Where Are the Islamic Moderates?

As the war on terrorism expands to new fronts, a dangerous deterioration in relations between the United States and the Muslim world is proceeding apace.

Two explanations within U.S. policy-making circles have emerged to explain this hostility, yet both are seriously flawed. A more honest and promising approach requires rethinking our conception of Muslim moderation and adjusting our policies to accord with our highest principles.

The first view of the problem of Islam dominated the Clinton years. It was based on the self-evident "fact" that a once proud Islamic civilization has fallen far behind the West for reasons of its own doing. However, Muslims still have the potential to join the civilized world if, like other developing countries, they would only follow our prescription for establishing a free market and liberal democracy. However painful this cure, ignoring our advice would mean even greater poverty, inequality, and fanaticism.

Such an explanation at least carried the promise that development -- and along with it, a decrease in anti-Americanism -- was possible. It's a view that seems to have been disregarded by many senior members of the Bush Administration, who prefer an elaborated version of the "clash of civilizations" thesis which sees the civilizational blocs, notably the "West" and "Islam," as inherently opposed and deeply antagonistic. For them, the future of relations looks grim and mounting hostility unavoidable, which has culminated in a policy of preemptive full-scale -- even nuclear -- war in response.

Even as the President speaks of the peaceful essence of Islam, Muslims seem doomed to be modernized by force. Indeed, while our political ideology has shifted, the underlying foundations for U.S. policy has continued to include a commitment to Westernization in the guise of modernatization, a process that for most of the non-West has never occurred without significant violence. Yet this durable myth of only one path to the future is so pervasive that some of modernity's -- and conservative politics' -- most trenchant critics also see it as the solution to what ails the Muslim world.

Thus, for example, Salman Rushdie has recently called for "moderate" voices of Islam to "insist on the modernization of their culture and faith," lest heretics from within (aided by American marines?) break down the "prison doors" of a seemingly recalcitrant Islam. Rushdie should know better, as he has written some of the most acerbic critiques (most powerfully and ironically in The Satanic Verses) of the very modernity he now wishes imposed on the religion he was born into.

In fact, Muslim "moderates" do not hold these views at all, as "modernization" has long been seen as inseparable from European imperialism and colonialism, followed by nationalism and Cold-War superpower conflict -- each of which have wreaked havoc from Algeria to Indonesia. The belief that "Islam is the solution" emerged because of the failure of the West's model of modernity to bring the advertised freedom, justice, and development. In this context, while Secretary of State Powell's recent call for dialogue with "moderate" Muslims to build a democratic future for the Middle East is laudable, the U.S. cannot bribe or bully our allied "moderate" regimes and expect them to last. We might be able to compel the leader of Turkey's new Islamist Government to support the war against Iraq and leave unchallenged the power and corruption of the Turkish military, but these policies are contrary to the reasons for the party's popularity, and will likely further radicalize its constituents.

Similarly, Powell's seal of approval of the much celebrated recent Arab Human Development Report because it was "written by Arabs themselves" misses the fact that there is no such thing as a specifically "Arab" species of development, and that the authors (no doubt in order to be seen as moderates) conveniently ignored cultural issues or the long-term impact of centuries of Western domination of the region.