Mirror-Imaging the Mullahs
Our Islamic Interlocutors
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
Publication Date: January 1, 2008
Resident Fellow
Reuel Marc Gerecht
In 1993, Bernard Hourcade, a geographer, sociologist, and Persianist who was the head of Iranian studies at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, got a bit of a shock. After completing lengthy negotiations on the first cultural and scientific exchange between France and the Islamic Republic, the Iranian delegation demanded the agreement open with the words: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim (”In the Name of God, the Compassionate and the Merciful”). The negotiations were supposed to be a friendly arrangement, something less formal than an accord. So the French were aghast that the Iranians, whom Hourcade and the other French scholars and diplomats had known for years, would demand the Koranic invocation. The Iranians understood well the secular ethos of France. Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, then the president of the Islamic Republic, was even then making a determined pitch for more French investment and trade.
Exasperated and operating independently from the French foreign ministry, Hourcade responded that Tehran would either withdraw this stipulation or Paris would begin booting Iranian scholars and scientists from France. Within twenty-four hours, the Iranians informed Hourcade that the Islamic Republic would not object to the removal of the Koran’s most famous lines.
For a devout Muslim, “happiness” derives exclusively from the believer’s faithfulness to God’s commandments and hence his odds of going up, not down, in the afterlife. The idea of “fun” is something difficult for him to digest fully.
The episode, like the contretemps provoked by President Mohammad Khatami when he visited France in 1999 and Spain in 2002, and insisted that wine not be served at official banquets (the French and the Spanish cancelled the dinners rather than forego the wine), conveys a truth not so easy for Westerners to accept. Even on minor issues, religion–and in particular, the devout version of Islam that governments like Iran’s embrace–can intrude, distort, and paralyze. The Koran says nothing about banning wine for non-believers, let alone non-believers living in their own lands, or that wine by its mere presence compromises the faithful. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who spent most of his life explicating and defending the Holy Law, upheld the religious right of Iranian Christians in Iran to produce and drink wine in their homes and in their churches. Yet here we were seventeen years later listening to a reformist cleric, who had loudly promoted a “dialogue of civilizations,” demand that Frenchmen abstain from their national drink.
There is a lesson here: God may be kaput in most of the West, but he has hardly been reduced to the status of personal philosophy in Islamic lands. And, yet, our God-diminishing, mirror-imaging impulse keeps blinding us to Islam’s place at the center of the political realm. The tendency to view Muslims through secular eyes, or to recast them and their faith into a version of Christianity (”Islam is a religion of peace”), is perhaps the greatest impediment to rational American policy. Whether it be clerical Iran’s nuclear program, Pakistan on the brink, the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio, Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabis, or Egypt’s ice-cold relations with Israel, religion offers the one indispensable prism through which to peer into the region. For if we cannot see the Middle East first and foremost on its own terms, which means, among other things, never forgetting that Muslim states define themselves as exactly that, then we will surely find ourselves caught in binds worse than Iraq.
In March 2003, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency–the two institutions that enjoyed the most contact with Iraqis under Saddam Hussein–viewed Iraq as the most secular nation in the Arab world. Influential Iraqi expatriates, among them Ayad Allawi, Ahmed Chalabi, Adnan Pachachi, and Kanan Makiya, bolstered this view, suggesting further that a free Iraq could and should be led by Westernized Iraqis not known for their religious beliefs. In truth, Iraq under Saddam Hussein had become a profoundly religious place for Sunnis and Shiites alike. That no one seemed to realize this owes something to the fact that Iraqi intellectuals, usually smitten with some variation of Arab nationalism, socialism, or Communism, were not inclined to linger on antiquated topics such as religion. Western scholars, usually possessed of the same progressive mindset, avoided probing too deeply. Regional experts, for example, considered Hanna Batatu’s magisterial work, The Old Social Classes and New Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, published in 1978, to be the bible of contemporary Iraq studies. It is also a wasteland. We can read that enormous work and come away thinking that modern Iraq, one of the central lands of Islamic history, and key to the development of Shiite identity, is a country of irreversibly fading faith. If the Bush administration, for one, had understood that the opposite was true, it would have also understood that election plans that ignored Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country’s preeminent Shiite jurisprudent, were doomed; it would have recognized at the outset how rich Sunni soil was for al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists; it would have gleaned the depth of the Sunni-Shiite divide; and it would have sent more troops.
