Selling Out Moderate Islam

...As the French scholar Olivier Roy acutely noted in Le Monde, Europe is now in the cross hairs of many Middle Eastern governments for its more activist role in the region since the invasion of Iraq...

...One of the more bizarre facts of the modern Middle East is to see the ruling Muslim elites of these countries—men and women of considerable influence and privilege—bemoan their powerlessness owing to the hidden, omnipresent, all-powerful machinations of the West, in particular, the United States...

...It should give us hope and encourage us to push for real elections where our national interest stands to gain the most—in Egypt and Iran...

...The psychology of victimization— surely one of the worst gifts the Western anti-imperialist left has given the Muslim world—can only be made worse by Westerners who treat Muslims like children unable to compete and to defend their religion...

...When al Qaeda's princes—bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi— rail against the intrusion of Western democracy into the Muslim world, they know what they are talking about...

...NonMuslims living beyond the writ of Islamic law were not expected to respect a prophet not their own...

...It will pull fundamentalist believers—the pool that bin Ladenism must draw from to survive—into the great ethical and spiritual debates that can best happen when free people fight it out in elections...

...They will not be able to confront the "baggage" that all Middle Eastern Muslims have with the West, especially the United States, and come to a livable consensus on how they are going to absorb Western ideas, influence, and money...

...Until the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections, this view inevitably underscored progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as indispensable to better relations...

...And the Brotherhood—unlike Iraq's Shiite religious parties, which have seen an American-led war against a barbarous tyrant and the enormous rise in pro-American sentiment in Shiite Iran—is consistently and deeply anti-American, as is the Brotherhood mothership in Egypt...

...What is striking is that Washington has been doing the opposite of what it intends and doesn't know it...

...Former President Clinton echoed this sentiment while visiting the Persian Gulf emirate Qatar: "None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions...

...The faster democracy arrives, the sooner the debates about God and man can begin in earnest...

...Many of the best and brightest of the Middle East now live abroad...

...Is it Presidents Clinton and Chirac's desire that Muslim satirists never develop because their work would be insensitive to less irreverent Muslims...

...In the Middle Ages, Christian theologians said vastly worse things about the Prophet Muhammad than the Danish cartoons implied...

...Even in Iran, where the bankruptcy of a virulently anti-American clerical dictatorship has done wonders for the democratic ethic and the prestige of the United States, a functioning democracy is probably the only way the Iranian people will find a sustainable, peaceful modus vivendi with their complicated love-hate for America...

...Tehran has probably also been behind the demonstrations in Iraq...

...Touching the well-ordered, paternalistic home, which Muslim men, poor or rich, have always seen as a bedrock of their identity, is unavoidably convulsive...

...In all probability, more pro-American commentary by these men would do just the opposite...

...Correctly understood, bin Laden is an ugly expression of protest against the region's rot...

...Before the Bush administration, Washington usually gave unquestioning support to dictatorships in the region...

...The only exceptions to this rule may be Iraq and Syria...

...If Westerners appease Muslims who countenance violent intimidation, we are doing a terrible injustice to the liberal and progressive Muslims among us, who really would like to live in lands where people can say about the Prophet Muhammad what they have said about Jesus, Mary, and Moses...

...There was this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark, . . . these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam...

...A greater liking for the United States would not enhance the counterterrorist credentials of any of the above...

...Let us be frank: For every Said Eddin Ibrahim, a courageous secular liberal who has seen the inside of Egypt's prisons, there are several religiously motivated dissidents who are willing to question President Mubarak's rule...

...This is all about internal Muslim evolution, about coming to terms with the centuries-long absorption of both good and bad Western ideas...

...Though no fan of the caricatures, Sistani is giving a slap to Tehran and its agents in Iraq...

...There is perhaps nothing more debilitating for the Bush administration than to believe that anti-anti-Americanism ought to be a key component in our overseas policy...

...Few of the Arab liberals and progressives one meets at conferences appear to have the intestinal fortitude of fundamentalists who are similarly opposed to their regimes...

...There is just too much historical baggage for the United States to overcome it quickly or easily...

...It would appear that if President Clinton had his way, a Muslim Gibbon would not be welcome in the United States...

...A rise in anti-Americanism throughout the region seems inevitable...

...Syria is the least certain, since the Syrian wing of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood would probably do very well in any free election there...

...Most of Europe under the umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is now in Afghanistan, increasingly in combat roles against Taliban insurgents and the holy warriors of al Qaeda...

