One is the trim, turbaned, cigar-smoking Iyad Jamaleddine, who’ll tell you that “God created religion to serve man, not the other way around.” The other has a last name as famous as any in the Middle East: Hossein al-Khomeini, the 45-year-old grandson of the ayatollah who turned Iran into a revolutionary theocracy a quarter century ago. The old man called the United States the Great Satan. The grandson says of Americans, “I love them, because they liberated Iraq from the unjust ruler.”
And there’s more: both men want to see separation of mosque and state. Al-Khomeini says Shiites like himself “have suffered more from Arabs than Israelis.” And he leaves the door open for the United States to move into Iran as it did in Iraq: “The Iranians need freedom more than they need bread. It doesn’t matter where it comes from.”
No wonder Washington wants to protect these guys. Their message sounds heaven-sent to Americans mired more deeply every day in the anti-American fanaticism, feuds and violence of the Middle East. And these preachers of Islamic moderation and freedom, even in the splendid isolation of their heavily guarded Baghdad compound, are not alone. They’re part of a broader reformation struggle, a radical rethinking of the role God and man (and woman) will have in the Muslim world of the new millennium.
But the Bush administration had better be careful. Washington has played games with Islam before, thinking it could exploit the faith for its own geopolitical purposes. America’s partnership with the Saudis and Pakistanis to support holy war against the Soviets helped mightily to spawn Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Now, on the second anniversary of Al Qaeda’s catastrophic attacks against America, it’s worth asking what we’ve learned about this religion that boasts 1.2 billion faithful.
For starters, it’s clear that fundamentalist teachings will attract zealots, bigots and demagogues in any religion. Absolutism is often easier to sell to the masses–or to impose on them–than relativism. And the quasi-libertarian message of preachers like Jamaleddine and al-Khomeini has yet to inspire people in the streets of the Middle East, where it counts.
Virtually every religion also has sects that thrive on the notion of persecution. Not only Muslims, but Christians, Jews, Hindus and people of other faiths may be convinced that the best defense of their religion is a war against the unbelievers. (“I expect a great reward in heaven,” said Paul Hill, who was executed in Florida last week for murdering an abortion doctor. “I am looking forward to the glory.”) What may be unique to Muslim societies is the pervasive sense of desperation after so many centuries of misrule by caliphs, kings, corrupt presidents and colonial masters. “If you’re desperate, you turn to God for reasons of identity,” says Jordan’s Prince Hassan, “and you express yourself with violence.”
Among progressive Muslim scholars there’s a lot of anger at the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs, who for years helped underwrite schools and mosques that preached only the most conservative, unthinking interpretations of Islam. “The dictatorial terror state is just like a dictatorial, terrorizing father in a family,” says Jamaleddine, who comes from an influential Shiite family in Iraq and spent many years exiled in Iran. “Such a father produces children who are cowards or evil bullies.” Now the Saudi regime, for instance, finds itself in a life-or-death struggle with the radical salafis it helped produce.
Iran’s clerical regime is obviously more interested in its own survival than the souls, or the well-being, of the faithful. “People in Iran have reached the conclusion that the mullahs do not represent religion,” says the younger al-Khomeini, who is now effectively exiled in American-occupied Iraq. “They realize religion is one thing and mullahs are something else.”
Yet the failures of old Islamic trends are much easier to identify than the future promised by the new ones, which usually claim they’re rooted in tradition, too. Most reformers, like Washington-based Islamic law specialist Azizah al-Hibri, agree that for the Islamic world to get back on its feet, Muslim women need to play a greater role. With a proper knowledge of Islam, says al-Hibri, “Muslim women realize they can be both honest Muslims and liberated women.” For Sheik Hamza Yusuf, a Californian convert to Islam and a leading progressive thinker, it’s the extremists who are breaking with true Islamic tradition. Uneducated mullahs, he says, have turned Islam from a subtle and flexible faith into strict, unimaginative dogma. And yet Islamic liberalism doesn’t look like Western-style freedom: at a recent Islamic retreat in New Mexico, where Yusuf was a lecturer, women and men in the audience were separated by a screen and they ate in different dining rooms. The modern American and European notion of equality–that separate can never be equal–has yet to penetrate even some progressive Muslim scholarship.
It would be a huge mistake to hear moderate Islamist calls for democracy as an endorsement of everything they’ve seen in the West. And al-Khomeini’s remarks not-withstanding, there’s not much love for the Bush administration, even among reformers. “The Islamic world thought the period of colonialism was over,” says Tunisian Islamist Rachid Ghannouchi, who is exiled in London. “But after the actions of the Bush administration, they know it’s not.” He says he’d like to see the United States and Islamic societies work together, but he’s openly suspicious of the efforts made by Washington so far. “It would like to change Islam, secularize it,” says Ghannouchi. “It wants to promote Islam without Sharia [religious law] and without jihad, [which is] the right to defend ourselves.” Cooperation with the United States should happen, he says, but “why should we have to sacrifice our Islam to have a friendship with America?”
After hundreds of years, the doors to change have been opened wide in the Muslim world, and nobody can predict where that will lead. Still, there are lessons the United States can draw. The most essential is that Washington cannot try to tailor dynamic and complex cultural trends to suit its needs (or prejudices), then discard the results if it doesn’t like them. It can only hope that the most liberal reformers eventually do learn to move the masses. And, yes, in some cases it might even help them live long enough to do that.