Then again, we always make the same mistakes. In the nine years (1985-1994) that I spent in the Central Intelligence Agency working on Middle Eastern issues, especially on the “Iranian target,” I cannot recall a single serious conversation about Islam as a faith, and about why a glimpse of the divine inspired an entire generation of young Iranian men to draw closer to God through war and death. In part this was because the organization veered toward “hard-fact” reporting. Intelligence services need to know about the size, disposition, and quality of soldiers and their materiel, about potentially lethal imports and exports, and about technical progress in the drive for weapons of mass destruction. Needless to say, few Iranians with a passionate commitment to the Almighty associated with the CIA. Serving Allah and serving Langley was a difficult philosophical proposition.
The CIA, like the State Department, is a secular institution where officers typically do not discuss their faith (or, more to the point, lack thereof) or the faith of others. Friends at Langley tell me that even today there remains little sustained attention to the question of how believing Muslims, country by country, view the outside world, or how Saudi-supported militant Salafi teachings have gobbled up mosques and religious schools throughout the once virulently anti-Wahhabi lands of the eastern Mediterranean. For spooks, such “hearts and minds” reporting belongs in the arena of covert action, not “foreign intelligence” collection, where proper case officers ply their trade. And covert action, never a large-scale enterprise in the Middle East as it was in Cold War Europe, is dead as a doornail at Langley.
More broadly, educated Westerners tend to assume that, like themselves, well-educated Middle Eastern Muslims possess too much common sense for religion to determine their political behavior. People naturally associate with their own kind. Secularists attract secularists. Westerners usually don’t seek out devout Muslims, at least not for long. The effect of all this on our image of the Muslim Middle East has been substantial. The American-educated Iranian political scientist, Mohammad Hadi Semati, who until recently worked at the Woodrow Wilson Center, had a significant impact on Washington’s Iran analysts. A delightful fellow who socialized easily with Americans, Semati, who has since returned to the University of Tehran, offered up a treasure trove of information about the Westernized Iranians who hover around the clerical elite’s “pragmatists” and reformers. For Washington’s Iran-lookers, who rarely if ever travel to the Islamic Republic because the regime won’t issue them visas (or because it will imprison them), Semati provided what Western journalists rarely do: detailed, colorful, and delicious gossip about the players in Tehran.
Yet, Semati and his fellow Iranian progressives, precisely because they think and dream more or less as we do, have also been among the most errant analysts of their homeland. Iran’s liberal intellectual elite, whose members flourished briefly under Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, and who have become devotees of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, labor mightily to depict an Iran that is beyond a Thermidorian Reaction. Real innovative religious discussions–the kind of anti-clerical philosophical commentary that one used to hear from the lay (and now downtrodden) Islamist Abd al-Karim Soroush–don’t figure in this progressive crowd simply because the religious dimension has too much salience. Thus, Semati didn’t anticipate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being a serious contender in Iran’s 2005 presidential election. Instead, he predicted another victory by Rafsanjani, the ultimate pragmatist. “All of my friends thought Rafsanjani was going to win,” Semati remarked to me after Ahmadinejad crushed the gorbeh (the cat), Iran’s most politically adept and probably most despised cleric. In the progressive telling, Ahmadinejad was just too religious, too coarse to prevail in “post-revolutionary” Iran, which, the progressives assured us, was more prepared to make peace with America than America was prepared to make peace with it.
Not surprisingly, then, their American friends assumed no differently. When I was an advisor to the Iraq Study Group, the overwhelming majority of my colleagues thought that America under George W. Bush, not Iran under Ali Khamenei, deserved more blame for delaying the restoration of “normalcy” between the two states. In its deliberations and its final recommendations, the ISG barely acknowledged Islam. Read a stack of essays and op-eds about the Middle East by Bush p?re’s former national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, one of America’s preeminent realists, and the words “Islam” and “Muslim” seldom appear, much less any discussion of how Islam as understood and practiced by Iran’s rulers could affect American diplomacy–which, in Scowcroft’s eyes, really ought to be able “to assuage Iran’s security concerns and temper its urge to acquire a nuclear capability.” (Realists have a way of making devout Muslims sound as if they mostly require a sympathetic and reassuring psychotherapist.) For his part, Zbigniew Brzezinski prefers to see contemporary “Islamism” as a movement “led by secular intellectuals,” which combines “militant populism with a religious gloss.”
