Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (32 page)

How to proceed? First, we have to admit to ourselves that we have been trumped and cornered by Osama bin Laden, who as the years pass increasingly emerges as a genius in waging the war of ideas and setting its parameters. While paying lip service to damning the decadence and ungodliness of U.S. and Western societies and regularly raising the banner of the new and blessed caliphate, bin Laden has shown relentless consistency in keeping the Muslim world tightly focused on U.S. foreign policies and their impact on Islam and its believers. With the aid of al-Jazirah, al-Arabiyah, and the Internet, bin Laden has kept these policies and their visible impacts before Muslims on a daily basis.

In this environment, the United States is almost never given the benefit of the doubt in what is, to be sure, a very limited public square in the Islamic world. Because this battle of ideas is not like that of the Cold War, “free society” versus “non-free society,” our efforts to sell the freedom-liberty-democracy product that worked against the Soviets are feckless. Polls by Pew, Gallup, BBC, and Zogby all show that in most Muslim countries polled our way of life is admired; this finding is validated by the seemingly endless numbers of Muslim families who want to immigrate to the United States. Thus, when our hearts-and-minds voices say that American society allows parents to feed, educate, and provide health care for their children, Muslims say, that is great, we admire that and applaud you, but why the hell are you protecting those corrupt, apostate criminals who rule Saudi Arabia? When our voices say, Americans are generous, look how much we helped after the tsunami and the Pakistani earthquake, Muslims say, thanks and God bless you for that, but why have you supported, armed, and protected Arab police states that have oppressed and tortured us and our children for the last half-century?
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Americans frankly have no hearts-and-minds product to sell that will get us a hearing or the benefit of the doubt in Islam’s public square. As noted, the positive beneficial aspects of U.S. society are not being contested. Because bin Laden has successfully made U.S. foreign policies the center of the war of ideas, any Muslim who publicly argues that America should be given the benefit of the doubt is implicitly acquiescing in U.S. support for Israel, manipulation of oil prices, and support for Russia in Chechnya. This is the reason why Americans hear so few “moderate Muslim voices” opposing bin Laden and the Islamists; the moderates are out there and often do not approve of the Islamists’ military actions, but they hate U.S. policies with just as much venom and passion as the Islamists, per the polls by Pew, Gallup, BBC, and Zogby.

The need to correct American misperceptions of what motivates our Islamist foes is obvious, mandatory, and easy to carry out: our elites simply must stop lying and tell the truth. The hatred being generated by Guantanamo Bay, rendition, and killing Iraqi and Afghan civilians, moreover, is an unavoidable price of fighting a war against a nonuniformed, nonstate actor under the terms of international agreements, treaties, and traditions that can accommodate only nation-state-vs.-nation-state conflicts. But we need to be mindful that their cost is more than mere public relations fallout; that hatred for Americans as well as for their government is growing in the Muslim world, and the solution to this problem lies in winning—and winning soon.

A final handicap problem for the United States in the hearts-and-minds arena emanates from Bernard Lewis’s book
What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.
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My own view is that Dr. Lewis did not intend the book to be a final, definitive, and unreserved condemnation of the worthlessness of Muslim civilization. For many Americans and Westerners, however, the book has been portrayed as making that case, and many appear to have adopted that view as their own. To serve their own war-mongering purposes, for example, the neoconservatives most strongly broadcast this description of the book, but President Bush and his colleagues, Democratic Party leaders, media commentators, academics, generals, and many everyday Americans have stated much the same view in one form or another. Protestant evangelicals and Israeli leaders and pundits have given the argument the added and powerfully offensive negative twist of describing Islam as a religion of evil and wickedness, the Prophet as a murderer and a pedophile,
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and those who believe themselves to be defending Islam—and implicitly tens of millions of Muslims—as mad, nihilistic, and apocalyptic gangsters. Through this interpretation of Dr. Lewis’s book, be it merited or a bit exaggerated, we now have an increasingly widespread, common-wisdom type of criticism of Muslims and Islam as evil, warlike, medieval, antimodern, woman-hating, archaic, and inhuman.

Standing against these negative assumptions and judgments is a reality that seems contradictory. Today Islam is the fastest-growing
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religion in the world, a fact that suggests that the best answer to Dr. Lewis’s “What went wrong?” question is that the evolution of Islam is not working out the way elite Westerners wanted it to work out. “The constant media refrain about ‘what went wrong’ with Islam—to paraphrase Bernard Lewis,” William Dalrymple has commented in
The New Statesman,
“ignores its self-evident success and its increasing popularity.”
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Much of this growth clearly is due to the much higher fertility rates of Islamic countries, but as Dalrymple notes in Britain, France, and the United States it has “as much to do with conversion as immigration.”
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In Britain, for example, it has been estimated that by 2025 the number of converts in the British Muslim population will overtake the number of immigrants.
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Islam, it seems, is attractive to an increasing number of non-Muslims, who, we must assume, find in it spiritual solace, a means of understanding the world, and guidance for how a decent life should be lived by individuals, families, societies, and nations. Now, some analysts will contend that Western converts to Islam are the dregs of Western society, and no doubt U.S. and European prisons are places where such conversions occur at a brisk pace. Nonetheless, the rapid, natural, and by-conversion growth of the world’s Islamic population must be the result of something more than a sudden willingness to adopt a war-mongering, medieval, and inhuman religion. Common sense would suggest, I think, that most people are unlikely to seek solace and direction from that sort of faith.

