WHO SPEAKS FOR ISLAM? WHO SPEAKS FOR THE WEST?
A program of New York University, Dialogues: Islamic
World-U.S.-The West emerged from the tragedy ofSeptember 11th, 2001, which highlighted the need forgreater communication among and about the UnitedStates, Europe, and the Muslim world. The programwas founded as a forum for constructive debate betweenthe various religious, intellectual, economic, andpolitical sectors of American, European, and Islamicsocieties. Dialogues brings contentious issues betweenthe Islamic world and the West into a more rationalplane and promotes this approach to a wide audiencethat includes the important constituencies of policyand decision makers, policy analysts, the media, andeducational institutions.
Dialogues is committed to a number of academic,policy, and outreach activities, including conferenceson a variety of topics of critical importance today—theclash of perceptions, elections, the nature ofauthority in the Islamic world and in the West,Muslims in the West, the role of the media, andeducation, among others—that result in the develop-ment of policy recommendations. Our conferencesare based on solid scholarly background material andbring together policy analysts, policy makers,scholars, religious leaders, business and nongovern-mental organization leaders, and media decisionmakers, with the goal of altering public perceptionsand effecting policy change. In addition, findingsfrom the program are published as policy papers aswell as in book form and are disseminated to educa-tional institutions worldwide for use by students,faculty, and researchers. Moreover, Dialogues iscreating a network of leaders who will continue tocommunicate with and consult one another formallyand informally for years to come—a valuable networkfor negotiating peace in times of crisis. Ultimately,dialogue should extend to the general population,thus allowing the widest possible scope of participa-tion and expression.
AB
OU
T D
IALO
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Cover: Arches at Tin Mal mosque,Morocco (c. 1156) Photo: Kim Zumwalt
WHO SPEAKS FOR ISLAM?
WHO SPEAKS FOR THE WEST?
Report of the Conference organized by
Dialogues: Islamic World-U.S.-The West
in cooperation with
the Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, February 10-11, 2006
Funded by the governments of Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and France; the
MacArthur Foundation; and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund
R E M A R QU E I N ST I T U T E — N E W YO R K UN I V E R S I T Y
ii
W H O S P E A K S FO R I S L A M ?
W H O S P E A K S FO R T H E W E ST ?
Copyright © 2006 by Dialogues:
Islamic World-U.S.-The West. All rights
reserved. No part of this publication
may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For more information, address
Dialogues: Islamic World-U.S.-The West
Remarque Institute
Faculty of Arts and Science
New York University
194 Mercer Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY, 10012-1502
iii
CONTENTS
Director’s Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
Message from Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General . . . . . . . . . x
Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii
Opening Session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Session I—Improving Mutual Perception Through the Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Session II—The Impact of Globalization on the Muslim World. . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Session III—The Challenges Posed by Science and
Technology to the Muslim-Western Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Session IV—What Is the Future Framework for the
Muslim-Western Relationship? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Closing Session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Notes to Sessions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Appendix I: Conference Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Appendix II: List of Participants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Appendix III: Mustapha Tlili’s Opening Statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Appendix IV: Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s Keynote Address . . . 52
Appendix V: Background Paper—“Who Speaks for Islam?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Appendix VI: Background Paper—“Who Speaks for the West?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
The conference “Who Speaks for Islam?
Who Speaks for the West?” represented
more than two-and-a-half years of sub-
stantive and administrative preparations,
during which time Dialogues’ staff refined
the core intellectual concepts behind the
conference, drafted and translated back-
ground materials, liaised with the
government of host country Malaysia,
and continued to raise funds.
Evolution of the Conference Theme
The original idea for the conference
emerged from a recommendation at
Dialogues’ first international conference,
“Clash of Civilizations or Clash of
Perceptions?” in Granada, Spain, in
October 2002. Most participants felt
that questions central to “defining Islam”
required further discussion.1 Many
participants felt strongly that the intra-
Islamic debate should take precedence
over the cross-cultural debate. It was thus
suggested that a conference be held that
would invite Muslims of conservative,
modernist, Islamist, and secular thought
to sit together to discuss their views on the
nature of religious authority. This task
was considered especially important at a
time when the official ulama (religious
scholars) appear to be under attack, in
part from youth and women, and when
radical fundamentalists are attempting to
establish their own religious monopolies.
The Granada participants believed that
iv
DIRECTOR’S PREFACE
v
this debate could well help foster a valu-
able exchange of opinions within the
Muslim world, which was regarded, in
turn, as an integral step toward achieving
wider dialogue with the West. But it soon
became clear that the question of who
speaks for Islam begs its counterpart:
who speaks for the West? This new
dimension of the debate reflected the
confusion in the West that mirrors the
confusion in the Muslim world with
regard to the sources of authority. Dia-
logues thus adopted a two-pronged
conference theme, questioning both
Muslim and Western systems of legiti-
macy, not only for the sake of taking a
balanced approach, but also with an eye
toward advancing the quest for under-
standing between Islam and the West.
Over the course of the two-and-a-half
years of planning, the conceptual prem-
ise of the conference was continually
refined through exchanges with various
thinkers and policy makers in the United
States, Europe, and the Muslim world,
including at a preparatory committee
convened in Amman, Jordan, on
December 6-7, 2004, and hosted and
chaired by His Royal Highness Prince El
Hassan bin Talal. Our most sincere grat-
itude goes to His Royal Highness for his
generosity and his steadfastness on behalf
of the cause of peace and understanding
between the Muslim world and the West.
Background Material
In keeping with Dialogues’ tradition of
grounding its conferences in solid schol-
arly research, its staff assembled two
working groups to draft background
papers—one on “Who Speaks for Islam?”
and the other on “Who Speaks for the
West?” The papers are meant to offer
analytical, politically neutral surveys of
those who claim to speak with authority
in either world and thereby offer a foun-
dation for debate among the conference
participants in Kuala Lumpur. Over a
two-year period, the papers were drafted
and revised with the objective of produc-
ing the most accurate, comprehensive,
and informative documents that the pro-
gram could produce with its resources.
The papers were translated from English
into Arabic, and both versions were made
available to the participants prior to the
conference. In addition to Mustapha
Tlili; Shaanti Kapila, Dialogues’ special
assistant; and Shara Kay, Dialogues’
editorial consultant, the “Islam” working
group was also composed of Hassan
Abedin of the Oxford Centre for Islamic
Studies and Mohammed Ayoob, Uni-
versity Distinguished Professor of
International Relations at James Madi-
son College, Michigan State University.
The “West” team included Lisa Ander-
son, dean of Columbia University’s
School of International and Public
vi
Affairs; Tony Judt, Erich Maria Remar-
que Professor in European Studies and
director of the Remarque Institute
at New York University; and Scott Mal-
comson, journalist and author. Our
thanks go to all of them for their unspar-
ing efforts in pursuit of accurate
knowledge, clarity of expression, and
elegance of style.
Liaising with the
Malaysian Government
We came to an early decision that the
conference should be held in a non-
Arab, majority-Muslim country, and in
September 2003, I met with the then-
prime minister of Malaysia, Dr.
Mahathir Mohammed, and proposed
that the Malaysian government serve as
host and cosponsor. As a centrist, plu-
ralist, multicultural democratic country
with a majority-Muslim population,
Malaysia seemed a fitting choice.
Although Dr. Mahathir strongly sup-
ported the idea and agreed in principle
to host the conference, Abdullah Ahmad
Badawi replaced him as prime minister
on October 31, 2003, and the govern-
ment’s decision was thus not formally
delivered until January 2005. Although
the Institute Kefahaman Islam Malaysia
(IKIM) was initially designated by the
Malaysian government as the cosponsor
organization in 2004, in September
2005, the Malaysian government turned
over local responsibility for the confer-
ence to the Institute of Diplomacy and
Foreign Relations Malaysia (IDFR), an
agency within the Malaysian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs that provides formal
training to Malaysian foreign service
officers. IKIM Chairman Tan Sri Dato
Ahmad Sarji bin Abdul Hamid and IDFR
Director Fauziah Mohd Taib, as well as
her colleagues, deserve our most sincere
thanks.
Fund-Raising
Fund-raising is always essential to suc-
cessful conference planning. Generous
annual contributions from the Rocke-
feller Brothers Fund in 2004 and 2005
enabled Dialogues to undertake initial
steps, including the drafting of back-
ground papers, the convening of the
preparatory committee, and planning
missions to Kuala Lumpur. With the
formal approval of the Malaysian govern-
ment to host the conference secured in
January 2005, Dialogues stepped up
fund-raising efforts. In addition to
Malaysia’s important financial support,
significant contributions from the For-
eign and Commonwealth Office of the
United Kingdom, the MacArthur Foun-
dation, and the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs of France enabled Dialogues to
convene the conference in February 2006.
vii
To all of these supporters we say thank
you, and we hope that this report shows
the importance and far-reaching effects
of your contributions.
Context of the Conference
Two weeks before the conference was
convened, the world witnessed the erup-
tion of an international crisis prompted
by a Danish newspaper’s publication of
satirical cartoons depicting the Prophet
Muhammad.
On September 30, 2005, Denmark’s
largest circulation and historically right-
wing newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, printed
12 drawings of the Prophet Muhammad,
including one showing him wearing a
turban shaped like a bomb and another
showing him with devil horns. On Octo-
ber 19, a delegation of ambassadors from
Muslim countries posted in Denmark
attempted to meet with Danish Prime
Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to dis-
cuss the issue. The prime minister rejected
the request on the grounds that the gov-
ernment could not interfere in a free
speech issue. Frustrated by the lack of
response, a delegation of Danish Muslim
leaders traveled to Cairo to present the
matter to the scholars of Al Azhar
University, a theological institution
renowned throughout the Muslim world
as an authority on Islamic faith and prac-
tice. Meanwhile, as the controversy was
building, a Norwegian publication, Mag-
azinet, reprinted some of the images on
January 10, 2006.
The cartoons offended millions of Mus-
lims around the world who perceived a
willful violation of the proscription on
visual depictions of the Prophet, exacer-
bated by the linking of Islam with
terrorism. With further reprintings, the
controversy became a crisis. On February
1, newspapers in Belgium, France, Ger-
many, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland,
including France-Soir, Die Welt, and
Courrier International, reprinted the car-
toons on their front pages as a sign of
solidarity with the Danish paper. On
February 8, the French satirical weekly,
Charlie-Hebdo, published a special issue
with the full set of cartoons, adding new
ones in the same vein.
Numerous demonstrations took place in
early February, with the largest and most
dramatic occurring in Palestine, Syria,
and Lebanon. Subsequently, thousands
of protesters took to the streets in
Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt,
France, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Malaysia,
Mauritania, Morocco, New Zealand,
Pakistan, Qatar, the Sudan, the United
Kingdom, and Yemen. While some
protests were peaceful, others were
violent; 13 people died in total in
viii
Lebanon and Afghanistan. Danish
embassies were stormed by angry mobs in
Beirut, Tehran, and Damascus. In Saudi
Arabia, Bahrain, and much of the Gulf,
Danish products were boycotted and two
Danish factories were temporarily closed.
The intense reaction around the Muslim
world, coupled with equally intense reac-
tions among European populations,
made the issue a top international news
item, with politicians and heads of state
called on to weigh in with their opinions.
Several Western leaders expressed their
strong commitment to freedom of the
press while noting the need to exercise such
liberty with care. U.S. President George
W. Bush, for instance, stated that “with
freedom comes the responsibility to be
thoughtful about others.” 2 In France,
President Jacques Chirac denounced “all
manifest provocations that might dan-
gerously fan passions.”3 In Vienna, the
then-president of the European Union,
Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel of Austria,
condemned the “spiral of reciprocal
provocations and insults that fuels the
flames of intolerance.”4
The conference took place in the midst
of this controversy—immediately after
the embassy burnings in the Levant and
before the major demonstrations in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The cartoons
affair, which pushed the Muslim and
Western worlds to confront familiar
issues of respect, freedom, and tolerance
in new, concrete circumstances, thus
informed panel debates and lent an added
sense of urgency to the conference.
This report offers the findings of both
our preparatory efforts and the confer-
ence itself. My gratitude goes to
Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohame-
dou, associate director of the Program
on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict
Research at Harvard University; Shaanti
Kapila, Yale University graduate and spe-
cial assistant at Dialogues; Shara Kay, a
graduate of Harvard University and Dia-
logues’ editorial consultant; Marisa
Menna, a New York University graduate
and Dialogues’ intern; and Andrea Stan-
ton, a doctoral student at Columbia
University, all of whom worked tirelessly
under my supervision to make this report
worthy of your time and consideration.
At this critical moment in the Muslim-
Western encounter, we hope to have
made an informative, provocative, and
useful contribution to the dialogue.
Mustapha Tlili
Founder and Director
Dialogues: Islamic World-U.S.-The West
Remarque Institute
New York University
x
I am delighted to send my warmest wishes
to this international conference on Islam
and the West.
We all are aware that this is a time of
sharply increasing intolerance, extrem-
ism, and violence, which have strained
relations alarmingly between the Western
and the Muslim worlds. They have exac-
erbated misconceptions about each other
among peoples of Islamic and Judeo-
Christian or secular traditions. There is a
danger that the essential dialogue between
cultures and societies is being reduced to
an angry exchange between the fringes,
with each side assuming that extremists
speak for the other side as a whole and in
turn—allowing its own extremists to
frame its own hostile response.
The extremist tendency to divide
humanity into mutually exclusive groups
or categories, and to treat anyone who
tries to cross the dividing lines as a trai-
tor, is one of the greatest threats that we
face in the world today. Muslims have
perhaps suffered most from this ten-
dency, but they have not suffered alone.
Extremist slogans have gained ground in
East and West, inciting misperceptions
and threatening peace and security all
over the world.
The truth is that no one voice can claim
to represent an entire faith or a whole
civilization. Nor can any one individual,
MESSAGE FROM KOFI ANNAN, UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY-GENERAL5
xi
any single organization, or any particu-
lar government claim to speak for either
the Muslim world or the Western world.
Instead, it is up to each of us to speak for
ourselves and for our values.
That is why the question your conference
asks is so timely and so pertinent. It is
time for the voices of understanding and
acceptance of diversity to show their
strength. It is time for every one of us to
speak up, rather than let others speak for
us or to assume that the menacing voices
of extremists are empowered or man-
dated to speak for their societies.
And yet the question of who speaks for
each of us in this dialogue begs another,
equally important, question: to whom do
we choose to listen? Surely the hallmark
of any genuine dialogue is not only the
respectful and constructive tone of the
discourse but also the manner in which
that discourse is received by others.
We cannot insist on the civility of dis-
course unless we give serious attention
to what is said. History teaches us that
grievances expressed peacefully, and yet
ignored, will eventually manifest them-
selves in ever-more forceful and violent
ways.
And so, as we ask who speaks for Islam
and who speaks for the West, we must also
ask whether we are listening. A more civil
discourse that fails to resolve long-stand-
ing grievances will ultimately lose the
support of the most aggrieved among us
and cause many to call into question the
usefulness of civility in itself. This is a
sure path to increased rancor and
renewed violence.
Our shared challenge is therefore twofold.
First, we must embolden the voices of
tolerance and understanding engaged in
this dialogue. Second, we must foster a
greater receptivity and will to give atten-
tion to what those voices say to us.
Your gathering seems well-qualified to
embark on such a dialogue. Your diverse
backgrounds and experiences should
enable you to make an important contri-
bution to the Alliance of Civilizations,
which I launched last year at the initiative
of the Spanish and Turkish prime min-
isters. This initiative is intended to
respond to the need for a committed
effort by the international community—
in both its intergovernmental and its civil
society forms—to bridge divides and
overcome prejudices, misconceptions,
and polarizations that potentially
threaten world peace. Meetings such as
yours will be essential for its ultimate
success, a goal made all the more urgent
by recent alarming events.
xii
Are the Muslim and Western worlds
monoliths? How can we improve percep-
tions of one civilization by the other?
These and other critical issues were
addressed at “Who Speaks for Islam?
Who Speaks for the West?”—a conference
convened in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, by
New York University’s Dialogues: Islamic
World-U.S.-The West and the Institute
of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations
Malaysia on February 10-11, 2006.
Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
of Malaysia opened the conference,
which brought together 50 eminent per-
sons—policy makers, religious leaders,
scientists, economists, news media pro-
fessionals, and other opinion makers—
from 17 Western, Muslim-majority, and
other countries. Those attending included
former president of Iran Mohammad
Khatami, Grand Mufti of Bosnia-
Herzegovina Mustafa Ceric, Oxford
University historian Timothy Garton
Ash, president of the Rockefeller Broth-
ers Fund Stephen Heintz, and director
of the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory’s Center for Global Security
Research Ronald Lehman. Participants
engaged in lively debates aimed at con-
veying the diversity within each tradition,
dispelling misperceptions that can cloud
members of each tradition’s understanding
of the other, and developing strategies to
promote a better relationship between
the Muslim and Western worlds.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
xiii
Participants tackled such timely issues as
the impact of globalization on the Mus-
lim world and the challenges that science
and technology pose for the Muslim-
Western encounter. The conference
concluded with a policy-oriented session
devoted to laying the ground for new
frameworks for a better relationship
between Islam and the West.
The conference reached the
following conclusions:
Freedom of speech is a universal value.
It is the oxygen of liberty, and, as such, it
should be encouraged rather than stifled.
The “collision of opinion” is a healthy, if
uncomfortable, process, resulting over
time in improved intercommunal
understanding. Yet free speech should be
exercised in a manner that is balanced,
fair, nuanced, and contextualized. Free
speech cannot be unlimited. Every soci-
ety sets certain legal limits defined by
knowledge of and respect for local cus-
toms. The boundaries placed on free
speech should be minimal, however, and
should mostly serve to prevent libel, pro-
mote respect for individuals, and avert
violence. In keeping with this approach,
individuals’ and institutions’ responsible
self-restraint in the exercise of free
speech is of paramount importance.
Ultimately, there are legitimate and ille-
gitimate ways to address the relationship
between free speech and mutual respect.
The illegitimate option is through vio-
lence. Legitimate options include the
precise application of judicious law,
responsible journalism, and promotion of
the visibility of minorities’ and others’
views.
The media play a key role in transmitting
socioeconomic and political informa-
tion, which impact both societies’ and
individuals’ perceptions. That role, a
form of power, can be used positively to
encourage civilized debate. It can be used
negatively when dissemination of such
information is unbalanced or skewed to
allow the few to speak for the many.
Today the Western and Muslim worlds
diverge in their expectations of the role
of government regarding media account-
ability. Western media coverage of
Muslim affairs has historically focused on
sensational issues. In so doing, it has
often failed to portray the full reality of
“normal” life in the Muslim world. Con-
versely, the media in Muslim countries
have often presented the policies of some
Western countries as driven by animus
toward Islam, oil interest, and the ideo-
logical designs of conservative and
neo-conservative political groups. These
skewed portrayals foster both Islamopho-
bia and fear of the West, two genuine
threats to open communication between
the Western and Muslim worlds.
xiv
Globalization is a complex phenomenon.
It encompasses the internationalization
of capital and new information tech-
nologies, as well as the transformation of
culture and, in particular, the massive
“transfer of taste.” Globalization is
shaped by the economic and political life
of individuals and communities around
the world, but it is also determined by the
different social environments in which
people live and operate. That variety
creates tensions and opportunities.
Globalization puts the same challenges to
Muslim and non-Muslim countries,
although capital, industrialization, and
technology have tended for the past 200
years to aggregate in the West. Given this
historical reality, the Muslim world,
which in previous eras led the world in
scientific learning, needs a new push
toward science and technology to level
the global playing field and reap the ben-
efits that globalization can offer. It also
needs to reconcile its rich tradition with
the demands of the modern world. The
impact of 21st-century globalization on
the Muslim world has thus far varied by
nation. Generally, however, gender equal-
ity, participatory governance, education,
and peace are necessary requirements for
successful globalization in the Muslim
world. The importance of such reforms is
acknowledged in most Muslim countries,
but carrying them out has proven a dif-
ficult and often politically sensitive task.
The injustice characterizing the inter-
national economic and financial system
remains problematic. Fundamentally,
this challenge concerns the process of
international governance. Globalization
is not a one-way street. It is a process of
sharing power, information, knowledge,
and rewards. Without a genuine share of
the rewards, excluded nations will give
rise to greater trouble and violence. The
coming years will see a pressing need to
focus on energy efficiency and restructure
the world’s energy usage in terms of
renewable resources rather than fossil
fuels. Only by easing competition over
increasingly scarce fossil fuels can the
world avoid major economic and politi-
cal crises between nation-states and
global blocs.
Technology has become a driving force
behind the world economy. Moreover,
science as a discipline offers possibilities
for building bridges and improving lives
around the globe. Applying scientific
research to practical human problems
produces challenges as well as opportu-
nities, for which open societies are better
equipped. There is no contradiction
between Islam as a religion and the sci-
entific pursuit of knowledge. The ethical
issues that do arise, such as cloning,
relate to specific technological applica-
tions of scientific knowledge, and are
issues with which other faiths wrestle as
xv
well. Sadly, despite the importance of
science and technology in today’s world,
the Muslim world has few loci of scien-
tific research or technology production,
whether university, public, or private
sector. This dearth hurts the Muslim
world economically and creatively, by
spurring the brain drain of scientists who
find training and employment in the
West. The proud tradition of the Islamic
golden age of scientific enlightenment is
not borne out today. Instead, the widen-
ing technology gap makes it imperative to
place renewed emphasis on technology in
the Muslim world.
Genuine intercivilizational dialogue is
of paramount importance in a world that
feels smaller by the day. The debates
about culture and identity that take place
within each world and tradition—Western
and Muslim—need to be recognized as
part of a global conversation; the visibil-
ity of these internal dialogues may matter
as much as their content. True dialogue
brings out uncomfortable truths, which
cultures must be ready to address con-
structively. Specifically, Muslims should
consider reopening the interpretation of
religious texts; stressing critical thinking
and openness to remedy the narrowing of
public education that has impoverished
so many nations’ schools; and fostering a
healthy civil society able to challenge
official authorities. The West, for its
part, should address the double stan-
dards that have informed Western
nations’ assumptions and policies; rec-
ognize the contribution of other
civilizations to science and technology;
and work cooperatively to define com-
mon, cross-cultural principles.
Critical societal introspection and
self-criticism are the sine qua non of
internal and collective progress. Muslims
tend to approach this issue in two ways:
through criticism and self-criticism.
Criticism, although a natural first
response, results in feelings of self-vic-
timization and blaming outside forces
for all that goes wrong in the Muslim
world. Self-criticism, while a more dif-
ficult process, invites Muslims to cast a
critical but forgiving eye on domestic
problems, which may result in pragmatic
reforms. At its most effective, self-
criticism relies on freedom, equality,
incisiveness, and tolerance. The West is
also faced with two options: turning a
deaf ear to honest grievances or listening
with an open mind to the Muslim point
of view. Both the Muslim and Western
worlds should endeavor to unequivocally
protect individuals and groups from acts
of intolerance and discrimination; pro-
tect societies against the actions of
extremists; and intensify dialogue to
address misunderstandings on the basis
of improved, shared knowledge.
1
The conference opened with the hosts
welcoming participants and outlining the
purpose and aims of the event. Mustapha
Tlili, founder and director of Dialogues:
Islamic World-U.S.-The West at New York
University, thanked the government of
Malaysia for cohosting the event and the
governments of the United Kingdom
and France, as well as the MacArthur
Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers
Fund, for their generous financial
support.
Given the simultaneous international
developments and renewed global discus-
sion of the relationship between Islam
and the West, Mr. Tlili stressed the time-
liness of the gathering. He noted that
forces of irresponsibility, insensitivity,
and intolerance have been combining to
endanger that relationship, infusing it
with misperceptions and mistrust. This
tension is underscored by cruel realities of
economic and military inequality, social
dislocation, and political repression.
Yet, Mr. Tlili noted, the very combina-
tion of these formidable challenges and
the volatility of the current political cli-
mate creates a window of opportunity for
positive action. The conference, he said,
should capitalize on this opportunity to
launch a new dynamic of constructive
engagement between the two cultures.
That engagement relies on critical self-
reflection and investigation of which
OPENING SESSION
2
individuals and institutions, if any, can
claim the authority to speak on behalf of a
civilization. Mr. Tlili urged participants
to consider these issues and suggest prac-
tical ways to remedy misunderstandings,
chart new channels of communication,
and, ultimately, deepen mutual under-
standing.
Fauziah Mohd Taib, director general of
the Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign
Relations Malaysia, which cosponsored
the conference, spoke next. Echoing Mr.
Tlili’s appeal for a conference that engages
substantively with today’s critical issues,
she stressed the importance of a forum
for intercivilizational dialogue, remarking
that unity can be found in multiplicity.
Mr. Tlili and Ms. Taib then welcomed
Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah
Ahmad Badawi, who was introduced by
Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid
Albar.
In his remarks, Mr. Albar noted that the
primary challenge facing the assembled
scholars and practitioners is to remedy
the lack of tolerance. This task is partic-
ularly arduous, he commented, in the
midst of sobering moments of intoler-
ance such as the current one.
Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
opened his address by returning to the
two questions asked in the conference’s
title—“Who Speaks for Islam? Who
Speaks for the West?”—and noting their
pertinence at a time when the Muslim
and Western worlds combined comprise
51 percent of the world’s population.
Attempting to address these consequen-
tial questions in a fresh but productive
way, he said, would mean working from
three postulates: (1) blame cannot be
assigned to any one side, (2) neither civ-
ilization is monolithic, and (3) a loud
but small number of extremist voices do
not represent the silent majority of the
Muslim world or the West.
According to the prime minister, those
who can legitimately claim to speak for
each side are those honest individuals
who strive to live by universal principles
of tolerance, upholding justice and
dignity, fighting tyranny, rejecting
oppression, equalizing opportunities,
redistributing wealth, and being inclusive
in word and deed.
But as the prime minister pointed out,
what is most visible to each side today is
the perceived hostility each side has of
the other. Large numbers of Muslims
look to the West and see only subjuga-
tion, domination, selective persecution,
and hegemony. Similarly, many West-
erners look at Islam and find only
violence, terrorism, and intolerance.
3
Such misperceptions have serious conse-
quences, he insisted, and redressing
them is the challenge facing this gather-
ing of bridge builders. Animosity and
antagonism between the Muslim and the
Western worlds must come to an end.
Reciprocity and equality should become
the rule, heralding a harmonious rela-
tionship ultimately characterized by
Muslims speaking for the West and West-
erners speaking for the Muslim world.
Among the first session’s central objec-
tives were conveying the diversity within
each tradition and dispelling mispercep-
tions. Since the media in both the
Muslim world and the West exercise
enormous influence in disseminating
information that shapes mass percep-
tions of “the other,” participants aimed
to develop a strategy to promote better
understanding between the Muslim and
Western worlds through the media.