Islamism, however, comes much closer to being an authentic expression of Islam than Brzezinski realizes. Devout Muslims probably constitute a majority in every Muslim country in the Middle East. Iran may–just may–be the exception, twenty-eight years of theocracy having dampened the average Iranian’s attachment to his faith and its clerical custodians. Who, then, qualifies as devout? Someone who believes the Koran embodies the literal word of God and that the Holy Law, the Sharia, ought to be revered and obeyed. Devout Muslims can pick and choose to an extent, allowing local customs, man-made legislation, and human weaknesses to intrude into their everyday lives. But the Sacred Law remains the beloved ideal.
A devout Muslim also loves history. He may do so selectively, ignoring the complexity and diverse strains of medieval and modern Islam in favor of the imagined clarity of early Islam under the Prophet Mohammad. The glories of Islam, foremost among them the faith’s unrivaled military conquests, endure vividly for the believer. So, too, memories of the Christian counterattack in the Levant and Andalusia (memories revived, ironically, by Western Orientalists; Saladin has a special place in contemporary Muslim literature not least because Christians recall, seldom accurately, Richard the Lionheart, not because Muslims have always revered Saladin). Memories notwithstanding, devout Muslims can certainly be sincere and devoted friends of Americans. They can, in the right circumstances, even be America’s friends.
But it is neither a natural nor easy friendship. In the congressionally sponsored 2003 report on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, “Changing Minds Winning Peace,” former ambassador Edward Djerejian, the chairman of the advisory group, avers that “Our adversaries’ success in the struggle of ideas is all the more stunning because American values are so widely shared. As one of our Iranian interlocutors put it, ‘Who has anything against life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?’” Odds are extraordinarily good that this Iranian is highly Westernized, doesn’t pray often or at all, and would be hard-pressed to discuss the Koran in detail. For a devout Muslim, “happiness” derives exclusively from the believer’s faithfulness to God’s commandments and hence his odds of going up, not down, in the afterlife. The idea of “fun” is something difficult for him to digest fully.
If the urge to pursue “happiness” is not a self-evident truth, as Djerejian implies, neither is the Western concept of liberty–that is, the rights that the individual can claim against government, and the corollary freedom to follow one’s curiosity and dreams so long as they do not impinge on the autonomy of others. Having banished religion from their conversation, American and European elites are supremely confident–devout Muslims would say mistakenly so–that their enlightened ideas and values have universal resonance. Yet, it is preposterous to suggest, as some in the West do, that only Taliban-like Muslims oppose what we label as basic human or “universal” rights. Hard-core fundamentalists aren’t the only Muslims who understand that the Koranic injunction, “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong,” probably the defining ethical commandment in the Muslim Holy Book, is inherently incompatible with modern Western sentiment and law.
In the Islamic world, moreover, the personal really is political. Although Muslim governments often have awful relations with each other, and friendlier relations with Washington, this isn’t a reality they advertise with pride. The contemporary Muslim ideal, as expressed in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, tends to be highly traditional on this count: Muslims ought to have closer relations with one another than they have with non-believers. Sayyid Qutb, one of the primary theoreticians behind today’s Islamic revival, was hardly alone among Muslims in reacting to America’s pulsating culture with both fascination and horror. As Osama bin Laden knows well, Saudis, among the most repressed Muslims on the planet, constantly bounce between this yin and yang. Believing Muslims who have no intention whatsoever of becoming holy warriors frequently react to American permissiveness and consumerism with the same mixture of curiosity and revulsion.
