Author: Martin Kramer

Inclusion or Exclusion? Islamism in Politics

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer, “Inclusion or Exclusion? Islamism in Politics,” in An Agenda for Action: The 2002 Doha Conference on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World (Washington: The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, 2003), pp. 41-44. The remarks were originally delivered on October 20, 2002. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

In the title of this panel, we have been given these two alternatives of inclusion and exclusion for the Islamist movements.

The choice of words already tends to prejudge the issue: How can one possibly oppose inclusion? Isn’t the essence of democracy and equality summarized by the word “inclusion”? Isn’t exclusion something fundamentally undemocratic and discriminatory? How is it possible to advocate the exclusion of anyone from politics? After all, the inclusion of everyone, men and women, black and white, rich and poor, is considered the fundamental condition of democracy and, one could argue, also of modernity.

Needless to say, I’m sympathetic to the arguments in favor of inclusion. In the Middle East I think many of us would agree that the authoritarian state has failed to fulfill its self-appointed role of bringing modernity to the masses and to the state. This state will always be limited in the public goods it can deliver. So eventually the state will have to find a way to accommodate the growing desire for wider participation.

But let me also state my own unequivocal view: The inclusion of Islamists has not represented a progressive step forward where it has been taken, and in some cases it may actually constitute a dangerous step backward. It would be a mistake for the United States to press for the inclusion of Islamists even if democracy promotion becomes a feature of its Middle East policy.

Similarly, I think it would be a mistake to rush to the defense of Islamists whose conduct has brought the wrath of the state down upon their heads. Where Islamists have been tainted by terrorism, the United States should not be bound by the fact that these same Islamists may sit in parliaments.

Anyone familiar with U.S. policy already knows that it does not include support for the inclusion of Islamists. I’m not stating anything but the obvious. Yet no one who speaks for U.S. policy has been prepared to rationalize it. So allow me to rationalize it. I’m not an official or prospective official; I speak only for myself. But since 9/11 the views that I hold are held much more widely than they were before. It’s an approach to Islamism that I should stress has nothing to do with Islam per se and everything to do with the actual conduct of the Islamist movements themselves.

Let me not put too fine a point on it. To date almost every political order that has included Islamists and given them a space in which to operate has become a trouble spot or a breeding ground for terrorism. Some say,“include the Islamists,” include them in the game and they will moderate. The actual evidence to date is that the more space Islamists are given, the more threatening they become in the first instance to their fellow Muslims, including many secularists, but also to the United States.

Now, let me illustrate the point by a number of examples. In an earlier session someone mentioned Lebanon as being very exceptional in the Arab world. I too think it is unique in the Arab world. It actually has a measure of political pluralism, it has political parties, a relatively open press, and elections. Lebanon’s predisposition is to include everyone, and the Islamists of Hezbollah have been included in the system for a decade now. Hezbollah is formally recognized, its representatives sit in the parliament, and it has a standing invitation to join the cabinet of the Lebanese government.

Yet this has not deterred the Islamists. To the contrary, they have established a virtual state within the state. Hezbollah remains armed. It has taken over some of the most sensitive parts of the country. And it operates with minimal regard for the Lebanese state. It periodically nudges both Lebanon and the region to the brink of war.

Now, I know that some of you will say, “But they’re a resistance movement,” to which I would answer, perhaps they were a resistance movement but now they are a power unto themselves much like the PLO was in the 1970s, or, one could argue, even more than the PLO because Hezbollah actually has strategic capabilities. I think this bodes ill for the future prospects of Lebanon as a state.

And what of the Palestinian Authority? Even under the less than ideal rule of Yasser Arafat, it has been less oppressive than any other Arab state. It tolerates a wider range of political expression than Syria, Jordan, or Egypt. And, of course, it tolerates the Islamists as well. The result here again is the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have gained an influence which is far in excess of their numbers. If Hamas is not formally part of the Palestinian government it’s only because Hamas chooses to remain outside, but they are entirely free to organize, preach, and demonstrate.

How have they used that freedom? They are armed to the teeth, they have grown terrorist appendages, which answer only to themselves and whose violence has infected the entire Palestinian body politic. But beyond issues related to their stance towards Israel, they have become an authority within the authority and they are a law unto themselves.

Now, you might say the two instances I just gave are exacerbated by the Arab-Israeli conflict and so they aren’t genuine tests. So let’s look beyond the Arab- Israeli arena. Is the situation any different in the Arabian Peninsula, for example? It would be presumptuous of me to speak about Yemen, given the fact that my colleague on this panel will do so, so I won’t. I would simply ask this: Did the opening of Yemeni politics a decade ago not create the space in which extreme Islamism now flourishes today? Is it a coincidence that in the 1990s Yemen pioneered the inclusion of Islamists and that today Yemen is regarded as a breeding ground for extreme Islamist terror?