Session chair Iqbal Riza, special adviser
to the secretary-general of the United
Nations on the Alliance of Civilizations,
opened the session by reading a state-
ment from UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan to the conference. In his
statement, the secretary-general acknowl-
edged that we are at a critical moment in
the Muslim-Western encounter. Extrem-
ists on both sides threaten to overwhelm
the dialogue between cultures, which is
why this gathering of tolerant voices is so
timely. He urged participants to bear in
mind that how we receive and act on the
discourse of the other is as important as
what is said; respectfully put, grievances
that are not addressed will eventually
spark violence. The conference is well-
equipped to make a real contribution to
the UN’s new Alliance of Civilizations
initiative, which was established to over-
come prejudices and misunderstandings
that potentially threaten world peace.
5
SESSION I—IMPROVING MUTUAL PERCEPTION
THROUGH THE MEDIA
6
Mr. Riza then turned to the theme of the
first session, stressing the media’s
important role in strategic communica-
tion of information. Whereas educated
elites can turn to other sources to cor-
roborate, clarify, or dispute information
found in the local press and televised
media, the average person relies solely on
this information, believing it to be the
“full story” on any issue. The ability to
convey or withhold information repre-
sents the media’s greatest power.
Freedom of expression is critical to the
media, but it is also vital to societies in
general as a means of fostering progress,
limiting the power of the state, and pro-
tecting the rights of citizens. However,
this freedom can be dangerous, particu-
larly at a time of troubled relations
between the Muslim and Western worlds.
This is especially salient with regard to
the media, whose power can be used neg-
atively—particularly when unbalanced,
misleading, or inaccurate information
promotes stereotypes. Such abuses pro-
duce a situation where the few—those
whose voices are taken up by the media as
sources—speak for the unheard many.
The key question regarding the promo-
tion of accurate information and
informed dialogue is how to balance the
need to limit the power of the media to
shape opinions while protecting the free-
dom of expression that allows for a
healthy exchange.
The first speaker, Timothy Garton Ash,
director of the European Studies Centre
at St. Antony’s College, Oxford Univer-
sity, started by identifying the current
moment as a time of opportunity, thanks
to the many fast-paced transformations
that define and redefine the world today.
Whereas in earlier times different com-
munities could express local customs and
views in a relatively isolated manner, cul-
tural globalization has ushered in a
constant awareness of other places, other
cultures, and other eyes, which has been
reinforced by accelerated migration. For
the majority of the world, a purely local
existence and a mostly local awareness are
thus no longer possible. This evolution
from local to global is reinforced by the
proliferation of round-the-clock, “24/7”
mass media.
Given the global context of today’s world,
how can the media’s role as a protector of
human freedom be understood and sup-
ported, Mr. Garton Ash asked? Perhaps
the best approach, he suggested, is to
start from the expression that freedom
of speech is the “oxygen of liberty.” This
is a universal value that is not attached to
a specific culture. Just as modernization
is not synonymous with Westernization,
the right to speak freely—though prac-
ticed more consistently in that part of the
world—is not a value confined to the
Western world. Freedom of speech is that
7
healthy “collision of opinion” of which
John Stuart Mill wrote the following:
I do not pretend that the mostunlimited use of the freedom ofenunciating all possible opinionswould put an end to the evils of reli-gious or philosophical sectarianism.Every truth which men of narrowcapacity are in earnest about, is sureto be asserted, inculcated, and inmany ways even acted on, as if noother truth existed in the world, or atall events none that could limit orqualify the first. I acknowledge thatthe tendency of all opinions tobecome sectarian is not cured by thefreest discussion, but is often height-ened and exacerbated thereby; thetruth which ought to have been, butwas not, seen, being rejected all themore violently because proclaimed bypersons regarded as opponents. Butit is not on the impassioned partisan,it is on the calmer and more disin-terested bystander, that this collisionof opinions works its salutary effect.Not the violent conflict between partsof the truth, but the quiet suppres-sion of half of it, is the formidableevil: there is always hope when peo-ple are forced to listen to both sides;it is when they attend only to one thaterrors harden into prejudices, andtruth itself ceases to have the effect oftruth, by being exaggerated intofalsehood.6
The difficulty comes in translating free
speech from the abstract into its concrete
application, including its limits in any
particular society. Which subjects are
taboo, for what reasons, and with what
consequences should they be raised
regardless? As much as the answers vary
across cultures, all societies must avoid
leaving the definition of forbidden sub-
jects to those espousing extremist
positions. The limits of free speech must
be defined by those who wish to keep such
limits to a minimum. Tolerance, which
makes free speech palatable as well as pos-
sible, likewise requires patience with views
that initially appear divisive. The “colli-
sion of opinions” may seem at the outset
to inflame passions, but in the long run it
informs and enriches debate. Providing
civilized dialogue based on the open
exchange of views is one of the free media’s
most important functions—and it is for
this reason that restrictions upon it must
be applied cautiously.
The second speaker, Max Boot, senior
fellow for national security studies at the
Council on Foreign Relations, echoed
Mr. Garton Ash’s comments regarding
the timeliness of the topic. He stated that
what the West and Islam are experiencing
today is not so much a clash of civilizations
as a divergence of assumptions. For exam-
ple, many in the Muslim world assume
that governments can and should be held
8
accountable for the actions of their
national media, while in the West these
are assumed to be two separate spheres.
Referring to the cartoons controversy,
Mr. Boot noted that some media had cho-
sen to contribute to the problem rather
than work for its resolution and increased
intercommunal understanding. He noted,
however, that generally speaking, the
Western media have made efforts to avoid
offending Muslims. For instance, both the
news agency Reuters and the BBC eschew
the phrase “Muslim terrorist” when
reporting the use of force by militants or
insurgents. These efforts notwithstand-
ing, ignorance of Muslim sensitivities,
coupled with sensationalist tendencies in
the popular Western media, has enabled
negative reporting. Portrayal of the rich
reality of the Muslim world and coverage
of the “normal” are sorely missing.
The danger of simplistic narratives of
“Muslim terrorists” and other stereotyp-
ical views is that, when promulgated
through the media, they can become the
dominant prism through which people
perceive Islamic civilization. The news
media, in particular, should work to
provide a more accurate depiction of
each civilization so that the debate within
and among civilizations can be based on
solid facts.
For their part, Mr. Boot continued, the
media in Muslim countries have tended
to filter news reporting through the
point of view that American foreign pol-
icy is motivated by animus toward the
Arab and Muslim world, the pursuit of
oil and other commercial interests, and
Zionist and neoconservative lobbies. Mr.
Boot attributed this in part to the diver-
sity of opinions that is prevalent in the
West, which can create a situation
wherein a view that is considered mar-
ginal within the West is picked up by
foreign media and gains greater currency
outside the West.
The third speaker, Boutheina Cheriet,
professor of sociology at the University of
Algiers and former minister of women’s
affairs, spoke from the desire to ground
policy discussions in a theoretical under-
standing of the history behind the
current situation. She suggested that an
adequate response to the cartoons crisis
required investigation of the meaning
that the Western and Muslim worlds have
each attached to free speech. Mill’s “col-
lision of opinions” is also a “collision of
thought.” Further examination reveals,
for instance, that a number of great
Western thinkers carried and promoted a
negative image of Islam and Muslims.
Although not explicitly cited in contem-
porary media coverage, their opinions
often inform a “common sense” subtext
9
of understanding. As an example, Ms.
Cheriet mentioned Max Weber, the emi-
nent German sociologist, who wrote in
The Sociology of Religion that Islam is
a “warrior religion” that displays a
feudal spirit, champions the subjugation
of women, and simplifies ethical
requirements.
Western thinkers have also often exhib-
ited “Manichaean thinking” vis-à-vis the
Muslim world. Ms. Cheriet referred to
sociologist Ernest Gellner’s work, which
pointed out Western historians’ tendency
to represent human conflicts in a binary
way: two opposites in confrontation with
one another.7 This way of viewing the
world has certain negative conse-
quences—as may the very formulation
who speaks for Islam and who speaks for
the West. Rethinking the universal legacy
that history, as the chronicle of human
events, has to offer humanity will enable
more objective representations of the
other, which will in turn produce better
journalistic accounts of conflicts and
civilizations.
Former Iranian President Mohammad
Khatami spoke next, stressing the time-
liness and overall importance of
reexamining civilizations, which he
explained is as difficult to accomplish
globally as within the Islamic tradition.
The importance of dialogue among
cultures is paramount. Today there are
great opportunities for this dialogue,
although it is jeopardized by various
threats. For example, true dialogue can-
not tolerate that the prophet of one of
the world’s great religions be insulted.
Islamophobia is also a danger, and steps
must be taken to eradicate it. Mr.
Khatami cautioned that the signs of
growing Islamophobia ought not to be
taken lightly by the West.
By the same token, the urgent need for
self-examination and intercultural dia-
logue should encourage Muslims to
consider how their identity fits—and is
perceived by others—in a globalized
world. The “social” dimension of iden-
tity is what matters most when it comes to
communication. However, identity is
neither predetermined nor preexisting;
it is created and shaped by time and
space—today, possibly, more than ever.
In other words, Muslims’ willingness to
take an impartial, critical, but respectful
view of their own tradition can foster the
development of a creative and flexible
identity in a democratic paradigm.
Absent such a dynamic, frivolity and vio-
lence will continue to proliferate.
Mr. Khatami also pointed out the diver-
sity that characterizes Islam, which
is evident from Arab, Asian, African,
Persian, and Turkic influences on
10
religious teachings, practices, and cul-
tural expressions. This multiplicity of
Muslim voices must be reflected in the
media. The panel’s discussant, Feisal
Abdul Rauf, chairman of the Cordoba
Initiative, concurred, noting also that the
current boundaries of the Muslim world
are not the product of its own history but
have been imposed by the West. Simi-
larly, recent Muslim thought has been
shaped by and expressed in Western
modalities. In classical Islam, the ques-
tion, who speaks for Islam? would not
arise. God speaks for Islam, and man
interprets God’s words. A nuanced pic-
ture of the historical development of
Muslim ideas is therefore necessary to
understand the heterogeneity of Islamic
thought. Mr. Abdul Rauf maintained
that Islam does not have to be defined by
a binary relationship that sets it against a
presumed universal secularism. Since
religion and identity are largely matters
of perception, the media must play a
leading role in finding solutions to the
problems of misperceptions of other
cultures and traditions.
Following these remarks, the floor was
opened to general discussion including
conference participants and observers.
Kamar Oniah Kamaruzaman, associate
professor at the International Islamic
University in Malaysia, asked for a defi-
nition of “freedom of expression” and
wondered what kind of professional
ethics guided the media in the cartoons
controversy. Mr. Boot responded that
freedom of speech is often defined as the
right to express any views that one wishes,
adding that although there should be
limits to that right, they should be min-
imal and concerned mostly with
preventing libel and the espousal of vio-
lence. He went on to say that although
offensive speech should be limited, gov-
ernmental policing of the press ought
always to be kept to a strict minimum. As
is often stated, the best remedy for speech
deemed offensive is more speech. Pro-
fessional ethics do exist, and they are
recognized by the media and the general
public, with the exclusion of radical
groups. Media lacking such ethics ulti-
mately lose credibility and thereby their
audiences.
Richard Bulliet, professor of history at
Columbia University, added that the
work of the media is often informed by a
number of “common sense” cultural
myths. One of the most powerful in
recent years has been the theory of the
“clash of civilizations,” which, he noted,
is not grounded in empirical facts. Mr.
Boot agreed, indicating that the clash is
within Islam, rather than between Islam
and the West.
11
If free speech is a universal value, argued
A. Riawan Amin, president director of
Bank Muamalat Indonesia, so too is
respect. Given the interrelated nature of
the two, what is the ultimate criterion by
which they should be prioritized? The
cartoons controversy, which drew in
various media outlets, government agen-
cies and officials, and ordinary citizens,
raises the question of the degree to which
the nation in toto and the government in
particular are responsible for regu-
lating free speech. What is painted as a
dismissible myth (in this case, the repre-
sentation of the Prophet Muhammad) by
some members of the European media,
governments, and citizenry is an urgent
reality to practicing Muslims.
Jean-Pierre Langellier, Le Monde corre-
spondent in the United Kingdom and
Ireland, took exception to Mr. Amin’s
characterization of the current situation.
He reiterated that freedom of speech is
the oxygen of democracy, and thus its
expression is nonnegotiable except in
relation to the law and the respect of
individuals. To be deprived of that free-
dom is to be metaphorically asphyxiated,
to feel the painful privation of an essen-
tial component of democratic life. The
critic’s right of irony extends even to
blasphemy, which has been confirmed by
the European Court of Justice. Though
Mr. Langellier admitted that there is
a thin line between a right and how it is
perceived by others, republicanism and
the French constitution regulate this
matter by providing for legal recourse.
Furthermore, from a French republican
perspective, religions are mere beliefs
that can be criticized and deconstructed.
It is indeed a form of progress to do so.
Given that the Arab press habitually pub-
lishes anti-Semitic materials to no public
protest, Mr. Langellier said, and that
some Muslim countries are open to revi-
sionism about the Holocaust, what is
worse for the reputation of Islam, he
asked—a caricature in poor taste or a sui-
cide bomber at a wedding in Amman?
Returning to Max Weber’s derogatory
remarks about Islam, a participant com-
mented that there is a long list of such
assaults on the part of some of the great-
est Western minds. These respected
philosophers and scientists have articu-
lated all manner of demeaning thoughts
on Islam (as well as Hinduism and Bud-
dhism, for that matter). Yet one seldom
finds similar attacks on the West
expressed by leading Muslim scholars and
intellectuals. In Islam, one does not
defame another religion. Though free-
dom of expression is absolute, such a
right cannot in and of itself condition
our morality. If one is legally free to blas-
pheme, what is key is the moral question
of whether to blaspheme.
12
Expanding on Mr. Garton Ash’s discus-
sion of cultural globalization, Farhan
Nizami, director of the Oxford Centre
for Islamic Studies, noted that the reason
communities can no longer live with
their local prejudices is that they are
readily visible to others, primarily
through the globalized media, raising
new questions of responsibility for media
organizations. There must also be con-
sistency in the dynamic between free
expression and restraint. Western soci-
eties and their media cannot be strict
regarding some issues and lax on others.
In the context of the relationship
between Islam and the West, this also
brings to the fore the persistent question
of individual rights versus communal
rights.
Craig Charney, president of Charney
Research, remarked that globalization in
effect ends up creating a “dilemma of
transparency” whereby the more people
are exposed to other cultures, the more
they have to object to.
Responding to Mr. Langellier’s com-
ment on the republican principles,
Mohammed Arkoun, professor emeritus
of Islamic thought at the Sorbonne,
noted that while the French constitution
states that religious commands do not
supersede French law, many constitu-
tions around the Muslim world stipulate
the exact opposite, namely, that civil law
cannot contradict the shari‘a (Islamic
law). Both sides hold their “truths to be
self-evident,” and their media merely
reflect that logic. It is precisely in such
polarized conflicts—the Danish cartoons
incident being merely the most recent
episode in a long list of controversies that
included the Salman Rushdie matter, the
affair of Talisma Nasreen8, and the ques-
tion of the veil—that we have to inquire
about the nature (and usefulness) of the
intellectual tools that are available to us.
Mr. Arkoun argued that scientists have
long demonstrated that reality and our
perceptions of it are socially “con-
structed”; it is fundamental differences
in our social realities, rather than partic-
ular events, which underlie the debate.
On a separate note, he continued, we
must place newfound investment into
scientific research, which in turn would
be transmitted through a reinvigorated
educational system in which hard knowl-
edge, an open perspective, and a
commitment to literacy could vastly
improve the relationship between Islam
and the West.
The session closed with Mr. Garton Ash
highlighting the alleged clash of civiliza-
tions as a doctrine that has already done
serious damage to relations between
Islam and the West. Mr. Garton Ash
insisted that it is therefore key to portray
13
the conflict properly, as a clash of values
rather than civilizations. He suggested
that an efficient means of fighting partial
or distorted knowledge is increasing vis-
ibility of the other. In that sense, the
West must redouble its efforts to portray
the richness of the debate within the
Muslim world.
The second session, moderated by
Chandra Muzaffar, president of the
International Movement for a Just
World in Malaysia, addressed various
aspects of globalization and the changes
globalization has engendered in recent
years. Participants discussed the impact
these changes have had on Muslim
countries and societies.
Mr. Muzaffar opened the session by not-
ing the complexity of globalization as
a phenomenon that goes beyond the
internationalization of capital and infor-
mation technologies. Globalization also
involves cultural and moral values and
has had particular impact on taste.
Though revolutionary in significant
ways, the current globalization is not sui
generis. History has seen previous waves of
globalization, with the most recent one
taking place during the colonial era.
Similar to today’s movement but on a
smaller scale and at a slower pace, the
Muslim world itself was a major source of
one such wave of globalization, which
rippled out from the Mediterranean
basin several centuries ago, bringing
about transfers of goods, people, infor-
mation, and technology.
The impact of the current globalization
on the Muslim world has been varied,
with positive and negative outcomes for
different nations. Whereas Malaysia, for
15
SESSION II—THE IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION
ON THE MUSLIM WORLD
16
instance, has benefited enormously from
one particular aspect of globalization,
namely, trade, the interwoven interna-
tional financial networks proved
disastrous to the Indonesian economy
during the 1997-1998 Asian financial
crisis. The globalization of communica-
tion technologies, for its part, is exerting
tremendous impact across the Muslim
world, particularly on youth.
The first panelist, Ralf Fücks, member of
the executive board of the Heinrich Böll
Foundation, also stressed the complexity
of globalization, which, he concurred,
was not concerned solely with financial
matters. The societal dimension of glob-
alization has been essential in shaping the
economic and political life of citizens
around the world. By the same token,
globalization itself is shaped in turn by
different sociopolitical and cultural
environments. While some would argue
that the phenomenon is a U.S.-driven
“equalizer” that diminishes local speci-
ficities, Mr. Fücks pointed to its capacity
to promote diversity. One of the vehicles
of that variety, he remarked, is brought
on by global migration and the accompa-
nying visibility of a plethora of cultural
mores (articulated through food, music,
films, and religious practice). Conse-
quently, as goods are transported and sold
all over the world, companies are also
assembling multicultural workforces. Yet
such variety can also create tension,
which can lead to additional gaps between
nations and civilizations, as in the case of
Islam and the West.
The Muslim world is reacting in manifold
ways to recent global transformations,
with some countries and populations
appearing to be able to engage with
the new realities more successfully than
others. What is certain is that key com-
ponents of that successful engagement—
human liberties, rule of law, equal
opportunity, independent media—are
universal rather than merely Western val-
ues, and that, as the 2004 Arab Human
Development Report indicated, these
elements are often lacking in Muslim
societies.9 Mr. Fücks expressed hope that
the next wave of globalization would offer
avenues to lastingly remedy these short-
comings, allow a fair say to the global
South, and multiply ways to avoid civi-
lizational conflict.
The next speaker, Kurt Seinitz, foreign
editor of Die Kronenzeitung, commented
that for all the talk of globalization bring-
ing increased diversity, most Westerners
continue to demonstrate a widespread
lack of basic knowledge about Islam. That
lack is compounded in the West by social
secularization and the accompanying
death of religious taboos, which decreases
interest in and empathy with non-Western
17
religions. Similarly, many Westerners
view Islam as a monolith, and indeed the
demonstrations that took place in the
wake of the cartoons controversy were
regarded as confirmation of this.
Mr. Seinitz added that, to the contrary,
Islam is a globalized world in and of
itself. It is an international community
that includes some of the richest and
poorest countries in the world. Global-
ization presents both these winners and
losers with challenges, much as it does
non-Muslim countries. By and large,
however, few Muslim countries appear to
have made notable contributions to the
current field of information technology.
One reason is because the basic compo-
nents of a viable and fertile economy—a
good investment climate, inexpensive
manufacturing, and market availability—
are often missing in the Muslim world.
To compete economically, it is hoped
that the Muslim world will renew its
golden age of scientific progress and
enlightenment (during which women
were educated and joined the workforce).
Using China as the prime example, Mr.
Seinitz posited that democracy is not a
precondition for modernization. Glob-
alization itself has no moral values.
(On this point, several participants
remarked that there is a basic tendency
for globalization to strengthen democracy.
Hence, in the late 1980s and early 1990s
we witnessed a so-called “third wave” of
democratization that accompanied grow-
ing interdependence.) Mr. Seinitz
pointed to examples of effective models
of modernization and development in
the Muslim world, such as Malaysia and
Turkey. What is needed within the Muslim
world, as these examples demonstrate, is
better governance that encourages mod-
ernization and enables Muslim nations
to prosper from globalization, rather
than suffer its losses.
The panel’s discussant, Mr. Amin, noted
the importance of the Qur’an as the
source of ultimate authority among Mus-
lims. This model of discourse, he
remarked, is characterized by tolerance
with the rewards going to those who do
good. Currently, the United States dom-
inates the rest of the world in terms of its
wealth, military power, and educational
infrastructure. As long as 20 percent of
the world’s population consumes 80
percent of its resources, there will be
trouble and rebellion among those left
out. To address this imbalance, argued
Mr. Amin, there must be reform of the
world economic system.
The subsequent discussion focused
on the costs of globalization for the
Muslim world. Mohamed Jawhar Hassan,
director-general of the Institute of
18
Strategic and International Studies
(Malaysia), pointed out that since global-
ization inherently favors the powerful and
tech-savvy, its costs are highest for those
cultures that can least afford them.
Whereas globalization is generally uncon-
cerned with religion, the Muslim world is
primarily characterized by a common,
vibrant religious heritage. Mr. Jawhar
Hassan indicated that Muslim countries
have four institutional challenges to
surmount (1) an uneven and often insuf-
ficient knowledge base, (2) a lack of
empowerment of the female population,
(3) an absence of participatory gover-
nance, and (4) the prevalence of ethnic
conflicts. Imran Ali, professor at Lahore
University of Management Sciences, added
that the distribution of oil revenues must
be addressed before the Muslim world
can better engage with globalization.
Those internal challenges play out in the
context of global problems that are equally
daunting, noted Mr. Fücks, who cau-
tioned against a relapse into economic
and military imperialism. That trend is
materializing not merely in economic
means but also in military terms. At the
other end of the spectrum, we see the
rise of a novel form of terrorism—the
nonstate, transnational armed group.
These ideologically motivated com-
batants aim to redress injustices by
empowering people rather than states.
Mr. Fücks went on to say that the archi-
tecture of international institutions such
as the United Nations helps maintain
the current global power structure.
Apart from a few cosmetic changes in the
dynamic of institutional engagement
between the World Bank and particular
governments in the South, there has
been no genuine reform of the interna-
tional system. In particular, reform of the
United Nations remains a gnawing, elu-
sive issue. The renewed violence and
anger that the world has witnessed in the
first years of this century is evidence of a
severe institutional imbalance. Mr. Fücks
added that if the world is not able to
transition from reliance on fossil
resources to renewable forms of energy,
future generations may be condemned to
further conflicts over dwindling supplies.
Mr. Amin concurred that the inter-
national economic system must be
reconstructed to accommodate for the
effects of globalization. Previous recon-
figurations of the world economy were
brought about by increased migration,
free exchange of goods, and the advent of
common commodities markets. The
challenge, hence, is not one of capacity
but of rearrangement. Is the West willing
to make another such vast adjustment
today?
19
Mr. Muzaffar offered Malaysia as an
example of a country that has had success
with modernization despite the pressures
of globalization. This, he feels, is due to
five major reasons: (1) a lasting balance
of power among national ethnic groups;
(2) a socially responsible and relatively
honest political leadership since the late
1950s; (3) a sustained economic growth
accompanied by redistribution to bridge
the gap between indigenous and non-
indigenous peoples; (4) an emphasis on
education, irrespective of gender; and
(5) an ever-more ingrained cultural
sense of tolerance at the societal level.
Mr. Langellier expressed that the main
difficulties the Muslim world is facing are
self-imposed. He argued that the rela-
tionship between faith and ideology in
Muslim countries needs to be overhauled
to enable modernization.
Mr. Bulliet, however, noted that these
challenges must be considered from a
historical perspective. The globalization
that occurred between 1000 and 1500
was dominated by the Muslim world and
witnessed a massive movement of knowl-
edge, science, art, and philosophy from
Islam to the West. The West’s leadership
at the time—like some in the Muslim
world today—resorted to violence,
notably the Crusades, to regain power.
Returning to the notion of dialogue, Mr.
Nizami suggested that language itself can
become a barrier. Therefore, the chal-
lenge is to find ways to deploy language in
ways that achieve progress rather than
create more problems. To do so, our dis-
course must be pragmatic, honest, and
dispassionate. An examination of the
assumptions that surround notions of
governance, accountability, and democ-
racy, for instance, could potentially
unearth a wealth of insights into policy
reform.
Mr. Boot interjected that the post-1500s
rise of the West was linked to sophisti-
cated currency practice (interest, bonds,
and stocks) and that adoption of those
practices by the Muslim world would have
huge socioeconomic benefit. Israel, he
argued, achieved its own good fortune by
installing a free market and promoting
education for women. Unlike many Arab
countries, he insisted, Israel does not
blame its problems on others.
Mr. Muzaffar remarked that the impor-
tance of domestic reform is widely
acknowledged throughout the Muslim
world. It is the global dimensions of
these political questions that need fur-
ther examination. In particular, he
differed with the assumption that good
governance necessarily brings progress.
Prior to the Gulf War, Iraq enjoyed a
20
first-rate heath care system, high levels of
education (including among women),
and a vast public infrastructure, yet the
country’s leadership made the wrong
geopolitical choices. Mr. Muzaffar stated
that the Middle East’s problems come
from oil and Israel’s predatory stance,
and it is high time that these be addressed.
Both Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar
at the American Enterprise Institute, and
Mr. Charney took strong exception to
Mr. Muzaffar’s statement on Israel.
At the session’s close, Mr. Ali stated that
the global transfer of resources must
indeed be put in historical context and
the arrogance that plagues the Western
discourse must likewise be examined.
Mr. Amin concurred, stressing that
Westernization is not necessarily mod-
ernization, nor is democracy a panacea.
Recent decades have brought extraordi-
nary transformations in information
technology and in biotechnology, the
collective impact of which has been felt
worldwide. These transformations often
reinforce feelings of powerlessness
among those who have not benefited.
This session explored the challenges that
these developments pose for govern-
ments, societies, and traditional moral
authorities, as well as for ordinary citizens.
The session’s chair, Ronald Lehman,
director of the Center for Global Secu-
rity Research at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in the United
States, opened by identifying the role of
science in facilitating intercivilizational
engagement and its ability to build
bridges that transcend differences and
to offer shared opportunities to improve
lives around the world. However,
particular scientific discoveries and
applications of technology can create
tensions when they conflict with cultural
practices and religious beliefs.
Mr. Lehman raised four questions to
lead the discussion. First, noting that
participation in the global high-tech sec-
tor is made possible by education that is
not equally accessible to all, he asked how
science and technology can reach out to
the different strata within communities.
