent election.

One need not endorse either the ideology or the tactics of these groups to wonder if the wholesale rejection of dialogue with them is truly in the long-term interests of the United States. Indeed, looking beyond the disastrous war in Iraq, perhaps the central questions facing American foreign policy are as follows: How is it possible to promote democracy and fight terrorism when movements deemed by the United States to be terrorist and extremist are the most politically popular in the region? And given this popularity, what would true democracy in these nations resemble? It is impossible to answer these questions without first listening to these movements, but the U.S. government and, frequently, the media have deemed them unworthy even of this; their public grievancesover Americas seemingly unconditional support for Israel, its invasion of Iraq, its backing of dictatorial regimes that rule much of the Muslim worldare dismissed as illegitimate or insincere, their hostility explained away as a rejection of Western freedoms. In fact, as I discovered during my own visits with Islamist leaders over the past year, these groups are busy forging their own notions of freedom, some of them Western and some of them decidedly not. If we want to envision a democratic future for the region, we need not embrace these ideas, but we most certainly need to understand them.

* * *

To write with any nuance about Islamists for an American audience is to invite controversy. I experienced this firsthand a year ago when, as a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times, I visited Lebanon for a story that discussed Hezbollahs evolution from its origins during the countrys civil war and the basis for its popularity. My trip fell during Muharram, a ten-day religious holiday for Shiites; during the holiday, Nasrallah was speaking in the southern suburbs every other night, and I went to see Hussein Nabulsi, head of Hezbollahs media relations center, to ask if it would be a problem for me to attend. Nabulsi initially balked, but after looking me up and down he quickly relented: given my dark features, thin beard, and blue jeans, he concluded that I would be indistinguishable from most party militants. He insisted, though, that I speak no English while in the crowd and that I find a local Shiite to accompany me to the event. This latter role was filled by Mostafa Naser, an industrious, neatly groomed man in his mid-twenties who had been recommended by my rent-a-car agency when I had asked for a driver well acquainted with the southern suburbs.

That night we parked on a main road in the Dahiyeh and joined a stream of thousands of people heading to an auditorium in the heart of Haret Hreik, the district where Hezbollahs political offices are located and where Nasrallah was to speak. After passing through three checkpoints, where we were patted down for weapons, we reached an auditorium decorated with green, black, and red flags commemorating Muharram. (The first is the color of Islam; the second conveys grief for the death of the Prophet Muhammads grandson, the Imam Hussein, who was killed along with his followers at Karbala in 680 a.d.; and the last signifies Husseins blood.) We dropped our shoes near the entrance and then tiptoed through the packed crowd, which was divided between men on the left and women on the right.

Nasrallah took the stage with such little fanfare or applause that I first mistook the man at the podium for a political warm-up act. Even to a non-Arabic speaker, Nasrallahs charisma was readily apparent. He spoke for an hour, seeming never to refer to notes, and kept the crowd alternately applauding and pumping fists throughout. Naser periodically whispered a few translated snatches from the speech, which mixed religious and political messages. Heavy anti-Israeli commentary drew a particularly noisy response; the crowd erupted in laughter when Nasrallah derided the United Nations as an American toady and heaped scorn on its call for Hezbollah to disband its militia.

As unsettling as Nasrallahs cult of personality may be, much of what I saw in the Dahiyeh surprised me. Although the area is often referred to as Hezbollahland, it hardly has the feel of a so-called Islamofascist state. At corner cafs, men and women sip small cups of thick, black coffee or cocktails made with fresh fruit topped with whipped cream. In a small Christian section, bars serve alcoholcloudy, anise-flavored arak is particularly popularand attract a fair number of Shiite clients. Many women wear a long gown and hijab, the traditional Islamic head scarf, but Western-style clothing is not uncommon, and there were no Hezbollah Revolutionary Guards to enforce dress codes. On the street one day I saw a Shiite woman decked out in a short blue-jean skirt, low-cut top, and black bootsunusual dress for the area, to be sure, but she drew hardly a glance. Beyond such matters, it was obvious that Hezbollah was organically rooted in Lebanese political, social, and cultural life and that reducing it to the standard caricatureterrorist groupwould be grossly misleading. [2]

I also saw how important it was to lay out Hezbollahs own political narrative, which is frequently given short shrift, at best, in American accounts. For example, virtually any news story about the group will recite the litany of civil war‒era attacks on American targets in Lebanon, especially the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks. But at the time, many Lebanese Muslims saw the United States as a hostile force that had intervened in the civil war on behalf of Israel and its Lebanese Christian allies in the government; the attack on the Marine barracks came after American warships battered antigovernment positions with shells. And although Hezbollahs control of its own militia is clearly untenable in a democratic Lebanon, the partys explanation for why it has thus far refused to disarmthat is, to defend against Israelis hardly without merit from a Shiite point of view. Since 1982, some 20,000 people in Lebanon, many of them Shiite civilians, have been killed by Israeli attacks, and Hezbollahs militia is the only entity in the country that represents any type of credible deterrent force.

After submitting my story, though, I ran up against insurmountable editorial obstacles. It was clear that I was deemed to have written a story that was too favorable to Hezbollah, even though any article seeking to examine its popularity would, by necessity, require some focus on the groups more attractive aspects. After the story was near completion, a new editor was called in to review it because, I was told, Hezbollah had a history of inviting reporters to Lebanon and controlling their agenda. The obvious implication was that this had happened in my casedespite the fact that, outside of my interviews with Hezbollah officials, I had had no contact with the party. I had hired my own driver (who turned out to be sympathetic to Hezbollah, like most Shiites, but not connected to the movement) and translators (all Christians), with no restrictions placed on where I went or who I met with; and in fact I had spent significant time with the groups critics.

The primary problem, it soon became clear, was fear of offending supporters of Israel. At one point I was told that editorial changes were needed to inoculate the newspaper from criticism, and although who the critics might be was never spelled out, the answer seemed fairly obvious. I was also told in one memo that we should avoid taking sides, which apparently meant omitting inconvenient historical facts. Over my repeated objections, editors cut a line that referred to Israels creation following World War II in an area overwhelmingly populated at the time by Arabs. That, I was told in an email from one editor, David Lauter, was

the Arab view of things. Israelis would say, with some justification, that much of the area wasnt overwhelmingly populated by anyone at the time the first Zionist pioneers arrived in the first part of the 20th century and that the population rose in the mid-decades of the century in large part because of people migrating into Palestine in response to the economic development they brought about.

But that argument, which in any case doesnt refute what I wrote, was long ago rejected by serious Mideast scholars, including many in Israel. It also avoids confronting a root cause of the conflict. According to the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the original Zionist governing body in what was to become Israel, there were roughly 1.1 million Arab Muslims living in Palestine at the time of partitiontwice the number of Jews. Perspective is everything, I replied in an email to the editors. If my name was Mostafa Naser and I grew up in the southern suburbs of Beirut, I seriously doubt I would be an ardent Zionist. If we cant even acknowledge that Arabs have a legitimate point of viewand acknowledge what the numbers showwe caricature them as nothing more than a bunch of irrational Jew haters. As I noted in a conversation with one editor, religious hatred, on both sides, is an element in the conflict, but it is fundamentally a struggle over land and national identity. If an Eskimo state had been created in Palestine in 1948, one suspects that anti-Eskimo feeling would have increased markedly in the Arab world.44 When I asked Musawi about the Holocaust denial that has been espoused by some Arab leaders, and suggested it reflected an unwillingness to acknowledge Jewish suffering, he replied, We are not denying that European racists persecuted an entire people or belittling the suffering of the Jewish people, and we say this with utter frankness and without compliment. But Europeans committed those crimes, and then we were made to pay for them with our land. After days of unfruitful negotiations, and a final edit that in my view gutted the story, I decided to pull the piece rather than inoculate it to the point of dishonesty.

*You can find the entire article March Harper’s Magazine on newsstands now: http://harpers.org/MostRecentCover.html

The Associated Press

February 20, 2007

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/02/20/africa/ME-GEN-Egypt-Hunting-The-Brotherhood.php

CAIRO, Egypt: With a wave of arrests and military trials, Egypt’s government is dramatically stepping up its campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s most powerful opposition movement. It also has launched a new tactic: Going after the Islamic group’s money.

The government is trying to dismantle what it says is a financial network that feeds millions of dollars to the group through companies owned by wealthy members everything from furniture stores to fast-food chains.

That crackdown comes as President Hosni Mubarak, a key U.S. ally, is increasingly sounding the alarm about the Brotherhood, calling it a danger to the country’s security. Authorities accuse the group of trying to increase its power and even seeking to set up an armed militia.

But the Brotherhood, which renounced violence in the 1970s, denies it is creating a military wing. Its deputy leader, Mohammed Habib, called the claims part of “a whole campaign of fear-mongering, aimed at marginalizing us.”

Last week, Egyptian security forces arrested 78 Brotherhood members in what appeared to be an attempt to cripple the group ahead of April elections for the upper house of Egypt’s parliament. Most of those arrested were potential candidates. In all, a total of about 300 members are in custody.

In early February, Mubarak also ordered 40 other Brotherhood members including its top financial figure, Khayrat el-Shater put on trial before a military court on charges of money laundering and terrorism.

Both sides call the face-off a struggle for democracy.

Mubarak’s government says it is trying to defend the country from a movement that wants to impose Islamic rule. The Brotherhood “needs to answer a very important question: What sort of Egyptian state they want a secular one or an Islamic one?” said Aly Eldin Helal, a top ruling party member.

But the Brotherhood charges that Mubarak who has held autocratic power for a quarter century wants to eliminate the sole opposition movement that could challenge his regime if a fair vote were held. The Brotherhood and secular opposition groups accuse the 78-year-old president of trying to ensure his son, Gamal, succeeds him.

The Brotherhood, which has been banned since 1954 banned but runs candidates as independents, made dramatic gains in parliament elections in late 2005, winning a fifth of the legislature’s seats.

Egyptian human rights activists believe the Brotherhood’s showing then was a key reason why the United States has backed down somewhat on public pressure on Mubarak to enact democratic reform.

Now the government is trying to push through what it calls its own reform package, including constitutional changes that would make it harder for the Brotherhood to participate in politics.

The recent wave of arrests occurred after a December protest by the Brotherhood in which 50 young members appeared in military-style black uniforms and balaclavas prompting government claims the Brotherhood was taking up arms.

Soon afterward came the crackdown on the group’s cash flow. El-Shater, the movement’s No. 3 leader, was arrested along with two other Brotherhood businessmen, and a public prosecutor ordered the freezing of assets of 34 companies connected to members.

That has highlighted the powerful financing the Brotherhood enjoys.

El-Shater, for example, has an estimated wealth of around $87 million, according to Adel Abdel-Aleem, a former official in Egypt’s state security office who writes frequently about the group. Also arrested was businessman Hassan Malek, who owns a chain of furniture stores and textile factories.

The Brotherhood’s resources also come from donations from its estimated 400,000 members each donates 8 percent of his income each month.

Brotherhood businessmen then invest those donations, including in apartment complexes, supermarket chains, textile factories and fast-food chains, according to Abdel-Aleem and Tharwat el-Kharabawi, a former Brotherhood member.

El-Kharabawi, who left the group to try to form a moderate political party, told the Associated Press the movement spent about $10.5 million in the 2005 elections.

