Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

This is a short article I published in the ISIM Newsletter in 2002. Ironically, it was posted online by “CampusWatch,” a site created by Daniel Pipes, whose views I criticize in it. Presumably someone at CampusWatch posted the article because, although I am critical of the neoconservative view of the Middle East, I am also critical of some of my fellow Middle East experts who seem determined to ignore the more odious aspects of militant Islamic movements.

It should be obvious that it is unethical to object to the antisemitism lite of a Pat Robertson or an Ann Coulter while ignoring the more obvious antisemitism that pervades many Islamist texts. One can be, and should be, outraged by both the simplistic neoconservative cant about “Islamofascism” and much of what is said and done by Islamists. One can be, and should be, outraged by what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza. But this does not entail portraying Hamas as the innocent victim of “Islamophobia.” One can be, and should be, outraged by the neoconservative effort to induce the government of the United States to attack Iran. But this not entail ignoring the vile Holocaust denial of Ahmedinejad.

By failing to condemn that which deserves condemnation, many prominent Middle East experts unintentionally help the neoconservatives portray all critics of Israel as antisemites. Analyzing the nationalistic and anti-imperialist dimensions of Islamic militancy is legitimate. Ignoring the reactionary and xenophobic dimensions of Islamic militancy is not.

There is a middle path between demonization and idealization. And that is the path that should be taken by serious analysts of Islamic militancy.

Henry Munson, Between Pipes and Esposito, ISIM Newsletter, July 2002

Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published a short book (137 pages) by Martin Kramer entitled Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Kramer is the editor of the Middle East Quarterly, a journal founded by Daniel Pipes and others who feel that the discipline of Middle Eastern Studies, as practised in the United States, has become too pro-Arab and too ‘dovish’. Kramer, a former director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, shares Pipes’s views, though he has generally been less strident in expressing them. Ivory Towers on Sand is primarily a critique of scholars dealing with issues related to American foreign policy in the Middle East. Kramer is not especially troubled by current trends in the study of Sufi poetry.

Both Kramer and Pipes, like their intellectual mentor Bernard Lewis, view the Muslim world as inherently irrational, violent, and above all, anti-Semitic. The Arabs in particular only understand force. They will behave only if they are beaten mercilessly. The American government should not waste time trying to address their alleged grievances, or those of Muslims in general, because these all boil down to primitive hatred of the infidel and resentment that the infidel now dominates the believer instead of the other way around (Lewis 1990).This view of the Islamic world underlies the policies of the Sharon government in Israel and the policies favoured by at least some members of the American administration. So the issues at stake are by no means strictly academic.

Munson, International Election Monitoring: A Critique Based on One Monitor’s Experience in Morocco Middle East Report, 1998

Since the early 1980s, countless teams of “international observers” have monitored elections in countries ostensibly becoming more democratic. Most monitors typically arrive shortly before voting begins and leave shortly after it ends. Foreign election observers usually visit only a small fraction of the polling sites and electoral districts. The capital and easily accessible cities tend to receive more attention than the countryside.

Most foreign observers know little about the political context of the elections they are observing. Too often they focus on the technical mechanics of elections while ignoring basic questions such as the role of voting in any real distribution of power. To term a technically flawless election to a parliament lacking effective power “free and fair” is misleading.

Munson, Fundamentalism — Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Although the terms fundamentalism and fundamentalist have entered common parlance and are now broadly applied, it should not be forgotten that the myriad movements so designated vary greatly in their origins, character, and outlook.

Munson, Fundamentalism Around the World–What’s Really Behind It? -Britannica Blog, Nov. 17, 2006

Fundamentalism reflects moral outrage at the violation of traditional religious values, but can it also articulate nationalistic and social grievances as well?

Fundamentalism, as I discuss in my new entry on the subject for Encyclopaedia Britannica, is a type of militantly conservative religious movement characterized by the advocacy of strict conformity to sacred texts and a moral code ostensibly based on them. It existed long before the word did. One could speak of the Maccabean revolt of the second century B.C.E. as having a fundamentalist impulse insofar as it insisted on strict conformity to the Torah and Jewish religious law. Similarly, Calvin’s 16th-century Genevan polity and 17-century Puritanism could be called fundamentalist insofar as they insisted on strict conformity to the Bible and a moral code based on it.

Munson, Lifting the Veil: Understanding the Roots of Islamic Militancy, Harvard International Review, 2004

Public opinion polls taken in the Islamic world in recent years provide considerable insight into the roots of Muslim hostility toward the United States, indicating that for the most part, this hostility has less to do with cultural or religious differences than with US policies in the Arab world.

Munson, More Americans to Die for Iraq’s Pro-Iranian Theocracy -Britannica Blog, Jan. 11, 2007

Just as American governments failed to see the local social and nationalistic dimensions of communist movements during the Cold War, so too have they failed to see the local social and nationalistic dimensions of militant Islamist movements in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. (See my Britannica Blog on fundamentalism.) A “global war on terror” has now replaced the global war on communism as the paradigm shaping American foreign policy. The various local grievances that fuel militant Islamic movements are ignored. Armed force is seen as the key to defeating Islamic militancy when in fact this approach strengthens the very forces it is supposed to weaken. The totally unnecessary fiasco in Iraq is a case in point.

Munson Intolerable Tolerance, Contention 5/3, 1996

The laudable desire to eliminate popular misconceptions about Islam in Western culture has sometimes induced Western scholars to embrace notions as fanciful as those they seek to refute. One thinks, for example, of the argument that Islamic fundamentalists, or “Islamists,” are benign revivalists who have been unfairly maligned by biased Western journalists, government officials, and scholars. There is a kernel of truth to this argument, but those who make it tend to minimize the significance of those aspects of Islamic militancy that are rightly condemned not just by non-Muslims, but by many Muslims as well. The notion that every Muslim is an infidel-hating terrorist is of course ludicrous — and dangerous. But trying to eradicate this stereotype does not entail glossing over the intolerance, violence, and fanaticism associated with many of the movements that advocate strictly Islamic states.

This review article contains a number of typos as published. But they are by and large easily recognized as such.

Munson, Religion and Violence, Religion, 2005