Second, he inquired whether faith and
science advance together in the Muslim
21
SESSION III—THE CHALLENGES POSED BY SCI-ENCE AND TECHNOLOGY TO THE
MUSLIM-WESTERN RELATIONSHIP
22
world and beyond, or whether they are
adversaries. Third, Mr. Lehman won-
dered whether the Muslim world was
transitioning from consumer to pro-
ducer of technology at home and abroad
and the implications of such evolution
for the Muslim-Western relationship.
Fourth, he asked how scientific coopera-
tion between Muslims and Westerners
could contribute to international peace
and security and could mitigate the dan-
ger of “dual use” technology, such as
nuclear energy.
The first speaker, Imran Ali, prefaced his
remarks by making three underlying
statements about the issue of technology.
He noted, first, that there is no contra-
diction between Islam as a religion and
the scientific pursuit of knowledge. Like
all religions, however, Islam places cer-
tain moral limits on the application of
science, proscribing, for example, the
use of ultrasound technology in the serv-
ice of fetal sex selection. Second, during
the past five centuries, the Muslim world
has been beset by a downturn in scientific
production, while the Renaissance and
the Industrial Revolution led to dramatic
advances in Western technology. Third,
the technology gap was reinforced by the
subjugation of most Muslim countries
during the colonial era. As global tech-
nological transformations continue to
accelerate, will the gap widen, or will
there be a breakthrough in the Muslim
production of high-quality, scientific
advancement?
Mr. Ali noted that in quantitative terms
there are many centers of technological
research in the Muslim world, but the
limited quality of their contributions
hinders the Muslim world’s competitive-
ness. While there are many top-notch
individuals in the sciences, they rarely
aggregate into first-rate schools or
departments. With the notable exception
of Turkey, and, to a lesser extent,
Indonesia and Iran, the Muslim world
lacks industrial clusters that produce and
patent technology. Excluding only the
resource-based sectors (oil and gas),
there are few, if any, companies based in
the Muslim world that could be included
in the top 500 worldwide. These defi-
ciencies urgently need to be addressed.
Mr. Ali felt that current prospects for a
scientific and technological revolution in
the Muslim world are dim. On the eco-
nomic front, where there are advances,
such as in the large and dynamic “grey-
market” sector, they tend to undermine
the structural profitability of bona fide
activities. Additionally, the removal of
subsidies in many countries, com-
pounded by rising production costs, has
further diminished competitiveness.
Apart from oil-driven activities, Muslim
23
economies score low in innovation-
based production. The private sector is
still factory based and has not moved to a
more agile, digital platform. This tech-
nological frailty also has military
consequences: most Muslim countries
have no significant technologically
advanced weaponry. The economic,
geopolitical, and strategic implications of
globalization are, hence, linked.
The second speaker, Mustafa Ceric,
grand mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
began by examining the relationship
between faith and science. He noted that
science is a tool used for achieving
human goals, but it is not a goal in and
of itself. This relationship has always
underscored the interaction between
theologians and scientists. Intellectual
tolerance has been a distinctive feature of
Islam for centuries, including lengthy
periods during which other civilizations
were stuck in their dark ages. The dra-
matic decline of the high scientific
profile of the Islamic world challenges a
staging of a “comeback,” while avoiding
both assimilation through secularization
and the isolation that would result from
a rejection of globalization.
The next speaker, Rainer Wessel, presi-
dent of Ganymed Pharmaceuticals,
began by highlighting that technology
poses great challenges to us all, regardless
of location or faith. Mr. Wessel stressed
that the current era is witnessing a
momentous technological revolution
fueled by three areas of innovation:
information technology, biotechnology,
and nanotechnology. The publication of
the human genome in 2001 constituted
a landmark event encapsulating this
recent history. While scientists them-
selves have placed ethical limits on their
own research, the overarching challenge
today is closing the gap between fast-
developing technology and legislation
that is not keeping pace. He suggested
that there is a role for nongovernmental
organizations, such as the recently
launched International Council for the
Life Sciences, to provide independent,
field-based regulation.
Mr. Wessel explained that the United
States has led the way in recent scientific
progress—particularly in biotechnology—
with Europe and Asia closely following.
As technology has become the principal
driving force behind these economies,
potential abuses of its products also
increase. Technology is inherently nei-
ther good nor bad: what matters is the
use to which it is put. Pressing ethical
questions regarding the application of
technology have been posed across dif-
ferent cultures, polities, and religions,
with the debate constantly shifting along
with scientific innovation.
24
Mr. Wessel concluded by stating that sci-
ences seem to flourish better in open
societies. With science now a major driv-
ing force behind successful economies,
he pointed to the need for economic and
political liberalization in Muslim coun-
tries to stir scientific development.
The panel’s discussant, Mark Smolinski,
director of the Global Health and Secu-
rity Initiative and vice president for
Biological Programs at the Nuclear
Threat Initiative (NTI) based in Wash-
ington, D.C., discussed the work of his
organization to improve global capacity
for prevention of and preparedness to
biological threats through enhanced dis-
ease surveillance, early detection, and
response. A consequence of globalization
is that diseases spread quickly and over
great distances, as demonstrated by
recent severe acute respiratory system
(SARS) and Asian bird flu epidemics.
The NTI is working to establish regional
organizations to monitor and respond to
infectious diseases and has launched one
such pilot program in the Middle East
involving Israel, the Palestinian Author-
ity, Egypt, and Jordan—demonstrating
that regional cooperation in the arena of
science and technology is possible even in
a volatile area.
Mr. Bulliet launched this portion of the
discussion by questioning the relationship
between Western-trained Muslim scien-
tists and scientific development in their
home countries. Just as the repatriation
of U.S.-based Chinese and Indian scien-
tists has contributed in no small measure
to these countries’ recent economic suc-
cesses, could the same not be true for the
Muslim world? Mr. Ali responded that,
at this point, many Muslim scientists
return to their countries of origin only
to find that they cannot make a signifi-
cant contribution in the absence of a
professional environment conducive to
sustained scientific creation. With scarce
research possibilities and a culture of
bureaucratic and institutional impedi-
ments—and with no apparent leadership
invested in resolving these problems—
Muslim scientists often find it impossible
to live and work in their home countries.
The Islamic world must culturally reinvest
in the sciences to stem this brain drain.
Mr. Bulliet also pointed out that major
scientific contributions during the Mus-
lim golden age took advantage of that
civilization’s permeability and lack of
national boundaries. Today, technolog-
ical pursuit is centered nationally,
whereas Muslim scientists might fare best
by creating regional networks.
Hussein Solomon, director of the Cen-
ter for International Political Studies at
the University of Pretoria, endorsed Mr.
25
Wessel’s statement about the link between
technology and open societies and added
that changes in educational systems—
shifting away from rote learning to critical
inquiry—are necessary to foster a revival
of technological progress in the Muslim
world. This must also be supported by
active recruitment of and competitive
salaries for promising scientists. Abdel-
majid Charfi, professor emeritus of
humanities and Islamic studies at the
University of Tunis, concurred, adding
that dogmatic training and memory-based
education, as opposed to open-minded
engagement, are conducive neither to
proper education nor scientific produc-
tion. Mina Al-Oraibi, a journalist for
Asharq Al-Awsat, noted that these chal-
lenges are compounded by an urgent
sense among Arab youth of having to catch
up with fast-paced global transformations.
Mr. Fücks questioned the existence of
such a discipline as “Islamic science.”
Religion could be a source for ethical
guidance in science, he offered, but reli-
gion should not interfere with science.
This concern is not unique to Islam, but
one that is relevant to Christianity as
well, with regard to the teaching of evo-
lution, for example. Several participants
agreed that Muslims should avoid adding
the qualifier “Islamic” to science or other
fields, as this demonstrates cultural inse-
curity and does not offer a constructive
solution to the problems faced by
Muslim countries.
Vitaly Naumkin, president of the Inter-
national Center for Strategic Studies in
Moscow, wondered whether it might be
useful to develop a Muslim scientific
strategy or a joint Muslim vision of sci-
ence. He also raised the question of
whether measures adopted in the West
for security reasons, such as the increased
difficulty encountered by Muslims apply-
ing for visas to work or study in the
United States, were preventing Muslims
from gaining access to the information
and education necessary for technological
advancement. Mr. Wessel acknowledged
that restrictions on the flow of knowl-
edge are indeed a problem, not only
between the Islamic and Western worlds,
but within the West as well. Although
such restrictions do not impair science
itself and are mostly limited to regulating
sensitive matters, certain people are
excluded from information that could
serve them better. For example, it is
important that scientists in the Muslim
world know about virulent viruses in
order to make antibodies to fight them.
The threat that such knowledge could fall
into the hands of terrorists seeking bio-
logical weapons is offset by the benefits
this knowledge would bring in the battle
against infectious diseases.
26
The discussion then turned toward
sources of funding for research and
development in the Muslim world with
Mr. Wessel remarking that although there
is significant funding available from
Muslim individuals—particularly in the
Gulf countries—such support is not
always effectively distributed across the
Muslim world.
Mr. Nizami raised the problem of the
widespread assumption of the West’s cen-
trality in scientific matters, specifically
the idea that progress demands the mir-
roring of Western history. Although the
Enlightenment made future scientific
advances possible, these, in turn,
depended on Muslim philosophical and
scientific contributions of an earlier era.
Furthermore, Mr. Nizami added, much of
Europe’s success rested on the institu-
tionalized monopoly of patent protections
and secured markets. Given that today’s
Muslim societies have neither of these
capabilities, can they do the same?
Mr. Ali suggested that while the Euro-
pean system cannot be replicated in the
Muslim world, there are other models
for industrialization that could be
instructive. To create climates conducive
to scientific development, governments
across the Muslim world must establish
and institutionalize private property
rights, which would stimulate a virtuous
cycle of investment and returns. Ulti-
mately, Muslim countries must “set their
own shops right,” and this begins with
elites who all too often enrich themselves
with little regard to the welfare of their
less fortunate countrymen.
The session closed with Mr. Ceric noting
that Islam and the West have the oppor-
tunity to build trust around the interplay
between science, politics, and theology by
cementing technological interdepend-
ence and enabling strong international
regulatory systems.
The last session of the conference sought
to draw on the panel discussions in order
to make recommendations for American
and Western policy in general toward the
Muslim world and vice versa, including
the establishment of formal mechanisms
for dialogue.
The session chair, Stephen Heintz, pres-
ident of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
opened the discussion by noting that the
logic behind such a conference is to
advance policies that reflect a broadly
shared vision of constructive, coopera-
tive, far-sighted, and principled global
engagement. An effort of this type seeks
to amplify a wider range of voices than
would otherwise be heard. In doing so, it
strengthens the relationship between
Muslim and Western societies. Inasmuch
as U.S. foreign policy, in particular, will
continue to have a profound influence
on the world’s ability to cope with com-
plex global challenges, it is essential to try
to reduce the current destabilizing ten-
sions by promoting mutual respect and
understanding and by encouraging col-
laboration among Muslim and Western
societies in managing global challenges.
This endeavor recognizes, too, that both
the Muslim and Western civilizations are
engaged in parallel internal debates
about their respective identities, futures,
and places in a rapidly changing, increas-
ingly interconnected world.
27
28
Mr. Heintz noted that, in addition to the
media, our policies and actions speak for
us. Each side must therefore constantly
inquire whether its policies, both domes-
tic and foreign, correspond to informed
attitudes about the other. Mr. Heintz
expressed concern that the mutual per-
ceptions of the Muslim world by the
Western world and vice versa seem ever-
more distrustful, hence the importance of
dialogue in devising a lasting framework
for the Muslim-Western relationship.
Such a framework, offered Mr. Heintz,
could feature the following five compo-
nents: (1) measures to restore and
increase trust; (2) the use of accurate and
impartial language to describe relation-
ships and shared aspirations; (3) the
application of professional norms that will
ensure media responsibility; (4) reform
of international institutions to render
globalization more inclusive, equitable,
and sustainable; and (5) greater exchange
in the realms of education and science.
The first speaker, Usman Bugaje, chair-
man of the House Committee on Foreign
Affairs in Nigeria, started by noting that
dialogue between Islam and the West is
not just desirable, it also offers the only
route out of the current situation of ten-
sion and mistrust. Although the search
for understanding may bring to light
uncomfortable truths, both cultures
need to educate themselves about the
other. Two such “uncomfortable truths”
to note at the outset of this process are
that (1) any dialogue will inevitably
involve a discussion on power as the cur-
rency of achievement and on current
power structures and (2) the acceptance
of difference is a sine qua non of progress.
It bears reminding, stressed Mr. Bugaje,
that what applies to one religion does not
necessarily apply to another, and that
unity is not synonymous with uniformity.
The Muslim and Western worlds face dif-
ferent challenges. For Muslims, the
present challenge is threefold. First, it
concerns democratization of the inter-
pretation of religious texts. The “gates of
ijtihad” must be reopened, Mr. Bugaje
maintained; the text is divine but its
interpretation is human, a principle of
Muslim scriptures themselves. Second,
Muslims must tackle the challenge of
education more directly and efficiently,
particularly by rekindling their intellec-
tual curiosity instead of proscribing
fields of study. Third, in the face of per-
sistent dysfunction, the need for Muslim
countries to embrace “good governance”
has become imperative; the first step is
the empowerment of civil societies to
challenge their governments to live up to
the standards of Islam.
29
According to Mr. Bugaje, the challenge is
similarly threefold for the West. First, the
question of double standards toward the
Muslim world must be addressed with a
view of correcting misconceptions and
ensuring equal treatment for Muslims.
Second, the Western world must relin-
quish its claims to ownership of
“civilization” in general and science and
technology in particular. Too often,
Westerners ignore or minimize others’
contributions toward global progress.
The degree of dominance that the West
currently enjoys gives it all the more rea-
son to create space for participation by
the rest of the world and Muslims in par-
ticular. Third, while no values are
absolute, the West might benefit from
stating a broadly shared set of values.
These respective challenges, concluded
Mr. Bugaje, are underscored by the
urgent need for both sides to work on
communication with one another.
The next speaker, Mohamed Charfi,
professor emeritus of law at the Univer-
sity of Tunis and former minister of
education (Tunisia), opened by taking
stock of the historically rocky relation-
ship between the Muslim and Western
worlds, which has ranged from hostile to
cooperative. For the past 100 years, the
relationship has been framed around the
question of colonization and its after-
math. Three geographical areas continue
to fuel conflict and misunderstanding:
Palestine, Chechnya, and Iraq. The
sooner just and lasting solutions to these
gnawing rivalries can be found, the bet-
ter the prospects for good relations
between Muslims and Westerners.
Since positive developments often escape
the world’s notice, Mr. Charfi pointed
out that many Muslim countries have, by
and large, taken control of their political
and economic destinies. Efforts have
been particularly effective in Malaysia
and Turkey. The dichotomy between suc-
cess and frustration may come down to
which parts of the Muslim community
focus on criticism as opposed to self-
criticism. The former group indulges in
a blame game, entertaining notions of a
Western conspiracy; such a negative
approach, argued Mr. Charfi, leads to
self-victimization and is ultimately a dead
end. The alternative is to respond to the
challenges facing the Muslim world by
engaging in self-examination, diagnosis
of concrete problems, and ultimately
long-term domestic transformation.
Echoing Mr. Bugaje’s analysis, Mr.
Charfi identified four realms that repre-
sent challenges for the Muslim world
today: freedom, equality, good gover-
nance, and education. He placed
emphasis, in particular, on freedom,
which he indicated should be thought of
30
not merely as a “buzz word” but in its
full implications, notably, tolerance of
dissent, both internal and external.
Equality, for its part, must be under-
stood especially in relation to gender
issues; Islam cannot be used to justify
limitations on women’s rights when the
religion’s very ethos is of humanity and
empowerment. As for good governance,
it first and foremost requires trans-
parency, separation of powers, and
respect for the rule of law. Regarding
education, Mr. Charfi stressed the need
for modernization and more critical
thinking in the Muslim world. A proper
educational system is one that not only
teaches its students how to use their
minds but is also open to foreign contri-
butions. As several participants pointed
out throughout the conference, knowl-
edge of other cultures is essential for
survival in a global world.
The next speaker, Wilhelm Höynck, for-
mer secretary-general of the Organization
for Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE), argued that future interactions
between the Muslim and Western worlds
depend on tolerance but also on the very
real challenge of its implementation. One
such meaningful and practical step, he
suggested, is support for the Alliance of
Civilizations, the UN initiative launched
in July 2005, which seeks to bridge
civilizational divides and overcome
prejudice, misperceptions, and polariza-
tion among cultures. It is equally
important to develop adequate and
innovative institutional responses for
proactive management of rapidly escalating
crises. Admittedly, noted Mr. Höynck,
this is a monumental task that calls for a
balanced and cooperative effort.
He raised three principal objectives for
those concerned with improving the
relationship between Islam and the West:
(1) protecting individuals and groups
from acts of intolerance and discrimina-
tion; (2) safeguarding societies against
the actions of religious extremists; and
(3) intensifying knowledge-based dia-
logue to address disagreements. Beyond
such institutions as the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe
and the League of Arab States, the
untapped potential of a larger set of
regional actors is an additional asset
toward accomplishing these goals.
Mr. Höynck cautioned that one must be
realistic in assessing the very real chal-
lenges facing Muslim-Western relations.
The more attempts at dialogue fail, the
more people will lose heart, and the
more frustrations will build. He closed
on an optimistic note, however, suggest-
ing that the experience in building a
unified Europe from among once antag-
onistic states should offer hope for
31
a lasting, peaceful solution to conflicts
between the Muslim world and the West.
The discussant, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, sec-
retary-general of the Muslim Council of
Britain, outlined two options for moving
forward. The negative option is to dwell
on what has not been done and continue
to lament the status quo. A positive
approach is to assess the challenges and
forge ahead by listening (to the other)
with an open mind. Specifically, it is
unhelpful to construe a view of Islam that
does away with the religion’s intrinsic
variety. A positive approach offers greater
prospects for building mutual respect,
anticipating or defusing crises, breaking
down monolithic preconceptions, and
working together on the challenges that
unite Muslims and Westerners.
Sir Iqbal agreed with Mr. Bugaje’s analy-
sis that the interaction between Muslims
and Westerners has a long history shaped
by ideas and science but primarily by
power—its presence, absence, uses, and
impact. The two civilizations are now in
a postcolonization phase, dealing with
the fallout from decolonization and, in
some quarters, a dangerous yearning for
imperial power. The outcome of this
phase of the relationship depends on the
Muslim world to implement equitable,
democratic, and well-governed systems
recognizing the rights of women.
According to Sir Iqbal, the West must in
turn (1) widen the definition of citizen-
ship to confer rights and societal
responsibilities not merely legally, but
communally, in acceptance of people of
different cultural backgrounds; (2) inte-
grate this citizenry—and especially the
youth—in a dynamic way without impos-
ing a sterile and alienating uniformity;
and (3) foster an inclusive society intol-
erant of prejudice.
In the general discussion that ensued,
participants concurred on the impor-
tance of self-criticism and introspection
within both the Western and Islamic
worlds. Mr. Muravchik remarked that the
West has a system of permanent soul-
searching built on the cornerstones of
freedom and democracy, which includes
opposition parties, a free press, and an
active intelligentsia that is at liberty to
criticize those in power. By contrast, he
pointed to the current situation in the
Islamic world where several newspapers
in different countries, including in
Malaysia, had been shut down, and edi-
tors fired, for reprinting the Danish
cartoons.
Mr. Muravchik added that a positive out-
come to the conference and a validation
for the process of dialogue would be for
the delegates to issue a far-reaching,
intercommunal statement that would
32
condemn, in all forms, defamation that
offends religious sensibilities across faiths.
Ramón Pérez-Maura, vice-editor of
Diario ABC, agreed with the importance
of institutional vehicles, such as the newly
formed Alliance of Civilizations, to fur-
ther mutual recognition. Such efforts
require strong leadership in order to
fairly and comprehensively represent the
idiosyncrasies and traditions of each side.
For example, he remarked, the Christian
lineage of the West (once referred to as
Christendom) must be acknowledged as a
lasting influence on large segments of the
Western population.
In that respect, Mr. Fücks posited that
while the West tends to be defined (and
defines itself) as a set of institutions and
values, roughly circumscribed geograph-
ically, Islam is understood and paints
itself as a religious community spread
over a number of specific countries but
global in its presence. This configura-
tion, he remarked, raises the issue of
difference between the provinces of faith
(a set of personal beliefs grounded in the
absolute truth of divine power) and pol-
itics (in which there is no absolute truth).
Participants further addressed the ques-
tion of power and the notion of its
limitations, primarily the requirements
of justice. Mr. Riza noted that when
the politically and socioeconomically
aggrieved do not find justice, they often
turn to use of force. He reiterated the call
for reform of international institutions,
such as the UN Security Council, to give a
greater stake to less powerful states. Hoda
Badran, chairperson of the Alliance for
Arab Women, remarked that the persist-
ence of double standards perpetuates
injustices and, therefore, the sometimes
violent acts undertaken to right them.
While noting that the conference had been
useful from his perspective, Mr. Solomon
urged that the discussion on how to
improve Muslim-Western relations should
move beyond elite circles to encompass
grassroots activists in communities and
the faithful in churches, mosques, and
synagogues. Truly effective dialogue must
embrace all strata of societies.
The session closed with Mr. Heintz high-
lighting three main areas of insight that
emerged during the discussion that could
be further developed as follows: (1)
reorienting the framing of the current
relationship away from the religion/
region dyad; (2) reforming global insti-
tutions such as the United Nations, the
International Monetary Fund, and the
World Bank to ensure greater justice in
their operations; and (3) empowering
transnational civil society to play a larger
role in intercivilizational dialogue.
At the close of the conference, Mustapha
Tlili, founder and director of Dialogues
and coconvener of the event, noted the
positive tone that had characterized the
debates. These had not been easy discus-
sions especially in the context of divisive
international events, but the group man-
aged to strike the proper balance between
honest, no holds-barred exchange and
joint construction of a positive vision of
the future.
A major challenge facing both this gath-
ering and the Muslim and Western
civilizations at large is that of finding
lasting ways to work and live together.
Meanwhile, each culture is undergoing
massive and rapid transformations and
thereby altering perceptions of itself
and of others. The resulting opportunity
to improve relationships demands a role
for those able to speak “better” for Islam
and the West. This forum, it is hoped,
will be reconvened annually to facilitate
that process.
The conference was formally brought to
a close by Mohammad Najib Abdul
Razak, deputy prime minister of
Malaysia, who also applauded the spirit of
cooperation and understanding that
characterized its proceedings. Mr. Abdul
Razak noted that the early-21st century
has been a troubled period characterized
by fracture, confusion, violence, and a
Muslim-Western relationship fraught
33
CLOSING SESSION
34
with tension and mistrust. This unfortu-
nate state of affairs has contributed to a
rise in intolerance, brought into sharp
focus by the Danish cartoons crisis.
By rationally and dispassionately tackling
the issues of who speaks for Islam and
who speaks for the West, this conference
has managed to distance itself produc-
tively from the currents of anger and
hatred that underlie civilizational mis-
trust. It has also attempted to allow the
reasoned and cultured voices of the many
tolerant Muslims and Westerners to
come to the forefront of the dialogue.
To be certain, Muslims and Westerners
will always hold different worldviews
grounded in their own philosophical tra-
ditions as well as their distinct historical
experiences. Yet the process pursued
here can contribute to mutual under-
standing. Although solutions will not
immediately materialize, the exercise
itself and the wide dissemination of its
results—beyond academe and expert
groups—will sow seeds of greater under-
standing between Islam and the West.
The conference “Who Speaks for Islam?
Who Speaks for the West?” was anchored
in three moments: (1) a historical
outlook on the long-standing issues
characterizing the difficult relationship
between Islam and the West; (2) the dra-
matic events and global changes of the
post-September 11, 2001, era; and (3)
the immediate escalation of that dynamic
in the context of the Danish cartoons
crisis that erupted shortly before the
conference. Against this multilayered
context, conference discussions aimed at
three objectives: (1) reining in the forces
of irresponsibility, insensitivity, and
intolerance; (2) engaging constructively
in critical self-reflection; and (3)
considering creatively the practical policy
implications of these outcomes.
An immediate and widely shared conclu-
sion was the rejection of the inevitability
of the clash of civilizations, indeed, of
the notion of clash itself. Participants
preferred to frame the current situation
as a “difficult moment” of disagreement
and differing perceptions and interpre-
tations, echoing the consensus reached
by participants in Dialogues’ first interna-
tional conference, “Clash of Civilizations
or Clash of Perceptions?” held in
Granada, Spain, in October 2002.
35
CONCLUSIONS
36
To be certain, profound differences exist
and were acknowledged by participants,
notably the interesting paradox that, in
the view of some participants, resides at
the heart of the relationship between
Islam and the West. These participants
argued that from a religion devoid of a
clergy and intercessionary corps, Islam
evolved historically toward more institu-
tionalized forms of practice and,
especially, discourse. This is particularly
true in modern times, as demonstrated
in regional and international policy pro-
nouncements in crisis situations. The
West, however, has moved from central-
ized and highly organized religious
structures, embodied for centuries in the
power of the Catholic Church, toward
multifaceted practice and no particular
cohesion in its public discourse.
The second major aspect of the discus-
sions was the identification of the
contradictory tendencies and percep-
tions, including illegitimate ones, which
increasingly characterize the exchange
between Islam and the West. Specifically,
the “hijacking of discourse” by radicals
on both sides was understood as a signif-
icant impediment to progress and
genuine dialogue. Strengthened educa-
tional structures, more responsible
media, and improved societal tolerance
were identified as conditions for estab-
lishing proper trust and understanding.
Third, the discussions demonstrated
strong existing incentives for overcoming
misperceptions. Among these, the apo-
litical role of technology (and of a global
community of scientists) is an asset that
can be made to work, in particular, to the
benefit of the Muslim world.
The debates also showcased a variety of
perspectives in relation to both the locus
of the problem between Islam and the
West and the type and extent of prescrip-
tions necessary to address it. Whereas
some argued that something “went
wrong” in the Muslim world causing
socioeconomic and technological
decline, others regarded politics as the
crux of the conflict.
Disagreements also emerged concerning
the core values of each civilization and
how these could be affected by an effort
to ameliorate the relationship with “the
other.” With the Danish cartoons crisis
weighing on participants’ minds, some
were adamant that free speech, though
not absolute, is preeminent and could
suffer no relativisms. Others considered
mutual respect a value equal with free
speech and argued that, for all its sanc-
tity, freedom of expression could not
excuse disrespect of “the other.”
As for prescriptions for improving
the Muslim-Western relationship, the
37
conference raised more questions than it
could hope to answer. Are urgent changes
needed domestically, regionally, or glob-
ally? Is the breaking of some long-held
practices a factor ushering positive change
and modernization, or is it merely dis-
ruptive and counterproductive?