Last night, one of our Kuwaiti participants drew a line between Kuwait’s relative political openness and the spread to that country of al-Qaeda, and I take that as a suggestion that perhaps Kuwait drew the line in the wrong place when it drew it to include the Islamists.

And how can we forget the political order that is the most inclusive of Islamists? I’m speaking of Saudi Arabia, which is a regime built upon an institutionalized inclusion of Islamists in the political order. No, there are no elections in Saudi Arabia, but the Islamist element, which is to say much of the Saudi religious establishment, has an allotted share of power. For a long time it was believed that the Saudi royal house had found the perfect formula for neutralizing the religious zealotry that created the Saudi state: bring the zealots into the tent, make them complicit in the modernizing project of the Al Saud, tempt them, co-opt them, and harvest those fatwas of compliance with the ruling order.

I think we all know what has become of this experiment now that we’ve taken a closer look at it since 9/11. It’s not certain who has co-opted whom. The Islamists who are within the system have subverted it, using the immunities they enjoy to spread extremism and its terrorist offshoots across the world. The Saudi symbiosis has become an extremism machine. “Our Islamists,” the ones who were supposed to be safely under control, have been running amok.

So in short, political inclusion has not been an antidote to extremism. Quite the opposite: The more inclusive the system, the more likely it is to become the host of some cancerous Islamist movement, which combines both incitement and terrorism.

What about the moderate Islamist? Surely you realize that all Islamists are not alike, you will say. I do realize it. Obviously there must be differences among Islamists. A well-known American scholar has made a career of repeatedly urging that the U.S. government “distinguish between Islamic movements that are a threat and those that represent legitimate indigenous attempts to reform and redirect their societies.”

This seems an eminently reasonable objective on paper, but in practice it means going out and measuring each movement and classifying it. Let’s admit the truth: The record of Arab and Western governments in classifying Islamist moderates has been a very patchy one indeed. Time and again Islamists who are regarded as moderates have turned out to be anything but that. That is because the idea of Islamism as a spectrum from extremism through moderation is a misleading analogy. Islamism is not a spectrum; it is more like an orbit. At times Islamists appear to be approaching us. At other times they appear to be moving away from us. But the thing to remember is that they are always in motion and that they will not defy the gravity of their idea. In particular, they can’t be expected to exit the orbit of the ideal Islamic state and slip into the orbit of liberal democracy. This is as likely as the conversion of these Islamists to another religion.

There are governments in the region that may decide to include Islamists. They may feel that the risks of exclusion are greater than the risks of inclusion. This might be particularly true in the monarchies, where there are certain agreed limits to the process of political change. In these settings a ruler may feel that Islamists can be compelled to play strictly according to the rules of the ruler. It’s hard for me to second-guess these decisions, even though many of them have gone wrong in the past.

The problem is that when the inclusiveness bargain goes wrong, when Islamists begin to violate the rules of their contract, they often begin by assailing the contract of these rulers with the United States. In fact, it’s now happening across the region. The stability of the region, and with it the discourse of live and let live, are not being undermined by Islamists who have been excluded in places like Syria, Iraq, Libya or Tunisia; they are being undermined by the most included of the Islamists. Where these Islamists have acquired certain immunities, they are wary about criticizing their rulers head-on. So the discourse of dissent has taken the form of a particularly virulent anti-Americanism, and its main theme has been that the United States is waging a war on Islam itself. Those who make this claim are in a cynical way seeking to continue the work begun on 9/11.

There is little that the United States can do to dissuade governments from giving these Islamists space or a platform. But it should be understood that the U.S. isn’t obligated by such decisions, and when the U.S. succeeds in linking these Islamists with terrorism and the support for terrorism, it is perfectly within its rights to insist that governments choose.

The United States is not at war with Islam or even with Islamism, but it can no longer be complacent about Islamists who have abused their inclusion to engage in or support a clandestine war against the United States. Inclusion cannot be bought at the price of America’s own interests and the lives of its own citizens at home and abroad.

Sometimes I hear the United States discussed in the Middle East as though it were some abstract principle, a set of philosophical assumptions that should be entirely consistent and free of all contradictions. The United States has pretensions to change the world. But it’s also a country like any other in that it has a number of people, some 280 million Americans of all faiths, creeds and races, whose security and well-being are the very first priority of the United States government. On their behalf the United States must sometimes follow policies abroad that contradict some generally enunciated principle by which Americans govern themselves, and frankly I see no fault in that.