...We should also not neglect to defend vigorously Christian, Muslim, or Jewish satirists, be they clever, banal, or ugly, wherever they may be found...

...So would the European Muslim "modernist" Tariq Ramadan and many members of the Arabic Al Jazeera television network, who can marry a real hatred for bin Laden with an exuberant loathing of the United States...

...Only Muslims—only fundamentalist Muslims—have the power to kill off bin Ladenism...

...With dictatorship giving way to democracy, Muslims of various stripes will make their best case to their brethren on why they should be given a chance to govern...

...Most European Muslims, like their non-Muslim compatriots, didn't notice and probably would not have cared about these caricatures, if it had not been for the activist imams in their midst...

...There is Israel, which even the most liberal and moderate Muslims often acutely dislike...

...This type of hearts-and-minds strategy will inevitably backfire, compromising the very Muslims that this administration and liberal Democrats would most like to see advance in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States...

...Concerning the cartoons, Sistani also strongly condemned the "misguided and oppressive" elements of the Muslim community whose actions "projected a distorted and dark image of the faith of justice, love, and brotherhood...

...But the sclerotic peace-process establishment in Washington, second in influence only to the transatlanticists, may not see what Hamas has tried to write as pellucidly as possible...

...Democracy is an ugly word to most of the region's rulers...

...Far more than most Middle Eastern Muslims and politically correct Western scholars of the region and Islam would like to admit, Western standards for individual liberty, curiosity, personal integrity, scholarship, and the political relations among men have become the defining benchmarks for Muslims everywhere, however resented or admired...

...Americans have acted, at least on the issues of Israel and women's rights, as if the Muslim world had a liberal silent majority waiting to rise up and embrace these issues as we do...

...But we have no choice, since continuing autocracy will only make the militants' message stronger and judgment day, as in Iran, a possibly bloody revolutionary event...

...That is, after all, what it means to be benighted infidels...

...Selling Out Moderate Islam Washington's misbegotten campaign to be loved in the Middle East BY REUEL MARC GERECHT The Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against the British author Salman Rushdie and those who helped publish his Satanic Verses, have revealed more disturbing things about the West than they have about Muslims in Europe and the Middle East...

...The electoral victory of Hamas should not give us pause...

...There is no way to gauge how many recruits fundamentalists have made on the women's issue since the Muslim Brotherhood formed in 1928...

...As important, the governments of the region also took sides...

...It can only fortify the destructive, self-pitying impulses that all too often paralyze Muslim conversations and thought...

...Both elections and satire are basic to the evolution of the Muslim world...

...Sean McCormack, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, declared, "Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief...

...The irreverent, religiously skeptical Western elite has Muslim members and Middle Eastern counterparts of equal intelligence and similar tastes...

...In its heyday, Islamic civilization contained many heterodox and heretical strains...

...Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, who has repeatedly saved us from potential disaster in Mesopotamia, wrote numerous fatwas after the fall of Saddam Hussein on the proper comportment and dress for female believers...

...In particular, Shiism, always a vehicle for minority protest, was rich in movements and cultural experimentation that sometimes electrified and horrified the Sunni Muslim world...

...Young men who feel most acutely the injustices of their societies and have the testosterone-driven determination to do something about it will have broader personal experience and a wider range of political options than to embrace just the mosque, where Muslims have usually found brave and tenacious popular heroes when they could find them nowhere else...

...And there is the little fact, always near the surface in the Muslim world but often ignored or forgotten in the United States, of nearly 1,400 years of always-competitive, often intimately antagonistic and violent, history between Christendom and Islam...

...And Washington has consistently advanced, especially in the Bush administration after 9/11, the women's agenda throughout the region, another sure-fire way of angering the young men who are most likely to transmute into jihadists...

...Lurking behind much of the American response to the Danish cartoons is a difficult, probably impossible, and certainly unnecessary short-term foreign-policy goal: improving the image of the United States among Muslims...

...And the government-controlled media throughout the region, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have not been helpful...

...With Denmark, the initial response of the Bush administration aligned America more with those Muslims who felt the cartoons impugned their sacred messenger than with the European press that had printed the caricatures...

...As we saw in Egypt, the West Bank, and Gaza, Sunni Muslim fundamentalists are going to be among those pushing seriously for democratic change in the Middle East, and will, as in the Palestinian territories, surely be among those who benefit most from the collapse of secular autocracy...