The Brotherhood insists it still is committed to peaceful change, despite the recent government crackdown on its finances and string of arrests.

But a leading moderate in the group, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, warned that those who feel hopeless about democratic change could turn violent.

Last week’s arrests, he said, are “an indirect call by the regime for violent forces to become active, because it is crushing all the peaceful factions.”

RICE CALLS ON EGYPT TO FREE OPPOSITION LEADER

Wed Feb 7, 2007

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070207/pl_nm/usa_egypt_dc_2

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for the release of ailing, imprisoned Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nour ahead of a meeting with Egypt’s foreign minister on Wednesday.

Nour, who challenged Hosni Mubarak in the 2005 presidential elections, is serving a 5-year sentence for submitting forged documents when setting up his liberal political party. He says the charges were fabricated.

Twenty-three Egyptian human rights groups urged Egyptian Mubarak last month to free Nour, a diabetic whose health has seriously deteriorated since a December 18 cardiac catheterization procedure in a Cairo hospital.

The State Department has voiced concern about his condition and last month urged Egypt to consider releasing him on medical grounds. Nour won 8 percent of the vote in the 2005 elections, coming a distant second to Mubarak on 89 percent.

Speaking at a congressional hearing, Rice sought to rebut criticism that she has muted her calls for democracy and human rights in Egypt and said she raised Nour’s case with Mubarak when they met in Egypt in January.

“I did raise … cases like Ayman Nour, where we think that his release would be wholly appropriate, and internal reforms in Egypt,” Rice, who is scheduled to meet Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit on Wednesday afternoon, told lawmakers. “We are going to continue to press for those.”

A statement released by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, Egypt’s main independent rights group, on January 22 said 23 rights groups were asking Mubarak to reduce his sentence to time he has already served.

It said Nour’s family had said prison authorities prevented his doctors and lawyers from visiting him, violating both the Egyptian constitution and international agreements.

330 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001 USA

Phone: (212) 4651004 Fax: (212) 4659568

TUNISIAN INTERNET WRITER STILL JAILED AFTER TWO YEARS

New York, February 28, 2007The Committee to Protect to Journalists today called on Tunisia to free an Internet writer jailed two years ago for Web articles that criticized President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and described torture in Tunisian prisons.

Secret police in Tunis arrested Mohamed Abbou, a human rights lawyer and contributor to the Tunisnews Web site, on March 1, 2005, just hours after the site posted his article about Ben Ali. The piece denounced Ben Ali for inviting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the World Summit on Information Society, a U.N.-sponsored forum on Internet governance, and compared the Tunisian leader to his Israeli counterpart. In the Arab world, such a comparison is highly negative.

Authorities had already been angered by Abbous earlier work, which included a piece in which he compared torture in Tunisias prisons to that committed by U.S. military guards at Iraqs infamous Abu Ghraib, according to human rights lawyers and advocates.

On April 28, 2005, a Tunisian court sentenced Abbou to three and a half years in prison for “defaming the judicial process” and for an assault allegation that was directly contradicted by eyewitnesses. An appellate court upheld the sentence in June 2005. Tunisias executive branch exerts great influence over the judiciary, using the court system as a tool to punish critics, CPJ research shows.

Mohamed Abbous continued imprisonment is an outrage that highlights Tunisias awful press freedom record, said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. If Tunisia supports human rights, as it likes to tell the world, then it should abide by international standards of justice.

Abbou is currently imprisoned in El-Kef, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) from his home in Tunis, making family visits difficult. His wife, Samia, his lawyers, and friends have been harassed by Tunisian police and assaulted by men thought to be affiliated with the government. Since his imprisonment, Abbou has gone on several hunger strikes to protest his imprisonment, his harassment by prison guards, and the intimidation of his family, lawyers, and friends.

In November 2005, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the United Nations concluded that the detention of Mohammed Abbou was arbitrary and in violation of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It reminded the Tunisian government of the need to abide by international standards of free expression and due process. Despite this record, Tunisia was named a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council when the panel was established in June 2006.

A December 2006 CPJ analysis found that Internet journalists are being jailed in increasing numbers worldwide. CPJ outlined widespread repression of the Tunisian news media in a December 2005 special report and in the new edition of its book, Attacks on the Press.

CPJ is a New Yorkbased, independent, nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide. For more information on press freedom, visit www.cpj.org.

U.S. Department of State

Office of the Spokesman

For Immediate Release March 1, 2007

2007/151

IMPRISONMENT OF TUNISIAN ACTIVIST

The United States is disappointed to note that March 1, 2007, marks the two-year anniversary of the imprisonment of Tunisian activist lawyer Mohamed Abbou. Mr. Abbou was convicted in 2005 of defamation of the judicial process and assault after publishing articles on the internet critical of the Government of Tunisia. The legal processes involving his case were characterized as highly irregular by Tunisian non-governmental organizations and international observers. We urge the government to carry through on its declared intention to pursue democratic reform, including allowing greater freedom of expression and association and to release all those imprisoned for expression of free thought, including Mr. Abbou.

Reuters, February 17, 2007

TUNIS, Feb 17 (Reuters) – A Tunisian court on Saturday barred the country’s leading independent human rights league from holding a congress unless it allows pro-government members to take part, league members said.

The case is being watched closely by international rights groups as a test of civil freedoms in Tunisia. The government’s critics accuse it of suppressing free speech, stifling democracy and jailing hundreds of opponents.

The Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH) has tried since 2005 to hold the congress, which was suspended by the courts after 22 league members accused the leadership of excluding them.

The activists who lodged the complaint are also members of Tunisia’s leading ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD).

“The decision is not a surprise — it is a political decision dressed up as a judicial one,” said Mokhtar Trifi, the league’s president.

“But what is surprising is the timing, as we were expecting a period of greater openness towards rights groups in Tunisia.” The league’s leadership says the excluded members are government stooges who want to undermine the independence and credibility of the league, which was founded in 1977.

They in turn accuse the league’s leadership of cronyism, physical and verbal violence and sidelining members who disagree with them.

Chedli Ben Younes, a lawyer and one of the excluded members, said the leadership had acted illegally.

“The court’s decision has protected us from the offences of the league, which wants to remove opponents seen as pro-government,” he said.

The government says it has not intruded in the dispute and insists it is committed to democracy and respect of human rights.

When the group attempted to meet in Tunis last May, dozens of plainclothes police officers blocked their path. Witnesses said that activists who tried to breach the cordon were kicked and beaten.

There’s trouble brewing, and it’s our fault.

By Anne Applebaum

Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007

http://www.slate.com/id/2159691/

TUNIS, Tunisia”If you wanted to support democracy in the Arab world, why did you begin with your enemies instead of your friends? Why Iraq and Iran? Why not us?”

It’s an excellent question, and when it was posed to me a few days ago by Mokhtar Trifi, president of the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights, I found it hard to answer. Trifi, whose dark suit and elegant French make him seem like the statesman he ought to be, does indeed seem a far better candidate for U.S. friendship and support than, say, the current prime minister of Iraq. Because Tunisia also seems, on the surface, much closer to the West than many of its neighbors, it also makes a curious example of what might have been.

Like Turkey, Tunisia is an avowedly secular Muslim state: Women in Tunisia have the right to divorce and to marry as they please. Most do not wear headscarves, let alone veils. The average income has risen in recent decades, and the middle class is relatively well-educated. On a Friday afternoon in the suburbs of Tunis, every other street corner seems to feature a lyce, from which pour crowds of bluejeaned teenagers, boys and girls, chatting and laughing. Ask them, and they will tell you that they feel themselves to be more Mediterranean than Arab, that they have a lot more in common with Parisians than with Syrians or Saudis.

But surfaces are deceiving, as Trifiwhose office is haunted by omnipresent goons, whose visitors are sometimes harassed, and who is occasionally beaten up himselfcan testify. One French analyst, Batrice Hibou, has described how the myth of “reform” has been used in Tunisia to disguise from the outside world the deepening corruption, nepotism, and stagnation of a one-party state, dominated by what is, in effect, a president for life. While French politicians speak of the Tunisian “economic miracle,” party cadres connive to keep the best jobs in their own hands. Though the United Nations held its “World Summit on the Information Society” in Tunis in 2005, Tunisia deploys an Internet filtering and control regime draconian even by Arab world standards. The goons hang about the Internet cafes, too, hands stuffed in the pockets of their windbreakers.

Tunisians have also become masters of a certain kind of recognizable, Putin-esque, postmodern political charade, supporting a whole panoply of phony political parties, phony human rights groups, and phony elections. They talk of “democracy” and “reform” and, of course, “anti-terrorism.” But break the mold in Tunisiaengage in genuine opposition politicsand you might find you’ve lost your state health-care coverage or even your private-sector job. The tentacles of the party reach deep, though actual violence is rare. Says Trifi, “It causes too much trouble.” After all, violence could damage the benevolent image that draws so many European tourists to Tunisia’s beaches.

In the short term, this sort of system has suited lots of people, not merely President’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s friends and relations. Most notably, it has suited France, Tunisia’s closest business partner and former colonial power. In 2003, French President Jacques Chirac proclaimed that since “the most important human rights are the rights to be fed, to have health, to be educated, and to be housed,” Tunisia’s human rights record is “very advanced.” More to the point, the French believe that the authoritarian Tunisian government is the only thing preventing a massive wave of illegal immigration to France.

Unfortunately, the authoritarian government is also producing potential migrs. For, in fact, the most notable product of the Tunisian “economic miracle” is currently a lot of well-educated but unemployed young people. Once upon a time, the educated and the frustrated might have formed the backbone of a democratic revolution, just as they once did in South America and Eastern Europe. Now, the Tunisians look at Iraq and see that “freedom” brings chaos and violence. Which leaves them with two options: emigration or radical Islam. Or perhaps both.

No one knows the true extent of radicalism in Tunisia, because it is in the government’s interests to exaggerate the size of the threat. Nor does anyone know the true extent of Tunisian radicalism in the suburbs of Paris. But there have been bombs, arrests, and reports of copycat al-Qaida groups. Thus has an apparently benign authoritarianism produced in liberal Tunisia, as everywhere else in the Arab world, precisely the sort of terrorist inclinations it was supposed to prevent.

Soonce againwhy didn’t the West interest itself in Tunisian democracy 15 years ago, back before “democracy” became a negative term, back before the not-quite-free economy went sour, back before radical Islam became chic among the bluejeaned teenagers? The answers, as Trifi knows well, are clear: because democracy promotion was an afterthought that has never been an important U.S. goal in the Middle East. Because France, which has far more influence in Tunisia than we do, has never been remotely interested. And because no one in the West has ever been very good at thinking through just what the longer-term results of the authoritarian status quo might really be.

Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.

ISLAM’S PIONEERING WOMEN PRIESTS

By Richard Hamilton

BBC News, Rabat, Morocco – February 25, 2007

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6392531.stm

A radical innovation in the Islamic world has arisen in Morocco – women priests. The Mourchidat, as they are known, are the first women ever in any Muslim country that can perform the functions of a male Imam in a mosque, except lead the prayers.

Fifty Mourchidat have graduated and have now begun their ministries.

However, not everyone agrees with the new appointments.

The Mourchidat will be allowed to lead religious discussions and give advice in their communities – particularly to women.

