Category: Morgue

America’s Quest for a New Moral Bedrock: A Muslim Perspective

Council for Research in Values and Philosophy
Chapter XV in the 1996 publication entitled: ‘Civil Society and Social Reconstruction‘

Two-thirds of America’s 5 million Muslims have immigrated from Third World countries during the last three decades. Some American scholars and journalists are concerned that the “Islamic wave” augurs a “culture clash” in this “Judeo-Christian society.”¹ Muslims, like other waves of immigrants, doubtless will have their share of adjustment problems in America. But like most others they also are contributing to the well-being of American society. In this paper, I propose to examine the Muslim role in an important task that is increasingly drawing many Americans’ attention: the moral regeneration of society.

The chapter begins by focusing on some of the cultural values that Muslims bring to this society. Then it examines the social and economic crisis liberalism has spawned in America and the world. Finally, it argues that Islamic values help overcome this crisis by bolstering an inchoate American movement to reinforce a moral, communal lifestyle.

Islamic Cultural Values

Muslim immigrants are not easily excited over racial issues, but resent slurs against their faith. Race has not played a major role in their history. We have not suffered race-based slavery, segregation, apartheid or holocaust. We have had religious feuds and warfare and are sensitive, or even defensive, about our faith. But more pertinently, Muslims have theologically and historically been color-blind.

The community originated in the town of Medina, in today’s Saudi Arabia, as an amalgam of nomadic and settled Muslims of different tribes and regions. Muhammad united them into a powerful social and military force under the concept that “faith replaced blood as the social bond.”² Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and his immediate successors as head of the 7th century Islamic polity set the example of a multiracial community by freeing African slaves and appointing some of them to positions of authority. Later on former slaves formed ruling dynasties in Egypt and India.

Communal brotherhood is a basic Islamic tenet. For all their ethnic and cultural differences, Muslims are enjoined to consider themselves “close to one another” as though they “form one body.” They are told to support one another and “be responsible for one another” in their joys and sorrows; charity for one’s kin and community has been emphasized over and over in Islamic scripture.³

The Muslim concept of the individual and of communal solidarity is profoundly influenced by a seminal Islamic doctrine about the purpose of life and man’s relationship with the transcendent. God, according to the Quran, created man as his “viceregent on Earth,” to take care of the creation and to answer directly and individually to the Creator for his deeds.⁴ Man is an autonomous being, superior to all others and even the angels, but he is required by the Creator to conduct himself according to moral principles. The Muslim never felt the need for liberation from a church hierarchy. Islam does not have a priesthood. All Muslims are of equal status in the eyes of God. Hence conceptually, they are a classless community of equals tied by a common bond of brotherhood.

Communal solidarity, too, provided the impetus for territorial and cultural expansion during the Muslim imperial age. The Muslim was then proud to identify himself as a Muslim (rather than a Meccan, Yemeni or Syrian). Ever since Muslim lands came under colonial occupation, Islam became the mobilizing force against foreign rule. Today it is a rallying cry against repressive autocracies and the foreign powers that support them.

Empire building, defense against colonialism, struggle against autocracies and their foreign collaborators are all noble enterprises. Hence, the Muslim feels proud to identify himself with Islam in the name of which he undertakes such efforts. No wonder that the most inveterate opponents of Muslim dictatorships today are the so-called “Islamic fundamentalists.” Ernest Gellner observed that among many of today’s young Muslim women:

Contrary to what outsiders generally suppose, the typical Muslim woman in a Muslim city doesn’t wear the veil because her grandmother did so, but because her grandmother did not. . . . The granddaughter is celebrating the fact that she has joined her grandmother’s betters. . . .⁵

Except for Arabs, who make up a fifth of the world’s nearly billion Muslims, Muslims in most other one countries are at least bi-racial. The bond of faith holds them together in communities. It has not, of course, stopped them from occasional internecine bloodletting. Yet the concept of an egalitarian, multiethnic community has been an effective force in Muslim struggles against social inequities and political tyranny. It has been the most powerful force behind the spread of Islam, especially among the socially estranged and economically disadvantaged.