To be sure, exposure to the West has colored the dreams, professional expectations, and worldly knowledge of Muslims. The Islamic World has always been highly syncretistic–up to a point. When the Mongols nearly buried Islam in the thirteenth century, the Mameluks, the resolutely devout slave soldiers of Egypt who stopped the Mongol advance in 1260 at Ayn Jalut, acquired many of the trappings of Mongol culture. Since the eighteenth century, the Islamic World has absorbed Western language, thought, manners, architecture, food, furniture, and clothes. But that does not mean Muslims became any less Muslim. It does mean that today’s devout Muslims comprehend Western concepts–and Western challenges–better than their forefathers. Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, the so-called spiritual advisor to Ahmadinejad, who can expatiate endlessly on the poisonous nature of the West, can easily give the Karl Popper-obsessed Mohammad Khatami a run for his money in his appreciation of Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophical foundations of Western thought. Men of unquestionable faith can be “populists” or calm, black-eyed lawyers who connect in solitary ways with God; they can be pacifists and warriors. As much as Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Algerian Islamist leaders Abbassi Madani and Ali Belhadj, or Iran’s Mohammad Khatami and Mesbah-Yazdi, view themselves as God’s men trying to keep the faithful on the “straight path.” Their brand of Islam has no less authenticity than a spinning Sufi dervish whose spiritual roots lie in pagan and Christian neo-Platonism.
Members of the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy tend to see these members of the ruling Iranian elite as bearded versions of themselves–men who do not believe that morality and other “abstract” ideas have much of a role in foreign affairs. They have the hardest time seeing the obvious: When Khamenei, a man of principle and integrity, calls the United States the “enemy of God,” he means it.
The Islamic Republic, itself based on the idea that Iran exists to further the cause of Islam, has always taken substantial risks in the name of its mission. It seized American hostages and kept them for a year; it aided and abetted the killing of 241 American servicemen in Lebanon; it sent or supported assassination teams around the globe during the 1990s to murder Jews and dissidents in the very same countries where it was trying to promote trade ties; in 1996, it murdered nineteen American airmen in Saudi Arabia three weeks before making its formal application to the World Trade Organization; and it granted, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, free passage to members of al-Qaeda after the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa.
American and European realists tend to ignore this last episode since it unravels the conceit that the Islamic Republic has become, for all its theological eccentricities and deplorable behavior at home, a country you can do business with. Or, if absolutely necessary, contain. Regardless of what one thinks of the latest National Intelligence Estimate, those prone to substituting Communism for Iran’s militant faith and suggesting that, like the Soviet Union or Red China before it, Iran’s clerical regime can be deterred from reckless conduct abroad and overwhelmed by its own internal contradictions, ought to recall that the Soviet Union as a going philosophical proposition lasted fewer than seven decades. The jihadist impulse in Islam has lasted almost 1400 years. Communism was a post-Christian, Western materialist dream: it did not aim to save men’s souls. It promised to improve their mundane lives–and could be graded accordingly. Is it really necessary to point out that Islam, by contrast, is not about economics? When Iran’s rulers refer to the United States as the “enemy of God,” they aren’t taking their cues from the dialectic.
To Iran’s clerics, the obstacle to closer relations is fairly straightforward: America epitomizes the anti-Islamic. For Rafsanjani, Khomeini and Ahmadinejad, who view Iran, like their beloved teacher Khomeini, as the sword and shield of God’s will on earth, mutually beneficial relations between the United States and the Islamic Republic do not fall within the realm of theological possibility. Short-term compromises can be found only on issues that do not raise existential questions. For example, Tehran encouraged the Sunni Dari-speaking Afghan Tajiks to cooperate with the non-Taliban, American-backed Pashtuns in establishing a government in Kabul. (Primary benefit to the clerical regime: One million-plus much-disliked Sunni Afghan refugees could go home.) But the occasional compromise does not mean that Iran has forsaken its faith and will to expend blood and treasure–to the outsider’s eye, often with irrational zeal–to advance its causes. Saudi Arabia and Iran have spent billions of dollars–at times when neither country was flush with funds–to advance their respective visions of Islam. The issues that animate the Islamic Republic’s mission civilisatrice–support to Hizbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, or the radicalization of the Iraqi Shia, which counts, with the possible exception of the quest for nuclear weaponry, as the most important foreign policy goal of the clerical regime–are not up for negotiation.