The only thing they will not be able to do is to lead prayers. That role will still be reserved for male Imams.

In the courtyard of Rabat’s biggest mosque – the Sunna mosque – I spoke to Khadija al-Aktami. She is one of the newly qualified Mourchidat.

I asked her why she thought women would be well suited to this new role: “Women make good priests because God has made them more sensitive, merciful and more patient than men!

A woman is a mother, a wife, a daughter and a friend, so she will perform well in this role. Besides, no one can understand a woman as well as another woman.”

May 16 2003, like September 11, is a date etched in people’s minds and synonymous with terror in Morocco.

Forty-one people died in a series of suicide bombings by Islamic fundamentalists in Casablanca. It was partly in response to the Casablanca attacks that the Moroccan government introduced women priests – to promote a more liberal brand of Islam and to counter radicalism.

The Minister of Islamic Affairs, Ahmed Toufiq says the Mourchidat programme was necessary to maintain a healthy society as a preventative measure against terrorism.

“Society is like a human body and the body needs to be looked after: it needs to be fed and its health has to be preserved,” he said.

“Terrorism is the extreme example of a serious illness in society. You cannot leave a body until it gets into a crisis. You have to feed the body to avoid it falling into a state of crisis and disease. There are all sorts of measures you can take to prevent a crisis and this is one of them. There is an obligation to do this as a means of prevention.”

Control strategy?

Abdelwahed Motawakil, is the Secretary-General of the outlawed Islamist movement, Justice and Charity. His office is constantly being watched by the secret police.

‘Justice and Charity’ is highly critical of the establishment and is calling for the Moroccan monarchy to be abolished. It also believes that the new women priests are just instruments of government propaganda.

“If you take the idea in the abstract, I must say that it’s an excellent idea, because it gives an opportunity for women to participate in an area that has been monopolised by men,” he said.

“But if you look a little deeper and analyse the motives, you will find out that it is part of a strategy adopted by the regime to control the religious field and not to leave that field open for their opponents – the Islamists. So they want to control that area and convey their official view of Islam.”

Khadija al-Aktami is just starting on her new career as a Mourchidat but some of her colleagues will not be joining her.

They have been discovered to be supporters of Justice and Charity – something that will be viewed as a major embarrassment for the Moroccan government as it tries to combat Islamic extremism.

By David Ignatius

Daily Star staff

Thursday, February 22, 2007

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=79746

“Are you on the road, or in the ditch?” Back when I covered labor negotiations 30 years ago, that was the question reporters would ask to get a sense of how contract talks were going. The phrase came back to me last weekend as I listened to a series of relentlessly negative presentations at a conference here on America’s relations with the Muslim world.

We are in the ditch in the Middle East. As bad as you think it is watching TV, it’s worse. It’s not just Iraq, but the whole pattern of America’s dealings with the Arab world. People aren’t just angry at America – they’ve been that way to varying degrees since I first came here 27 years ago. What’s worse is that they’re giving up on us – on our ability to make good decisions, to solve problems, to play the role of honest broker.

Let’s start with some poll numbers presented at the Doha conference by Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor and a fellow of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, which co-sponsored the conference with the Qatari Foreign Ministry. The polling was done last year by Zogby International in six countries that are usually regarded as pro-American: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In these six “friendly” countries, only 12 percent of those surveyed expressed favorable attitudes toward the United States. America’s leaders have surpassed Israel’s as objects of anger. Asked which foreign leader they disliked most, 38 percent named US President George W. Bush; former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a distant second at 11 percent; and the present Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was third with 7 percent.

The poll data show a deep suspicion of American motives: Sixty-five percent of those surveyed said they didn’t think democracy was a real American objective in the Middle East. Asked to name two countries that had the most freedom and democracy, only 14 percent said America, putting it far behind France and Germany. And remember, folks, this is coming from our friends.

During the Doha conference, speakers put into words the attitudes summarized by the poll numbers. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a fiery Sunni preacher who appears regularly on Al-Jazeera, said that America acted as if “some people were created to lead and others to be led,” and that America had “lost the trust and confidence” of Muslims.

Well, okay, he’s notorious for his anti-America and anti-Israel views. But I heard the same thing from Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, who said Arabs were “losing confidence in the US role” as a peace broker.

And my friend Rami Khouri, who is one of most balanced journalists in the Arab world, warned that a broad popular front is emerging to challenge American hegemony. Iraq “discredits what America tries to do in the Mideast,” he said. Khouri explained that Arabs admire Hizbullah because it represents “the end of docility, the end of acquiescence.”

You don’t have to agree with these critics to recognize that the anger they express represents a serious national security problem for the United States. That’s what Bush seems not to understand in his surge of troops into Iraq, his bromides about democracy and his strategy of confrontation with Iran. It isn’t a tiny handful of people in the Arab world who oppose what America is doing. It’s nearly everyone.

To get out of the ditch, America must change its Iraq policy, soon. That doesn’t mean pulling out of Iraq quickly, as many Democrats in Washington seem to favor. I found few people here who thought a quick American pullout made sense. But it does mean shifting the American focus – so that we are talking with Iraq’s neighbors, and negotiating with the Iraqis a timetable for withdrawal of US troops. Tellingly, the one American who got loud, sustained applause here was Chris Kojm, a senior adviser on the Iraq Study Group report.

And to get back on the road, for real, America must broker a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. I winced when I heard Olmert say last weekend in Jerusalem that “the American and Israeli positions are totally identical” on the terms for recognizing a Palestinian unity government. The Israelis are right in insisting that Hamas must recognize Israel’s right to exist. But how to get there? What if US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had responded: America is a mediator in this conflict. Its positions are independent of either side, and it is willing to talk to all parties to achieve peace. I would have loved to see the looks of astonishment from the America-bashers here.

Syndicated columnist David Ignatius is published regularly by THE DAILY STAR.

THE US AND ISLAM: A WIDENING RIFT

By Rami G. Khouri

Daily Star staff

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=79700

It is no surprise that at the annual meeting of the US-Islamic World Forum in Doha last weekend, sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the state of Qatar, the focus of discussion returns repeatedly to American policies throughout the Middle East. The heart of US-Islamic relations is the discord over the Middle East, but that issue also clouds wider perceptions of the United States around the Muslim world.

At this annual gathering of some 200 personalities from all walks of life, we can experience two related phenomena: reaping the wisdom of scholars, analysts and pollsters who chart for us the broad trends (mostly deterioration) in American-Islamic perceptions of each other; while simultaneously watching Americans and Arabs in action, through their words, as the two continue to express mutual hostility and fear.

The dynamic is uneven, but now mutual. For years the US has used its military and diplomatic power to pursue its aims in the region, overthrowing regimes and trying to rearrange the political and social landscape. On September 11, 2001, a band of killers from the Arab world attacked the US, and Washington responded with armed fury. It waged a “global war on terror” that has achieved a few measurable successes but sparked many more currents of concern and resistance around the Islamic and Arab worlds.

The statistical data from many reputable pollsters is consistent. One recent American survey of the Arab world (University of Maryland with Zogby International) shows that 78 percent of Arabs have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of the US, while 72 percent of Arabs polled see the US as the biggest state threat to them. A global survey of 40 Islamic communities by the American Gallup organization showed that Muslims admire American technology, freedom, and democracy, but want more “respect” from Americans. Not surprisingly, the poll found that 57 percent of Americans, when asked what they admired most about Muslim societies, said “nothing” or “I don’t know.”

This is not a foundation for a mutually constructive relationship, and it shows every time Americans gather with Arabs and Muslims to talk, as happened in Doha. Private discussions among those who view themselves as adversaries, or who even fear each other, tend to be useful, frank and satisfying; the public debate, however, verges ever more negatively on the insulting and the catastrophic. You only need to listen to American officials speak at such gatherings to understand why nearly four out of five Arabs have an unfavorable view of the US and its policies.

Last year Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes gave a talk that could have won a prize for naivete, arrogance, and insult all rolled into one. This year, the task of further lowering Arab-Islamic esteem for the US government fell to David Satterfield, the senior adviser and coordinator for Iraq in the office of the US secretary of state.

The gist of his remarks was that the US public and government have limited patience in Iraq, and it was up to Iraqis now to take charge of their future by acting in a national rather than a sectarian fashion. He noted, correctly, that Iraq now represented a potential strategic threat to the entire region in the form of sectarian conflict, while saying that the US could act mainly as a “catalyst” from now on as Iraqis took charge of their own destiny. He also said that the challenge to Iraq and others came from terrorists and insurgents “who try to achieve their goals through the use of violence”- as if the US had not used weapons when invading Iraq.

The destruction that might be unleashed around the Middle East, and possibly the world, from the US decision to go to war in Iraq is only now becoming clear. For the US to say that its patience is limited and that it can at best be a catalyst in the face of the furies and destruction it has unleashed is precisely the sort of self-serving double standard that causes so many people around the world to fear and resist the US.

The matter of responsibility, impunity, and accountability is rising higher on the list of priorities of people around the world who wish to end the cycle of fear and war that seems to define the US and much of the Arab and Islamic world. Saddam Hussein and his Baathist thugs were finally held accountable and killed. Similar judicial processes, but with more legitimacy, are under way in Lebanon and Sudan.

One wonders: Are only Arabs and Muslims to be held accountable for their brutality and crimes? Or is it possible to ask that those in the US, the United Kingdom, Israel, and other lands who have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people also be held accountable to world public opinion and the rule of law? Only then can we hope to slow down and perhaps stop the terrible cycle of perpetual tyranny and war in the Middle East – now closely associated with mutual disdain and distrust among ordinary Americans, Arabs, and Muslims.

Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

U.S. WEIGHS IN ON IRAQ RAPE CASE

By ROBERT H. REID, Associated Press Writer

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070222/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_rape

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The U.S. military on Wednesday weighed into the politically explosive case of a Sunni woman allegedly raped last weekend by three Iraqi policemen, announcing its own investigation after the Shiite-run government dismissed her allegations as false.

The announcement, made to reporters by the chief military spokesman, appeared aimed at containing the growing political storm. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s exoneration of the three officers after an investigation lasting less than a day has enflamed Sunni-Shiite tensions over a case that strikes at the heart of Iraqi attitudes toward protection of women.

Al-Maliki, a Shiite, stoked the political flames further Wednesday by firing a top Sunni official who called for an international investigation into the woman’s allegations, which were broadcast Monday by satellite television stations across the Middle East.

Rape is considered not only an assault on the victim but a grave offense against her entire family and community. The allegations harkened back to the dark years of Saddam Hussein’s rule, when wives and daughters were raped in front of their husbands and fathers to exact confessions from the men.

Al-Maliki insists the charge was fabricated by Sunni politicians and extremists to discredit the police and the ongoing security crackdown in Baghdad. He announced a “reward” for the officers who were implicated.

Regardless of the truth, many Sunnis considered the government’s speed in clearing the policemen as an insult to their community. Al-Maliki announced an investigation Monday evening and cleared the officers the following morning.

With the issue threatening to spiral out of control, the U.S. military announced Wednesday that Gen. David Petraeus, the new top U.S. commander in

Iraq, had ordered his own investigation, appointing an American officer to begin collecting evidence.