Finally, consensus was achieved where it
most matters: participants unanimously
reaffirmed the principles of coexistence
and civilized alliance, which are essential
to an informed reappraisal and recali-
bration of the relationship between Islam
and the West. The conference’s proceed-
ings constitute a flexible platform upon
which such recalibration can begin.
38
1. See the report “Clash of Civiliza-
tions or Clash of Perceptions?”
online at www.islamuswest.org.
2. See the White House press release,
“President Bush Welcomes King
Abdullah of Jordan to the White
House,” issued February 8, 2006,
and online at www.whitehouse.gov/
news/releases/2006/02/20060208
-1.html.
3. As quoted in Dan Bilefsky, “Muslim
Protesters Ignore Appeals for
Calm,” International Herald Tribune,
February 9, 2006.
4. See “Around the World, Leaders
Weigh in on Cartoons, Riots,” Daily
Star, February 9, 2006.
5. This “Message to the Conference on
‘Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks
for the West?’ Kuala Lumpur, Feb-
ruary 10-11, 2006,” was delivered
by Iqbal Riza, special adviser to the
secretary-general on the Alliance of
Civilizations, as part of the opening
session.
6. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Kitch-
ener, Ontario: Batoche Books,
2001 [1859]), p. 49.
7. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism,
Reason, and Religion (New York:
Routledge, 1992).
8. Talisma Nasreen is an outspoken
Bangladeshi feminist writer who was
charged with blasphemy by the
Bangladeshi government for her
1992 novel Lajja (Shame), which
depicted the tragedy that befell a
Hindu family in Bangladesh follow-
ing the destruction of a mosque by
Hindu fundamentalists in India.
She was forced to flee Bangladesh in
1994 after a fatwa calling for her
death was issued by the militant
group the Council of the Soldiers of
Islam. She now lives in exile in
India.
9. Arab Human Development Report
2004: Towards Freedom in the Arab
World (New York: United Nations
Publications, 2004).
NOTES TO SESSIONS
40
FEBRUARY 10, 2006
OPENING SESSION
9:00–9:30 A.M.
Opening Ceremony
Introductory Remarks by
Mustapha Tlili, Founder and Director,
Dialogues: Islamic World-U.S.-The West,
New York University
Fauziah Mohd Taib, Director
General, Institute of Diplomacy and
Foreign Relations Malaysia
Welcome by
Syed Hamid Albar, Foreign
Minister of Malaysia
9:30-10:00 A.M.
Opening address by
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, Prime
Minister of Malaysia
10:00-10:30 A.M.
Break
SESSION I—IMPROVING MUTUAL
PERCEPTION THROUGH THE MEDIA
10:30 A.M.-12:30 P.M.
Moderator
Iqbal Riza, Special Adviser to
the UN Secretary-General on the
Alliance of Civilizations and his
representative at the conference
Speakers
Timothy Garton Ash, Director,
European Studies Centre, St. Antony’s
College, Oxford University (United
Kingdom)
Max Boot, Senior Fellow, National
Security Studies, Council on Foreign
Relations (United States)
Boutheina Cheriet, Professor at
the University of Algiers and former
Minister of Women’s Affairs
(Algeria)
Mohammad Khatami, former
President of Iran
Discussant
Feisal Abdul Rauf, Chairman,
Cordoba Initiative (United States)
12:30-2:30 P.M.
Friday prayers/lunch
SESSION II—THE IMPACT
OF GLOBALIZATION ON THE
MUSLIM WORLD
2:30-4:30 P.M.
Moderator
Chandra Muzaffar, President,
International Movement
for a Just World (Malaysia)
APPENDIX I: CONFERENCE PROGRAM
41
Speakers
Ralf Fücks, Executive Board,
Heinrich Böll Foundation (Germany)
Kurt Seinitz, Foreign Editor,
Die Kronenzeitung (Austria)
Discussant
A. Riawan Amin, President Director,
Bank Muamalat (Indonesia)
4:30 P.M.
Break
8:00-10:00 P.M.
Group dinner with keynote address
by Mohammad Khatami, former
President of Iran
FEBRUARY 11
SESSION III—THE CHALLENGES
POSED BY SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY TO THE
MUSLIM-WESTERN RELATIONSHIP
8:30-10:30 A.M.
Moderator
Ronald Lehman, Director, Center
for Global Security Research, Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory
(United States)
Speakers
Imran Ali, Professor, Lahore University
of Management Sciences (Pakistan)
Raisu-l-Ulama Mustafa Ceric,
Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina
Rainer Wessel, President and CEO,
Ganymed Pharmaceuticals (Germany)
Discussant
Mark Smolinski, Director, Global
Health and Security Initiative and Vice
President for Biological Programs,
Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI)
(United States)
10:30-11:00 A.M.
Break
SESSION IV—WHAT IS THE
FUTURE FRAMEWORK FOR THE
MUSLIM–WESTERN RELATIONSHIP?
11:00 A.M.-1:00 P.M.
Moderator
Stephen Heintz, President of
the Rockefeller Brothers Fund
(United States)
Speakers
Usman Bugaje, Chairman, House
Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Nigerian Parliament (Nigeria)
Mohamed Charfi, Professor Emeritus
of Law, University of Tunis, and former
Minister of Education (Tunisia)
42
Wilhelm Höynck, former Secretary
General of the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE) and personal representative
of the current OSCE Secretary
General
Discussant
Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary General
of the Muslim Council of Britain
(United Kingdom)
1:00-3:00 P.M.
Group lunch with keynote address by
Timothy Garton Ash,
Director, European Studies Centre,
St. Antony’s College, Oxford
University (United Kingdom)
CLOSING SESSION
3:30-4:00 P.M.
Closing address by
Mohammad Najib Abdul Razak,
Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia
44
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Chairman, Cordoba Initiative
(United States)
Ajmal M. Razak Al-Aidrus
Deputy Dean for Academic Affairs,
International Institute of Islamic
Thought and Civilization, International
Islamic University (Malaysia)
Imran Ali
Professor, Lahore University of
Management Sciences (Pakistan)
Mockbul Ali
Islamic Issues Adviser, Foreign
and Commonwealth Office
(United Kingdom)
Mina Al-Oraibi
Journalist, Asharq Al-Awsat
(United Kingdom)
A. Riawan Amin
President Director, Bank Muamalat
(Indonesia)
Mohammed Arkoun
Professor Emeritus of Islamic Thought
at the Sorbonne (Algeria/France)
Danuta Garton Ash
Open University (United Kingdom)
Timothy Garton Ash
Director, European Studies Centre,
St. Antony’s College, Oxford University
(United Kingdom)
Hoda Badran
Chairperson, Alliance for Arab
Women (Egypt)
Max Boot
Senior Fellow, National Security
Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
(United States)
Usman Bugaje
Chairman, House Committee on
Foreign Affairs, Nigerian Parliament
Richard Bulliet
Professor of History, Middle East
Institute, Columbia University
(United States)
Raisu-l-Ulama Mustafa Ceric
Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina
Abdelmajid Charfi
Professor Emeritus of Humanities and
Islamic Studies, University of Tunis
(Tunisia)
APPENDIX II: LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
45
Mohamed Charfi
Professor Emeritus of Law, University
of Tunis, and former Minister of
Education (Tunisia)
Craig Charney
President, Charney Research
(United States)
Boutheina Cheriet
Professor of Sociology, University of
Algiers, and former Minister of
Women’s Affairs (Algeria)
Ralf Fücks
Executive Board, Heinrich Böll
Foundation (Germany)
Nicolas Galey
Special Adviser to the Foreign Minister
(France)
Karl von Habsburg
President, Pan-European Movement
of Austria and former member of the
European Parliament (Austria)
Mohamed Jawhar Hassan
Director-General, Institute of Strategic
and International Studies (Malaysia)
Stephen Heintz
President, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
(United States)
Karen Brooks Hopkins
President, Brooklyn Academy of Music
(United States)
Wilhelm Höynck
former Secretary General of the Orga-
nization for Security and Co-operation
in Europe (Germany)
Rastam Mohd Isa
Secretary General, Ministry of Foreign
Affairs (Malaysia)
Kamar Oniah Kamaruzaman
Associate Professor, International
Islamic University (Malaysia)
Shahran Kasim
President, Malaysian Islamic Youth
Movement (ABIM) (Malaysia)
Mohammad Khatami
former President of Iran
Jean-Pierre Langellier
Le Monde Correspondent in the
United Kingdom and Ireland (France)
Ronald Lehman
Director, Center for Global Security
Research, Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (United States)
46
Joshua Muravchik
Resident Scholar, American Enterprise
Institute (United States)
Chandra Muzaffar
President of the International
Movement for a Just World (JUST)
(Malaysia)
Vitaly Naumkin
President, International Centre for
Strategic and Political Studies (Russia)
Farhan Nizami
Prince of Wales Fellow in the Study of
the Islamic World and Director of the
Oxford Center for Islamic Studies
(United Kingdom)
Ramon Pérez-Maura
Vice Editor, Diario ABC (Spain)
Jane Perlez
Southeast Asia Correspondent,
The New York Times
Iqbal Riza
Special Adviser and representative
of the secretary-general of the
United Nations
Sir Iqbal Sacranie
Secretary-General, Muslim Council
of Britain (United Kingdom)
Kurt Seinitz
Foreign Editor, Die Kronenzeitung
(Austria)
Kole Shettima
Director of the Africa Office,
MacArthur Foundation (Nigeria)
Mark Smolinski
Director, Global Health and Security
Initiative and Vice President for
Biological Programs, Nuclear Threat
Initiative (United States)
Hussein Solomon
Professor and Director, Centre for
International Political Studies,
University of Pretoria (South Africa)
Rainer Wessel
President and CEO, Ganymed
Pharmaceuticals (Germany)
48
Your Excellencies, Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
On behalf of New York University’s Dia-
logues: Islamic World-U.S.-The West, I wish
to welcome you and thank you for join-
ing us at this important moment.
I extend my deepest gratitude to the gov-
ernment of Malaysia, our host. There
could be no better venue for this gath-
ering than Malaysia—a flourishing,
multicultural democracy where differ-
ences are respected and tolerance prevails.
My most sincere thanks go as well to the
other funding institutions, first among
them the government of the United
Kingdom, whose financial support
makes this conference possible. I also
thank the government of France. Two
forward-thinking American founda-
tions—the MacArthur Foundation and
the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—have also
supported Dialogues since the program’s
inception. They deserve our profound
gratitude. In particular, I would like to
recognize Stephen Heintz, president of
the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, who is
here with us, for his unflagging encour-
agement and guidance and his conviction
in our mission.
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, we
could not meet at a more critical time in
the long history of the Muslim-Western
encounter. In 14 centuries of interaction
between the Islamic world and the Western
world, this relationship has clearly seen
some ups and downs. There is no doubt
in my mind that the present moment is
fraught with danger and may be one of
those “down” moments, if we are not wise
enough to check the forces of irrespon-
sibility, insensitivity, and intolerance.
Tragic events in history have almost
always resulted from misunderstandings,
leaving future historians to bitterly ques-
tion, what might have happened if? In
this case, we still have the time to summon
the voices of reason and dialogue, to halt
this race toward further violence—both
the violence of insensitivity and the vio-
lence of mobs burning down embassies.
When we began to plan this conference
more than two-and-a-half years ago, we
already understood that deep feelings of
humiliation, resentment, and anger arise
from asymmetry of power, economic
dependence, social dislocation, political
repression, and other sad realities. We
knew that these feelings—however real or
imaginary their causes—could ignite
in unpredictable explosions.
Misperceptions and misunderstandings,
such as the “cartoons affair” of the last
several weeks, perfectly illustrate the
APPENDIX III: MUSTAPHA TLILI’S OPENING STATEMENT
49
combustible combination of alienation
with arrogance and ignorance. I think it
is realistic to say that what has happened
since the beginning of this affair will
happen over and over as long as mutual
understanding and respect are not the
operating paradigm of the Muslim-West-
ern relationship.
The misunderstanding is indeed mutual.
Freedom of expression is a hard-won and
fundamental value in the West. Like the
separation of state and religion, this
Western value is not necessarily shared or
understood by the Muslim world. There
was very little the Danish or the Norwe-
gian government could have done to stop
the publication of the inflammatory
material, except, maybe, to put the mat-
ter before the courts. No other Western
government would have handled the
matter differently—freedom of expres-
sion is the law of land. Yet many Muslims
wonder, for the sake of peace and har-
mony between the Muslim world and the
West, whether there might be a way of
balancing legal freedoms with civic
responsibility, as is practiced when it
comes to material denying the Holocaust.
To be sure, there were not one but many
“Western” reactions to events surround-
ing the publication of the cartoons. The
United States, the United Kingdom, and
Europe naturally approached the situation
from their own particular perspectives
and experiences regarding the role of
religion in pubic life.
On the Muslim side, protesters who
burned Western embassies must not be
misinterpreted as speaking for the nearly
1.3 billion Muslims who, although they
may have been personally offended by the
drawings, went about their daily lives,
many of them appalled by the violence
exercised in the name of their religion.
As U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice stated recently, “There is a huge
transition going on in the Middle East, as
a whole and in its parts” [Steven R. Weis-
man, “Rice Acknowledges Surprise Over
Hamas,” New York Times, January 30,
2006]. I wholeheartedly agree. I submit
that her assessment is valid for the Mus-
lim world as a whole. At a moment when
its traditional moorings are being
uprooted by modernity, isn’t the time
ripe for all Muslims—and in particular
Muslim thinkers—to embark on a new
ijtihad, on a process of critical self-
reflection, to examine the meaning of
their Islamic identity and values, to
reflect on the question, who speaks for
Islam? and how to reconcile Islam and
modernity?
The twin questions, Who speaks for
Islam? Who speaks for the West? are the
50
theme of this conference. We have gath-
ered you here—political, religious, civil
society, and business leaders, scholars,
editors, and journalists—not only to
ponder these questions, but to seize
the opportunity to suggest practical ways
and means to chart new channels of
communication; to deepen mutual
understanding; to help youth, women,
and other vectors of social change reach
a better understanding of each side’s val-
ues, history, problems, and hopes.
As Dialogues’ motto proclaims, the need
has never been as urgent as it is today to
knock down the walls of misunderstand-
ing and build bridges of knowledge and
reason. Educational programs, media
campaigns, concerted integration of
Muslim communities in the West, more
debates like ours today—all these paths
should lead, we hope, to the triumph of
reason and tolerance, assuming that fun-
damental policy differences and related
grievances are simultaneously taken into
consideration.
There is nothing inevitable about the
clash of civilizations. Human affairs, as
Machiavelli writes in the concluding
pages of The Prince, are partly under our
control and only partly governed by the
violent forces of history. It depends on
the prince—in this case, all of us, leaders
and constituents, who affect the course of
the state and the destiny of mankind. It
rests in our hands to uphold reason and
resist the trend toward a violent clash.
I would like here to recognize Mr. Iqbal
Riza, special adviser to the secretary-gen-
eral of the United Nations on the
Alliance of Civilizations, the initiative
launched last summer by Secretary-Gen-
eral Kofi Annan. We hope that this
initiative will lead to concrete collective
policies that will—to paraphrase the
prime ministers of Spain and Turkey in
their recent op-ed in the International
Herald Tribune—cultivate peaceful coexis-
tence by taking an interest in the other
side’s point of view and respecting that
which it holds most sacred [Recep Tayyip
Erdogan and José Luis Rodríguez Zapa-
tero, “A Call for Respect and Calm,”
International Herald Tribune, February 5,
2006].
The agenda that you have before you
reflects the concerns that I have just
broached. Discussions of the globalization
of the media and business and constant
innovations in science and technology
will occupy much of our time over the
next two days; many in the Muslim world
feel left behind by the transformative
effects of these forces. The final session
will be devoted to offering rational and
tolerant policy proposals to overcome
this resulting alienation.
51
As put forth in the two background
papers developed by Dialogues for this
conference, the cacophony of voices
speaking for the West is matched by the
cacophony of voices in the Muslim world.
On both sides there is a crisis of identity.
The simultaneous trends toward secular-
ism in Europe and greater religious faith
in America are just one example of the
growing differences within the West. As
for the Islamic world, its members range
from violent extremists to tolerant,
peace-loving citizens and organizations.
We hope the two background papers will
provide further historical and contem-
porary context for our debate.
In conclusion, I would like to read a pas-
sage from the background paper on
“Who Speaks for Islam?” which I’ll ask
you to keep in mind throughout the
course of our discussions:
The relationship between Islam andthe West has a long and perhaps cycli-cal history. The crisis within theMuslim world today might be said tomirror the situation of the West dur-ing the Middle Ages, when the Muslimempire was the center of knowledgeand civilization. To end its stagna-tion, the West entered a period ofself-reflection and embarked uponthe Renaissance, in part by appro-priating Islam’s scientific and culturaladvances. The renowned 13th-centuryItalian theologian and philosopher
Thomas Aquinas, for example, soughtinspiration in the works of Muslimphilosopher Ibn Rushd, the mostrevered philosopher of the time atthe Sorbonne. Perhaps the Muslimworld today, by examining its situa-tion through the lens of modernity,will embark upon a contemporaryIslamic Renaissance. We can onlyguess at how this might change the rela-tionship between Islam and the West.What is certain at this point is thatgreater communication, improvedunderstanding, and identification ofthe multiple–and sometimes con-flicting–sources of authority withineach civilization can only hasten ourentry into a new phase of the historyof the Islamic-Western encounter.
52
Excellencies, Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi
waberakatuh and good morning.
It is a real delight for me to see so many
renowned scholars and thinkers assem-
bled in Kuala Lumpur to discuss such a
pertinent issue as who speaks for Islam
and who speaks for the West. It is auspi-
cious that this dialogue begins on a
Friday, which is observed by Muslims
everywhere, every week, as a special day.
To those of you who have come from
afar, I bid you a very warm welcome. I do
hope that your stay in Malaysia will be
both pleasant and rewarding.
The two questions, Who speaks for
Islam? Who speaks for the West? are
among the most fundamental issues in the
interface between two great civilizations—
the Islamic world and the Christian West.
Their answers are not only important in
determining the relationship between
Islam and the West but are also vital in
shaping the future of humankind because
Christians and Muslims make up at least
half of the world’s people. There are
2,039 million Christians accounting for
32 percent of the world’s population,
and there are 1,226 million Muslims
making up 19 percent of the total.
When we ask you to search for the answers
to the two questions, it is our intention
neither to point fingers at any religion
nor to apportion blame on anyone
regarding the state of affairs that now
exists between the Islamic world and the
West. What we seek is the truth, which
can serve the best interests of all
humankind, and help bring peace to this
troubled world of ours. Let us pray to
God the Almighty, so that He gives us
wisdom, courage, and determination to
discover the answers.
I do not suggest for a moment that
“Islam” or the “West” is a monolithic
entity. There is tremendous heterogene-
ity in both civilizations. Both manifest
diverse and sometimes contradictory
trends and tendencies. Having made that
clarification, allow me to continue to
speak of Islam and the West in the way
they are normally understood.
Let me say at the outset that while there
are a multitude of voices that speak on
behalf of Islam on the one hand and the
West on the other, there are certain
voices that I feel do not do justice to
either Islam or the West.
I hold the strong view that, in the case of
Islam, those who deliberately kill non-
combatants and the innocent, those who
APPENDIX IV: PRIME MINISTER ABDULLAH AHMADBADAWI’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS
53
oppress and exploit others, those who are
corrupt and greedy, and those who are
chauvinistic and communal do not speak
on behalf of Islam.
In the case of the West, I do not regard as
defenders of Western civilization those
who invade and occupy someone else’s
land; those who systematically cause
innocent children, women, and men to be
killed; those who oppress other people
and exploit their resources for their own
selfish ends; or those who are racist in
outlook and bigoted in their religious
beliefs. Anyone who seeks to dominate
and control, who attempts to establish
global hegemony, cannot claim to be
spreading freedom and equality at the
same time.
Who then speaks for Islam? Who then
speaks for the West? The noble Qur’an
speaks for Islam. At its core is an eternal
message of justice and compassion, of
equality and humanity, of peace and sol-
idarity. There is also the Prophet’s
exemplary life and mission, which reflect
the quintessence of Islam. Through their
struggles and sacrifices, the illustrious
caliphs from Abu Bakr to Salahuddin Al-
Ayubi (Saladin) also succeeded in
bringing to the fore the authentic face of
the religion.
In a sense, the great accomplishments of
Muslim civilization—in science and med-
icine as in agriculture and architecture—
served to enhance the image of Islam.
The scholars who were responsible for
these accomplishments such as Al-
Khwarizmi and Ibn Sina should be
counted among the true voices of the
religion.
It follows from this that in the contem-
porary world, those who uphold justice,
who fight tyranny, who seek liberation
from oppression, who are honest and
upright, who are universal and inclusive
in word and deed, are the ones who rep-
resent the real message of Islam.
One should also add that those who pro-
tect the rights of the human being, those
who treasure the dignity of women and
the welfare of children, those who pre-
serve the integrity of the family, those
who help the poor and feed the hungry,
those who live in harmony with the envi-
ronment, are also speaking on behalf of
Islam.
In a nutshell, all Muslims anywhere who
sincerely endeavor to live according to
the universal values and principles of the
Qur’an are the true spokespersons of
Islam. What this means is that the over-
whelming majority of Muslims, who by
54
and large lead decent lives, are already
speaking for the religion.
To express the principles of life that are
important to ordinary Muslims as
demonstrated in Islamic civilization, I
have personally sought to promote an
approach that I call “Islam Hadhari,”
which we have defined as “a comprehen-
sive approach to the development of
mankind, society, and country based on
the perspective of Islamic civilization.”
The 10 principles of Islam Hadhari
embody universal values that have
endowed the religion with strength and
character through the ages. The 10 prin-
ciples are, namely
(1) Faith and piety in Allah
(2) A just and trustworthy government
(3) A free and independent people
(4) A vigorous pursuit and mastery of
knowledge
(5) Balanced and comprehensive
economic development
(6) A good quality of life for the
people
(7) Protection of the rights of
minority groups and women
(8) Cultural and moral integrity
(9) The safeguarding of natural
resources and the environment
(10) Strong defense capabilities
I consider this fresh approach as a neces-
sary part of the reform and renewal that
is needed in Islamic countries and in
Muslim society as a whole. Malaysia feels
that it is well-placed to begin this jour-
ney of reform and renewal because it is a
multiracial and multireligious country in
which we treat our diversity as an asset to
be nurtured. In fact, we are merely build-
ing on the tolerance we have observed
and the interfaith coexistence that we have
practiced in the country for decades. We
wish to show by example that a Muslim
country can be modern, economically
competitive, democratic, and fair to all
its citizens irrespective of their religion.
Islam Hadhari is not a new religion or
madhab [school of Islamic jurispru-
dence]. It is not a new ideology. It is not
meant to pacify the West. It is neither
intended to apologize for the perceived
Islamic threat nor to seek approval for a
more friendly and gentle image of Islam.
It is the way for practicing the religion in
these modern times but firmly rooted in
the noble values and injunctions of Islam.
The principles of Islam Hadhari are what
Muslims should emphasize in the contem-
porary world, the pursuit of knowledge
being one of the most fundamental. In
other words, there are certain civiliza-
tional principles in the religion whose
realization will bring greatness and glory
to the Muslim community, the ummah,
today, just as they propelled the Islamic
55
civilization to such splendor and mag-
nificence in the past.
Western civilization, too, has its share of
greatness and majestic accomplishments.
We must acknowledge that in the West,
principles such as freedom and equality
have found concrete expression in the
rule of law, public accountability, accept-
ance of political dissent, and respect for
popular participation. We must also
acknowledge that many great statesmen
and reformers of the past made sterling
efforts to redistribute wealth, to equalize
opportunities, and to achieve equity and
social justice. They may be regarded as
the true spokespersons of the West.
Admittedly, the West is also the civiliza-
tion that has given birth to a whole host of
scientists and researchers, from Newton
to Einstein on the one hand, and from
Marie Curie to Alexander Fleming, on the
other, who have contributed immensely
to the well-being of humankind.
However, for a lot of Muslims today, this
is not the face of the West that they see. It
is the hegemony of the centers of power in
the West that is most visible to them. They
see the subjugation of Palestine as an indi-
rect concretization of this hegemony. They
see hegemony manifested directly in the
attack on Afghanistan and in the occupa-
tion of Iraq. These are some of the realities
that confront the Muslim masses today.
Of course, there are other manifestations
of hegemonic power that have also made
a deep impression on the Muslim mind.
These include foreign military bases in
Muslim countries; the dominant presence
of huge Western corporations; the perva-
sive impact of currency markets; the
ever-expanding security tentacles of the
superpower; plus certain negative traits
and influence of Western culture and
ideas.
At the popular level, the West is perceived
as “biased” against Islam and Muslims.
Muslims feel, rightly or wrongly, that
they have become victims of double stan-
dards and selective persecution. More
specifically, Muslims see those responsi-
ble for the devastation of Jenin and
Fallujah, and the humiliations of Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo, as the ugly face
that speaks for the West.
Similarly, many in the West see Islam as
synonymous with violence. The Muslim
is viewed as a congenital terrorist. They
[Westerners] think Osama bin Laden
speaks for the religion and its followers.
Islam and Muslims are linked to all that
is negative and backward. For example,
Muslim men, it is alleged, oppress their
wives. Women, it is said, have no rights in
Islam. Some so-called Western “experts”
on Islam argue that Muslims invariably
discriminate against non-Muslims. They
56
say Muslims are intolerant. They say
Islam is incompatible with democracy
and modernity. The demonization of
Islam and the vilification of Muslims,
there is no denying, is widespread and
within mainstream Western society.
It is the duty of all people of goodwill to
work hard to change these negative per-
ceptions on both sides of the divide.
Undoubtedly, the task is not going to be
easy, for these perceptions have deep
roots. Since the advent of Islam at the
beginning of the seventh century, Chris-
tian, and to a lesser degree, Jewish
antipathy toward the religion and its
Prophet, Muhammad, has grown into
active antagonism. The Crusades, West-
ern colonialism, the imposition of Israel
on the Arab world, postcolonial hege-
mony, and the Western desire to control
oil and gas, especially those supplies com-
ing from the Muslim countries, have all
contributed in one way or another to the
huge chasm that has emerged between the
West and Islam. The targeting of so-called
“Islamic terrorists” in the global fight
against terrorism aggravated the situation,
and the senseless violence of the terror-
ists themselves has made things worse.
Quite clearly, we will not be able to
change the situation by mere talk, dia-
logue, and being nice to one another.
We must be brave enough, and we must
be honest enough, to admit that as long
as there is hegemony, as long as one side
attempts to control and dominate the
other, the animosity and antagonism
between the two civilizations will con-
tinue. This is why hegemony must end.
Mutual respect for one another should
replace hegemony. Reciprocity should
become the ethical principle that condi-
tions relations between the West and
Islam. The West should treat Islam the
way it wants Islam to treat the West and
vice versa. They should accept one another
as equals. Respect, reciprocity, and equal-
ity: these are the essential prerequisites
for a happy and harmonious relationship
between the two civilizations.