The late Elie Kedourie used to say that hypocrisy cannot characterize a government. It can characterize an individual but not a government. A government must protect its people and their interests. The policies it pursues to achieve this may complement one another on a practical level even though they contradict one another on a philosophical level. In an individual it is a virtue to live consistently by principle; in a government it’s a dangerous indulgence. The most harmful regimes in the 20th century ignored the interests of their own peoples, instead pursuing some self-appointed mission in the world.

So in conclusion I say this: By all means let the United States promote the idea of inclusion. That is the half of policy that is idealistic and, if you will, missionary. And let it at the same time accept the exclusion of the Islamists. That is the half of policy that is practical and legitimately self-interested. To promote any other policy would be an irresponsible gamble unbecoming of the world’s only superpower.

Arabic translation of this presentation: Download

Campus Watch is Ticking

On By Martin Kramer

Now that the flap surrounding Campus Watch has subsided, it’s useful to look back at the way the project was received. Campus Watch seeks to monitor Middle Eastern studies on campus. Daniel Pipes, who directs the project and its institutional parent, the Middle East Forum, has said that it builds upon my own book, Ivory Towers on Sand, and I’m flattered. But it received far more media attention than my book did, because of its tactic of listing a small number of academics deemed to be especially egregious.

Nothing confers more prestige on an academic than putative status as a victim of some right-wing conspiracy. It’s probably the shortest route to academic power, tenure included. It was no surprise, then, when a hundred academics submitted their names for inclusion. These people sign their names to activist petitions all the time, and many were clearly anxious join the list, so as to bask in the admiration of their colleagues. Alas, Campus Watch abolished the list after about a week, and the disappointment of the tenured radicals was palpable.

As for the actual targets of Campus Watch—the egregious eight and their colleagues—they can hardly be faulted for hitting back. But the way a few of them did it exemplifies the very flaws that Campus Watch promises to expose. The responses thus open yet another window on the Escheresque world inhabited by the mandarins of Middle Eastern studies. Let’s peer through it for a moment.

Consider Professor Hamid Dabashi, the intemperate ayatollah who presides over Columbia University’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. He jumped into the fray last spring, when he cancelled his classes to join a pro-Palestinian demonstration and belittled the university’s Hillel rabbi for registering a complaint. (Dabashi just had to protest against Zionism, “a ghastly racist ideology.”) All of which, presumably, earned him his listing at Campus Watch.

In a television appearance on Donahue with Daniel Pipes, Dabashi’s principal line of defense was that Pipes represented a “failed academic,” who had no right to criticize him or anyone else in the ivory tower. How did Dabashi reach this conclusion? Presumably by reading Pipes: “You have not written one sentence worth reading twice,” Dabashi blurted to Pipes on national television. But in an interview given immediately after the broadcast, Dabashi said the opposite: “I have never met the man [Pipes] or read a word he has written.”

So which is it? Has he read every sentence, or not a single word? I suspect that Dabashi, like a lazy undergraduate, really didn’t do the reading after all, but simply relied on hearsay about Pipes’s oeuvre. When students do this, it’s called faking it, for which their professors usually fail them. So it seems to me that if there was a failed academic on Donahue that night, it had to be Dabashi.

But of course Dabashi simply expressed, in exaggerated form, the prevalent culture of Middle Eastern studies. The academics only read one another, because their fortunes depend only on one another. If you haven’t subjected yourself to peer review, you aren’t worth reading. This goes far to explain the intellectual isolation of Middle Eastern studies, which are trapped in a hopeless circle of self-references.

Want more evidence for that attitude? Professor Juan Cole teaches the modern Middle East at the University of Michigan. He once ran its Middle East center, and he now edits the flagship journal of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). I wouldn’t have put him on a list of worst offenders (although he is working his way up), and he was probably the only person truly surprised to find his name at Campus Watch. But again, his response exemplified the very mindset Campus Watch seeks to expose.

The crux of Cole’s criticism? “As for Pipes himself,” Cole told Salon.com, “let’s just say that he’s not a full professor at a major university.” Since Cole is a full professor at a major university, this is known as “pulling rank.” Now on Cole’s personal website, he mentions his childhood as an “army brat,” and his put-down of Pipes reminds me of nothing so much as a military man grumbling about civilians who stick their noses in business they don’t understand. (It’s a striking contrast to the attitude of Pipes, who grew up in Cambridge as the son of a renowned and controversial Harvard professor. One assumes that in that household, it was taken for granted that full professors at major universities could be full windbags.)