“Once the Iraqi government makes a decision on how they are going to move forward, there is an investigating judicial process established and they need this information from us, we will make that readily available to them,” chief military spokesman Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell said.

The 20-year-old woman told Arabic language television stations that she was detained Sunday by Iraqi police at her west Baghdad home and accused of aiding Sunni insurgents.

She was then taken to a police garrison where she was raped by the three policemen before American soldiers arrived and took her away, she said. The government and Sunni Arab politicians have released her name, but The Associated Press has decided not to publish it.

Caldwell confirmed that “an Iraqi woman” was brought to the U.S.-run hospital Sunday evening and released the following morning but refused to give further details or talk about her treatment.

However, the prime minister’s office e-mailed news organizations what it said was a U.S. medical report indicating no signs of rape.

The one-page English language form indicated blood and other tests had been performed and included a handwritten note in English stating “no lacerations” or “obvious bruising.” The word rape was not used.

Iraqi women rarely report rape because of shame and fear of public scorn. Victims even risk death at the hands of male relatives seeking to purge the family’s honor. Some officials, including Sunnis, discounted the woman’s claim simply because she came forward publicly.

“What has been said about the woman’s rape seems like a fantasy,” said Aida Osayran, a Sunni lawmaker and member of parliament’s Human Rights Committee. “It is certain that what she says is improper because it is not in our customs and traditions.”

Meanwhile, Iraqi officials sought to discredit the claim by casting dispersions on the woman’s character.

Brig. Gen. Qassim Moussawi, spokesman for the Baghdad security operations, said the woman had been in an “urfi” marriage, a common-law relationship that is not legally recognized in most Arab countries, and that she knew her husband only by his first name.

Moussawi said the woman was detained in a house which was not hers and that clothing found there was traced to a man whose body was found nearby. He did not elaborate.

Such comments did little to calm the outrage among many Sunnis, who have little confidence in the Shiite-led police forces.

In Mosul, a few hundred Sunni students staged a rare, half-hour rally at the local university campus to demand the government reopen the investigation. Participants by and large accepted the woman’s account.

Similar sentiments echoed across the Arab world, especially in Sunni countries deeply suspicious of Iraq’s Shiite-led government. Television stations in Egypt and the Persian Gulf have reported extensively on the case since Monday.

Columnist Issa al-Enezi wrote in Kuwait’s Al-Siyassah newspaper than “instead of ordering a serious investigation,” al-Maliki “rewards the perpetrators alleging the girl was making up the story to foil the security plan.”

“Rewarding criminals is encouraging them. It is denying justice and instigating infighting among Muslims. May God help Iraqis put up with their extremist government,” al-Enezi wrote.

Al-Maliki’s office gave no reason for dismissing prominent cleric Ahmed Abdul-Ghafour al-Samaraie as chairman of the Sunni Endowments, a government agency that takes care of Sunni mosques and shrines.

On Monday, al-Samaraie said the rape allegations proved the failure of U.S. and Iraqi security forces to protect Baghdad’s citizens. He called the allegations “a horrific crime” and called for an international investigation “into this crime.”

Following his dismissal, al-Samaraie, speaking from Amman in neighboring Jordan, said al-Maliki lacked the authority to fire him and repeated his criticisms about the rape case.

“We will continue to speak with courage, and we will not fear anyone but God,” al-Samaraie said. “I am not concerned about a job because the honor of Iraqi women is a thousand times more valuable than government jobs.”

AN IRAQ INTERROGATOR’S NIGHTMARE

By Eric Fair

Friday, February 9, 2007; Page A19

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020801680.html

A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I’m afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.

That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man, whose name I’ve long since forgotten, was a suspected associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.

The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency. The violence raging there today is evidence that those tactics never worked. My memories are evidence that those tactics were terribly wrong.

While I was appalled by the conduct of my friends and colleagues, I lacked the courage to challenge the status quo. That was a failure of character and in many ways made me complicit in what went on. I’m ashamed of that failure, but as time passes, and as the memories of what I saw in Iraq continue to infect my every thought, I’m becoming more ashamed of my silence.

Some may suggest there is no reason to revive the story of abuse in Iraq. Rehashing such mistakes will only harm our country, they will say. But history suggests we should examine such missteps carefully. Oppressive prison environments have created some of the most determined opponents. The British learned that lesson from Napoleon, the French from Ho Chi Minh, Europe from Hitler. The world is learning that lesson again from Ayman al-Zawahiri. What will be the legacy of abusive prisons in Iraq?

We have failed to properly address the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Men like me have refused to tell our stories, and our leaders have refused to own up to the myriad mistakes that have been made. But if we fail to address this problem, there can be no hope of success in Iraq. Regardless of how many young Americans we send to war, or how many militia members we kill, or how many Iraqis we train, or how much money we spend on reconstruction, we will not escape the damage we have done to the people of Iraq in our prisons.

I am desperate to get on with my life and erase my memories of my experiences in Iraq. But those memories and experiences do not belong to me. They belong to history. If we’re doomed to repeat the history we forget, what will be the consequences of the history we never knew? The citizens and the leadership of this country have an obligation to revisit what took place in the interrogation booths of Iraq, unpleasant as it may be. The story of Abu Ghraib isn’t over. In many ways, we have yet to open the book.

The writer served in the Army from 1995 to 2000 as an Arabic linguist and worked in Iraq as a contract interrogator in early 2004. His e-mail address is erictfair@comcast.net.

By Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh

Thursday, February 8, 2007; Page A21

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/07/AR2007020702136.html

As Iran crosses successive nuclear demarcations and mischievously intervenes in Iraq, the question of how to address the Islamic republic is once more preoccupying Washington. Economic sanctions, international ostracism, military strikes and even support for hopeless exiles are all contemplated with vigor and seriousness. One option, however, is rarely assessed: engagement as a means of achieving a more pluralistic and responsible government in Tehran.

The all-encompassing nuclear debate comes as Iran’s political landscape is changing once again. As America became reconciled to a monolithic Iran, represented by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his brand of rambunctious politics, the results from December’s local elections suggest Iranians were doing otherwise. Ahmadinejad’s defiant rhetoric and populist posturing did not impress the Iranians who turned out in large numbers to elect city councils and members of the Assembly of Experts. Voters favored pragmatic conservatives and reformers who oppose their president’s policies abroad and his economic programs at home. Despite this show of dissent, though, it would be a mistake to assume that Iran’s regime is about to fall or that a democratic spring is looming.

Iran has long appeared ready for democracy. It has a literate, youthful population that is immersed in world culture, is at home on the Internet, is keen to engage the West and is above the anti-American anger that dominates the Arab street. No other Middle Eastern country has as much civic activism or a population that has voted as often in elections at various levels. But positive social and cultural indices have so far not translated into a political opening. Iranian society may be ready to embrace democracy, but Iranian politics is not ready to accommodate it.

Iran does not have an organized pro-democracy movement. The reformers who were swept to power in 1997 never coalesced around a coherent platform, nor did they produce a political party. Their movement inspired activism and student protests, and it changed the style and language of politics, but its lack of organization ultimately cost it the presidency in 2005. Reformism was popular but politically ineffective.

The clerical regime has also proved to be enterprising in facing demands for reform, particularly by using elections to manage opposition within the bounds of the Islamic republic. Economic isolation, supported by international sanctions, has kept the private sector weak, which has in turn denied supporters of change levers they could use to pry open the regime. The public sector accounts for more than 80 percent of the Iranian economy, and the constitution gives the clerical leadership most of the power. The problem facing democracy is not so much the state’s theocratic nature as it is the enormous domination it enjoys over the economy, society and politics. For democracy to succeed, the state’s domination of the economy and society must be reduced.

For too long, Washington has thought that a policy of coercion and sanctions applied to Iran would eventually yield a responsible and representative regime. Events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe suggest that containment eventually generates sufficient pressure to force autocratic elites to accommodate both international mandates and the aspirations of their restless constituents. Ironically, though, U.S. policy has buttressed the Iranian regime, which has justified its monopoly of power as a means of fending off external enemies and managing an economy under international duress.

More than sanctions or threats of military retribution, Iran’s integration into the global economy would impose standards and discipline on the recalcitrant theocracy. International investors and institutions such as the World Trade Organization are far more subversive, as they would demand the prerequisites of a democratic society — transparency, the rule of law and decentralization — as a price for their commerce.

Paradoxically, to liberalize the theocratic state, the United States would do better to shelve its containment strategy and embark on a policy of unconditional dialogue and sanctions relief. A reduced American threat would deprive the hard-liners of the conflict they need to justify their concentration of power. In the meantime, as Iran became assimilated into the global economy, the regime’s influence would inevitably yield to the private sector, with its demands for accountability and reform.

It is important to appreciate that Iran has a political system without precedent or parallel in modern history. The struggle there is not just between reactionaries and reformers, conservatives and liberals, but fundamentally between the state and society. A subtle means of diminishing the state and empowering the society is, in the end, the best manner of promoting not only democracy but also nuclear disarmament.

Vali Nasr is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of “The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future.” Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic.”

UZBEKISTAN: RIGHTS ACTIVISTS CALL FOR CONTINUED EU SANCTIONS

By Ahto Lobjakas

http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/02/A4496AC9-CFA6-46A0-A379-BD65A611D776.html

BRUSSELS, February 28, 2007 (RFE/RL) — Human rights groups are sounding the alarm ahead of a meeting on March 5 at which EU foreign ministers will review sanctions against Uzbekistan, which were imposed after government troops brutally suppressed a demonstration in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijon in 2005.

The International Helsinki Federation For Human Rights (IHF) wants EU sanctions against Uzbekistan to continue — and possibly be extended — because of the deteriorating human rights situation there. Based on a firsthand fact-finding mission to Uzbekistan, the group released a report in Brussels on February 27 saying there is no reason for the EU to ease sanctions.

The EU sanctions originally included a suspension of political cooperation, an arms embargo, and a visa ban against 12 officials held directly responsible for the violent crackdown against Andijon demonstrators.

“When states operate without any kind of transparency — without any kind of monitoring — they can do what they want. We don’t know what’s going on in Uzbekistan.”

Political contacts were resumed in November after Tashkent agreed to “expert-level” discussions about Andijon. EU foreign ministers should examine Uzbekistan’s progress on human rights at their upcoming meeting.

‘Selling Out’ Human Rights

“There’s absolutely no basis for lifting these sanctions,” IHF Executive Director Aaron Rhodes says. “There has been no improvement in the human rights situation — there has been a severe downgrading of the human rights situation. And the effect of this is that there really [isn’t] anybody monitoring human rights there. And so, when states operate without any kind of transparency — without any kind of monitoring — they can do what they want. We don’t know what’s going on in Uzbekistan.”

Rhodes said Uzbekistan’s human rights community has been “wiped out” since the violence in Andijon and the “lights have been turned off” by authorities there. He said United Nations rapporteurs are denied entry into the country at a time when the remaining OSCE presence is “ineffective.”

Rhodes urged EU ministers not to “sell out” on human rights in order to create an “appearance of political progress.” He ascribes that temptation to EU members seeking closer relations with energy-rich Central Asia.

In November, EU countries appeared split over a preferred course. In a meeting with Uzbek Foreign Minister Vladimir Norov in Brussels, the EU was promised an exchange of views on Andijon and a “human rights dialogue” at a later date.

