Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Margaret Nagle, Rethinking Islamic Fundamentalism, UMaine Today Magazine - March/April 2007

Why has American foreign policy in the Middle East failed? Part of the answer, says Munson, is the failure to understand people who do not see the world as it is seen by most Americans. This, in turn, is related to the failure to situate current events in their broader historical context. American policymakers often have failed to understand that the angry rhetoric reverberating in the Muslim world is rooted not just in religion, but also in nationalistic and social grievances.

“We must understand how the other side thinks,” says Munson. “And that’s not just an esoteric, anthropological, ivory tower view, but a fundamental point in understanding international affairs. Foreign policy is not just about natural resources or missiles, it’s about having a sense of others and why they do what they do. If we don’t understand others, we can’t respond appropriately,” a point that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War eloquently made more than 2,500 years ago.

Munson argues that fighting people whose motives one does not understand is like fighting blindfolded. That’s what we are doing in Iraq, he says.

Munson emphasizes that it is a mistake to assume that political movements have only one cause or distinctive feature. He has argued in a series of recent articles that militant Islamic movements definitely do have a fundamentalist dimension. They insist on strict conformity to a sacred text and require that all aspects of life, including the social and political, should conform to sacred scriptures believed to be inerrant and immutable. But Islamic fundamentalism usually also has a nationalist and anti-imperialist dimension. For many Muslim fundamentalists, militant Islam is to some extent a means to an end — overcoming foreign domination.

In the Quran, as well as in the minds of many traditional Muslims today, there is but one explanation for the subjugation of the believer by the unbeliever: God is using the latter to punish the former for his sins, including deviating from his laws, Munson says. Only a return to a strictly Islamic way of life will induce God to free the faithful from the faithless. A return to Islam is thus linked to overcoming foreign domination and a return to cultural identity. In 1972, the Ayatollah Khomeini told followers:

If the Muslim states and peoples had relied on Islam and its inherent capabilities and powers instead of depending on the East (the Soviet Union) and the West, and if they had placed the enlightened and liberating precepts of the Quran before their eyes and put them into practice, then they would not today be captive slaves of the Zionist aggressors, terrified victims of the American Phantoms, and toys in the hands of the accommodating policies of the satanic Soviet Union. It is the disregard of the noble Quran by the Islamic countries that has brought the Islamic community to this difficult situation full of misfortunes and reversals and placed its fate in the hands of the imperialism of the left and the right.

Munson stresses that understanding such rhetoric does not entail endorsing it. He notes that there are many aspects of Islamic militancy that are outrageous and deserve condemnation, notably the horrendous violence against civilians and the anti-Semitism. He describes the Holocaust conference held in Tehran in December 2006 as “sickening.” But he stresses that “it is in the interest of the United States to try to limit the appeal of militant Islamic movements. Invading Muslim countries has precisely the opposite effect, as we can see in Iraq.”

Munson: Zakaria should have foreseen that the outrage provoked by the occupation of Iraq would benefit the militant Islamists it was supposed to weaken. He did not. Moreover, he fails to mention that many foreign-born Americans bring with them the myopias they were born into. Some Indian-born Americans, for example, are supporters of militant Hindu nationalism. Zakaria is nonetheless right to stress that an understanding of how others see us is an essential ingredient of a sensible foreign policy.

Fareed Zakaria: The Power of Personality, Newsweek.com, December 24, 2007

I’ve spent my life acquiring formal expertise on foreign policy. I’ve got fancy degrees, have run research projects, taught in colleges and graduate schools, edited a foreign-affairs journal, advised politicians and businessmen, written columns and cover stories, and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles all over the world. I’ve never thought of my identity as any kind of qualification. I’ve never written an article that contains the phrase “As an Indian-American …” or “As a person of color …”

But when I think about what is truly distinctive about the way I look at the world, about the advantage that I may have over others in understanding foreign affairs, it is that I know what it means not to be an American. I know intimately the attraction, the repulsion, the hopes, the disappointments that the other 95 percent of humanity feels when thinking about this country. I know it because for a good part of my life, I wasn’t an American.