It is significant that in both civilizations
there exist men and women today who
are working toward a genuine transfor-
mation in relations, which will bring to
an end the animosity and antagonism of
the past and the present.
There are many in the West, for instance,
who realize that the exercise of hege-
monic power and the demonization of
Islam are not conducive for interciviliza-
tional peace. It is these voices that the
world should listen to. Likewise, there
are numerous groups and individuals in
the Muslim world who are deeply dis-
tressed by the violence and terror
perpetrated by certain fringe groups
57
within the ummah, just as they are equally
uncomfortable with the sweeping denun-
ciations of Christians, Jews, and the
West. They, too, oppose hegemony and
occupation, but their words are authen-
tic voices of Islam.
Certain voices, both in the West and in
the Muslim world, are not given the
prominence they deserve. The main-
stream media should give much more
attention to them. It is only too apparent
that these two groups—one in the West
and the other in the Muslim world—share
a common perspective on some of the
critical challenges facing both civiliza-
tions and the world at large. Both are
opposed to hegemony. Both reject vio-
lence and terror. Both yearn for a just
and peaceful world. Both are united by a
common bond. It is this common bond
that makes them bridge builders.
It is such fine men and women who are
capable of reaching out to one another,
who are willing to transcend the civiliza-
tional divide, which we need badly at this
juncture in history. It is a pity that there
are not enough of them. One of our
most urgent tasks is to multiply the
bridge builders. We must develop
through the family, education, and the
media tens of thousands of men and
women who can be critical of the weak-
nesses and wrongdoings of one’s
civilization and, at the same time, be
empathetic toward “the other” civiliza-
tion. When the bridge builders reach a
critical mass, their collective power
would become so overwhelming that it
would destroy the walls erected by those
who are hell-bent on keeping Islam and
the West apart.
At that point, when the bridge builders
reign supreme, the people of the West
will speak for Islam and the Muslims will
speak for the West.
Ladies and Gentlemen, let us start now
by curbing the extremists in our midst.
We must put a stop to the mockery of any
religion or the sacrilege of any symbol
held sacred by the faithful. Let us not
underestimate the power of religion as
an imperative for people to act. In the
face of fanaticism and hysteria, we must
take action to counsel moderation and
rationality.
On that note, let me conclude by con-
gratulating the Malaysian Institute of
Diplomacy and Foreign Relations and
Dialogues: Islamic World-U.S.-The West
for organizing this very important con-
ference and for bringing together in
Malaysia a prominent group of people
who are serious about the subject of dia-
logue between civilizations. For those
who have come from abroad, I invite you
58
to take this opportunity to look around
you and witness for yourself the Malaysia
that you might have heard of. I hope you
will be able to bear witness to our efforts
at nation building in which interfaith
and interethnic harmony lies at the core
of our national development program.
Thank you.
60
Introduction
Since the events of September 11, 2001,
many in the West have come to view the
Islamic world with a mixture of fear and
hostility. Violent attacks against civilian
populations, supposedly sanctioned by
Islamic religious doctrine, seem to vali-
date Samuel Huntington’s theory of a
“clash of civilizations.”1 In the West,
Islamic principles, theology, and above
all, political activity in the name of Islam,
have become suspect, while traditional
schools of learning and the Islamic sem-
inaries, or madaris, have come under
special scrutiny. There is widespread
debate in the West over the training of
Islamic clerics and religious leaders, the
authority they hold in their societies, and
whether they use this authority to pro-
mote violence against Western targets.
More and more Westerners, influenced
by what they see, hear, and read in the
media, have come to believe that it is the
most extremist among the Islamists who
represent, and speak for, Islam. Lacking
an understanding of the intricacies of
Muslim societies and the debates and
cleavages within them, many Westerners
confuse the terms Islamist and funda-
mentalist with the term ulama, the
traditional scholars and jurists of Islam.
The confusion about who speaks for
Islam is also related to the fact that there
is no single locus of religious authority
within Islam. There are currently multi-
ple groups in a variety of states that
simultaneously claim to speak on Islam’s
behalf. A major purpose of this paper is
to identify these groups, including the
ulama—the scholars of religion who were
traditionally considered to be the
authentic interpreters of Islamic faith
and law. The ulama are themselves
divided both by the schools of jurispru-
dence to which they belong and by their
political orientations. Beyond the ulama,
those who claim to speak for Islam
include leaders of various Muslim states,
many of which are products of the twin
processes of colonization and decolo-
nization. Several of these leaders claim to
speak on behalf of the Muslim world but
often use Islamic discourse to advance
the agenda of their state or regime.
Other claims to speak for Islam have
been made by a number of Islamist
groups that emerged in the second half of
the 20th century. Although these groups
represent a relatively recent phenome-
non, their ideas are rooted in salafi
thought that goes back to the latter half of
the 19th century.2 Another cluster that
claims to speak for Islam is made up of
extremist groups that have deviated
APPENDIX V: BACKGROUND PAPER—“WHO SPEAKS FOR ISLAM?”
61
significantly from the strategies pursued
by most Islamist political formations.
These extremists include transnational
networks that undertake violent terrorist
activities in the name of Islam, whereas
mainstream Islamists are primarily
engaged in advocating social transforma-
tion and/or regime change through
peaceful means within individual Muslim
countries. Finally, more recently, schol-
ars and proponents of what may be called
the New Ijtihad have begun, however hes-
itatingly, to assert themselves if not as
spokespersons for Islam then as signifi-
cant voices advocating change in the
Muslim world. This paper will analyze
each of these claimants in turn.
The UUllaammaa
The question of who speaks for Islam
dates to its classical age, from the death of
the Prophet in AD 632 to the end of
the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258. Tradi-
tionally, the ulama and the fuquha,
the scholars of jurisprudence, were
guardians of the Islamic faith and the
leading authorities in religious matters.
Their legitimacy rested largely on their
partial independence from the state and
their dual role of “representing the
interests of the state to the laity and the
interests of the laity to the state.”3 But,
even in the classical age, there was no
single source of religious authority for
the entire Muslim world or even for the
territories under the control of the
caliphs of Islam. This was in stark contrast
to the situation in Western Christendom
where religious authority was concen-
trated in the Papacy until the time of the
Reformation in the 16th century. The
decentralization of religious authority in
Islam emerged from the absence of a
hierarchically organized clergy capable of
acting as the fount of religious authority
and scriptural interpretation. Conse-
quently, religious authority in Islam has
never been able to project itself as a rival
to temporal authority in the way the
Papacy has in Western civilization.
There was little attempt during the early
centuries of Islam to impose a single
body of interpretation, especially in mat-
ters of Islamic law. This is also suggested
by the fact that there were hardly any wars
of religion within the Muslim commu-
nity, as opposed to the many conflicts
within Western Christendom. Tolerance
of both diversity within Islam and of
other faiths was the rule rather than the
exception in the classical period of Islam.
Five madhahib, or schools of Islamic
jurisprudence (four Sunni, one Shia),
were established within the first three
centuries of the Islamic era.4 They were
62
named after the outstanding jurists who
were the founders of these schools – the
Hanafi, the Shafii, the Maliki, the Han-
bali, and the Jaafri. Traditionally, the
followers of the four Sunni schools con-
sidered all the Sunni schools and their
interpretations equally legitimate and
valid for their respective followers. There
was some tension—inspired more by pol-
itics than by religion – between them and
the followers of the Jaafri school, to
which the overwhelming majority of
Shias belonged. It was not until 1959 that
the head of Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s old-
est and most renowned theological
institution, issued a fatwa accepting the
Jaafri madhab as the fifth school of
Islamic jurisprudence on par with the
four established Sunni schools.
This tradition of decentralization of reli-
gious authority and lack of significant
tension among the various schools of
jurisprudence helped the ulama retain a
considerable degree of autonomy from
the state, which they were thus less likely
to confront or threaten. Simultaneously,
the lack of centralized authority or hier-
archy among the scholars of religion
made it very difficult for temporal
authorities to exercise control over them.
Consequently, in practice, religious
and temporal spheres came to be quite
separate, with the leader in each realm
following a policy of “live and let
live.” Furthermore, the ulama normally
exhorted their followers to accept estab-
lished authority lest dissension lead to
anarchy and the fragmentation of the
ummah, the community of believers. As
noted Near Eastern scholar L. Carl
Brown writes, “Rather than a divine right
of rule, Islam came to recognize a
divinely sanctioned need for rule.”5
This did not mean that the state in clas-
sical Islam desisted from using religion to
buttress its political legitimacy; still, the
state was never very successful in intrud-
ing into the religious sphere. For their
part, the ulama accepted the temporal
rulers’ right to rule as long as the latter
protected the lands of Islam, did not
interfere with their Muslim subjects’
practice of the faith, and promoted, at
least by word if not always by deed,
Islamic law (shari‘a). It was only in the
17th century, when the Ottoman Empire
was at its zenith, that a concerted attempt
was made by the state to incorporate the
senior religious functionaries into the
imperial bureaucracy.
The balance between the religious and
political spheres shifted radically in
modern times as Muslim states became
powerful vis-à-vis the ulama in ways
that were inconceivable two centuries
ago. In most Muslim countries, the state
now controls the private religious
63
endowments, or awqaf, that formerly
provided for the ulama. This is particu-
larly the case in the Sunni Muslim
countries, including Egypt, Malaysia,
Saudi Arabia, and others. Such financial
control by the state has greatly eroded the
autonomy of those learned in religion. It
has turned many ulama, from the most
learned, the muftis— those with the right
to pronounce religious edicts (fatwa)—to
common prayer leaders in mosques, into
state functionaries. The expansion of the
state’s control can also be attributed to
the reluctance of sovereign nation-states
to function with the minimal religious
control characteristic of the classical
Muslim empires. As the “people” came to
be seen as the source of political legiti-
macy in modern times, the state sought
to control the people, including their
religious leaders, in order to prevent
challenges emerging from civil society.
The establishment ulama, those
employed and supported financially by
the state, face severe disincentives from
expressing dissent, let alone actively
opposing the regimes that pay their
salaries. In the current era of mass
political awareness, even in the least
democratic countries, this relationship
between the official clergy and unrepre-
sentative regimes has severely diminished
the popular authority of the state-
appointed ulama and has proved
conducive to the emergence of alterna-
tive groups seeking to speak on behalf of
Islam.
Even Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s most
esteemed institution of theological
learning, has seen its authority ques-
tioned in recent years owing to its close
ties to the Egyptian government. The
world’s oldest university, Al-Azhar (“The
Brilliant”) was founded in Cairo by the
Shia Fatimid dynasty in 972 for the pur-
pose of propagating the Fatimid’s brand
of Ismaili Shiism. Over time, however,
Al-Azhar came to be identified primarily
with Sunni Islam, due to the subsequent
influence of Sunni practice in Egypt.
Since its founding, Al-Azhar has been
renowned as a center of academic debate,
discussion, and learning. Although the
university’s ulama have generally followed
a religious mandate, Al-Azhar has at
times been at the forefront of political
struggle, such as during the anticolonial-
ist movements against Napoleon’s French
armies at the turn of the 19th century as
well as against the British in 1919.
Despite occasional forays into the polit-
ical sphere, Al-Azhar was able to
maintain a large degree of independence
from the state, as it drew its financial
resources from awqaf. This changed,
however, when Egyptian President Gamal
Abdel Nasser nationalized Al-Azhar in
64
1961. The state assumed the authority to
appoint Al Azhar’s Grand Sheikh and
created civil servants out of its ulama.
Since Nasser, Egyptian presidents
including Anwar Sadat and Hosni
Mubarak have increasingly relied on Al-
Azhar to garner public approval for
policy decisions, most notably for the
Camp David Accords in 1987 and the
Persian Gulf War in 1990.
By the same token, Al-Azhar has been
able to substantially expand its role in
public life. In recent years, Al-Azhar
officials have become involved in regu-
lating many spheres of Egyptian life,
from the content of books, television,
and other media, to policy issues such as
whether or not sexual education should
be taught in schools.
Al-Azhar’s moral authority, however,
has been questioned by an increasingly
skeptical populace that views the state-
employed ulama as tools in the
government’s battle against Islamists and
extremists.6 Contradictory fatwas have
further diminished Al-Azhar’s credibil-
ity. In August 2003, for example, Azhari
Sheikh Nabawi El-Esh banned recogni-
tion of the Iraqi Governing Council;
several days later, following a well-publi-
cized meeting with the American
Ambassador in Cairo, Grand Sheikh
Mohammed Sayed Tantawi then reversed
this judgment. In his rejection of El-
Esh’s fatwa, Tantawi declared that “no
Egyptian cleric has the right to pass ver-
dicts on the affairs of another country.” 7
Not only did Tantawi’s reversal incite
outrage among those who viewed his
decision as a direct result of American
intervention, but he also brought into
question Al-Azhar’s jurisdiction by pro-
claiming that Azheri ulama had no right
to rule on Iraqi affairs.
In light of Tantawi’s assertion, it is ironic
that Al-Azhar may enjoy its greatest
influence beyond Egypt’s borders. Al-
Azhar remains a preeminent voice in the
Muslim world, particularly through its
education of students and future clerics
from more than 50 countries. As Bar-
bara Rosewicz wrote in the Wall Street
Journal, “Poor Islamic countries beg for
its missionaries and rich Arab ones hire
its sheikhs to run their own Islamic uni-
versities. Al-Azhar graduates fill the
clergy, courts, and government min-
istries all over the Middle East—with the
exception of Shiite Iran.”8
While state-sponsored ulama like those
of Al-Azhar may increasingly be seen as
“puppets,” especially by frustrated and
politically aware youth, a growing distinc-
tion is apparent between establishment
and nonestablishment ulama. Nonestab-
lishment ulama, i.e., those not affiliated
65
with the state, such as the Al-Azhar-edu-
cated Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, have
recently achieved unprecedented levels of
popularity. Al-Qaradawi has become a
household name across the Arab world
through his weekly appearance on the
religious show Al Shari‘a wa Al Hayat
(Islamic Law and Life), broadcast on the
Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera, as well
as through his Web site (qaradawi.net).
Although the decline of the establish-
ment ulama’s authority intensified after
the end of colonialism, the process actu-
ally began in the middle of the 19th
century when the print revolution
sparked a dramatic increase in literacy
rates in many Muslim countries. As the
scholar of Islamic studies Carl Ernst has
argued, a situation had been created in
the Muslim world by the middle of the
20th century that was analogous to the
Reformation period in Christian Europe.
Lay literate Muslims, not trained in the
religious sciences (and, therefore, largely
unfamiliar with the accumulated traditions
of Islamic theology and jurisprudence
and the tools required to interpret
them), now had direct access to the sacred
texts of Islam and the principal sources
of Islamic law, the Qur’an and the
Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet.
Access to these texts both in the original
Arabic and in translation had a revolu-
tionary impact across the Muslim world.
Thus began a process of scripturalism,
or literal interpretation of the sacred
texts, among certain groups of literate
Muslims, paving the way for (what has
been called in the context of the Refor-
mation in Western Christianity) “the
priesthood of the individual.” Literal
interpretation of sacred texts without
adequate reference to context created a
situation where “fundamentalism” could
thrive among some Muslim thinkers and
activists.9
Multiple Sovereignties
and Nation-States
The crisis of religious authority in the
Muslim world was intensified by the col-
onization of Muslim countries by
European powers, which began in the
17th century but was accelerated in the
18th and 19th centuries. This process
culminated in the dismemberment of the
Ottoman Empire following its defeat in
World War I and the establishment of
British and French control over its Arab
regions under the Mandate system.10 The
Muslim world had fragmented into sev-
eral autonomous polities in the very first
centuries of Islam—the breakaway
Umayyad Caliphate of Spain in the
eighth century providing the earliest
major example. However, the fiction of
the unity of the ummah, at least among
the demographically predominant Sunnis,
66
had been maintained until the advent of
European colonialism through the insti-
tution of the caliph as titular head of the
Muslim world.
The caliph’s power was, for long periods,
marginal, such as during the latter part
of Abbasid reign from the middle of the
10th to the middle of the 13th century
(when the caliph reigned by permission
of Turkic dynasties that controlled Bagh-
dad). The Ottoman emperor took the
title of caliph in 1517 when his armies
captured Egypt, where Mamluk rulers
had kept the institution nominally alive
by installing scions of the Abbasid
dynasty after the Mongol sack of Baghdad
in 1258. The Ottoman appropriation of
the title demonstrated decisively that the
caliphate had become tied to force and
conquest and therefore had little reli-
gious sanction or significance.
In reality, the religious significance of
the caliphate had always been in some
doubt. The institution evolved from the
Prophet’s tradition of nominating a
prayer leader when he himself was
unable—for health or other reasons—
to lead prayers. Muhammad elected not
to nominate a political successor, pre-
ferring that the community of believers
choose its own leader after his death.
This process was problematic from the
beginning, as the selection of the very
first caliph was challenged by those who
wanted succession to be restricted to the
House of the Prophet. Three of the first
four caliphs were, in fact, assassinated,
demonstrating the extent to which the
legitimacy of the institution was contested.
The religious sanction for the caliphate
was further weakened when Muawiya
transformed it into a hereditary monar-
chy, establishing Umayyad dynastic rule.
Despite its shortcomings, the existence
of the caliphate offered most Muslims a
feeling of continuity and at least a formal
locus of political authority, however geo-
graphically distant. Consequently, a great
sense of loss was felt when the caliphate
was abolished after the defeat of the
Ottoman Empire in World War I, when
the Republic of Turkey was established.
The concept of the ummah was deprived
of political significance, although it con-
tinued to have emotional appeal for
many Muslims. Some Islamists, for
example, the Hizb-ut-Tahrir and Al
Qaeda, express nostalgia for the institu-
tion of the caliphate and are committed
to its revival.
The restoration of the caliphate, how-
ever, is not widely supported. Most
Muslims, including most Islamists, are at
ease working within the parameters of the
nation-state, despite the fact that the
importation of the European concepts of
67
the “sovereign state” and “nationalism”
compounded the problem of decentral-
ized and multiple authority structures in
Islam. As established by the Westphalian
European system, sovereignty resides in
the nation, embodied politically and ter-
ritorially in the state.11
The importation of the nation-state
model also bolstered the already existing
anticolonial movements in Muslim-
majority countries. Such movements
often combined elements of territorial
and ethnic nationalism with such
ingredients as resistance to foreign dom-
ination, all the while drawing on Islamic
heritage. Thus the concept of jihad reen-
tered Muslim popular imagination in the
19th century as a religious doctrine
enjoining resistance to foreign rule.12
During the colonial period, such
resistance in the name of Islam was ter-
ritorially limited to liberating particular
colonial possessions. For example, in the
latter part of the 19th century, the
Mahdi’s jihad focused specifically on the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, just as the jihad
of the Indian “Wahabis” was directed only
against the British in India.
The nationalist political project, even
where it employed Islamic vocabulary,
called above all for the construction of a
modern, quasi-secular, independent
state on the basis of the European model.
This agenda promised an end to the
humiliation of European colonialism,
the implementation of a state-driven
economic development program, and
the assertion of a modern national iden-
tity based on watan, or homeland.
The Muslim world’s emergence from
colonial rule brought both general edu-
cation and religious teaching largely
under the control of the postcolonial,
nationalist state. The increase in state
power at the expense of the authority and
autonomy of the ulama had major impli-
cations for the interpretation and
enforcement of Islamic law. As the
Islamic legal scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl
has pointed out, “The disintegration of
the role of the ulama and their co-
optation by the modern praetorian state,
with its hybrid practices of secularism,
have opened the door for the state to
become the maker and enforcer of the
divine law; in so doing the state has
acquired formidable power that has
further ingrained the practice of author-
itarianism in various Islamic states.”13
Accordingly, many who desire to make
societies more Islamic believe that this
can be achieved only by using the state as
an agent for Islamization through legal
decree and coercive enforcement.
68
The primacy of the territorial state has
also been both acknowledged and legit-
imized in the Muslim world by the
creation of numerous interstate organi-
zations that deem themselves “Islamic” or
“Muslim.” The leading example is the
Organization of the Islamic Conference
(OIC), whose members are sovereign,
territorial states with majority Muslim
populations. These interstate organiza-
tions explicitly acknowledge the doctrine
of noninterference in the internal mat-
ters of their members. They operate
largely on the basis of realpolitik with their
members pursuing individual political,
military, and economic goals, while
sometimes using Islamic vocabulary to
justify their policies.14
Self-Proclaimed Islamic States
Some states in the Islamic world are
theocracies and identify themselves as
such based on their adherence in matters
of governance to Islamic scripture and
theology. Saudi Arabia and Iran in par-
ticular proclaim themselves Islamic and
have intentionally used their Islamic cre-
dentials to further both their domestic
legitimacy and their foreign policy goals.
Both, on occasion, have also used their
Islamic credentials to claim the authority
to speak for Islam.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, the legiti-
macy of the hereditary monarchy that
gives its name to the country rests on the
alliance between the House of Saud and
the Wahabi religious establishment. The
Saudi state has used its Islamic identity to
promote its interests abroad both by set-
ting up international governmental and
nongovernmental Muslim organizations
and funding religious groups, educa-
tional institutions, and the construction
of mosques in foreign countries. This
dimension of its foreign policy became
especially salient in the 1980s and 1990s
following the Iranian Revolution in 1979
that challenged the Saudi hereditary
order by terming it un-Islamic. The
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the same
year, however, provided the Saudis the
opportunity to buttress their Islamic
legitimacy by supporting the (American-
backed) mujahedin engaged in fighting
Soviet occupation.
In the meantime, the Saudi regime came
face-to-face with a new, serious challenge
at home: the emergence of a radical Wahabi
movement, influenced by the extremist
thought of the Egyptian Islamist Sayid
Qutb. The Wahabi radicals broke ranks
with the religious establishment allied to
the House of Saud, denounced the
regime as un-Islamic, and staged the
1979 takeover of the Ka’aba, the holiest
Muslim shrine. Osama Bin Laden and
69
his followers are ideological descendants
of the neo-Wahabis and their leader,
Juhaiman al-Utaibi.15
The neo-Wahabis turned violently
against the Saudi regime for a number of
reasons, including their perception that
the regime had deviated from the austere
Islamic principles of the Wahabi theolo-
gians. The Saudi monarchy’s dependence
on the United States for its security and
economic well-being sparked further
hostility among Islamists. Consequently,
Saudi Arabia, the “kingdom in the mid-
dle,” as the political scientist Gregory
Gause has called it, has seen rising ten-
sions between two different Islamist
tendencies.16 This situation hamstrings
the Saudi regime’s capacity to speak on
behalf of Islam.
A similar situation exists in Iran. The
shah’s repression of all forms of political
opposition in the 1970s created the vac-
uum filled by Islamist forces, in this case
a faction of the Shia ulama. Ayatollah
Khomeini’s rise as the primary vehicle
for Islamists in Iran is explained in part
by the fact that the Shia ulama maintained
financial independence from the Iranian
state, in contrast to Sunni clerics’
dependence on state patronage. Shia
clerics’ independence was achieved to a
large extent through the payment of
khums, or one-fifth of a person’s income,
by the religious laity to their marja, or
preferred senior cleric.
The robust Shia tradition of ijtihad17
enabled the politically activist faction of
the Iranian clergy inspired by Khomeini
to adapt its strategy to the concerns of the
1960s and 1970s. The same Shia predilec-
tion for innovation provided Khomeini
the opportunity to advocate his theory of
Islamic government as guided by the
Supreme Jurist, with the Shia ulama the
ultimate repositories of both moral and
political rectitude.
Lay Islamist radicals were not, however,
absent from the Iranian scene. The writ-
ings and speeches of activists such as Ali
Shariati contributed significantly to the
shah’s downfall. Nevertheless, noncler-
ical forces could not compete with the
ulama for control of postrevolution Iran.
The ulama were better organized, had
much greater financial resources, and
were more united than their nonclerical
counterparts.18
Despite the pan-Islamic rhetoric of the
early years of the revolution, the postrev-
olution Iranian political elite, still led by
Khomeini, came to view the defense of
Iranian interests as their primary
(Islamic) duty. The Iraqi invasion of Iran
in September 1980 reinforced Iran’s
position that the defense of Iran was an
70
essential prerequisite for the defense of
Islam. In January 1988, Khomeini went
even further by declaring that the state’s
actions based on expediency could take
precedence even over the requirements
of the shari‘a.19
Raison d’état continues to be the driving
force as far as Iranian foreign policy
is concerned. This was demonstrated
most recently by Tehran’s neutral pos-
ture during the American invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq, and the regime’s
covert collaboration with the United
States during the war against the Taliban,
as widely reported by the media.20 These
policies reflected the Iranian regime’s
antipathy toward both Saddam Hussein
and the Iraqi Baathists, as well as the
Sunni fundamentalist Taliban. All in all,
Iran’s focus on national interest, just like
Saudi Arabia’s, compromises its capacity
to speak either on behalf of Islam or the
Muslim world at large.
Another instance of national interest
superseding pan-Islamic rhetoric is the
“Sulawesi Sea Crisis” that nearly brought
Southeast Asian neighbors Malaysia and
Indonesia to blows in February of 2005.
The Malaysian state oil company
Petronas sparked an international row by
awarding oil exploration rights in a dis-
puted, resource-rich region of the
Sulawesi Sea that is claimed by both
Indonesia and Malaysia. First Indonesia,
then Malaysia, responded with a show of
gunboat diplomacy, sending fighter jets
and warships to the contested area.
Although both countries’ leaders eventu-
ally resolved the dispute through
diplomatic means, harsh words were
exchanged, such as Indonesian House
Speaker Agung Laksono’s statement that
“the government should take stern action
without hesitation, including military
force if necessary.”21 The dispute engen-
dered strong nationalist feelings,
particularly in Indonesia, where protest-
ers across the country burned Malaysian
flags and hackers vandalized Malaysian
government Web sites with defiant slo-
gans and symbols.
Despite this confrontation, both nations
insisted that their relationship remained
strong, echoed by the statement of
Indonesian Foreign Ministry Spokesman
Yuri Thamrin that “we are both after all
countries, which not only have good
bilateral ties but are Muslim nations.”22
The Islamists
The dilemma over who speaks for Islam
has been compounded by the emergence
during the 20th century of several
political movements within predomi-
nantly Muslim countries that call for the
establishment of governance systems
71
based on what they consider the golden
age of early Islam. Although their stra-
tegies and styles may differ, these
movements are loosely united in their
common belief that contemporary social,
economic, and political problems facing
Muslim societies cannot be resolved
except by a return to the purity of the
early Islamic polity. These groups and
movements can be broadly termed
“Islamist” in order to distinguish them
from “Islamic,” for their primary focus is
political rather than theological.
The process of reappropriating and
reinventing the distant past—and the
accompanying rejection of intervening
tradition, including the right to inter-
pret religion—is rooted in the colonial
experience, in the sense that colonialism
reopened the issue of how Muslim soci-
eties ought to be governed and by whom.