Crackdown On Muslims

Rhodes declined to say how the IHF collected the information in its report. But he stressed that anecdotal evidence from isolated missions cannot replace systematic monitoring.

The IHF’s report includes a detailed list of continuing repressive measures — restrictions and abuse of imprisoned activists, as well as spurious attempts to discredit activists’ reputations, harass their relatives, and persecute them for political reasons.

Rhodes also highlighted a massive crackdown by Uzbek authorities on Muslims who practice their religion outside officially sanctioned channels, in “unregistered” mosques. He said it appears that “thousands” have been imprisoned — and that many have been executed.

Official Role In Abuses

Meanwhile, the IHF says it has direct evidence of collusion by high-ranking Uzbek officials in the political persecution of human rights activists.

It’s still unknown how many people died in the government crackdown. In addition, IHF Deputy Executive Director Brigitte Dufour told RFE/RL she was informed by a senior Uzbek official in 2001 that one woman activist was forced to undergo psychiatric treatment after complaining about the situation in Uzbekistan during a Warsaw meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

“She was demonstrating in front of the town hall, and she was taken directly to this [psychiatric] hospital and all that,” Dufour says. “And he said, ‘Well, I must admit [that] maybe we made a mistake here.’ He said: ‘She must be crazy. You recall what she said in Warsaw.’ So, in a way, he was admitting to having some political role in her detention.”

Dufour and Rhodes say the same Uzbek official who made those remarks now heads the country’s delegation in talks with the EU.

Rhodes warned the EU against “appeasing” the Uzbek government. But he also said there appears to be “no lack of interest” on the part of Germany to hear the views of human rights groups on Uzbekistan.

Germany, current holder of the EU Presidency, is now drafting the bloc’s first-ever strategy for Central Asia. It is expected to be unveiled at an EU summit in June.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier plans in late March to meet in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, with his counterparts from all five of Central Asia’s former Soviet republics.

TURKMENISTAN: FAMILY CONCERNED OVER IMPRISONED FORMER CHIEF MUFTI

By Felix Corley, Forum 18 News Service

http://www.forum18.org

http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=914

The extended family of imprisoned former Chief Mufti Nasrullah ibn Ibadullah, in his home region of Dashoguz [Dashhowuz] in northern Turkmenistan, is becoming increasingly concerned that it has heard nothing of him, Forum 18 News Service has learnt. “We have never once been allowed a meeting, never once have they accepted parcels for him and we don’t even know where he is being held,” one relative complained. Family members say rumours that Nasrullah had been freed at the time of last October’s prisoner amnesty are not true. No official was prepared to discuss Nasrullah’s case with Forum 18.

Nasrullah who turned 59 on 10 December 2006 and is from Turkmenistan’s ethnic Uzbek minority studied Islam during the Soviet period at the madrassah in the Uzbek city of Bukhara, then in Syria and Egypt. He became Chief Mufti after Turkmenistan gained independence in 1991, and was loyal to the then President Saparmurat Niyazov. However, the President removed him without explanation as Chief Mufti in January 2003.

In March 2004 Nasrullah was sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment, apparently on treason charges, by the court of the Azatlyk district in the capital Ashgabad after a closed two-day trial. The first five years were to be served in a high security prison. The government has repeatedly refused to give any details about the crimes they allege he committed and which articles of the Criminal Code he was sentenced under, or to release the text of the verdict.

Conflicting reports on Nasrullah’s whereabouts have emerged in recent years. Deutsche Welle claimed in May 2004 that Nasrullah was among a number of prisoners severely beaten in prison in the Caspian port city of Turkmenbashi [Trkmenbashy] (formerly Krasnovodsk), though this report could not be verified independently (see F18News 25 June 2004 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=349). There has been no verified news of Nasrullah since he was sentenced. His name was not in the officially-published list of those amnestied in October 2006 and he was not among the handful of other prisoners the government said it freed at the same time.

Turkmenistan’s most recent other religious prisoner was Hare Krishna devotee Cheper Annaniyazova, imprisoned in 2005 for illegally crossing the border, after she went to live in the Hare Krishna commune in Kazakhstan despite being refused an exit visa. But she was freed from the women’s labour camp in Dashoguz in October as part of the annual prisoner amnesty, though she has since been barred from leaving the country (see F18News 24 October 2006 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=860).

Although Turkmenistan offers no alternative to compulsory military service and has imprisoned Jehovah’s Witnesses in the past (see F18News 10 February 2006 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=725), none are currently known to be imprisoned.

In the wake of the death of the autocratic President Niyazov in December, religious believers in Turkmenistan have been watching for any signs of a new religious policy and an end to restrictions on religious communities (see F18News 21 December 2006 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=894).

The new President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, took his oath of office on 14 February on a copy of the Koran and Niyazov’s work the Ruhnama (Book of the Soul), which has long played its part in the late President’s grotesque cult of personality, including being foisted on religious communities (see F18News 1 March 2005 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=522). Forum 18 has been unable to find any state official prepared to say what the new President’s religious policy will be.

Crimea’s Tatars have created a promising model to lessen ethnoreligious conflict.

By Waleed Ziad and Laryssa Chomiak

WASHINGTON, February 20, 2007 THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0220/p09s02-coop.html

The effort to help Muslim moderates and democratic reformers, President Bush insists, is a primary bulwark against ethnoreligious conflict and the terrorism it breeds. Yet, five years into the war on terror, real-world examples to support that contention are scarce. There is, however, a conflict zone that has developed a strong model of stifling violent extremism one that could be replicated in hot spots around the world: Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

Last month in picturesque Crimea, minority Muslim Tatars clashed violently with ethnic Russians who make up the majority of the region’s population. This was the worst in a string of incendiary events that began in August 2006: pro-Moscow paramilitary gangs assaulted Tatars at their holiest site, a building housing their parliament was bombed, and a Tatar journalist was assassinated.

Meanwhile, foreign-sponsored Wahhabi Muslim extremist groups appeared on the scene, urging violent retaliation. Most anywhere else in the world, this would have been the trigger for a major ethnoreligious war. But thanks to the Tatars’ locally developed democracy, their leadership was able to avert full-scale hostilities.

The Tatars of Crimea were victims of ethnic cleansing and deportation policies under Russian czars and later under Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. In 1944, Stalin deported all Tatars to Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia. Throughout their exile, Tatars maintained a strong national identity, and, post-Stalin, they formed a celebrated nonviolent resistance movement.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Crimea became an autonomous republic in Ukraine, and the resistance movement collaborated with the newly independent Ukrainian government to secure Tatars’ right of return. However, Crimea continues to be dominated by its Russian majority and a pro-Moscow party.

The new repatriates faced oppression as ethnic Russian authorities in Crimea prevented the restitution of land and job opportunities. Rather than be marginalized, the Tatar leadership’s unique solution was the 1991 creation of the Mejlis, or “assembly” system, to establish their legitimacy in the Ukrainian political milieu.

Leaders adopted the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights as their political model, with democracy and nonviolence as guiding doctrines. Early on, Mejlis members appealed to the UN and the international community for recognition of their rights, which has resulted in close working ties between the Mejlis and various international aid organizations. The Mejlis was eventually recognized as a legitimate political player by Ukraine’s government. Mustafa Jemilev, the father of the resistance movement, now holds a seat in the Ukrainian parliament. Indeed, he is part of the Orange bloc coalition, which has been a symbol for democracy in the region and worldwide.

An elected religious institution, the Muftiyat, was established alongside the Mejlis system to prevent the inpouring of religious extremism and preserve Tatar Islamic folk traditions. Amid the ethnic tensions, small-scale Wahhabist groups sponsored by Arab Gulf states have emerged, including the banned Hizb-i-Tehrir, which castigated the Mejlis for its “soft” policies. But the Muftiyat, allied with the Mejlis, denounced these ideologies as “false teachings and objectives rejected by Islam,” and swiftly silenced the radicals with popular tolerance and education campaigns at local mosques.

The overwhelming success of the Mejlis in preventing the spread of violence rests on its exclusive reliance on negotiations, international support, and nonviolent public protests. When Tatar rights are denied or provocation occurs, Mejlis leaders step in to mediate. And the Mejlis actively prevents the formation of independent militias, recognizing their detriment to any negotiation process.

Despite many roadblocks, peaceful Tatar activism has achieved what was previously inconceivable: repatriation and citizenship for 250,000 Tatars, quasi- recognition of the Mejlis by the central government, and seats within Ukrainian and Crimean legislatures.

The Crimean Tatar experience proves that there is indeed a nonviolent prophylactic for ethnoreligious conflict. Giving official recognition to the political aspirations of indigenous minorities helps address popular grievances through peaceful negotiation instead of street violence. That’s the lesson of the Mejlis and Muftiyat in Crimea. And it’s the lesson that should be applied to other conflict zones, from Muslim minority populations across the former Soviet Union, to the Kurds in Syria and the Moros in the Philippines.

Fostering local participatory movements isn’t just about keeping democracy healthy. In the global war on terror, it’s one of the best defenses against transnational fundamentalism.

Waleed Ziad, an economic consultant and a principal at the Truman National Security Project, writes extensively on Islamic fundamentalist movements. Laryssa Chomiak, a Department of Homeland Security fellow, covered the Crimean Tatar minority for the University of Maryland’s Minorities at Risk Project. They recently returned from Crimea, where they interviewed Tatar leaders.

THE MODERN MUSLIM

Controversial scholar Tariq Ramadan explains why Mohammed had progressive views of women, why the Quran is a prescription for peace — and why he is banned from Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

By Steve Paulson

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/02/20/ramadan/index.html

Feb. 20, 2007 | Why are there so few moderate Muslims speaking out against Islamic terrorism? That’s a common complaint heard in the West, but in truth, plenty of Muslims are critical of suicide bombers. What’s harder to find are Muslim leaders who condemn terrorism while also maintaining credibility among disaffected Muslims, and intellectuals who can appeal to both secular Europeans and Middle Eastern imams. That’s why the Swiss-born Tariq Ramadan is such a compelling figure.

Ramadan has been called the Muslim Martin Luther King, and he’s often described as Europe’s most important Muslim intellectual. He has no shortage of charisma — a quality that serves him well as he reaches out to various constituencies. There’s no doubt that Ramadan commands a large following. Hundreds of young Muslims turn up at his public talks, and tapes of his lectures are widely circulated. He travels frequently throughout the Islamic world, trying to build bridges between European Muslims and conservative clerics.

But there are some countries Ramadan can’t visit. The United States, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have all banned him — each for different reasons. In 2004 Ramadan was all set to move his family to Indiana, where he’d accepted a teaching position at Notre Dame. But the U.S. State Department revoked his visa — though exactly why remains a mystery. Ramadan says it’s because he’s an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy. His critics say he has ties to Muslim terrorists. No evidence of a direct link to terrorism has ever surfaced, though plenty of people have looked for one. Yet his most vocal critics are in France, where Ramadan is a prominent public intellectual. The French journalist Caroline Fourest even wrote a book-length attack on Ramadan, titled “Brother Tariq.”