Viewing the Middle East through an Islamic lens leaves us uneasy, though not in complete despair. The Islamic revival, which has been vigorously underway since the 1960s, shows no signs of diminishing; there exists scant evidence that the dictatorships and kingdoms, which have done so much to encourage the trend, can reverse it now. Unlike Christianity, Islam dominates the public square, and until Muslims begin to battle openly about the proper scope of public discourse, reforming the theory and practice of Islamic law and governance seems extremely unlikely.
Even if Iraq stabilizes and democracy in the country gains depth, anti-Americanism will still be a staple of the Iraqi street. However, anti-American excuses and conspiracy theories can only go so far in electoral politics. In the end, democracy in Iraq ought to be a significant check at least on the holy-warrior virus. Elsewhere, as the Islamic identity grows stronger in the Arab heartland, a lasting Israeli-Palestinian accommodation will recede further into the future. A more self-consciously Islamic Egypt, the great intellectual engine of anti-Americanism in the Arab world, will continue to pump out hatred of America and the West, and behind the scenes, for both religious and selfish reasons, do what it can to sabotage Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. And Pakistan, perhaps the most dynamic Islamist stronghold, where first-rate minds with first-rate educations espouse ever-harsher ideologies, could radicalize even further under an impossible burden: To be a nation-state defined exclusively by Islamic identity when only Islamists really have any firm idea of what this means. (One thing it certainly means is that the United States can expect to be fighting in neighboring Afghanistan for a very long time.)
On the upside of the ledger, modernity, especially the female side of it, continues to rearrange the ethics of Muslim homes and communities. The Westernization of Muslim women appears to be unstoppable, although it’s not so clear how this will play out. Highly Westernized Muslim women in Europe and the Middle East are, like their brothers, rediscovering their Islamic identities and re-segregating themselves from men. But modernization could eventually modify this arrangement, and one has to suspect that the fundamentalist critics of Western rights for women have it right: they will reorder Islamic societies as they exist today.
Also on the personal scale, the Islamic conception of each believer as a deputy of God–the certainty that every Muslim can discern the beauty and superiority of his faith–contains within it the seeds of religious reformation and possibly even democratic growth. Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s call to Muslims to exercise their God-given right to vote amounts to a variation of this theme. In particular, modern Sunni Islam’s profound egalitarianism–the insistence that God and His law treat all men equally and a distaste for state-controlled religious authority–seems tailor-made for a system of representative government. Restored democracy in Pakistan–the protesting lawyers in Pakistan today should give us hope–could break and reverse the country’s radicalization, as Muslims of all stripes debate the relationship between Man, God, and parliamentary legislation.
For the most part, this is not a liberal debate, as we witnessed with the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria. It is simply a debate about how believing Muslims can encourage legitimate governance. The dialogue in the Arab Middle East is, if anything, part of the region’s growing religiosity. Unintentionally, the Islamic Republic of Iran has accelerated the trend by making everything public have a religious dimension. What would be everyday civic criticism in the West assumes religious overtones in Iran. In fact, many clerical dissidents see political pluralism as a means of salvaging the faith. The clerical regime still boasts many hard-core adherents who define happiness as wounding America. But the live-to-die drive, which al-Qaeda has in spades, seems attenuated among most Iranians, if not their rulers.
Alas, Islamic terrorism of the 9/11 variety remains an omnipresent possibility, at least until the Islamist wave recedes among Sunnis and from the halls of power in Tehran. Until things do calm down, it would be good to recall what Bernard Hourcade knew in 1993: the West can intimidate and deter Islamic militants if the West responds to them with sufficient force, and soon enough–before they conclude, as they often have, that the West won’t do anything at all. We should not deceive ourselves into believing that Muslim societies express themselves hypocritically: if Wahhabis or Khomeinists dominate political culture at home, they will dominate foreign policy abroad. The secular, “pro-American” autocratic political cultures that have defined much of the Middle East since World War II are dying, if not dead. The United States would do well not to pretend otherwise.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at AEI.