In other words, colonialism provided a
motivation first to rebel against non-
Muslim rule, and later to reconsider the
rules and mechanisms governing Muslim
societies after the expulsion of European
powers.
Many Muslims, especially the Islamists,
came to consider the ulama incapable of
providing a political vision for the future.
The ulama seemed preoccupied with the
finer points of theological interpretation
and with legal precedents that did not
apply to the contemporary situation.
Furthermore, the ulama were accused (by
reformers and revivalists alike) of
detracting from the religion’s innate
dynamism by closing the gates of ijtihad.
Such criticism of the ulama is epitomized
in the writings of Muhammad Iqbal, the
colonial era Islamic reformer and Indian
poet-philosopher, who argued that their
“false reverence for past history and its
artificial resurrection constitute no rem-
edy for a people’s decay.”23
Significant segments of the Muslim
intelligentsia came to believe that the
ulama were as responsible for Muslim
decline as the temporal rulers who suc-
cumbed to Western power. A new group
of lay thinkers, drawn largely from mod-
ern professions such as science,
medicine, journalism, and secular edu-
cation, along with a few activist ulama,
began to offer a new vision of the found-
ing texts of the golden age of Islam. The
Egyptian Hasan al-Banna, who founded
the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, con-
trasted the ulama of early Islam, who
challenged their caliphs, rulers, and gov-
ernors without fear, to the weakened
ulama of his time, who he found busy
ingratiating themselves with govern-
ment authorities.24 On the Indian
subcontinent, Abul Ala Mawdudi, who
founded the Jamaat-i-Islami in 1941,
also held negative views of contemporary
72
religious leaders. Of Mawdudi’s views on
the ulama, political scientist Seyyed Vali
Reza Nasr writes, “His discourse on the
Islamic state deliberately sidestepped the
ulama, depicting them as an anachronis-
tic institution that has no place in a
reformed and rationalized Islamic order
. . . Mawdudi derided the ulama for their
moribund scholastic style, servile political
attitudes, and ignorance of the modern
world.”25 Sayyid Qutb, the chief
ideologue of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s,
was even more critical of the ulama. He
denounced the very idea of “men of
religion, who take from religion a pro-
fession” as a corruption of the Qur’anic
message.26
These three thinkers-cum-activists were
among the most important Islamist fig-
ures of the 20th century. All of them
attended universities as opposed to
Islamic religious seminaries.27 Abul Ala
Mawdudi began as a journalist, while
Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb started
their careers in secular education. The
writings of Sayyid Qutb, executed by
Nasser’s regime in 1966, provided much
of the basic motivation for Islamist
activism. After his death, Qutb’s ideas
were used to preach the violent overthrow
of the Egyptian government, considered
by Islamists to be a legitimate target for
jihad because it had deviated from Islam.
Qutb’s ideas about jihad against nomi-
nally Muslim regimes provided a major
departure from traditional Islamic
political thought in which jihad was per-
mitted only for defensive reasons and
only against non-Muslim opponents.28
While these reformers shared an Islamic
vocabulary common to their visions, each
of them was influenced by the political
trajectory of his nation. Because they
operate in different settings and con-
texts, no two branches of Islamism are
identical. Thus the Muslim Brother-
hoods in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and the
occupied Palestinian territories have
adopted radically different political
strategies in response to specific chal-
lenges that they face within their
respective national boundaries. Indeed,
the parent organization, the Egyptian
Brotherhood, has itself mutated over
time; its leadership in the early 1980s
unequivocally rejected the more radical
and militant ideas associated with Sayyid
Qutb, the organization’s ideological
guru of the 1960s. As French scholar
Olivier Roy has pointed out, “[I]t is
intellectually imprudent and historically
misguided to discuss the relationships
between Islam and politics as if there
were one Islam, timeless and eternal.”29
Yet there are characteristics shared
by Islamic societies that relate to the
73
widespread appeal of Islamism in the
postcolonial era. First, the secular,
nationalist project has been generally
unable to provide dignity, freedom,
power, or wealth to most Muslim com-
munities.30 Second, these regimes have
often turned to authoritarian and
repressive methods, stifling political and
intellectual debate and eliminating
almost all secular opposition, thus creat-
ing political space that has been filled by
Islamists. However, unlike secular groups
that can be prevented from speaking in
public or through the media, Islamist
political activity can never be fully
suppressed since Muslim religious insti-
tutions are, to a significant extent,
immune from governmental retribution.
Publishing houses that print religious lit-
erature as well as mosques and affiliated
organizations continue to transmit polit-
ical messages disguised as religious
ones.31 Third, Islamist groups have set
up social service organizations in the
fields of health, education, and welfare—
areas in which corrupt and inefficient
governments in most Muslim countries
have failed. Such social services cultivate
important constituencies: the under-
privileged and the youth. Thus Islamist
charitable networks from Turkey to Egypt
to Pakistan have come to provide Islamist
groups with great staying power in the
face of state repression.32 The much-
reviled madaris, for example, often
provide the only source of education,
food, and shelter to the children of the
Pakistani poor.33
While these three factors unite Islamist
movements in postcolonial Muslim-
majority states, Islamism has also
flourished in Muslim-minority nations
for a different set of reasons. In regions
where Muslim groups are discriminated
against, or where their aspirations for
political participation, autonomy, or
independence are thwarted, secular lead-
ership has frequently failed to achieve the
groups’ objectives, and they have thus
turned toward the more radical ideology
of violent Islamism. Such ideological
shifts have recently taken place among the
adherents of ethnic secessionism, such as
the Chechens and the Kashmiris, as well
as among Palestinians. Such struggles,
even when undertaken in the name of
Islam, aim at creating new states or
achieving national liberation. Although
they draw on the religious sympathies of
Muslims elsewhere, they could well be
considered “national” rather than “reli-
gious” movements.34 Hamas in the
occupied Palestinian territories and
Hezbollah in Lebanon illustrate this
phenomenon.35
Nevertheless, Islamism reinforces the
belief among many in the West that Islam
is a monolith, that the most extreme
74
voices are its authentic spokespersons,
and that Islamist groups, even if they
operate under different names, are part
of a grand global project. The truth is
that in most areas—Pakistan, Egypt, and
Turkey among them—there are usually
several Islamist movements competing
for authority within the confines of the
same state. Certain networks, such as Al
Qaeda, do attempt to work beyond and
across national boundaries. However,
these are fringe groups, which, although
they attract the world’s attention with acts
of terror, are marginal to mainstream
Islamist movements and to daily political
struggles within most Muslim countries.
The major Islamist political formations,
such as the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in
Egypt, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) and the
Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) in Pak-
istan, the Nahdat al-Ulama (NU) in
Indonesia, and the Justice and Develop-
ment Party (AKP) and its precursors in
Turkey, have all acted according to the
rules of regimes unsympathetic to their
causes.36 Several of these groups have
even performed credibly in elections.
Others have learned to lie low when sup-
pressed and bounce back organizationally
and politically when autocracies liberal-
ize under domestic or international
pressure. Some, such as the Pakistani JI,
have even collaborated with military dic-
tatorships to advance their agendas.
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party,
however, has become a so-called post-
Islamist party. As the Turkish academic
Ihsan D. Dagi explains
Realizing that the rise of politicalIslam was detrimental to Islam’ssocial and economic influence inTurkey, [the party] defined itself as“conservative-democrat” in anattempt to escape from the self-defeating success of political Islam. . . Their demands are no longergrounded in Islam, Islamic civiliza-tion and values, and the uniquenessof Muslim society but on the univer-sality of political modernity, i.e.,human rights, democracy, and therule of law.37
The Egyptian political formation known
as Wasat, or Center, which is supported
largely by former members of the Mus-
lim Brotherhood, seems to be following
the same path despite the fact that Presi-
dent Hosni Mubarak’s government has
repeatedly refused it license to operate as
a normal political party.38
Transnational Islamist Networks
Transnational Islamist groups, particu-
larly militant ones, have come to the
forefront of global concerns through
terrorist activities over the last several
years with the emergence of Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda itself is not a centralized or
75
structured movement, but rather a label
applied by Western governments and the
media to what is a broad and diverse
“network of networks.”39 While this
makes it very difficult to counter Al
Qaeda by conventional military action, it
also means that Al Qaeda’s political
impact is likely to be limited; the network
offers no realistic political agenda that
appeals to a territorially defined political
and social base.
Furthermore, Al Qaeda, like mainstream
Islamist movements, is the product of a
specific context: the failures of the Tal-
iban regime enabled Islamist radicals—
who had initially gathered in Afghanistan
to fight the Soviet Union—to entrench
themselves in the country. The United
States, in conjunction with Pakistan and
Saudi Arabia, played a significant role in
facilitating, financing, and arming the
so-called mujahedin to fight Soviet Com-
munism in the 1980s. Consequently, not
only did thousands of Islamist radicals
gather in Afghanistan, but Afghan and
Pakistani youth were widely radicalized
and today provide much of the man-
power to Al Qaeda, according to
Columbia University Professor Mah-
mood Mamdani.40 From the American
perspective, the “good Muslims” of the
1980s have thus morphed into the “bad
Muslims” of today. The mujahedin of the
1980s are now called jihadis; while the
former term has positive connotations
because it is borrowed directly from
Islamic vocabulary, the latter is an inven-
tion of Western commentators and thus
pejorative.
Mamdani locates the Al Qaeda phenom-
enon within the American policy of the
post-Vietnam era beginning in 1975.
This policy aimed at creating terrorist
groups and turning them into political
movements, first in Angola and Mozam-
bique and then in Nicaragua and
Afghanistan, in order to destabilize left-
ist or revolutionary regimes considered
to be Soviet proxies. According to Mam-
dani, this policy emerged out of the
lesson that direct American intervention,
such as in Vietnam, was likely to be both
costly and ineffective. UNITA and REN-
AMO in southern Africa, the contras in
Central America, and the various radical
Islamist groups in Afghanistan were all
funded and trained by the CIA to under-
take terrorist activities.41 In some ways,
Islamist terrorists have roots more
related to American cold war policies
than to Islamic scripture.
While Al Qaeda has succeeded in making
itself known through spectacular acts
of terrorism and a thirst for publicity,
Tablighi Jama’at—the largest transna-
tional Islamic movement—is unknown to
most Westerners. Tablighi Jama’at
76
(“group that propagates the faith”) is a
missionary organization that traces its
roots to colonial India. It consists pre-
dominantly of lay Muslims who preach to
fellow Muslims and focuses on internal
faith renewal, rather than conversion of
non-Muslims. The group emphasizes a
return to Islam as practiced during the
time of the Prophet. According to its
leaders in America, the Tablighi’s goals
are “devotion to God and promoting
change in each individual, not society.”42
Although the Tablighi renounces politics
and violence, it has come under intense
scrutiny from Western governments for
being a breeding ground for Islamic
extremists. Both American and Euro-
pean intelligence agencies cite its
vulnerability to infiltration as well as its
tendency to promote religious awakening
among disaffected youth as cause for
concern.43
Voices of a New IIjjttiihhaadd
In contrast to the Islamists, a new group
of Muslim thinkers, which has emerged
during the past several decades, seeks to
apply contemporary intellectual methods
to the task of reforming Islam. These
thinkers, whom we might loosely term
the proponents of a New Ijtihad, are both
a response to and a product of the mod-
ernization of Muslim societies. They
belong to a reformist tradition stretching
back to the mid-19th century, initiated
by Muslim intellectuals including Sir
Sayyid Ahmed Khan in India, Syed
Jamaluddin Al-Afghani across the Mid-
dle East and Central and South Asia,
and Muhammad Abduh in Egypt, who,
influenced by the European Enlighten-
ment, applied positivist and rationalist
thought to reconcile Islamic turath (tra-
dition) with the challenges of modernity.
Although Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan relied
almost exclusively on the Qur’an for his
interpretation of Islam, he was not a
scriptural literalist. As political scientist
Carl Brown has pointed out, Sir Sayyid
insisted that Islam was “completely com-
patible with reason and with ‘nature.’
This meant that any supernatural events in
religion, even the Qu’ran, could properly
be interpreted allegorically or psycholog-
ically. In short, he was very much a 19th-
century advocate of science and posi-
tivism.”44 Sir Sayyid’s ideas ran afoul of
the traditional ulama, but he made a
foundational contribution to the spread
of modern education and rationalist
thought among the Muslim elite in India,
especially by setting up the modern educa-
tional institution that eventually became
the Aligarh Muslim University.45
Considered to be one of the founders of
Islamic modernism, Syed Jamaluddin
Al-Afghani was a vocal critic of Western
77
imperialism who called for a revival of
Islamic civilization to counteract Euro-
pean domination. Afghani traveled widely
throughout Muslim lands in the Middle
East and Central and South Asia, attempt-
ing to mobilize the masses in a
pan-Islamic movement against the impe-
rial threat. Afghani was deeply concerned
about the intellectual decay within the
Muslim world, and he attributed the
decline of Islamic civilization to neglect
of the basic sciences and a lack of inter-
est in the pursuit of knowledge. Afghani
believed that the only way to restore
Islamic civilization to its former grandeur
was to return to the “true core” of Islam.
In his famous refutation of French
philosopher Ernest Renan’s denuncia-
tion of Islam as an obstacle to philosophy
and science, Afghani concluded
If the Islamic world is as you say, thenwhy are the Muslims in such a sadcondition? I will answer: When theywere [truly] Muslims, they were whatthey were and the world bears witnessto their excellence. As for the pres-ent, I will content myself with thisholy text: “Verily, God does notchange the state of a people until theychange themselves inwardly.”46
Like his mentor Afghani, the Egyptian
thinker Muhammad Abduh advocated the
reform of Islam by returning to the reli-
gion’s “pure state” and casting off what he
viewed as its contemporary decadence
and divisions. For Abduh, revelation and
reason in Islam were complementary and
not antithetical. Islam, therefore, had
the innate capacity to reform and adapt
to changing circumstances by the exercise
of reason or ijtihad. Abduh’s ideas influ-
enced not only much of the modernist
thinking in the Arab world, they also
inspired what came to be known as the
salafi (purist) movements in the early
decades of the 20th century. Exponents
of salafi thought borrowed from Abduh’s
ideas about jettisoning much of the accu-
mulated “baggage” that they held
responsible for Islam’s decline. How-
ever, rather than looking to Islam’s early
period for a model of compatibility of
faith with reason, the salafis prescribed a
more literal return to the golden age
of early Islam, in that way prefiguring
Islamist movements of the second half of
the 20th century.47
Across the Muslim world as well as in
Muslim communities in the West, recent
decades have witnessed renewed calls for
ijtihad based on rationalist interpreta-
tions of Islam. As the scholar of
contemporary Muslim thought Suha
Taji-Farouki points out, while present-day
proponents of ijtihad share a motivation
with the “modernist” reformers of the
late 19th century, they differ in the scope
of their intellectual horizons.48 Whereas
78
the early modernists worked exclusively
within an Islamic frame of reference,
today’s thinkers avail themselves of
multiple critical and interpretive frame-
works. Most of these thinkers combine
knowledge of Islamic learning and
scripture with secular training (often
undertaken in the West) in the
social sciences, including anthropology,
sociology, philology, philosophy, and
hermeneutics. Their roots in Islamic and
Western intellectual processes offer them
a unique critical perspective on Islamic
scripture and heritage.
The postmodernist discourse of “contex-
tuality” has proven especially influential,
as many of these thinkers hold that the
Qur’an is situated in a specific time and
place—namely, the community of the
Prophet in the Hijaz. They believe that
the message—the Qur’an’s core ethical
principles—can and must be separated
from its history, both at the time of rev-
elation and over the nearly 14 centuries
since. Diverse thinkers such as the late
Pakistani reformer Fazlur Rahman; his
student, the late Indonesian public intel-
lectual Nurcholish Madjid; the Tunisian
scholars Mohamed Talbi, Abdelmajid
Charfi, and Mohamed Charfi; the
Algerian Mohammed Arkoun; the
Sudanese Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim;
and the American Amina Wadud have
all emphasized the importance of the
sociohistorical context of the Qur’anic
revelation and the necessity to differen-
tiate between the Qur’anic message and
intervening history.49 Their critical
rereadings of the Qur’an have admitted
interpretations and innovations that
prize reason, pluralism, universal human
rights, gender equality, and other “het-
erodox” positions.
The Egyptian-born and Switzerland-
based scholar Tariq Ramadan applies
similar methods in his work on the place
of Islam in modern Europe—an issue of
growing importance as the Muslim pop-
ulation in the West continues to expand.
Ramadan suggests that the only way to
arrive at a European Islamic identity is to
separate Islam from the cultures of the
countries of origin. Recently denied
entry to the United States by American
authorities and prohibited from taking
up his chair at the University of Notre
Dame, Ramadan has pointed out that
“when you are trying to create bridges
you are in the middle. . . you are too
Western for the Muslims, and too Mus-
lim for the Westerners. Controversy is
natural.”50 Other proponents of a New
Ijtihad often face similar dilemmas.
Although the ideas represented by these
progressive voices have yet to find wide-
spread resonance among ordinary
Muslims, they do offer an alternative to
more radical and revivalist interpretations
79
of Islam and a source of hope to those
who support greater dialogue between
Islam and the West.
Conclusion
In answer to the question of who speaks
for Islam, it is clear that there is no sin-
gle locus of authority in the Muslim
world today. While the traditional ulama
have lost much of their popular credibil-
ity as interpreters of religion, neither the
ruling elites in Muslim states nor the
Islamists, the militant fringe, or the
practitioners of the New Ijtihad have yet
been able to fill this role.
The cacophony of voices attempting to
speak for Islam has been amplified by the
constant flow of unvetted expression
through the Internet. As Gary Bunt, an
academic who writes frequently on Islam
and the Internet, establishes in Islam in
the Digital Age, the proliferation of
“Islamic” Web sites has vastly increased
the amount of debate in the Muslim
world.51 The Internet also offers believ-
ers an anonymous forum in which to
address their religious concerns. Coun-
seling sites and online fatwas are widely
accessible and increasingly popular,
while the development of online sermons
and Friday khutbahs has extended the
audiences of numerous preachers. The
authority of online religious officials,
however, is open to question. Unlike the
state-sponsored ulama, the “Internet
Imams” are beyond the control of gov-
ernment agencies; at the same time,
many of them have not gone through tra-
ditional training. As one would imagine,
this arena of free expression is now home
to a wide range of political opinions and
is often used to mobilize opposition to
those in power. The Internet has also been
employed by extremist groups to pro-
mote their own agendas; however, it is
almost impossible to verify whether spe-
cific sites speak for the groups that they
claim to represent, including Al Qaeda.
It might also be said that Islamism’s cur-
rent popularity is in significant part
due to the slow pace of reform in many
Muslim—particularly, Arab—states, as
well as to what is perceived by a large
majority of people in the Muslim world
as lack of serious commitment by major
international powers, especially the
United States, to address the grievances
harbored by most Muslims.52 Current
events in Palestine and Iraq, which lie
in Islam’s historical and political—if
not demographic—heartland, resonate
deeply with Muslims, accentuating the
feeling of impotence across much of the
Muslim world and increasing receptivity
to Islamist arguments. Post-September
11 American policies have contributed to
this pattern, demonstrating Washington’s
insensitivity in the eyes of many Muslims.
80
The cacophony of voices claiming to
speak for Islam is also an expression of a
more fundamental crisis in the Muslim
world–a century-long crisis of poor gov-
ernance, particularly in the Arab
world.53 Since decolonization, Arab
states have turned to a variety of political
remedies—including nationalism, pan-
Arabism, pan-Islamism, communism,
and socialism—yet, with a few exceptions,
all have failed to deliver widespread pros-
perity and good governance.
The tragedy of September 11, 2001,
played a major role in bringing the crisis
within dar-el-Islam to the attention of
the West. At home, “9/11” and the events
of subsequent years have made Muslims
more concerned about their current sit-
uation and about finding ways to resolve
it. Progressive Muslim thinkers are grow-
ing bolder and are taking risks to
challenge the ulama as well as the
Islamists. This surge of intellectual effort
has resulted in a soar in the number of
books published over the last few years by
the proponents of a New Ijtihad.
Finally, it should be kept in mind that the
relationship between Islam and the West
has a long and perhaps cyclical history.
The crisis within the Muslim world today
might be said to mirror the situation of
the West during the Middle Ages, when
the Muslim empire was the center of
knowledge and civilization. To end its
stagnation, the West entered a period of
self-reflection and embarked on the
Renaissance, in part by appropriating
Islam’s scientific and cultural advances.
The renowned 13th-century Italian
theologian and philosopher Thomas
Aquinas, for example, sought inspiration
in the works of Muslim philosopher Ibn
Rushd, the most revered philosopher of
the time at the Sorbonne. Perhaps the
Muslim world today, by examining its sit-
uation through the lens of modernity,
will embark on a contemporary Islamic
renaissance. We can only guess at how this
might change the relationship between
Islam and the West. What is certain at this
point is that greater communication,
improved understanding, and identifi-
cation of the multiple—and sometimes
conflicting—sources of authority within
each civilization can only hasten our
entry into a new phase of the history of
the Islamic-Western encounter.
82
1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of the
World Order (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1996).
2. The term salaf can be translated as
the “revered ancestors.” The main
thrust of salafi thought is its advocacy
for the return to the pristine form
of Islam practiced by the first gener-
ation of Muslims. This is seen as the
ideal from which later generations
of Muslims have deviated, leading to
Islam’s and Muslims’ decline.
3. Khaled Abou El Fadl, “The Place of
Tolerance in Islam,” Boston Review,
December 2001/January 2002,
online at http://bostonreview.net/
BR26.6/elfadl. html.
4. The schism within Islam that
resulted in the two grand families of
Islamic faith (the majority Sunni
and the minority Shia) came about
in the early years following the
Prophet Muhammad’s death. In 657
the notables of Medina selected Ali
ibn Abu Talib, cousin and son-in-
law of the Prophet, as the fourth
caliph. However, Muawiya, the
Umayyad governor of Syria who had
been appointed by Uthman, Ali’s
predecessor as caliph, refused to
recognize Ali’s authority. Those
who sided with Ali became known as
the Shia (partisans of Ali). The
majority who accepted Muawiya’s
rule as legitimate became known as
the Sunni. For a detailed rendering
of the intricate set of events that led
up to the Sunni-Shia division, see
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture
of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of
Islam, reprint edition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977),
pp. 276-79.
5. L. Carl Brown, Religion and State:
The Muslim Approach to Politics (New
York: Columbia University Press,
2000), p. 54.
6. Barbara Rosewicz, “Prestigious Al
Azhar is Force of Moderation,” Wall
Street Journal, August 10, 1987.
7. Mona El-Nahhas, “A confusing
fatwa,” Al-Ahram Weekly, September
4-10, 2003, online at http://weekly.
ahram.org.eg/2003/654/eg6.htm.
8. Rosewicz, “Prestigious Al Azhar Is
Force of Moderation.”
9. The Oxford English Dictionary
Online (www.oed.com) defines
fundamentalism as “strict adherence
to ancient or fundamental doc-
trines, with no concessions to
modern developments in thought or
customs.” For an argument that a
reformation has already taken place
in Islam with the emergence of
scriptural fundamentalism and
“priesthood of the individual,”
two fundamental features of the
Christian Reformation, see Carl W.
NOTES TO APPENDIX V
83
Ernst, Following Muhammad: Rethink-
ing Islam in the Contemporary World
(Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 66-67.
10. The Mandate system was established
by the League of Nations following
World War I to provide for the
administration of former Ottoman
territories and German colonies in
the Middle East, Africa, and the
Pacific. The Ottoman territories
were divided among the European
Allies, who were granted supervision
over these lands as a precursor to
eventual independence. In the Mid-
dle East, five new Mandates were
created from the former Ottoman
territories: Iraq, Transjordan, and
Palestine were British Mandates,
while Syria and Lebanon were
administered by France.
11. The Peace of Westphalia, embodied
in a series of treaties signed in 1648,
marked the end of Europe’s bloody
30 Years War and the birth of the
modern state system. The Peace of
Westphalia abolished the unity of the
Holy Roman Empire and enshrined
into treaty law the doctrine that the
religion of the ruler is the religion
of the state and no state could force
another to change its religion. Sub-
sequently, national interests began
to trump religion as the basis for
disputes among European states.
12. Rudolph Peters, Islam and Colonial-
ism: The Doctrine of Jihad in Modern
History (The Hague: Mouton,
1979).
13. Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Islam and
the Challenge of Democracy,”
Boston Review, April/May 2003,
online at http://bostonreview.
net/BR28.2/abou.html.
14. For details about the working of the
OIC and other international Mus-
lim organizations, see Saad S.
Khan, Reasserting International Islam
(New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001).
15. According to Sadik Al-Azm, “Bin
Laden may be seen as a more dan-
gerous, advanced, and global
version of Juhaiman al-‘Utaibi.
While Juhaiman directed his des-
perate, spectacular intervention
against the most important local
legitimizing symbol of the Saudi sys-
tem, bin Laden attacked the
American core without which the
local system could not possibly sur-
vive.” Sadik J. Al-Azm, “Time Out
of Joint,” Boston Review, Octo-
ber/November 2004, online at
www.bostonreview.net/BR29.5/alaz
m.html.
16. See Gregory Gause, “Kingdom in
the Middle: Saudi Arabia’s Double
Game,” in James F. Hoge, Jr., and
Gideon Rose, eds., How Did This
84
Happen? Terrorism and the New War
(New York: Public Affairs, 2001),
pp. 109-122; and Eric Rouleau,
“Trouble in the Kingdom,” Foreign
Affairs, 81(4), July-August 2002,
pp. 75-89.
17. Ijtihad can be defined as the exercise
of independent reasoning by jurists
to apply the shari‘a to legal questions
arising from circumstances that are
not covered by the Qur’an, sunnah,
established precedent, or direct
analogy.
18. Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots
and Results of Revolution (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2003), chap-
ters 9 and 10.
19. Daniel Brumberg, Reinventing
Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran
(Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2001), pp. 135-36.
20. See, inter alia, Jean-Michel Cadiot,
“Tehran and Washington a Step
Closer Through Afghanistan,”
Agence France Presse, October 7,
2001; Nazila Fathi, “On the Sly,
Iran Weighs Closer Ties With U.S.,”
New York Times, November 9, 2001;
Thomas L. Friedman, “The View
from Tehran,” New York Times, June
26, 2002; Seymour M. Hersh,
“The Iran Game: How Will Tehran’s
Nuclear Ambitions Affect Our
Budding Partnership?” New Yorker,
December 3, 2001.
21. “Government Urged to Get Tough
in Territory Dispute,” Jakarta Post,
March 7, 2005, online at www.the-
jakartapost.com/detaillatestnews.asp
?fileid=20050307181600&irec=2.
22. Quoted in Farrah Naz Karrim,
“Resolve Issue Through Talks,” New
Straits Times, March 9, 2005.
23. Quoted in John L. Esposito,
“Muhammad Iqbal and the Islamic
State,” in John L. Esposito, ed.,
Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983), p.