My point here is not that the neoconservatives, and many others who echo what may be an extreme interpretation Dr. Lewis’s book, are wrong (though I think they are) but that the deliberately added portion of denigration they inject into the Western-vs.-Muslim debate is a further obstacle to any successful hearts-and-minds campaign by the United States and its allies. Already faced by a difficult-to-overcome substantive issue—the near-unanimous belief of Muslims that U.S. foreign policy is meant to humiliate Muslims and attack Islam, and that Washington regards Muslim lives as cheap and expendable—Washington’s would-be hearts-and-minds warriors must overcome a blanket and scabrous Western condemnation of an increasingly popular religion. This condemnation can be expected to enrage Muslims who both love their faith and oppose violence against the United States and the West, and thereby contribute to their silent acquiescence in the face of the Islamists’ arguments and military actions.

Every American, of course, is and must remain free to think and speak as they will, but Americans would do well to review their own history for lessons about how such consistently denigrating language can greatly worsen deep divisions over substantive political issues. Politics in antebellum America, for example, confronted such divisive issues as the protective tariff, states-rights issues, banking, slavery, the addition of new states, and the extension of slavery into the western territories. These issues generally took on the form of a North-vs.-South sectional confrontation that led to civil war. Complicating any chance of ameliorating this substantive confrontation, moreover, was a northern view of the South that, over the course of the antebellum years, took on the character of a wholesale denigration not only of the institution of slavery and southern political views but of the character, faith, lifestyle, and culture of southerners. “Northerners believed that southern society was basically degenerate,” the noted historian Kenneth M. Stampp has written. “The want of national spirit, the rejection of political democracy, and the preference for slave labor were only a few of the many signs of social decadence.” Most of all northerners believed their southern countrymen were antimodern and determined to oppose and block societal progress. Northerners believed, Stampp writes, that “secession itself was a ‘revolution against civilization,’ a southern attempt to take revenge on the nineteenth century.”
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Adding to the vitriol and hatred of this general sentiment was a group of northerners who behaved in the same manner as those who have used Dr. Lewis’s book as a comprehensive condemnation of Islam and Muslims. The ardent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his supporters chose the wholesale denigration of southerners and their society as the means for defining the antislavery cause as a confrontation between goodness and enlightenment on one side, and wickedness and medieval obscurantism on the other. While Garrison’s strategy did not cause the Civil War, it contributed mightily to the hardening of southern attitudes toward the North and the ultimate termination of debate on sectional compromise in favor of war. “But if Garrisonian abolitionism was not the original cause of sectional conflict over slavery,” the eminent U.S. historian Don E. Fehrenbacher has tellingly argued, “it nevertheless had a critical influence on the temper and shape of the conflict.”

And the cumulative negative impact of this constant denigration? Well, perhaps it was the production of a significant contribution to the coming of the war—the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857
Dred Scott
decision. In his recent study of President Abraham Lincoln and Roger B. Taney, the Maryland-born chief justice of the Supreme Court, the distinguished legal scholar James F. Simon details Taney’s rising anger and resentment over the North’s constant antebellum denigration of southerners as inferior both as human beings and in their culture and way of life. Simon assesses Taney’s pre–
Dred Scott
career on the Court as one of sound, well-documented, and Union-preserving constitutional reasoning and decisions. But Simon notes that even years before the
Dred Scott
case, Taney had begun to resent “northern humiliation” of the South and to worry that its continuation would push the South toward secession, a tragedy that was being made more likely by “the condescending attitude of northern politicians toward the south and their assumptions of moral superiority.” By 1857 Taney apparently had had enough. In drafting the Court’s majority opinion in the
Dred Scott
case, Simon argues, Taney was “influenced by his southern heritage,” and in the decision’s substance it “seemed as if the deep reservoir of southern resentment over the slavery issue suddenly poured out.” Chief Justice Taney “was a proud member of his region’s aristocracy,” Simon writes, “and when his class was attacked, he vehemently defended it. He bristled at the charge that slavery made the South morally inferior to the North.”
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In the
Dred Scott
case, Taney’s “bristling” not only overpowered the steady and talented mind that produced a career of prudence, good sense, and sound decisions, but also helped to bring on a civil war in which more than 600,000 Americans died. And several of the themes of the North’s denigration of the South are heard today in what is verging on a blanket Western condemnation of Muslim society: the Prophet Muhammad and Islamic society are “degenerate”; Muslims are in revolt against modernity and progress; secular Westerners are “morally superior” to pious Muslims; and Muslims are inferior because they oppose the separation of church and state. At bottom, the impact of such denigration is hard to quantify, but like Taney sharing and defending the proud southerner’s view, all Muslims share the heritage of Islam, tend to spring to the defense of their faith, society, and brethren, and bristle at the “humiliation” they perceive in Western criticism. Today, in fact, many millions of Muslims likely share the conclusion reached by the antebellum senator Judah P. Benjamin (D-Louisiana)—who later was a Confederate cabinet secretary—that “the heart of the matter was not so much what the abolitionists and Republicans had
done
or might
do
to the South, as it was the things they
said
about the South—and the moral arrogance with which they said them.”
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Thus, the shaping of Western thought and rhetoric toward wholesale denigration by the popularization and perhaps distortion of Dr. Lewis’s what-went-wrong thesis further reduces the already slim chance that any U.S. hearts-and-minds arguments will get a fair hearing among Muslims, radical, conservative, moderate, liberal, or otherwise.