...Islamic civilization may yet produce its Edward Gibbon, a sincere religious voyager who ends up scrutinizing the foundations of his civilization with a skeptical, cynical, and, at times, profoundly unfair irreligious eye...

...It camouflages what is really at stake in Denmark and the rest of Europe with these cartoons...

...Western indulgence of supposed Muslim outrage over these cartoon insults to the prophet is pretty demeaning...

...In Western eyes, his conclusions would hardly be called liberal—yet his commitment to democracy in Iraq is real...

...Many have sought greater freedom of expression and personal liberty in the West...

...The French, British, and Germans have taken the lead in trying to thwart Tehran's nuclear ambitions...

...Under dictatorship, Muslims cannot evolve politically...

...Senator John Kerry, too, took umbrage: "These and other inflammatory images deserve our scorn, just as the violence against embassies and miliReuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...And it is healthy...

...The Jewish state is, after all, an existential insult to both Arab nationalism and Islamic pride, even for Arab Muslims who view Arab nationalism as a cultural catastrophe and view the faith as irrelevant to their lives...

...an enormous number of Muslim clerics, intellectuals, and scholars chose to remain quiet, and in their silence there was surely often both fear and assent...

...With official encouragement, anti-Europeanism is bound to rise throughout the area...

...To wit: We need to encourage interfaith dialogue, we need to show that the West, particularly America, is not opposed to Islam, and we need to solve, or at least play down, points of friction between the West and the Islamic world...

...The spreading of democracy in the Arab Middle East will naturally increase, not diminish, anti-Americanism...

...In the classical and medieval Islamic eras, when Muslim armies usually defeated their non-Muslim enemies, manifestly fulfilling the divine promise that Muslims were God's chosen people, maintaining both collective and individual pride was much easier...

...The victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections has perhaps made evident what should have been obvious for years...

...Back then, Muslims cognizant of what the Christians were writing usually took it in stride, not too perturbed by the ruminations and calumnies of a superseded faith...

...It is possible that Muslims living outside the Middle East will have a substantial role to play in revivifying Islamic civilization—in shedding some light on the convulsive path that one may still hope will lead from dysfunctional dictatorship through bin Ladenism to more peacefully self-critical, democratic societies...

...And the controversy over the Danish cartoons could conceivably betray the most important, though least remembered, player in this controversy: the average Muslim in the Middle East...

...Anti-Americanism in and of itself is not a catalyst for Islamic terrorism...

...Anti-Americanism is the great bugaboo for these folks, and the more wonkish among them often have at their finger-tips polling data showing what a sorry state the United States is in among Muslims worldwide...

...A good, highly polemical example of this mindset is The Next Attack by Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon, former counterterrorist officials in the Clinton administration...

...This seems to be an opportunity to condemn the cartoons and communicate directly with the Muslim people on a host of issues...

...If it succeeds, democracy will eventually kill them off...

...Muslims who loathe these holy-war killers and want to see them extirpated from their societies can often themselves dislike, if not hate, the United States for a wide variety of reasons, some legitimate, some fictitious, some surreal...

...Beyond the question of whether any of these men really means what he says—it's not hard to imagine Clinton, Kerry, the Anglophone Chirac, or McCormack enjoying Monty Python's relentlessly mocking, anti-Christian romps Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life—they all echo a common view about Muslim sentiments and Western policy since 9/11, and especially since the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq...

...Among the Muslims of the United States and Europe, if not in the Middle East, there are many who have Western cultural sentiments and wit...

...Both have responded by inciting demonstrations in Lebanon and Syria...

...In all likelihood, this isn't so...

...For better or worse, expatriate and foreign-educated Middle Easterners have helped to shape decisively the secular and religious cultures that have dominated their homelands since World War II...

...America is seen by all as a force supporting change in the dynamics between Muslim men and women...

...On the traditional side, Muhammad Sayyid at-Tantawi, the head of al-Azhar, Cairo's famous seat of Sunni Islamic learning, and Egypt's grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, would probably fall in this category...

...Muslim autocrats, in conjunction with European and Middle Eastern Muslim militants, are likely to interfere increasingly in Europe's internal affairs to create fear and a more hesitant European community...

...tary installations are an unacceptable and intolerable form of protest...

...There are many other, vastly more important things, both historical and personal, at work inside young Muslim men (and occasionally women) who decide to kill themselves and others to express their love of God and their hatred of the United States...