One reason Ramadan garners such close scrutiny is his distinguished — some would say notorious — family background. In 1928 his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt — the group that later spawned al-Qaida’s Ayman al-Zawahiri. Al-Banna was murdered in 1949. Ramadan’s parents fled Egypt and settled in Switzerland, where his father, Said Ramadan, emerged as a major Islamic thinker. Tariq Ramadan resists simple labels. He’s a devout Muslim, but one who wants to loosen the strict interpretations of Islamic law. He embraces the Western values of pluralism and democracy, while also retaining the anti-colonial mantle of his grandfather. Ramadan is often accused of being two-faced, making nice with Western journalists while giving fiery speeches to young Muslims. Ramadan says his tone may change, but he insists that his message is consistent.

I had the chance to see Ramadan last summer in Cambridge, England, where he spoke to a small group of journalists. (After his job at Notre Dame fell through, he took an academic position at Oxford University.) In person, Ramadan was elegantly dressed and quite dashing. Now, at the age of 44, he’s just come out with a book about the life of Mohammed, “In the Footsteps of the Prophet.” Ramadan recently went into the BBC studios in London, where he spoke to me about his efforts to reconcile Islamic values with Western secularism, his difficulties with the U.S. government, and his new reading of the life of Mohammed.

There have been many books about Mohammed. Do you see your book as a corrective to what other scholars have written about the Prophet?

No. The purpose of the book was not to correct or to come with new revelations about his life. It’s really a rereading of his life, stressing two dimensions. The first one is spiritual. We can extract from his life the spiritual lessons for now and forever. And the second dimension is about contemporary lessons as to our relationships with our neighbor, with nature, with people from other religions. So it’s really to come back to the teachings, the lessons and the meditations.

What do you think non-Muslims need to know about Mohammed? What are some of the most common misunderstandings?

The perception they have is all about violence, it’s all about otherness, it’s all about discrimination toward women. And I think all this is wrong. He was promoting peace. And the way he was with women was far ahead of what we sometimes find in Islamic-majority countries today. You know, the Prophet’s life is really an introduction to Islam.

The picture you present of Mohammed is someone who had a very forward-looking attitude about the status of women. What lessons can Muslim women take away from Mohammed’s life?

First, he was really treating women as women — and not only as mothers, or sisters or daughters in Islam. Women are equal before God and have the same rights and duties. More than that, he was so respectful. He taught people the way they have to deal with women. When his daughter came to him, he stood up and welcomed her, talked to her, respected her, kissed her in front of the people. At that time, to have a daughter in this Arab tribe was quite a dishonor. It was not valued in society. And he was welcoming women in the mosque, letting them enter and talk in the mosque. Today, in the 21st century, people don’t even let women come into the mosque and practice their religion. He was promoting knowledge. His own wife, Aishah, was a scholar. This is something that we cannot forget about his life.

So if you look at Mohammed’s own life, you’re saying the rules prohibiting women from entering the mosque are just wrong.

Yes, exactly. This is wrong. This is coming from two main mistakes. The first one is the literal reading of some of the verses. We are forgetting to put things into context. More important than one verse is understanding the overall message of Islam. This is one mistake. We are also confusing Arab cultures, which are historical, with the universal principles of Islam. I really think we have to come back to the Prophet’s example to understand the way he was promoting the status of women. He wanted them to be involved at the social level, the political level, the scholarly level, but also within the mosque. Today, we need to come back to this and say, it is not Islamic to prevent Muslim women from entering mosques. Preventing them from getting knowledge is not Islamic. Forced marriages are not Islamic. And even domestic violence: You can’t just quote one part of a verse in the Quran, forgetting that the Prophet himself never beat a woman. He was so respectful. So if he is our example, we cannot accept domestic violence. This is not Islamic.

There are also verses in the Quran that call on the wives of Mohammed to cover up. Do you read these as prescriptions for how women should dress? For instance, is there a commandment for Muslim women to wear the head scarf?

The head scarf is an Islamic prescription but it cannot be imposed. So it’s an act of faith. We never had one woman forced to wear the head scarf during the Prophet’s life. It’s a choice. This is why I’m always saying it’s against Islamic teaching to force a woman to wear a head scarf. But it’s also against human rights to force her to take it off. It should be a free choice. Now, the discussion we have in some Muslim countries is not about the head scarf; it’s really about what we call the “niqab” — veiling the face of the woman. This is something which was specific to the Prophet’s wives and not to all women. And this is why we must have an intra-community debate about veiling the face — to say this is not Islamic. There is no compulsion in these matters. We really have to respect the choice of the woman.

In your book, you say Mohammed was not divine. He was a man chosen by God to receive the final revelation. This raises some interesting comparisons to the status of Jesus within Christian theology, since traditional Christian accounts do describe Jesus as the son of God. I’m wondering what, if any, implications this has for people today. Do you think Mohammed has the same status for Muslims as Jesus does for Christians?

No, not exactly. We recognize Jesus as a prophet but not as the son of God. For us, there is nothing divine in Jesus and nothing divine in Mohammed. They have one dimension coming from God. We are dealing with revelations, with texts coming to the prophets that they are transmitting to humanity. But at the same time, they have a human dimension. Even the Quran is saying to Mohammed that what he did in some instances is wrong. For example, once he was so obsessed with the protection of his community that as he was talking to some rich people, he neglected a poor old man who came to him asking a question about the Quran. And the Quran said, what you did in this situation was wrong. So God is speaking to a man who is a prophet — the best among humankind — but still a human being. The status is quite different from what we have in the Christian tradition. And more than that, he’s not a mediator. So if you want to speak to God, you don’t need the Prophet. You can talk to God straight away. It’s an intimate dialogue between you and Him.

What about the Quran itself? Does the Quran have a similar status for Muslims as the Bible does for Christians?

Not exactly. For Muslims, the Quran is the very word of God. The Quran is what was revealed. But we still need our intelligence, our reason and our mind to understand what was said to us. Some of the verses should be understood as immutable. When we speak about the six pillars of Islamic faith, this is not going to change. This is trans-historical. When we speak about practices, there is no change. We pray as the Prophet was praying. We fast the same. And we perform the pilgrimage in the same way. But when it comes to understanding the Quran in social affairs, we need our mind and our intellect to understand the meaning of the verses in order to implement them in a new historical context.

To make another comparison to current Christian thinking, there’s a big debate over the historical Jesus and how we should interpret certain episodes in his life. Especially the miracles. For instance, does a Christian have to believe in the Virgin Birth? And what should Christians make of the Resurrection? Was this an actual physical resurrection or something more ethereal? These questions have profound implications for a lot of Christians today, especially those with a more rational bent. Is there a comparable debate in Islam today — whether to read certain episodes of Mohammed’s life literally or metaphorically?

We don’t have so many miracles in the Prophet’s life. Really, what is presented as a miracle is the text itself. The Quran is perceived as a miracle. But still, we have what we call the “miraj” — a specific episode in his life when he went in one night from Mecca to Jerusalem and from Jerusalem close to God in the sky.

This was the Night Journey, when the angel Gabriel took Mohammed to Jerusalem, where he met the prophets who’d come before him, including Abraham and Moses. And Mohammed was raised beyond space and time through the heavens. It’s where he received the instructions about the five daily prayers. This is a remarkable story. But it does raise the question: Was this some kind of vision, or did it physically happen?

Muslims have exactly the same debates as Christians. For some Muslim scholars, this is a spiritual experience. Others say no, he did it with his body and came back. So the debate is there. But I’m not sure it has great implications about what to extract from this story. In the end, it’s an act of faith. What we can extract from this story is the many ways the Prophet is trusted by his companions, and the meaning of these prayers that we have to perform every day. They were not revealed when he was on earth but when he came close to God.

Well, let me ask you about the prescription on prayer. Can you be a Muslim in good standing and not pray?

Once again, it’s a discussion between scholars. I really think that a Muslim is one who recognizes that there is one God and then with his heart or her heart is sincere. And we cannot judge after this.

It sounds like you’re saying that many of these questions — about how to pray or whether a woman should wear a veil — ultimately come down to personal choice. These should not be prescribed by imams or other Islamic authorities.

There are norms known by the believers. It’s then up to everyone to choose and decide, knowing the norms. For example, I’m not going to say that praying is not an obligation. No, there is a prescription saying five prayers a day, but now, it’s up to you to decide whether to pray or not. You decide which way you want to practice.

I’m not sure what that means. If you don’t pray five times a day, have you sinned? Have you violated some core Islamic principles?

Violated? I will not use that term. But I will say that you know what you have to do as a practicing Muslim. This is your responsibility. A practicing Muslim who wants to do all his duties before God should pray five times a day. These are the prescriptions. Now, you cannot impose on anyone to do it. And you cannot say you are a bad Muslim because you are not doing it. You can only say you are not fulfilling all the prescriptions. As to judging your heart, it’s not my business. It’s between you and God. So I’m praying five times a day. I don’t know how I’m going to be judged. I just know I’m not always satisfied with my practice. Since I don’t know my destiny, I’m not going to judge the destiny of anyone else.

You have a very unusual background, including two Ph.D.s — one dissertation on Islam, the other on Nietzsche. Has your study of Nietzsche affected how you think about religion? After all, this is the philosopher who declared that God is dead.

Yes, of course it had an impact on my way of dealing with religion. Nietzsche himself was very religious when he was young. And then he was so disappointed by the answers he got from his own religion. He was very harsh with people trying to avoid the only true question for him as a philosopher: When you suffer, what are you going to do with this suffering? Because to live is to suffer. This was Nietzsche’s main statement. And I think it’s really important because at the center of his philosophy is a quest for meaning. This was also a quest for innocence. And coming from where I was coming — from the Islamic tradition — for me it was really central in my own religious education: how you can combine innocence, suffering and the quest for meaning?

You have lived in several European countries and in Egypt. How do you think about your own identity?

What I can say is that I am Swiss by nationality, European by culture, Egyptian by memory, universalist by principle and of course Muslim by religion. All this is really important. I have no problem with being at the same time Egyptian by memory and European by culture. I don’t have opposing worlds of references. I really think there are common hopes and common quests.

You went to live in Egypt for awhile, the country of your parents. I’ve heard that you felt out of place there and you realized that Europe was your real home.

Yes, that’s totally true. I was living in Europe. You know, my parents had a very difficult exile. They left Egypt because of political reasons. And they dreamed of going back there. I started idealizing my country of origin. I wanted to go there and I was sure I would find people with the same commitment to justice. Egypt was the country of my dreams when I was young. So I went there, studied there, and I felt that, no, it was not that. I’m no longer Egyptian by culture. There’s something very European in me. So I felt the gap. And then I decided, I have to go back home. And my home is not the home I was thinking it was at the beginning. What was the exile for my parents is no longer the exile for me.

Do you see your larger project as finding common ground between secular Europeans and conservative Muslims in the Middle East? Are you trying to build an understanding of Islam that’s acceptable in both places?

I’m not trying to promote something which could be acceptable. If we come back to the roots of the European project, we have common roots with the Islamic-majority countries. I really think we are dealing with a clash of perceptions, not a clash of civilizations. I want to deconstruct these perceptions to come to the common roots. So I’m not trying to make Islam more acceptable. There’s no point. I don’t have to do this. My aim is not to be accepted or to please people. It’s just to be consistent. In fact, my project is much more about reconciliation.