Cole of course misses the point. The wider public, and the rest of academe, have serious doubts as to whether Middle Eastern studies are capable of maintaining the standards they purport to uphold. Do we accept the Enron-ish assurances of Professor Dabashi? “Within universities there are built-in mechanisms of assuring the quality of our teaching and scholarship.” Or do we tilt an ear toward his Columbia colleague, Dean Lisa Anderson, president-elect of MESA? She has acknowledged “the widespread, if undocumentable, impression that an individual’s ethnic background or political persuasion may influence hiring or tenure decisions.” Perhaps that impression is widespread for a reason: the guild of Middle Eastern studies is engaged in backroom blacklisting on a massive scale. Now that would explain why you don’t find Pipes or his equivalent on the Middle East faculty of any American university.

As for the list itself: Campus Watch erred by not engaging critically with the ideas of those it listed. The names hung like some vague and unsubstantiated accusation. Campus Watch also overestimated the civility of its cyber-audience, some of whom took the “dossiers” as an invitation to spam and harass either those who were listed, or Campus Watch itself. So Campus Watch lived and learned—and corrected itself.

And Campus Watch did something else that undermines the (self-serving) charges of McCarthyism. From day one, it ran all the criticism of itself on its website. The best place for one-stop-shopping for the hostile reactions to Campus Watch has been its own Campus Watch in the News. You won’t find too many institutions or projects on the web that reproduce their bad press alongside the good. (Here’s another exception.) Does MESA, MERIP, the Electronic Intifada, or the Middle East Policy Council do the same? Campus Watch’s unorthodox “listing” received criticism. Fair enough—and Campus Watch changed. Campus Watch’s unorthodox practice of publicizing criticism of itself received no praise. Not fair—but not surprising, since it’s a practice none of Campus Watch’s critics intends to emulate.

Listing? I probably wouldn’t have done it, even for the publicity. But nothing else could have elicited such a vast and valuable corpus of outlandish responses—a mountain of grist for my mills, and proof that Middle Eastern studies haven’t changed. Thank you, Campus Watch.

When I Hear “Arab Democracy,” I Reach for My Seat Belt

On By Martin Kramer

Over the weekend, I delivered an address on the prospects of democracy in the Arab world, at the annual Lansdowne conference of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The question: Should the United States promote liberal democracy in the Arab world after a victory in Iraq? (The presumption: The United States will replace Saddam with some semblance of a pluralistic order.) I answered this question with these questions:

As the United States has just pursued a utopian Middle East peace process to its unintended consequence, it seems to me very appropriate to ask this: does anyone think that our tools of social engineering are any more precise when it comes to the democracy process? Are we so certain of the outcome that we can confidently take a jackhammer not only to the political structures of our enemies, but of our allies as well?

The argument that the removal of Saddam will topple the dominoes of despotism in the Arab world is really a third-tier rationale for war. If you don’t believe that Saddam has operational weapons of mass destruction, and you don’t think he had anything to do with 9/11 or Al-Qaeda, then this rationale is for you: regime change in Iraq will morph into regime change across the Middle East. It’s invoked to bring on board those Americans who can’t imagine resorting to force except in the selfless pursuit of some mission of mercy. The ending of “gender apartheid” in Afghanistan played a similar role in the war against the Taliban.

Frankly, my eyes glaze over when I hear Condoleezza Rice, James Woolsey, and Tom Friedman wax eloquent on the coming “march of democracy” in the Arab world. (Woolsey to James Fallows in the current issue of The Atlantic: “This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the Arab world. Just as what we did in Germany changed the face of Central and Eastern Europe, here we have got a golden chance.”) As a survivor of the Middle East peace process, which, we were told, would transform Israel, “Palestine,” and Jordan into a Benelux, I smell snake oil. Of all the rationales for war, this one is the least substantial and the most ideological, and those who make it cast doubt on whether they fully understand the regional context in which an Iraq war might be fought.

I’m not alone in my pessimism. There is a smart piece in The National Interest with the subtitle “Conjuring Arab Democracy,” that ends up here: “Our attitude toward promoting Arab democracy should be likened to playing the lottery: it’s no sin to wager, but it’s unwise to rely for one’s future on winning the jackpot.” A new policy brief from the Carnegie Endowment, with the title “Democratic Mirage in the Middle East,” ends up here: “The United States will be forced to work with existing regimes toward gradual reform—and this is a good thing. If a tidal wave of political change actually came to pass, the United States would not be even remotely prepared to cope with the resulting instability and need for large-scale building of new political systems.”

The Iraq debate should be decided by the consideration of threats, threats, threats. It would be unfortunate were it to be sidetracked by promises, promises, promises.