In the Indian subcontinent, for example, Islam is the only religion that has gained and retained a large body of converts from Hindus, most of them from the lower castes that were excluded from the Hindu social mainstream. A similar phenomenon is happening in the United States today. Each year an average of 12,000 Americans convert to Islam (while more than 90,000 other Muslims immigrate to the United States).⁶ The overwhelming majority of the converts are African Americans from the lower economic and social strata.

Like their co-religionists in the subcontinent, many American converts to Islam see their new faith as a refuge from social alienation. Most cite Islamic concepts of community, brotherhood, equality and social justice as reasons for their change of faith while, of course, expressing their belief that Islam is God’s true religion.

Before his conversion to Islam, Talib Abdullah of Hagerstown, Maryland, was “fascinated as [he saw] Egyptians, Saudis, Blacks, Pakistanis, Indonesians—all praying together shoulder to shoulder” at a mosque in New York. “The simple, straightforward message,” said Abdullah, an African American who leads prayers at mosques, “that there is one God, no Trinity . . . and equality, brotherhood and justice, all this make a powerful appeal. Most of all, what especially appeals to African Americans is [that] there is no racism in Islam.” Abdullah spent nine years in Saudi Arabia studying Islam and Saudi society. He complained that many overseas and immigrant Muslims do not live up to the Islamic tenets of equality and brotherhood. That, he said, reflects on them, not on Islam.⁷

Many view the Islamic communal support system as a vehicle to put their lives in order. Typically, Sam Bennett, an African American in his late 20s, had made several unsuccessful attempts to give up drugs. Then he came in contact with a group of converted Muslims. Some of them had troubles with the law but were now living “decent lives.” What impressed Bennett most about these new Muslims was that “they stick together, spend time together, support each other. . . . If one is sick everybody visits him.” Bennett realized that he needs “that kind of support.” Group solidarity did not exist among the “people I used to hang out with.”⁸

Group solidarity is an element of civil society. The term has been given a variety of definitions. Generally, it refers to the social and economic arena that humans share with fellow humans outside the direct control of the state. It includes social institutions such as markets, voluntary associations and a public sphere.9 The idea is as old as Aristotle’s civil society, koinonia politike.¹⁰ In plain language, Aristotle referred to voluntary group activity in a political community, which the chapter of George F. McLean aptly terms free human group interaction in public space in “righteous harmony.”11 In modern usage civil society is a feature of secular democracy. The ends of civil society remain the same as conceived by Aristotle, namely voluntary interaction among—and between—groups within a polity. But in today’s Western conception of the term, such institutions in Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Cuba would not qualify as part of civil society, for citizens’ public activities are not supposed to reflect the exercise of their free will There governments control much of the public sphere, whereas freedom is a seminal ingredient of modern civil society.

The Liberal Crisis

The concept of freedom, as understood in the West, is traceable to the 16th century Protestant Reformation and the subsequent Enlightenment. The Reformation “freed” the Christian individual from the jurisdiction of the Catholic ecclesiastical order, making the individual directly accountable to God. Martin Luther’s Reformation was reinterpreted by John Calvin to mean that while man cannot attain salvation except by performing God’s will, his performance does not guarantee his salvation: God already has predetermined whom he will save. There are signs, the argument went, which could help identify those chosen to be saved: they will be seen constantly doing good deeds and resisting the devil’s temptation toward evil-doing and pleasure seeking. Because the Protestant could never be sure of God’s will, good works and austerity became his mission in life. Thus industry and frugality turned out to be the hallmarks of Calvinist Puritanism.

Lutheran-Calvinist individualism was given a further interpretation by the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophers proclaimed that the individual does not need to attend to God or Scripture for instructions about good works, but can identify the good and the moral through reasoning. Morality, declared Immanuel Kant, calls for obedience to a universal law dictated by human reason. Hence, Kant construed individual freedom in a universal moral context. He even said, “It is morally necessary to believe in the existence of God” as the highest good, the fountain of a moral order.¹²

But another line of Enlightenment thinkers gave the idea of individual freedom the mother of all twists, turning the whole Protestant moral paradigm upside down. This school—identified by such terms as liberals, rationalists and humanists—has transformed our world more profoundly than any other since the Athenian philosophical school. The liberals, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Herder, Victor Hugo, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine and others did not have any use for the transcendent or for universal morality in the human perception of the good; on its own human reason can judge what it is good. Thus liberalism shifted “the entire basis of society . . . from obligations to rights and from community to individual.”