But Muslims in Europe face different issues than Muslims in the Middle East. Islam is a minority religion in countries like France and England, and in most Middle Eastern countries, there’s no effort to separate religion and politics. In Europe — especially in France — there is an absolutely strict separation. And a lot of people wonder whether Islam can thrive in a pluralistic society as just one of many religions, or whether there is an inherent drive within the Islamic tradition to become the one dominant religion.

I can understand that question, coming out of the repeated assumption that there is no difference in Islam between religion and politics. This is not true. There is a distinction between what is the realm of worship and what is the realm of social affairs. And here, there is a field of negotiation and rationality. Now, let me come to the reality of Western societies. People are asking, is it possible for Muslims to live in secular society? Look, millions of Muslims are already showing every day that they don’t have a problem. If you look at the United States, you have millions of Muslims who are living as quiet, peaceful American Muslim citizens. You don’t have a problem. The great, great great majority of Muslims don’t have a problem. Even in France. Five million Muslims are living in France. Half of them are already French. They don’t have a problem. The problem of the French Muslims is not the secular framework. The problem is that in the suburbs, they are dealing with discrimination and social marginalization. It has nothing to do with religion. The religious and cultural integration is done.

But when you are in the suburbs and feel you are second-class citizens, that after four generations you are still perceived as French with an immigrant background, there is something wrong in the perception. When we had the riots in the suburbs in November 2005, you had politicians speaking about “them” as if they were not French citizens. And this has nothing to do with Islam. These are French citizens doing exactly what the French do when they are not happy. They demonstrate. They are doing exactly what your sons and daughters did during the ’60s. So I really think all this perception that Muslims cannot live in secular society is totally wrong. Millions are already doing it in European societies. And let me add something: If we look at Senegal, at Turkey, at Indonesia, these are Islamic-majority countries, and they are dealing with this kind of separation and democracy. And they are open to the process of rational collective negotiation. So we cannot confuse the Islamic world with the Arab countries where the lack of democracy is not due intrinsically to Islam.

But some religious issues do come into play. The head scarf has been banned from French schools. Where does that leave Muslim families in France?

Yes, you’re right. What happened is that two years ago, the French government changed the law — what is called “the law of 1905” (separating church and state) — just to ban the head scarf from schools. Before that, the secular traditional law in France was not against the head scarf. So the French debate about the head scarf became a political issue. It’s not going to solve the problem. So what should young Muslim women do now? Do they have to avoid going to school? No, we have something in Islam which is a very flexible way to deal with reality. My position is it may be a wrong law. It may be discriminatory. But if a young Muslim girl has to choose between school and the head scarf, go to school. Go to school and learn.

The other choice might be to go to an Islamic school.

Yes, but there aren’t many Islamic schools in France. And I really think the solution is not to create a parallel system. It’s to be part of the system. To really be in the system as citizens and to be able, from within, to say we are respecting the laws, but we think this law is a bad one and we can challenge it. But I really think the decision to ban the head scarf had much more to do with internal political tensions between the French left and right than with the religious issue of how to integrate Muslim citizens. This may be the only law that discriminates against French Muslims.

But it does seem there are a number of cases — not so much in terms of law, but in everyday practice — where there are tensions. For instance, what if a company won’t allow a Muslim employee to pray five times a day at prescribed hours? Can you eat non-halal meat if there is no halal meat available? What if a woman needs medical treatment and there is no female doctor available? Can she see a male doctor? Which takes precedence: Islamic principles or the cultural values of the country?

I really think that Islamic thinking about living in Western societies is already articulated and developed. For example, when you are in the workplace and you can’t pray five times, you can adapt your practice by having the two prayers of the afternoon together and the two prayers of the night together. These are answers that we already have in the Islamic legal tradition, which are helping Muslims to adapt to a new environment. As to halal meat, you have many different opinions about what is possible. And for some, it’s not against Islam to eat the meat in the Western countries. As for women going to be treated by a male doctor, there is no problem if there is no choice. These problems are constructed out of anecdotes by new immigrants saying they can’t do that. In fact, Muslim communities in the West already have adapted to their situation.

One of the big points of controversy is whether Islam itself can be criticized. And this comes up in so many different situations — for instance, the furor over the Danish cartoons. Yes, it was insensitive for the Danish newspaper to run these caricatures of Mohammed. But on the other hand, Islamic activists deliberately whipped this up into a frenzy, even circulating some cartoons that were never published in that Danish newspaper. And all kinds of violence erupted throughout the Middle East as a result.

Yes, I think Muslims should ask themselves what kind of image they are spreading with this attitude. I was in Morocco when it happened. From the very beginning, I said, “Take an intellectual critical distance. Don’t react to this provocation. Yes, it’s not your way to deal with the sacred. But it’s a Western tradition just to laugh at religion. And you should understand that not all criticism means Islamophobia.” There are legitimate criticisms of some Muslim behaviors and some principles that are not understood. You have to explain, you have to be part of the game, you have to be vocal, and not react emotionally to all this. I think the big problem is this kind of over-emotional reaction coming from Muslims, which is not acceptable.

By the way, it’s really important to remember that in Europe, and even in the States, the reactions from Muslims were really reasonable. The strong reaction was coming from Islamic-majority countries. And not by accident. I think some governments and some groups were instrumentalizing this story just to get popular support. On the other side, you had far-right parties very happy to provoke this kind of reaction. So you have people on both sides trying to polarize the debate. And we should not fall into the trap. It’s clear, as you are saying, that Muslims should be very, very open to criticism. We should tackle these questions and try to come up with sincere answers.

You are clearly a voice for reform within the Islamic world. Many people in both Europe and the Middle East pay attention to what you say. Do you see this reform movement in Europe as something that other Muslims from around the world will look at and follow?

Yes, it’s already happening. For decades, we had our answers coming from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, from the traditional centers of Islamic knowledge. But now it has changed. For example, the meaning of civil society, the way we deal with medical issues, with ethics, it’s really now the other way around. Some of our answers are going back there and helping people think about the problems in a new way. You know, I’m traveling a lot to Islamic-majority countries — to Morocco, Jordan, Indonesia, Africa. Last summer I visited seven African countries — some of them majority-Islamic countries, like Senegal and Mali. And they were listening to the way we’re dealing with problems. So we had exchanges of ideas and methodologies. Our experiences in the West have already had a tremendous impact. You know, this call for a moratorium that I launched two years ago, at the beginning I got such strong rejections…

The moratorium on the Islamic edict about stoning women who’ve committed adultery.

By the way, it’s stoning adulterous men and women. And it’s not only this. It’s stoning for the death penalty and corporal punishment. At the beginning, I was criticized by so many Muslims. Even in the United States, people were saying, what are you talking about? And then, after much discussion, I went to Morocco and sat with 40 scholars. Even the mufti of Egypt responded with three pages on my call and mainly he said this is the way forward. He may disagree on the way it’s done, but on the content he’s saying we have to think about it.

You went on French television to propose this moratorium. And what a lot of people in France couldn’t understand is why you didn’t just come out and condemn stoning. It seems like an ancient, barbaric practice. Why wouldn’t you just say it’s not acceptable?

[Chuckles] Yes, I said I’m against it. And I condemned it in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. But it was a political game with the [French] home minister. He wanted to use it by saying, “Look, he’s not condemning this.” But I’m saying I’m against it. What I’m trying to do is open a debate in the majority-Islamic countries. The moratorium is the first step to stop stoning. So open the debate and ask the Muslim scholars, what do the texts say? And in which context? This is the only way forward. Even in Pakistan, I was called by the Islamic commission because they wanted me to promote this idea there. And they used the idea of the moratorium in one case of a Pakistani British man who was to be killed. Then they stopped and he was freed. The important Muslim council in Indonesia asked me to present my position on this because they think it’s the way to say, we take the texts seriously but we need a debate on the way these texts are implemented. Look, this is the way forward.

But I’ve heard that your call for a moratorium got you in a lot of trouble in some countries. It angered a lot of conservative clerics. Didn’t Egypt and Saudi Arabia ban you after that?

Saudi Arabia, yes. They banned me after that. Egypt banned me for another reason — because I’m critical of the regime and say it’s not a democracy. But yes, in Saudi Arabia, they said no, we can’t talk about this. This is against our religion. And some of the Muslims put me outside the realm of Islam as if I was betraying the very meaning of Islamic references, which is really interesting because Saudi Arabia remains one of the most important allies of the West. And the West is saying to the Muslims, “Look, you have to denounce stoning.” So there’s a great deal of hypocrisy here.

My point is reconciliation and consistency. I will be against the Saudi government and the way they are implementing Islamic principles. And I will never accept that a poor Pakistani in Saudi Arabia can be treated as a slave, as an animal — you can be just beaten. In the name of Islam, I have to say no, this is not acceptable. So let us open the debate with Muslim scholars. So my point is not to please the West or to please the Islamic-majority governments. My point is really to be consistent with my values and the principles of justice and respect toward the poor and the innocent.

Well, you sound very reasonable and yet you keep getting banned from different countries.

[Ramadan laughs]

Why do you think the U.S. State Department canceled your visa? Why have you been banned from this country?

You know, for two years, I didn’t know. I was to go teach at Notre Dame University. Everything was set. Then they revoked my visa with no explanation and they referred to the Patriot Act. So my understanding from the very beginning is that they were unhappy with my political discourse and my views on American policy.

American policy in Iraq and in Israel?

Exactly. When I went first to the American embassy in Switzerland, the first questions I got were about Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict because I was saying resistance is legitimate. The means they are using is not, but resistance is legitimate. And your invasion of Iraq is a mistake, it was illegal. I’m not the only one to say that. The United Nations thought from the very beginning your actions were illegal. So I think these are the main reasons I was banned. Last September I finally got an answer: Tariq Ramadan gave 700 euros to a Swiss organization which was connected to Hamas. What they don’t say, and what is really important to know, is that this organization is officially recognized by the Swiss government. All the money I gave was put in my tax form and everything was official. I gave them money to support schools.

The second thing, which is much more important, is that I gave the money between ’98 and 2002. I gave 700 euros to a European organization to help build schools. And this organization was blacklisted in the States in 2003. So I stopped giving money one year before this organization was blacklisted in the States. And I got a letter from the American Embassy telling me I should have reasonably known that this organization was connected to Hamas — meaning I should have reasonably known one year before Homeland Security that this organization was connected to Hamas. It’s ridiculous. How could I have known this? So it’s clear that this has nothing to do with the true reason. The true reason is that I’m vocal. I’m speaking loudly against American policy in the Middle East.

A lot of people don’t know what to make of your relationship with your grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. His name is always brought up by your critics because they say you are a closet supporter of terrorists. And they say he laid the intellectual groundwork for terrorist organizations like al-Qaida. How do you respond to those criticisms?

As to my relationship with terrorists, if this was the case, it would have come out in all this discussion with Homeland Security. It means that really, there’s nothing in my record. And there is nothing. Now, as to my relationship with my grandfather, I have with him the relationship I have with any historical figure. I put things into context and try to understand what he did. I support some things and I am selective and critical of other things. So, for example, I respect the fact that he was resisting colonization, and that he built 2,000 schools — half of them for women — which at that time was totally new. He was the father of my mother, and he wanted her to be educated, and he was pushing in that direction against many Muslim scholars at that time. I think this is the work of a reformist. He took from Mohammed Abduh something which was really interesting. He said we have nothing against the British parliamentary model; this is very close to what we have as Muslims. So he didn’t have a vision of everything from the West as bad.