187.
24. Saeed Abdullah, “The Official
Ulama and the Religious Legitimacy
of the Modern Nation State,” in S.
Akbarzadeh and A. Saeed, eds.,
Islam and Political Legitimacy (New
York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 14-15.
25. Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, “Mawdudi
and the Jamat-i-Islami,” in Ali
Rahnema, ed., Pioneers of Islamic
Revival (London: Zed Books, 1994),
p. 105.
26. Charles Tripp, “Sayyid Qutb: The
Political Vision,” in Ali Rahnema,
ed., Pioneers of Islamic Revival, p.
178.
27. Incidentally, the same is true of
Osama bin Laden, who was trained
as an engineer, and his deputy,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was trained
as a physician.
85
28. For analyses of Sayyid Qutb’s ideas,
see Yvonne Haddad, “Sayyid Qutb:
Ideologue of Islamic Revival,” in
John L. Esposito, ed., Voices of
Resurgent Islam and Charles Tripp,
“Sayyid Qutb: The Political Vision,”
in Ali Rahnema, ed., Pioneers of
Islamic Revival.
29. Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political
Islam (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1996), p. vii.
30. For a discussion of the model of the
“strangers” and the model of the
“ancestors,” see Fouad Ajami, The
Arab Predicament, second edition
(New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), p. 242.
31. For details of this argument, see
Mohammed Ayoob, “Political
Islam: Image and Reality,” World
Policy Journal, Fall 2004, p. 3.
32. For Egypt, see Carrie Rosefsky
Wickham, Mobilizing Islam: Religion,
Activism, and Political Change in Egypt
(New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002); for Turkey, see Jenny
White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey
(Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2003).
33. Husain Haqqani, “Islam’s Medieval
Outposts,” Foreign Policy, Novem-
ber-December 2002, pp. 58-64.
34. For the Chechen case that bears out
this thesis, see C. J. Chivers and
Steven Lee Myers, “Chechen Rebels
Mainly Driven by Nationalism,”
New York Times, September 12,
2004.
35. For Hamas and Hezbollah, see
respectively Shaul Mishal and Avra-
ham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas
(New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000), and Judith Palmer
Harik, Hezbollah: The Changing Face
of Terrorism (New York: I. B. Tauris,
2004).
36. See Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Mobi-
lizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and
Political Change in Egypt; Jenny
White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey;
Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard
of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-
I-Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley:
University of California Press,
1994); and Robert W. Heffner, Civil
Islam (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2000).
37. Ihsan D. Dagi, “Rethinking Human
Rights, Democracy, and the West:
Post-Islamist Intellectuals in
Turkey,” Critique: Critical Middle
Eastern Studies, 13(2), Summer
2004, p. 140. See also Mohammed
Ayoob, “Turkey’s Multiple Para-
doxes,” Orbis, Summer 2004, pp.
451-463.
38. Joshua A. Stacher, “Post-Islamist
Rumblings in Egypt: The Emer-
gence of the Wasat Party,” Middle
86
East Journal, 56(3), Summer 2002,
pp. 415-432.
39. The term “network of networks” is
borrowed from Jason Burke, Al
Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror
(New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003), p.
16.
40. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim,
Bad Muslim (New York: Pantheon,
2004).
41. Ibid.
42. Susan Sachs, “A Muslim Missionary
Group Draws New Scrutiny in
U.S.,” New York Times, July 14,
2003.
43. Sachs, “A Muslim Missionary
Group Draws New Scrutiny in
U.S.,” and Craig S. Smith, “French
Islamic Group Offers Rich Soil for
Militancy,” International Herald Tri-
bune, April 29, 2005.
44. L. Carl Brown, Religion and State:
The Muslim Approach to Politics (New
York: Columbia University Press,
2000), p. 95.
45. For Sir Sayyid’s ideas, see Christian
W. Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A
Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology
(New Delhi: Vikas, 1978).
46. Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response
to Imperialism: Political and Religious
Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din
“al-Afghani” (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1983), p. 173.
47. L. Carl Brown, Religion and State,
pp. 93-98.
48. Suha Taji-Farouki, ed., Modern
Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’an
(New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004).
49. For a more in-depth exploration of
these thinkers, see, inter alia, Suha
Taji-Farouki, ed., Modern Muslim
Intellectuals and the Qur’an; Rachid
Benzine, Les nouveaux penseurs de
l’Islam (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004);
Fazlur Rahman and Ebrahim
Moosa, eds., Revival and Reform in
Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999);
Ronald Nettler, “Mohamed Talbi’s
Ideas on Islam and Politics: A Con-
ception of Islam for the Modern
World,” in J. Cooper, R. Nettler,
and M. Mahmoud, eds., Islam and
Modernity (New York: I. B. Tauris,
2000), p. 131; Abdelmajid Charfi,
Islam entre le Message et l’Histoire
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2004);
Mohammed Arkoun, Rethinking
Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon
Answers, trans. Robert D. Lee
(Boulder: Perseus, 1994), The
Unthought in Contemporary Islamic
Thought (London: Saqi Books,
2002); Abdullahi An-Naim, Toward
an Islamic Reformation (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1990);
and Amina Wadud, Qur’an and
Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from
87
a Woman’s Perspective (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
50. Deborah Sontag, “Mystery of the
Islamic Scholar Who Was Barred by
the U.S.,” New York Times, October
6, 2004.
51. Gary Bunt, Islam in the Digital Age
(London: Pluto Press, 2003),
p. 141.
52. See Jean Lacouture, Ghassan Tuéni,
and Gérard D. Khoury, Un siècle
pour rien: Le Moyen-Orient arabe de
l’Empire ottoman à l’Empire américain
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2002).
53. See, for example, the Arab Human
Development Reports, published by
the United Nations Development
Programme.
54. See Maria Rosa Menocal, The Orna-
ment of the World: How Muslims, Jews
and Christians Created a Culture of
Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New
York: Little, Brown, 2002).
88
Introduction
The West is a vexed and elusive notion.
From the outside, it seems to be a coher-
ent, perhaps even monolithic, whole—a
single pole, both attractive and repellent,
but somewhat identifiable. The crosses
that adorn church steeples, the fine wines
of Bordeaux, television shows like Cheers
and Friends, women’s rights advocates
like Mary Robinson, multinational
corporations like ExxonMobil, the
American president, pop star Michael
Jackson—from the outside, these are all
emblems of the West and yet from within,
the West hardly exists. Americans and
Europeans do not call themselves “West-
erners”; they may see themselves as
members of the communities that others
perceive as the “West,” but rarely do they
feel loyalty to or affection for that all-
inclusive identity.
Were we examining some of the con-
stituent communities—the Roman
Catholic Church, France, Hollywood,
human rights groups, Wal-Mart, the
Bush administration, the German Social
Democrats—we would be better able to
identify spokesmen, exemplary figures,
and representatives whose pronounce-
ments summarize consensus or convey
authority. As this list suggests, however,
the “West” is a complex, fractious, and
conflicted group of societies. The
Catholic Church and women’s rights
groups differ over abortion; the Ameri-
cans and French differ over the meaning
of secularism and the merits of the war
on Iraq; Europeans differ among them-
selves about the historical significance of
Christianity in defining and shaping
modern Europe. Indeed, one of the most
striking features of the West is its frequent
embrace of difference, its willingness—
not to say, eagerness—to encounter,
adopt, and adapt new ideas, peoples, and
institutions. This enthusiasm can be
delightfully invigorating: from the adop-
tion of Arabic numerals to the
development of “Asian fusion” cuisine,
the West has borrowed, changed, and
used elements of cultures from around
the world. This voracious appetite can
sometimes also appear threatening, how-
ever, as the West seems to appropriate for
itself what is good and valuable from
around the world. But then haven’t all
civilizations, including Islamic civiliza-
tion, done just that?
Although the importance and influence
of the West are undeniable, it is still dif-
ficult to know how we can determine the
real nature of Western opinion today.
How are we to know whether a prominent
Westerner’s statement—for example, the
then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio
APPENDIX VI: BACKGROUND PAPER—“WHO SPEAKS FOR THE WEST?”
89
Berlusconi’s remark late in 2001 that
Western civilization is “bound to Occi-
dentalize and conquer” Islam—represents
a popular or idiosyncratic belief? How
significant were the Christian echoes of
U. S. President George W. Bush’s refer-
ence that year to a “crusade” against
terrorism?1 How, if the Muslim world
seems to be faced with a determined and
dangerous adversary called the West, do
we account for the fact that Islam is the
fastest growing religion in Europe and
the United States?
Today, the West has immense economic,
political, and military power—and some-
times expresses imperial or quasi-
imperial ambitions—but it is also riven by
significant discord. Its two main political
components—Western Europe and the
United States—are frequently at odds on
policy questions. The United States and
France, for example, faced with Muslim
girls wearing headscarves in state schools,
started from the same premise of reli-
gious liberty and state agnosticism–and
yet reached entirely different conclu-
sions. The decision by France to ban the
wearing of scarves by Muslim girls in
French public schools was made in
defense of secularism (laïcité). It was also,
to many Americans, an infringement of
personal choice in a matter of religious
expression. The decision by a Bush
administration official to publicly criti-
cize France in the matter may be taken as
an illustration of how differently Amer-
icans and Europeans think of religion
and of how different their fears are.2
When we examine the question, who
speaks for the West? we therefore need to
acknowledge at the outset that any claim to
represent the West must be partial at best.
A second caution is in order: the admin-
istration of U.S. President George W.
Bush reflects a relatively new “neoconser-
vative” worldview. This view tends to see
treaties and conventions as constraints
on American power rather than part of a
durable global order. It is largely unin-
terested in the “soft power” of culture,
the slow improvements achievable by
aid, development, and human rights
programs, or the conservation of envi-
ronmental, cultural, or other resources.
It takes only passing interest in trading
systems or international commerce. It
commonly disdains the accumulated wis-
dom of the foreign policy establishment
in particular, though neoconservatives
also have little regard for military or
other traditions.3 Yet we should not
assume that any American administra-
tion, even one with the ideological vigor
and forcefulness of the administration of
George W. Bush, can speak even for the
American policy-making establishment,
90
much less the American people, and very
much less the West.
Looking beyond the present moment,
this paper will consider popular beliefs,
political movements, and currents of
analysis that have defined the West and
in part have affected its relationship with
the Muslim world. These themes are (1)
the distinctive liberalism of the West as a
product of constant struggle with (and
accommodation of) the power of reli-
gious institutions and beliefs; (2) the
“export” of the West through economic,
military, political, cultural, and institu-
tional expansion; and (3) the institutional
complexity of large, economically
advanced Western democracies.
Christianity and the
Western Liberal Tradition
Liberalism represents an effort to man-
age conflict; it is a method for resolving
disputes but is not, in itself, a resolu-
tion. President George W. Bush’s call for
a “crusade,” for example, echoed Dwight
Eisenhower’s call for a “Great Crusade”
against European Fascism, yet was
accompanied by strong expressions of
respect for religion and, in particular, for
Islam. For the president, and within
liberalism, these statements were not
contradictory. Outward-looking and
altruistic idealism—crusading with a small
“c”—and tolerance have always coexisted
in the liberal tradition.
This tradition developed in the after-
math of the 17th century struggles among
Western European states that ended in
the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. The
treaties determined that political tolera-
tion for the three great European
religious communities of the time—
Roman Catholic, Lutheran Christian,
and Calvinist Christian—would hence-
forth be the norm. Indeed, toleration of
religious difference—among Christians
and even for other religious faiths—was
said to be itself a Christian idea. This
view was famously expressed by the Eng-
lish philosopher John Locke in his
“Letter on Toleration” of 1689:
I esteem that toleration to be thechief characteristic mark of the trueChurch. For whatsoever some peopleboast of the antiquity of places andnames, or of the pomp of their out-ward worship; others, of thereformation of their discipline; all,of the orthodoxy of their faith—foreveryone is orthodox to himself—these things, and all others of thisnature, are much rather marks ofmen striving for power and empireover one another than of the Churchof Christ. Let anyone have never sotrue a claim to all these things, yet ifhe be destitute of charity, meek-ness, and good-will in general
91
towards all mankind, even to thosethat are not Christians, he is certainlyyet short of being a true Christianhimself.4
Whether Locke was right about the “true
Church,” the idea of toleration, “even to
those that are not Christians,” became a
basic component of Western liberalism.
The Peace of Westphalia, from which
Westerners date the birth of the modern
state and the international state system,
was an acknowledgment that living
together in peace required a formal dis-
interest on the part of the authorities in
what would soon be defined as private
matters—notably, religious faith. It also
required noninterference in how other
rulers ran their own states. From this set
of protocols, the formally secular state,
the rights of citizens to civil and political
freedoms, and other elements of Western
liberalism have developed.
These liberal principles have not been
fully honored. Persecution of religious
minorities never fully ended in Europe,
and today there are signs of increased
anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic activity in
Europe as well as institutionalized suspi-
cion of Muslims in Europe and the
United States. Nonetheless, the necessity
of accommodation between church and
state, of common toleration, and of
preserving a bias toward individual free-
dom has remained characteristic of
Western life.
The modern West, then, is both Christ-
ian and deliberately, carefully not
Christian. This distinct balance came
only after ages of religious conflict both
between Christian Europe and outsiders
and, much more importantly, among
Christians themselves. Ever since, West-
erners have debated how to balance
religious affiliation and state liberalism
in public life, as the differing approaches
to headscarves in schools in France and
the United States suggest.
As an immigrant society, the United
States has generally respected private
belief more than Europe and insisted less
on public conformity. By contrast,
European Christianity’s experience of
other faiths, Islam in particular, is col-
ored by a history in which conflict played
a significant part, leaving in European
collective memory a distinct sense of
threat. Unlike American religion, Euro-
pean churches have a strong sense of
rootedness in place, culture, and local
history. This explains why the question of
the place of Christianity in the creation
of Europe and particularly the suprana-
tional European Union is much more
“loaded” than comparable debates in the
United States. Vaclav Havel argued in
92
1994 that the “European Union is based
on a large set of values, with roots in
antiquity and in Christianity.”5 This
European sense of a Christian tradition
reappeared over the next decade both in
the politics of immigration and assimila-
tion and in debates over the nature of the
European Union. Former French Presi-
dent Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s assertion
that admitting Turkey would be “the end
of the European Union” reflected this
conviction, as did the remark of Silvio
Berlusconi regarding the West and Islam.
The debate over whether God or Chris-
tian heritage should be mentioned in the
European Union’s new constitution is
another example of how the West strug-
gles with the appropriate expression of
religious affiliation in public life.6 For
many Europeans, the exclusion of Chris-
tianity from the constitution seemed to
deny the importance of the faith in
bringing Europeans to where they are
today and, perhaps, where they are
headed in the future. For others, to
acknowledge a particular religion in a
document like a constitution would be to
introduce a force that has always proved
divisive into a process that aims at unity.
These debates make the European
response to the Islamic world very differ-
ent from the American, which focuses
largely on issues of geopolitics and for-
eign policy, with special reference to the
Middle East. While the Middle East is
still vital from the European point of
view, many European politicians now
consider Islam a domestic issue, played
out in the suburbs of Antwerp and Paris,
or the underground of London, while by
and large Americans have just started
to confront the significance of their
own indigenous Muslim communities.
Indeed, from the era of Malcolm X until
September 11, most Americans associated
American Islam with the struggle for civil
rights for African Americans rather than
with the growing immigrant community.
The situation in the United States is dif-
ferent in another sense, as well.
American respect for the religious
impulse—of whatever type—has always
been high. Unlike that of Europe, Amer-
ican popular culture has generated
religious sects and enthusiasms with
unmatched fecundity, from Jehovah’s
Witnesses to new forms of Buddhism to
Scientology and the heterodox Nation of
Islam.7 What is incomprehensible to
American believers is not other beliefs
but unbelief, which was the charge against
“atheistic” or “Godless” Communism
during the cold war. The United States’
enlistment of religious Muslim allies
against atheist Communist parties in the
Muslim world sprang, in part, from this
moral vision of the anti-Communist
struggle.
93
The administration of George W. Bush
came into office advocating a greater
presence for religion in public life. This
was not necessarily intolerant; the “faith-
based charities” that the administration
sought to support, for example, included
Muslim charities, not least because Islam
is the fastest-growing religion in Amer-
ica and is especially strong among the
black urban poor.8 However, the admin-
istration was itself unusually Christian in
its outlook and willing to use Christian
faith as a political tool in advancing cer-
tain social policies, such as promoting
the traditional family and discouraging
abortion.
Yet since September 11, the avowedly
Christian element in the Bush adminis-
tration has gone some distance to make it
clear that Christianity as such—of any
type—is not the basis of Americanism.9
This is true as well for American public
opinion; a poll conducted by the
respected Pew Research Center following
the September 11 attacks captures the
ambiguities of the situation:
Favorable views of Muslim-Amer-cans have risen from 45% in Marchto 59% today, even though 40% ofthe public think the terrorists weremotivated at least in part by religionwhen they carried out the Sept. 11attacks. The survey finds clear evi-dence that Americans are heeding
President Bush’s call for tolerancetoward Muslims, and the President’sown core constituents—conservativeRepublicans—have shown by far thebiggest turnaround. Nearly two-thirds of conservative Republicans(64%) feel favorably toward Muslimsin this country, up 29 percentagepoints since March.10
The Export of the West:
From Empire to Security Alliance
Out of efforts to manage this divisiveness
grew the modern secular state. Soon after
it arose in Europe, it began to spread.
The export of Western models of state
organization took place mainly through
the imperial expansion of Western pow-
ers, principally Britain, France, Spain,
the Netherlands, and Portugal, begin-
ning in the 15th century and accelerating
as the notion of the modern state took
shape in the 18th and 19th centuries.
As a source of identity and as an exten-
sion of national territory, formal empire
remained important—particularly for the
Dutch, the British, and the French—until
well after World War II. Indeed, partly
because of the disasters of that war, the
initial postwar response was to turn to
empire as a kind of consolation, with
the recovered territories in East Asia
or the Middle East as a source of
renewed standing and confidence for the
94
European homeland. The final loss of
empire was in turn felt very strongly in
the Netherlands, rather less so in France
and Britain, for reasons having to do
with scale, but also with the alternative
resources and stronger historical identity
available to France and Britain. In Por-
tugal and Spain, imperial decline worked
very differently—it occurred over a longer
period and, since these were not stable
democracies, there was much less debate
over the implications of decolonization.11
The American attitude toward imperial-
ism has been quite distinct from that of
its European precursors. By and large,
Americans today do not see their coun-
try’s expansionist past in North America
as imperial. In part because much of the
expansion was associated with commercial
projects—from the Louisiana Purchase to
the Gold Rush, the transcontinental rail-
road and the sale by the state of land for
agriculture—most Americans think of
their nation’s push westward from the 13
original colonies as driven by material
growth and justified by moral progress.
They do not think of it as official, for-
mal, political conquest, nor is it taught
that way in American schools. The brief
period of undiluted American imperialism
in the Caribbean and the Philippines—at
the turn of the 20th century—is seen as
exceptional.
Moreover, today much of what people else-
where may see as American imperialism—
the nation’s dominant corporations, its
ubiquitous cultural products, the out-
sized importance of its consumer market
(and therefore of its tariff, tax, and trade
policies)—is seen by most Americans as
mere commerce or culture–not, in other
words, as matters of power.12
In fact, this distinction between the role
of the government, formal political
institutions, and the rest of society—the
private sector and civil society—is a cru-
cial one in understanding how the West
operates more generally. The govern-
ment of the United States, or of any
Western country, is but one of many
voices seeming—and claiming—to speak
for the West. Western societies are
cacophonous, perhaps none more so
than the United States itself. Western life
in the post-World War II period has
become thick with political and social
opinion and the institutional structures
to lend those opinions substance.
Institutionally, the contemporary West
took shape during and immediately after
World War II. Europe had exploded in
violence twice in 30 years, at a cost of
many millions dead. The world system
had demonstrated its inability to prevent
escalating destruction. Continental Fas-
cism had additionally proved that the
95
elimination of an entire people—Euro-
pean Jews—was technologically and
politically feasible to a degree almost
impossible to imagine. Similar levels of
destruction, based on political leaning
and class rather than racial or religious
grounds, had occurred in the Soviet
Union.
The West that grew out of this context
had several new features. After 1945,
state systems and borders in the major
theatres of war were essentially frozen,
regardless of whether the peoples affected
found such a status quo desirable. The
vanquished powers were thoroughly dis-
armed—permanently, as was generally
expected in the cases of Germany and
Japan. The victorious powers, above all
the United States and the Soviet Union,
emerged as the guarantors or enforcers
of the new stability.
A second new feature of the West imme-
diately after World War II was the
dominance of a single state. As we have
seen, the West had always been an arena
of competitive states, and its most
distinctive ideas—liberal pluralism and
the indefinite management of conflict
through balancing of powers—developed
against that backdrop.13 Single-state
dominance drastically altered the context
of Western liberalism because it threatened
the pluralism of Western state power.
A third new feature was that the domi-
nant state was the United States, whereas
the heart of Western civilization had been
firmly in Western Europe until 1945.
The war, and the decisive intervention
by America, changed that dynamic.
America’s goal, however, was not domi-
nance in an imperial sense (or in a fascist
sense). Rather, the United States
believed its interventions in the world
wars were unavoidable, the alternative
being a German-dominated world.
A fourth development was that this new
West faced a new East—the Eastern Bloc—
one that had no significant connection
with Islam and very little to do with the
traditional East, in the sense of “Ori-
ent.” The wholesale takeover of the term
“the East” by China, the Soviet Union,
and the eastern tranche of Europe was
entirely unprecedented.
The idealistic side of European imperi-
alism was dismissed—even by most
Westerners—over the course of the anti-
imperialist independence struggles of the
20th century, in particular those of the
period from 1945-1970 and as the cold
war came to dominate international con-
sciousness. The reappearance of a more
or less “pro-imperial” position among
influential Western commentators—
European and American—after the end
of the cold war and more so after
96
September 11 was thus particularly strik-
ing. However, there is no popular
pro-imperial movement in the United
States or Britain or anywhere else in the
West—unless strong belief in a forceful
“international community” led by Western
countries is itself Western imperialism.
With the end of the cold war, the values
represented by the West were now per-
ceived to be universal. This was the
contention of the American political
thinker Francis Fukuyama in his famous
1989 essay, “The End of History?”14
With the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the rejection of state socialism by
popular movements in the Communist
world, Fukuyama argued, the Western
system had won and there was no longer
any alternative or competitive model.
Fukuyama’s analysis received consider-
able support at the time, even in Europe.
The German sociologist and philosopher
Ralf Dahrendorf, for example, argued in
his 1990 article, “Reflections on the Rev-
olution in Europe” that “the First and
Second Worlds are being reunited into
something which has no name yet, nor a
number; perhaps it will just be the
World.”15 Insofar as liberalism assumes
pluralism, however, the notion of a
single “world” with no future “history”
revealed that a profoundly illiberal strain
remained alive in the varied fabric of
Western intellectual life.
Soon, however, it seemed entirely possi-
ble that, far from embracing liberal
democracy, much of the world would be
consumed in conflicts of ethnicity,
nationality, and religion. From 1989 to
1992, religion played an important role
in conflicts across the Balkans and in
the former Eastern Bloc (as in the
impending division of Czechoslovakia,
widespread persecution of Gypsies, and
the threatening isolation of Russian
communities in the Baltic States). Reli-
gion was becoming an increasingly
divisive force around the world, whether
connected to mainstream traditions
(Christian terrorism in the United
States, Muslim and Hindu conflicts over
Kashmir, Sunni-Shi’a clashes in Pak-
istan, Muslim-Christian conflict in
Nigeria and Sudan, and Jewish-Muslim
battles in the Middle East) or local
enthusiasms (the Lord’s Resistance Army
in Uganda, God’s Army of the Holy
Mountain in Burma).
Looking back on this period, Oxford
historian Timothy Garton Ash has writ-
ten, “Even at one minute past midnight
on 1 January 1990 we already knew that
this would be a formative decade in
Europe. A 40-year-old European order
had just collapsed with the Berlin Wall.
Everything seemed possible. Everyone
was hailing a ‘new Europe.’ But no one
knew what it would look like.”16
97
After 1989, both the United States and
Europe drifted away from “the West” as a
security concept. Americans debated the
purpose of foreign policy, oscillating
between relatively modest and conserva-
tive definitions of U.S. national interests
during the administration of George
H.W. Bush to the more ambitious, if very
different, idealisms of Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush. “The United States
recognizes that we have a special respon-
sibility that goes along with being a great
power,” the Clinton administration
declared.
Our global interests and our historicideals impel us to oppose those whowould endanger the survival or wellbeing of their peaceful neighbors . . .At the same time, this does not meanthat we or the international commu-nity must tolerate gross violations ofhuman rights within those borders . . .We will act with others when we can,but alone when we must.17
To what extent was this a “Western” for-
eign policy? There is no simple answer.
The Clinton administration, particularly
in its second term, was clearly at the head
of what is called the “international com-
munity.” It had a sympathetic partner in
the secretary-general of the United
Nations, Kofi Annan; a broad acceptance
among Europeans; and a sense for inter-
national structure, whether in managing
globalization or advancing human rights,
which marked it as enthusiastically
cosmopolitan. The international commu-
nity, however, is not avowedly Western,
and to some degree marked itself off
from the “West,” which for many in
Clinton’s camp is tarred by association
with imperialism, racism, and the
enforcement of uneven economic devel-
opment.18 At the same time, Clinton’s
actual security policies allowed ample
scope for unilateral American action.
In the last years of the Clinton adminis-
tration, there emerged two additional
schools of thought about American secu-
rity policy: the core/periphery model and
the imperial model. Both of these
reflected a sort of geographical reorgan-
ization of the political-conceptual map
of the world. The primary challenge to
the West was no longer from the East but
from the South, a region seen as less
prosperous, less law-abiding, and more
dangerous. The core/periphery model
distinguished a core of nations—overlap-
ping, to a great extent, with the old West—
in which laws, free trade, and human
rights formed something like a common
patrimony. Within the core, there were
no noneconomic rivalries and thus no
serious security concerns. Outside this
core was a world of conflict and even
chaos, from which security threats
emanated. The Harvard political scientist
98
Samuel Huntington’s famous 1993 essay,
“The Clash of Civilizations,” advanced
this model by arguing that the West–
which he saw as Europe and the United
States—was destined to clash with other
“civilizations.” He argued that “Western
concepts differ fundamentally from those
prevalent in other civilizations,” listing
those concepts as “individualism, liberal-
ism, constitutionalism, human rights,
equality, liberty, the rule of law, democ-
racy, free markets, the separation of
church and state.”19 According to Hunt-
ington, these concepts “often have little
resonance” outside the West and he advo-
cated a Western security strategy aiming at
“westernizing” Latin America; drawing a
firm line between Western Europe and
the Eastern Orthodox lands of the Slavs;
maintaining overwhelming technological
and military superiority; and forgoing
futile interventions elsewhere. The belief
in an enlightened Western cultural core
facing a benighted periphery became
more widespread over the course of the
1990s; it was used to justify inaction in
the Balkans, for example.20
The imperial model was similar to the
core/periphery theory in that it saw impe-
rial rule as emanating from a Western, or
formerly Western, core. The new impe-
rialists, however, believed in action
rather than isolation and took much
of their energy from a view that the
imposition of imperial rule was virtuous,
that it ensured stability and development.