...American foreign policy has long been in the odd position of trying to assuage Muslim anger at Israel by advancing the peace process even though a sober analysis should have told Washington's diplomats that the fundamentalist set—the young men who are most susceptible to making the leap to suicidal holy war—did not see this process as progress...

...Few prominent Muslim clerics and intellectuals could bring themselves to make an unqualified condemnation of Khomeini's actions...

...Damascus and Tehran, more closely allied than ever before, are under pressure from the West for their terrorist and nuclear ambitions, respectively...

...It is democracy, not dictatorship, that can best take Muslims through the difficult religious reformation that is well under way among both Shiites and Sunnis...

...American foreign policy should never be tailored to appease the anger of Muslim men—though, if we are to be honest, this is in part what we've been trying to do in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation and in much of our Muslim-oriented public-diplomacy...

...It has absolutely nothing to do with whether the Israeli-Palestinian peace process can somehow soon resume...

...Iraq is chock-full of devoutly religious Shiite and Sunni Muslims who abhor suicide bombers and religious radicals in their midst yet harbor— have probably always harbored—distinctly unfriendly attitudes toward the United States...

...As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice noted, somewhat tardily, the Syrian and Iranian regimes are trying to exploit this event for all that it's worth...

...If our standards collapse and give way to fear, theirs in the long-term have no chance whatsoever...

...Historically, there is no reason to believe this will happen under the dictatorships that gave birth to Islamic extremism in the first place...

...Correctly understood, anti-Americanism when it accompanies the loosening of political controls in the Middle East is a sign that the status quo that gave us bin Ladenism and 9/11—the perverse marriage of autocracy and Islamic extremism—is coming apart...

...What we have seen happen in the Islamic Republic of Iran under clerical dictatorship—the conversion of the most anti-American holy-warrior society into the least anti-American, probably most pro-democratic culture in the region—will likely happen elsewhere but even more rapidly if Sunni fundamentalists are given a chance to gain power democratically and demonstrate to their fellow Muslims how their interpretation of the Holy Law and Islamic history will improve their lives...

...It is a bizarre spectacle to observe the heretical Shi-ite-Alawite Baathist regime in Damascus—which has in the past been on the cutting edge of anti-Islamic pan-Arab nationalist propaganda and slaughtering thousands in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood—now defend the Prophet Muhammad from Danish despoliation...

...With Rushdie, Westerners deplored the Iranian cleric's death warrant but often temporized their condemnation by suggesting that the then hard-left author had been, as the former, redoubtable New York Times correspondent Kennett Love once put it, "mean to Islam...

...France has sided with the United States against Syria in Lebanon...

...However well intended, this empathetic view is seriously wrong-headed...

...The militant Muslims of Europe who do not want their brethren to embrace the continent's liberal, thoroughly secular culture helped fuel this controversy by emailing and faxing the offending cartoons to their spiritual allies in the Middle East...

...It's a decent bet that it has been a more intimate and effective message than the fraternal appeals after 1948 to eject the Jews from Israel...

...The religious radicalization of the Muslim body politic, which has gained ground under autocracy, will likely lose speed, if not rapidly reverse itself...

...Former Democratic congressman Tim Roemer, a member of the 9/11 Commission, which was deeply worried about the woeful image of the United States in the Muslim world, articulated what many Democrats and Republicans were surely thinking but not saying: "We have done precious little to effectively communicate to the hearts and minds and win that long-term war...

...And across the Atlantic, French President Jacques Chirac, who still hasn't recovered from Muslim French youth rioting last fall, gave the most "sensitive" European response: "Anything liable to offend the beliefs of others, particularly religious beliefs, must be avoided...

...Like Christendom before it, the Muslim Middle East will have to work out its relation to modernity...

...It will probably be for both Muslims and Westerners a nerve-racking experience...

...The fate of European Muslims is now openly in play...

...And there is the very tricky issue of women, which often animates progressive, traditional, and fundamentalist conversations...

...To be healthy, Muslim pride and political systems need to be based on real accomplishments, where the average believer can feel that he is participating in a larger, productive enterprise...

...In their book, Benjamin and Simon zealously use polls, and the opinions of unnamed American and European intelligence officials, to argue that the Bush administration is losing the war against Islamic holy warriors...

...And however timidly, Europe has joined the United States in calling for more open political systems in the Muslim Middle East...

...We should not, however, be alarmed by this phenomenon...