Now, he was the leader of an organization, and he was nurturing the members with slogans. And they were misleading to many of the followers. And here I’m critical of a very simple statement, which has been misunderstood by some of the followers. For example, you have, “The Quran is our constitution.” For some, it’s just come to the Quran and you refuse everything else. It was not what Hassan al-Banna was meaning. But this is the way it was understood, and you are responsible for some of the ways that people understand what you are saying. So it’s really important for me to be clear on that and to go further in the critical reading of this historical period of time. So I’m not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and I’m not representing them. But I’m not going to demonize my grandfather to please the West. I’m just asking the people, read, put things into context and criticize what is to be criticized, but also be fair to what he was trying to do during his life.

You have gone on record condemning all acts of terrorism. Would you say suicide bombings are never justified?

Yes, I’ve said that many times. To kill innocent people will never be justified. People were using this against me. I said, “Look, it’s never justified. You can, in certain circumstances, understand why people could be led to this. But to understand what is happening doesn’t mean you are justified.” But I’m also saying the situation of Palestinians now is so bad that it’s understandable without being justifiable. As an international community, as democrats, as people protecting human rights, we have to say that we need to do something. You can’t be silent as to the Palestinian oppression. My silence is as condemnable as their violence. We have to say no to suicide bombings, but also no to oppression.

One final question. You almost came to the United States. Your family was all packed and ready to move to Indiana. Why did you want to come here?

Yes, between 2001 and 2004, I came to the States almost 30 times. I met with so many leaders and scholars and Muslims, and they were telling me: We must build bridges between the European and the American experiences. And this is what I wanted to do. I’m still doing it from where I am, through a program like yours and video conferences. They are preventing me from being there physically, but I’m still exchanging views and trying to come up with a reasonable approach toward the future of our democratic societies. I think the voice that you are hearing now is a voice that may be necessary for American society today, especially under the current administration.

FOLLOWING THE DJERBA MODEL

Hayat Alvi Aziz

Middle East Times, 13 February 2007, www.metimes.com

Glenside, Pennsylvania – The Tunisian island of Djerba has a lesson for us all; it offers one of the best examples of interfaith harmony and coexistence. Recently, in one of my classes, I showed a brief video documentary on Djerba’s Jews and Muslims who have lived peacefully together for generations. Later, one student’s reaction was particularly telling, “So, there is hope.”

The situation in the Middle East gets darker by the day, as the region gets more and more enmeshed in conflicts. There are old, perpetual troubles such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, and then there are new ones, rearing their ugly heads. It is a region with a bad reputation, especially when it comes to peaceful coexistence.

Yet, Djerba successfully provides a precedent to rejecting hatred, prejudice, animosities, and distrust in the Middle East. Unfortunately, given that throughout the post-colonial era, the main preoccupation in the region has been territorial and political control, the greed of the various regimes as well as the anger of the disenfranchised masses has escalated. That is why examining the Djerba model is such an important step: it provides a clear example of healthy Jewish-Muslim relations that needs more publicity and replication throughout the region.

The Djerba model is a microcosm, albeit an extremely important one, within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). A larger scale example of Djerba’s paradigm is India, with there being a strong connection between India and the Tunisian island, as well as, more broadly, the entire MENA region: the common denominator of Islam.

During India’s independence struggle, led by the Congress Party, the Indian Muslim population was represented by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He clearly endorsed and participated in Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent civil disobedience agenda against the British colonial power, and was also a renowned Islamic jurisprudence scholar. By his example, and by virtue of Azad’s status as a religious authority, he was able to attract a substantial following among the vast Indian Muslim population. The end result was joint Hindu-Muslim cooperation in Gandhi’s non-violent campaign to expel the British colonial power from the subcontinent, as well as Azad’s unequivocal endorsement of Hindu-Muslim peaceful coexistence in an independent India.

Of course, the campaign was not without its problems and outbreaks of violence. Nonetheless, Azad remained steadfast in his principled stance as a non-violent activist working for a democratic, independent, sovereign, pluralistic India. He faced two major obstacles in his mission: the British authority, of course, which imprisoned him, and the opposition of some Muslim ideologues who disagreed with his pro-Gandhi orientation and political objectives. Fortunately, Azad’s ideological opponents in the Muslim community were unable to recruit enough supporters to undermine him. Such rivals consisted of either secular, Western-oriented, pro-British apologists, or Orthodox Islamists calling for the creation of an Islamic state ruled by a caliphate.

In the end, neither Maulana Azad nor Mahatma Gandhi was successful in convincing Muhammad Ali Jinnah to cease calling for the creation of Pakistan, partitioned from the right and left flanks of the Indian subcontinent. The creation of Pakistan, in itself, was an extremely violent process, stoking fierce Hindu-Muslim aggression, shattering the non-violent dream of Gandhi and Azad. Such history illustrates how Islam has been used for both non-violent and violent purposes in the past. It also proves that non-violent activism has been deemed consistent with Islamic principles, with no viable reason for rejecting notions of peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims, in this case, Hindus and Sikhs.

Therefore, what the Arab and Islamic world needs today is dynamic leadership – secular and religious – that, in the spirit of Azad, encourages socio-political change through non-violent means, promoting tolerance and acceptance of non-Muslims and diversity.

In that spirit, we find Muslims and Jews living and working side-by-side in the village of Hara Kabira in Djerba.

“It’s easy here in Djerba. This has been going on for a long time,” says one Jewish resident in the documentary, “this didn’t start yesterday.”

In fact, they have lived together for hundreds of years. Djerba’s Jews constitute a tiny minority, reportedly the oldest Jewish settlement in the world, possibly dating as far back as 2,500 years. They live alongside a substantial Muslim majority, yet the village is described as an “ideal model for coexistence.”

“Djerbans say they get along because they always have,” says the video’s narrator, “living together is a part of their heritage.” As such, Hara Kabira boasts not merely mosques but also several synagogues and a Jewish cemetery.

Sadly, the calm was shattered in Djerba in April 2002 when Al Qaeda operatives bombed a synagogue, killing 17 people. Nonetheless, the villagers have so far remained steadfast in maintaining their peaceful ties.

Israelis, Arabs, Iranians, and Muslims worldwide can all learn from Djerba’s example. And it wouldn’t hurt to acquaint themselves with Azad’s non-violent activism in India, either. Without taking the lessons of peaceful co-existence between Muslims and non-believers to heart, there can be no hope for a genuine, just peace and security in the MENA. The lessons of Azad and Djerba are also the strongest weapons against extremism. There is hope, yes, but only if people are willing to embrace the basic principles of acceptance and tolerance.

Hayat Alvi Aziz is director of International Studies at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania, specializing in the Middle East, South Asia, and Islam, and author of Regional Integration in the Middle East, coming out in May 2007. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed atwww.commongroundnews.org

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SOCIETY RELIGION

BEING A MUSLIM AMERICAN

After 9/11, living a life of faith in a time of suspicion.

Reviewed by Reza Aslan

Sunday, February 18, 2007; Page BW07

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/15/AR2007021501527.html

AMERICAN ISLAM

The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion

Book World Live

Paul Barrett fields questions and comments about his book, “American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion.”

By Paul M. Barrett

Farrar Straus Giroux. 304 pp. $25

By most estimates, Islam is now the largest non-Christian religion in the United States. And yet some 60 percent of Americans claim never to have met a Muslim. No wonder, then, that so many wild misconceptions about Muslims endure in the United States. Indeed, a third of Americans told Gallup pollsters in July 2006 that they thought America’s Muslims are sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

Paul M. Barrett’s well wrought and engaging new book, American Islam, seeks to change perceptions by providing an intimate group portrait of Muslim Americans as they struggle to combat the threats, prejudices and stereotypes that have dogged them since 9/11. Barrett, a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter who’s now at BusinessWeek, uses his journalistic skills to insinuate himself into the lives of his subjects — no easy task in a time of heightened suspicions. The book traces the lives of seven American Muslims, from the wily Dearborn, Mich., publisher and political activist Osama Siblani to the energetic journalist and Islamic feminist Asra Nomani, whose crusade to tear down the wall of separation between men and women in her Morgantown, W.Va., mosque made her a media superstar in the United States and, to her surprise, a scourge in her own community.

Barrett’s profiles paint the American Muslim community — more than 6 million strong and almost infinitely diverse — as a microcosm of the larger worldwide community of Muslims. Muslims in the United States face the same religious, ethnic and sectarian divides that one finds throughout the Muslim world — Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Iranians, Muslims and Christians. Yet American Muslims have, for the most part, avoided the conflicts of identity and integration that plague so many of their far more marginalized co-religionists in Europe. This partly has to do with economics: While most European Muslims are descended from impoverished immigrant families who flooded into Europe as guest workers at the end of World War II, most Muslims in the United States are, like the protagonists of Barrett’s book, either middle-class converts or well-heeled and often highly educated immigrants from a wide array of ethnic backgrounds.

While Barrett maintains a sense of narrative cohesion throughout, the individual profiles are, alas, a bit uneven. His otherwise absorbing chapter on Khaled Abou El Fadl, the renowned theologian and law professor at UCLA, lacks an in-depth discussion of why his theories about Islamic law, or sharia, are so controversial among traditionalist Muslims. And one wishes that Barrett’s profile of the charismatic Siraj Wahhaj, the imam of a Brooklyn mosque, had more fully mined the complex history of African American Islam, its troubling roots in the Nation of Islam and its continuing animosity toward Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia.

Despite these shortcomings, American Islam provides a welcome antidote to the widespread Islamophobia that has infected so many Americans over the last five years. Indeed, at a time when global perceptions of the United States are hideously unfavorable, the book makes a compelling argument that the greatest tool in America’s arsenal in the “war on terror” may be its own thriving and thoroughly assimilated Muslim community.

Still, it is hard not to be disheartened by Barrett’s account of the case of Sami Omar al-Hussayen, a University of Idaho graduate student caught in the wide net thrown upon America’s Muslim community after 9/11. Charged in February 2003 with violating the USA Patriot Act for providing “material support” to terrorists by running Arabic-language Web sites that encouraged suicide bombings, Hussayen suffered the same fate as the thousands of other Muslim and Arab Americans who were rounded up and held without due process, often on flimsy immigration charges. Throughout his ordeal, Hussayen insisted that he shunned terrorism and never lost confidence in the American legal system, which he relied upon to find him innocent and allow him to return to his family and his studies. He believed this to be true even after his wife and children were deported to Saudi Arabia in a blatant attempt to force him to “confess” to being a terrorist. He continued to believe it right up to the moment in July 2004 when, having been found innocent of all the terrorism charges, he was nevertheless deported for the most inconsequential visa violations.

While it is dispiriting to read about the bungling overzealousness of a government that has more often treated American Muslims as part of the problem of Islamic extremism than as part of the solution, there is nevertheless something oddly hopeful in Hussayen’s unflinching faith that the rights and freedoms for which the United States has for centuries been admired throughout the world would ultimately protect him from harm. Perhaps generations from now, when the war on terror has become little more than a somber footnote in our nation’s great history, that may once again be true.

As Muslims say, “InshaAllah.” God willing. ?

Reza Aslan, a Middle East analyst for CBS News, is the author of “No god but God.”

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