The writer and former State Department
policy planner Robert Kagan, together
with William Kristol, editor of the con-
servative Weekly Standard, argued in 1996
for an American “benevolent hege-
mony”; by 1998, Kagan was maintaining
that American dominance of the world
constituted a “benevolent empire.”21 The
term “imperial” had long been used to
describe the United States by its critics;
its use as a positive term was new. Its cur-
rency reflected the demise of a perhaps
alien but predictable East and the rise of
the often chaotic-seeming developing
South as a security focus of the West.
U.S. President George W. Bush’s initial
instincts as leader of the most powerful
country in the world were isolationist.
Although he shared a sense of the perils
that the United States faced from the
South, he spoke of a new “humility” in
the use of American power and a retreat
from the expansive engagement of the
Clinton administration, in particular, its
attempts at nation building. As presi-
dent, Bush repudiated the Clinton
administration’s commitment to the
International Criminal Court, declared
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty out-
dated, and withdrew from the Kyoto
Protocol on global warming. The Bush
administration’s reaction to the attacks
99
of September 11, 2001, was dramatically
more ambitious than its previous poli-
cies, and it reflected embrace of an
assertive policy toward the South, partic-
ularly the Islamic South. That said, it did
little to strengthen American ties to
Western allies. As President Bush told
Congress on September 20, “Great harm
has been done to us. We have suffered
great loss. And in our grief and anger we
have found our mission and our
moment.”22 The grief and anger were
international, as Bush noted in his
speech, and the citizens of some 80
nations other than the United States were
killed in the attacks. However, in security
terms the counterattack (except for
police and intelligence work, which
proved critical) would be administered
by the United States.
Was the United States, then, ending its
security link to what had been the West?
The idea of the West as a security concept
certainly did appear to have been gravely
weakened. To many observers the Bush
administration seemed to be construct-
ing an American empire, and that
empire did not, on the whole, seem to
connect America to the West as such.23
Institutional Complexity of the West
The institutional structure of Western
societies was projected on the world scale
in the design and development of inter-
national institutions after World War II.
In fact, the war’s conflicts were not yet
over when a majority of the world’s inde-
pendent states (at least those who were
explicitly anti-Fascist) assembled in San
Francisco to form the United Nations.
The institution closely reflected the new
West: it was dominated by a single state—
the United States; placed great emphasis
on ensuring the stability of existing
states, not least by enshrining the 1945
balance of power with the establishment
of the Security Council’s “permanent
five” members (United States, China, the
Soviet Union, France, and Britain);
accepted the de facto division of West and
East; and most important, accepted and
strengthened the idea that the victorious
Western powers had a responsibility and
a right to mold the global system.24 The
same perspective was applied by the
International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank, and indeed, all major
international institutions. In other
words, all “global” institutions—political,
economic, social, and cultural—would be
Western-dominated, with a subservient
yet substantial role usually reserved for
the large Eastern powers (the Soviet
Union and China).
Several trends have since undermined
this structure: the economic recoveries
of Germany and Japan; the shrinking
100
percentage of the world’s population
living in the West; the West’s dispropor-
tionate use of, and dependence on,
petroleum; and the breakup of European
empires, including the Soviet Union.
The international architecture of the late
1940s has not always adjusted well to these
trends. Nonetheless, the “international
community” in its varied institutional
expressions is still largely Western-dom-
inated, due in part to Western leadership
of international intergovernmental and
nongovernmental organizations.
The institutional West is not, however, as
monolithic as it sometimes appears to be.
As discussed, there are many significant
differences between the United States
and the rest of the West; between the
English-speaking countries and conti-
nental Europe; and between Eastern and
Western Europe. One can speak, for
example, of a European social model that
is increasingly distinct from the American.
The European model—with its emphasis
on the mutual obligations of citizens and
the state, and the attendant right of the
state to make fiscal and other claims on
its subjects—is quite unlike the American
model, where the emphasis is on freedom
from governmental interference.
Likewise, differences exist between Euro-
pean and American beliefs on the rule of
law. In the course of unification, Europe
has developed an extensive set of regula-
tions and laws, “right down to beer and
sausages,” as Robert Cooper—a British
Foreign Office senior civil servant and a
chief security-policy planner for the
European Union—notes in his reflec-
tions on “postmodern states”:
No one compels [European] states toobey the rules of the CFE Treaty orto pay fines imposed on them by theEuropean Court of Justice. They doso because of their interest as indi-vidual states in making the collectivesystem work and, within the Euro-pean Union, because all have aninterest in maintaining the rule ofEU law . . . [Europe], perhaps forthe first time in 300 years, is nolonger a zone of competing truths.The end of the Cold War has broughtwith it something like a common setof values. 25
Americans tend to place their arrival at a
common set of values much earlier than
the end of the cold war—rather, at the
moment when the Constitution was writ-
ten. The Constitution and the Bill of
Rights are seen by most Americans as the
basis for the legal order and, in many ways,
the social order. The law rests on a con-
ception of individual freedom that focuses
on limiting the powers of the state, not on
defining the activities of the individual.26
European and American attitudes toward
secular values and human rights are also
101
different in some aspects. Europeans
remain much more positive than Amer-
icans about legislating and enforcing a
rather complex set of human rights norms
(the core human rights treaties and their
annexes run to hundreds of pages).
Expansive European thinking about the
future has begun to take the form of a
growing European community of values.
This is no longer commonly seen as a
Western project, or even a Euro-Ameri-
can one, but more as a European effort
to lead an “international community”
different from, and in some ways against,
the American-led contingent.
The Western media similarly reflect both
Western dominance and significant dif-
ferences within the West. To the degree
that a “global culture” exists, it is trans-
mitted by Western-dominated means
and reflects Western values. Yet until
approximately 30 years ago, European
newspapers tended to be affiliated with
one or another political party, while
radio and television were primarily gov-
ernment-run. Over the past 30 years,
however, European governments have
either privatized media interests or
allowed private companies increasing
control of the airwaves.
The American media present a more
complex picture. In the postwar period,
American newspapers, radio, and television
were privately owned, and, by contrast,
strove on the whole for nonpartisan
objectivity. The general trend is still
toward consolidation of ownership—
though somewhat in contrast to
European ownership, U.S. companies
have consolidated across media as well as
within a particular medium, especially
since the Internet boom of the late ’90s.
For instance, CNN is not just the domi-
nant global news network; it is part of a
still larger company, Time Warner,
which owns print media, film, Internet,
and television production companies.
The result, in terms of who speaks for the
West, is that a few companies dominate
the debate, offering a glut of news and
cultural information, some of it bal-
anced and comprehensive, and some of it
myopic and poorly informed. Since Sep-
tember 11, in particular, some of the
more “patriotic” popular media have
presented foreign news as a contest of
Friends versus Enemies.
The intensity of the Western engagement
with radical Islam after September 11 has
also led to the amplification of some
extremist voices and a willingness among
the public to listen to extreme statements
about Islam and the Muslim world
in both Europe and the United States.
Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Brigitte Bardot
and Michel Houllebecq in France,
Melanie Phillips in Britain, Bill O’Reilly
102
and Ann Coulter in the United States,
and many others have exacerbated, in
popular language, the idea of a clash of
civilizations, with Islam on one side and
the West on the other.27 Such exploita-
tion of an alleged Islamic-Western
cultural divide has had its counterpart in
occasional remarks by Christian leaders
like Pat Robertson and Franklin Gra-
ham.28 It has also received some
intellectual validation in works by such
scholars as Bernard Lewis and Samuel
Huntington.29
Beyond the media and popular culture,
the role of scholars and intellectuals in
speaking for the West varies greatly. On
the European continent, particularly in
France and most of the Eastern/Central
European countries, the influence of
public intellectuals is considerable,
whether as commentators or policy advis-
ers. By contrast, in Britain, and still
more so in the United States, even the
most influential and visible intellectuals
are largely excluded from policy making.
In addition, the American practice of
rotating hundreds of positions with each
new presidential administration means
that a wholly different team regularly
replaces not only politicians but policy
advisers, academic experts, and mid-level
State Department and other planners.
This practice contrasts quite sharply with
the European pattern, whereby public
intellectuals and accredited experts often
retain their connections to policy mak-
ing, and to the fashioning of the nation’s
image, for decades at a time.
In the United States there is, however,
also an intellectual community poised
between the traditional academy and the
media, namely the various councils and
institutions grouped under the term
“think tanks.” The policy intellectuals in
this arena can have considerable influ-
ence over government.30 Think tanks
cover the entire political spectrum and
often provide a home for government
policymakers when their party is out of
power or their point of view has fallen
from favor. These institutions overlap
with influential magazines like the Weekly
Standard and the New Republic; they also
provide many of the “experts” called on
by television producers and opinion-
page editors to offer commentary on
current events.
Conclusion
The meaning of the West is today, more
than ever, flexible and contested, and any
effort to speak to the West must recognize
the complexity and diversity of those
who speak for the West. For peoples or
individuals who believe strongly in cul-
tural essences, the elusiveness of the West
can be maddening; however, to react to
103
this elusiveness by denying it, or by
imposing an order that isn’t there, would
be to move from confusion to error.
The nature of the West has always been
changing, and it is clear that the post-
cold war period is one of particular flux
and unpredictability. The breakdown in
transatlantic relations since late 2001
caught most Western decision makers by
surprise, and it is not at all clear how
profound and long-lived this rift will
prove to be. Certainly it is more than
merely a momentary disagreement about
policy toward Iraq or terrorism. It
reflects the different military and eco-
nomic capabilities of the two constituent
parts of the “West,” but it also reflects
very different post-World War II histo-
ries. In the second half of the 20th
century, Europe and the United States
absorbed and assimilated immigrants
from around the world in very different
ways, and those differences are reflected
in divergences in both domestic and for-
eign policy.
Similarly, the increasing importance of
religious observance and “faith-based”
policy and politics in the United States
(and perhaps with the new Pope Benedict
XVI in Europe as well) represents a
challenge to conventional interpreta-
tions of the modern Western political
landscape. Despite assertions that the rise
in public religious commitment in the
United States is tolerant and ecumeni-
cal—that is, that Americans continue to
prefer faith of any kind to atheist or irre-
ligious principles—most religiously
observant Americans are Christians, a
fact that seemed to prove very important
in the 2004 presidential election. In an
essay published by the New York Times
Book Review on September 18, 2005,
American historian Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., articulated this phenomenon:
The recent outburst of popular reli-giosity in the United States is a mostdramatic and unforeseen develop-ment in American life. As Europegrows more secular, America growsmore devout. George W. Bush is themost aggressively religious presidentAmericans have ever had. Americanconservatives applaud his “faith-based” presidency, an officeheretofore regarded as secular. Thereligious right has become a potentforce in national politics. Evangeli-cals now outnumber mainlineProtestants and crowd megachurches.Billy Graham attracts supplicants by the thousand in Sodom andGomorrah, a k a New York City. TheSupreme Court broods over theplacement of the Ten Command-ments. Evangelicals take over the Air Force Academy, a governmentinstitution maintained by taxpayers’dollars; the academy’s former super-intendent says it will be six yearsbefore religious tolerance is restored.
104
Mel Gibson’s movie “Passion of theChrist” draws nearly $400 million atthe domestic box office.31
Whether this rise in religious sentiment
will turn out to be inclusive and embrace
American Jews, Muslims, and others, or
divisive, pitting the American Christians
against Americans of other faiths, let
alone the rest of the world, may be
among the most important issues in U.S.
domestic politics in the coming years.
On the global scale, the extent to which
international institutions born in 17th-
century Western traditions of sovereignty
and statehood, and designed by Western
powers during the 20th century, can
nevertheless manage to serve a genuinely
international community is a matter of
profound debate, as the heated negotia-
tions of the United Nations 2005 World
Summit demonstrated. Although they
reflect Western interests and values both
in their structural design and in the pre-
dominant roles assigned to Western
powers, particularly the United States,
these institutions are still seen by many as
indispensable to peaceful resolution of
conflict.
Finally, one cannot fail to note the self-
questioning described earlier here that
reverberates through the multiple layers
and interstices of what is generally called
the “West.” In many ways, this introspec-
tion echoes the search for a new identity
and a new anchoring that is at work in
another tradition—that which is generally
called “Islam” by the West. Will these twin
identity crises be exacerbated by the words
and deeds of extremists in both camps
and lead to a “clash of civilizations”? Or
rather, will this reflection be channeled
into more productive and peaceful
endeavors and serve as the springboard
for an “alliance of civilizations”?32 These
will be major questions for the future not
only of the Western and Muslim worlds,
but for the entire world in these times
of nuclear, biological, and chemical arms
proliferation.
106
1. Apparently unaware of the strong
negative connotations of the term
“crusade” for many Muslims, Pres-
ident Bush touched off a firestorm
within Muslim public opinion when
he remarked in a speech in the days
after the attacks of September 11,
2001, that “this crusade, this war on
terrorism is going to take a while.”
The term “crusade” can have multi-
ple interpretations in English
beyond the religious meaning con-
tained in the term’s Latin root of
(Christian) cross; the Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary lists as the second
definition of crusade, “An aggres-
sive movement or enterprise against
some public evil, or some institu-
tion or class of persons considered
as evil.” In Arabic, however, the lit-
eral translation of “crusade” is a
“Christian campaign,” which con-
jures for many Muslims the
medieval Christian wars against
Islam in the Holy Lands. President
Bush’s unfortunate choice of lan-
guage was roundly condemned by
Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
For an analysis of the cultural impli-
cations of the term “crusade,” see
Anne E. Kornblut and Charles
Radin, “Bush Image of Crusade
Upsets Some Potential Allies,”
Boston Globe, September 18, 2001.
2. John Hanford, the Bush adminis-
tration’s ambassador at large, made
the criticism of France for interna-
tional religious freedom. Hanford
noted that items like headscarves are
worn “as a heartfelt manifestation”
of faith, and “this is, we believe, a
basic right that should be pro-
tected.” Hanford spoke in the
course of releasing an official report
on religious freedom that also crit-
icized Turkey for its ban on
headscarves. See Christopher Mar-
quis, “U.S. Chides France on Effort
to Bar Religious Garb in Schools,”
New York Times, December 19,
2003. Contrasting European and
American perceptions of Turkey’s
application to join the European
Union are another intriguing
instance of how the two Western cul-
tures perceive the “religious
identity” question differently, in
this case when looking at a political
question. See David L. Phillips,
“Turkey’s Dreams of Accession,”
Foreign Affairs, September/October
2004, for a characterization of the
mainstream American view; for
some European reaction to Turkish
admission and the American inter-
est in it, see the remarks by Frits
Bolkestein, the EU competition
commissioner, in Tobias Buck and
Daniel Dombey, “Fischler Criticises
NOTES TO APPENDIX VI
107
EU plans for Turkey,” Financial
Times, September 10, 2004, p. 1,
and the discussion in “Turkish
Tales,” The Economist, September 11,
2004.
3. For a survey of neoconservative
thought, see William Kristol, ed.,
The Weekly Standard, A Reader: 1995-
2005 (New York: HarperCollins,
2005).
4. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Tol-
eration (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1955), p. 13.
5. Havel’s speech is online at
http://www.europa-web.de/europa/
02wwswww/203chart/chart_gb.htm.
It inspired the Charta of European
Identity (1995), which is available at
the same electronic address.
6. Elaine Sciolino, “God’s Place in
Charter Is Dividing Europeans,”
New York Times, May 26, 2004.
7. One example is the career of Ruben
Habito, a native of the Philippines
who, although a Catholic, under-
went Zen training, received a
doctorate in Buddhist philosophy
from Tokyo University, then made
his home in the United States,
where he teaches at Southern
Methodist University and directs the
Maria Kannon Zen Center, both in
Dallas, Texas. See www.innerexplo-
rations.com/catew/13.htm.
8. The association of Islam with
African Americans, and to a lesser
degree with the prison population,
is one of many instances where race
and social class are closely associated
with a particular religious belief.
9. The then-Attorney General John
Ashcroft, who was perhaps the most
avowedly Christian member of the
Bush cabinet, made positive state-
ments about Islam following the
attacks, in tune with the line of the
administration as a whole. As early
as his first address to Congress, on
September 20, 2001, President
Bush said: “I also want to speak
tonight directly to Muslims
throughout the world. We respect
your faith. It’s practiced freely by
many millions of Americans and by
millions more in countries that
America counts as friends. Its teach-
ings are good and peaceful, and
those who commit evil in the name
of Allah blaspheme the name of
Allah. The terrorists are traitors to
their faith, trying, in effect, to
hijack Islam itself.” Bush, Our Mis-
sion and Our Moment: Speeches Since
the Attacks of September 11, Washing-
ton, D.C.: private printing, p. 15.
President Bush’s speeches are avail-
able at www.whitehouse.gov. One
treatment of the Bush White
House’s Christianity can be found
108
in David Frum, The Right Man: An
Inside Account of the Bush White House
(New York: Random House,
2003). Frum was Bush’s speech-
writer and, before his resignation,
one of the very few Jews in the
administration.
10. The Pew Research Center for the
People and the Press report on
“Post-September 11 Attitudes,”
released December 6, 2001, online
at http://peoplepress.org/reports/
display.php3?ReportID=144.
11. See Tony Judt, Post War: A History of
Europe Since 1945 (New York: Pen-
guin Press, 2005).
12. For a completely opposite view of
American imperialism, see Neil
Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s
Geographer and the Prelude to Global-
ization (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003). Within the
academy, the general view of Amer-
ican expansion is much less rosy
than is the case in high school and
undergraduate classrooms.
13. An interesting, very pluralist
approach to this question is pre-
sented by Joao Carlos Espada, Adam
Wolfson, and Marc F. Plattner, eds.,
Pluralism Without Relativism: Remem-
bering Sir Isaiah Berlin (Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2003).
14. Originally published in the summer
1989 issue of the National Inter-
est; subsequently expanded and
published in book form as The End of
History and the Last Man (New York:
Free Press, 1992).
15. Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the
Revolution in Europe: In a Letter
Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentle-
man in Warsaw (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1990), p. 23.
16. Timothy Garton Ash, History of the
Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches
from Europe in the 1990s (New York:
Vintage, 2001).
17. The passage is in the preface; the
text of the 1996 National Security
Strategy (NSS) can be found at
www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/
national/1996stra.htm.
18. See, for example, the feverish battles
over Stanford University’s decision
to modify its traditional “Western
civilization” core curriculum to
include more nonwhite, nonmale
voices, as chronicled in Nathan
Glazer, “Canon Fodder,” New
Republic, August 22, 1988, and
James Atlas, “The Battle of the
Books,” New York Times Magazine,
June 5, 1988. The strong genera-
tional abandonment of “the West” as
a tainted idea is examined in
Matthew Connelly and Paul
Kennedy, “Must It Be the West
Against the Rest?” Atlantic Monthly,
December 1994.
109
19. Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of
Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs, sum-
mer 1993. Huntington added
“cultural freedom” when he
expanded his argument to book
length: The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of the World Order (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1996),
p. 310.
20. President Clinton was said to have
decided that Balkan cultures were
too deeply affected by ancient ethnic
hatreds for U.S. intervention to
make any difference based on his
reading of Robert Kaplan’s Balkan
Ghosts: A Journey Through History,
(New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1993). See Nader Mousavizadeh,
ed., The Black Book of Bosnia: The
Consequences of Appeasement (New
York: Basic, 1996), p. 54; also
Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nation-
alism, War and the Great Powers,
1804-1999 (New York: Viking
Penguin, 2000), pp. xxiv-xxv.
21. Robert Kagan and William Kristol,
“Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign
Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August
1996; Robert Kagan, “The Benevo-
lent Empire,” Foreign Policy, summer
1998. In spring of 2000, these ideas
were further developed, alongside
contributions from several noted
architects of George W. Bush’s secu-
rity policies, in Kristol and Kagan’s
book Present Dangers: Crisis and
Opportunity in America’s Foreign
and Defense Policies (Washington:
Encounter Books, 2000). The
book identified the present danger
as U.S. hesitancy in maintaining
global hegemony.
22. George W. Bush, Our Mission and
Our Moment: Speeches Since the Attacks
of September 11.
23. Max Boot gave this argument on
October 15, 2001, in his Weekly
Standard article “The Case for
American Empire.” “Rome has
been attacked, and Rome is fighting
to re-establish its security and its
hegemony,” Michael Ignatieff wrote
in the New York Times on February 5,
2002, introducing the imperial
figure of speech into a broader dis-
course. Washington Post columnist
Sebastian Mallaby’s article “The
Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism,
Failed States, and the Case for
American Empire” appeared in For-
eign Affairs the following month.
Since then there have been numer-
ous articles and, by now, a number
of books, including Max Boot, The
Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and
the Rise of American Power (New York:
Basic, 2002); Niall Ferguson,
Empire: The Rise and Demise of the
British World Order and the Lessons for
Global Power (New York: Basic,
110
2003) and Colossus: The Price of
American Power (New York: Penguin,
2004), by a British historian and
frequent advocate of empire, par-
ticularly in the pages of the New York
Times; Andrew J. Bacevich, American
Empire: The Realities and Consequences
of US Diplomacy (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 2003); Clyde
Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American
Unilateralism and the Failure of Good
Intentions (New York: Basic, 2003);
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of
Capital (London: Verso, 2003);
and Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite:
Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and
Afghanistan (New York: Vintage,
2003). See the omnibus reviews by
Brian Urquhart, “World Order and
Mr. Bush,” New York Review of Books,
October 9, 2003; Martin Jacques,
“The Interregnum,” London Review
of Books, February 5, 2004; and
Ronald Steel, “Totem and Taboo,”
Nation, September 20, 2004. An
argument that America’s imperial
moment is more a mood swing than
a permanent shift is made in Ben-
jamin Wallace-Wells, “Right Man’s
Burden: Why Empire Enthusiast
Niall Ferguson Won’t Change His
mind,” Washington Monthly, June
2004.
24. On the birth of the United Nations,
see Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of
Creation: The Founding of the United
Nations (Boulder: Westview, 2003);
a recent meditation on the West,
including an argument that “uni-
versalization” of the West would
mark its demise, is David Gress,
From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the
West and Its Opponents (New York:
Free Press, 1998).
25. Robert Cooper, The Breaking of
Nations: Order and Chaos in the
Twenty-First Century (New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004), pp.
30, 60-61.
26. Robert Cooper writes, “The United
States is a state founded on ideas and
its vocation is the spread of those
ideas. European countries are based
on nation and history. For Ameri-
cans history is bunk. They aim, as
the Mexican author Octavio Paz
says, at the colonization not of space
but of time: that is, of the future.”
The Breaking of Nations, pp. 47-48.
27. See Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the
Pride (New York: Rizzoli Interna-
tional, 2002); on how Michel
Houellebecq created a scandal by
saying Islam was a “stupid” religion,
see Phillip Delves Broughton,
“Writer Defends Right to Call Islam
‘Stupid,’ ” Daily Telegraph, Septem-
ber 18, 2002; Brigitte Bardot, Un
Cri dans le silence (Paris: Editions
du Rocher, 2003); Ann Coulter,
111
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the
Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New
York: Crown, 2003); Melanie
Phillips’s columns appear in the
London Daily Mail and are online at
www.melaniephillips.com. Phillips’s
column “You Say Phobe, I Say
Phooey” from June 11, 2004, gives
her perspective on being called an
Islamophobe. Bill O’Reilly hosts The
O’Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel
and transcripts from his show are
online at www.foxnews.com.
28. Considerable controversy attended
the publication of Franklin Graham
and Bruce Nygren, The Name
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2002)
and Graham’s comments on Islam
made at the time, some of which can
be found in an interview at www.pbs.
org; for Robertson (and others), see
“Muhammad a Terrorist to Falwell,”
New York Times, October 4, 2002,
and “Islam Is Violent In Nature,
Robertson Says,” New York Times,
February 23, 2002.
29. See Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of
Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
(New York: Modern Library,
2003); and From Babel to Dragomans
(New York: Oxford, 2004), as well
as Ian Buruma’s review of the latter
book in the New Yorker, June 14,
2004. For Samuel Huntington,
see note 19, supra, and his recent
argument for defending what he
calls the “Anglo-Protestant” nature
of the United States in Who Are We?:
The Challenges to America’s National
Identity (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2004).
30. A glimpse of how one public intel-
lectual might influence policy can
be found in David Frum’s descrip-
tion of a visit by Bernard Lewis to
the White House, in Frum, The Right
Man: The Surprise Presidency of George
W. Bush (New York: Random
House, 2003), pp. 170-171.
31. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Forgetting
Reinhold Niebuhr,” New York Times,
September 18, 2005.
32. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
announced the formation of an
initiative toward an Alliance of Civ-
ilizations in a statement on July 14,
2005. Based at the United Nations
and cosponsored by the prime min-
isters of Spain and Turkey, the
alliance will work to bridge divides
between societies that are being
exploited by extremists.
Sorbonne-educated Mustapha Tlili is the founderand director of Dialogues and a research scholar at theRemarque Institute of New York University. He is aformer senior United Nations official, having servedthe organization in various capacities over a longcareer. In particular, he was the director of the UNinformation center for France, located in Paris; chiefof the Anti-Apartheid, Namibia, Palestine, andDecolonization programs section in the Departmentof Public Information at UN Headquarters in NewYork; and principal officer/director in charge ofcommunications policy in the same department. Anestablished novelist, Mustapha Tlili is a knight of theFrench Order of Arts and Letters and a member ofHuman Rights Watch’s Advisory Committee for theMiddle East and North Africa.
Dialogues has received financial support from theCarnegie Corporation, the MacArthur Foundation,the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the governments ofFrance, Malaysia, the State of Qatar, and the UnitedKingdom, the Spanish foundation El LegadoAndalusí, Majlis El Hassan, the nongovernmentalorganization of His Royal Highness Prince El Hassanbin Talal of Jordan, and Mortimer B. Zuckerman.
In these difficult times, when anger, extremism, andmisunderstanding appear to have gained the upperhand, Dialogues’ work is crucial to world peace andsecurity. Through dialogue based on mutual respect,Muslim and Western community leaders can dispelthe current climate of anger, check extremist trends,and lay the foundations for a more comprehensiveand lasting peace.
New York University is one of the world’s largest pri-vate universities. NYU’s president, Dr. John Sexton,is passionately committed to the goal of making NYUthe first truly global university. As the Universityachieves its core mission—the production of knowl-edge and the education of students for lives of leader-ship and service–it also seeks to foster a culture ofinformed dialogue and debate. The Universityencourages the exchange of ideas, knowledge, prac-tice, and beliefs inside, and outside, the classroom.