Theocentrism disappeared; in its place was substituted anthropocentric humanism, the belief that the individual human being is the measure of all things.¹³

Modern capitalist market economy is the product of this “anthropocentric humanism.” The individual now does not need a heaven to attain fulfillment; he can fulfill his life here on earth. Accordingly, the American Constitution substituted “pursuit of happiness” for that of the meaning of life. The market economy created by the workaholic, frugal Protestant is uniquely suited for the creation of the liberal’s heaven on earth, filled with material goods for the pleasure of the flesh.

Although liberalism has been the outcome of the European Enlightenment, consumerism is quintessentially an American phenomenon. As noted, European Enlightenment thinkers who identified the individual’s reasoning with “natural law” viewed the individual as part of a universal moral order. Some, of course, did not draw such a link, but their view was not reflected in any of the European political or social systems.

Rugged Individualism

It is in America that the individual was institutionally dissociated from a universal moral order. This was done in a two-pronged process. First, the country was envisioned by Puritans as well as some of the framers of the Constitution as a new “Holy Community” liberated from the corrupt Old World. Benjamin Franklin wanted to have the Great Seal of the United States bear the image of Moses crossing the Red Sea with the Israelites. Thomas Jefferson preferred the symbol of Israelites lumbering through the wilderness to the Holy Land. The American in this Holy Land, though “invested with a strong moral dimension,” was considered divorced from the “universal principles of the Enlightenment” espoused in the old sinful world.¹⁴

Not surprisingly, the political system “of the people, by the people, for the people” essentially asks Americans to “respect the self-created authority and the self-created law.”¹⁵ The law has become the substitute for morality, the glue that binds man to man in civil society. Hence America’s “rugged individual,” among the most broadminded and tolerant in the world, generally has lukewarm interest in kindred, in social and communal relationships. This peculiar American individualism also defined Americans’ approach to religions. President Dwight Eisenhower expressed it best:

Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what that is.¹⁶

The American’s religion, as a purely personal matter, usually does not evoke a feeling of fellowship for his co-religionists as it does in the believer of many other faiths. The freedom of the “rugged individual,” guaranteed by his “self-created laws” and suited to his religious disposition, is not conducive for intergroup and intragroup relationships—the hallmark of civil society. It is these relationships that give the free individual a context, make his life part of an orchestra of meanings rather than an irrelevant, solitary monotone.

American liberalism which has created the consumer, also has created the capitalist to cater to the former’s needs. The Protestant work ethic valued hard work and frugality—in other words, accumulation of capital and its productive use. In fact, the Puritans believed they had a covenant with God and their productive enterprise was sanctioned by him. In contrast the liberal philosophy, coupled with the Protestant work ethic, propelled Americans into a binge of production that has made the nation an economic and military superpower. Production and exchange in this economic order is regulated by the rules of market economy: maximizing profit by minimizing prices and maximizing output. Adam Smith, the prophet of this market economic system, argued that it would achieve maximum social good, which he defined as the aggregate of individual self-interests of its
members. Such a system, according to him, would benefit even the economically disadvantaged because scarcity throughout society would be overcome by surplus.

The Smithian market economy also has made economic powerhouses out of some of the smaller North Atlantic and East Asian nations. Generations of men and women have enjoyed material comforts that their forebears could hardly imagine. With the collapse of the communist command economic model, the rest of the world, too, is lurching toward the market economy. Internet and World Wide Web are spearheading a communications revolution moving this stampede into still higher gear.

But at what cost?
And to what end?

Consumerism

Adam Smith reminds me of the estate manager of my 19th century ancestor in the Indian state of Assam. The manager’s family dealt in opium and got my fun-loving ancestor to try opium until he became addicted. Then the manager began to supply him with abundant quantities of opium at high prices from his family shop. Under an arrangement the manager worked out with his family, my ancestor would pay his opium bills in periodic installments clearing up the arrears at the end of each Bengali year. At year ends, my ancestor’s unpaid opium bills would far exceed his cash savings. On the manager’s advice, he would sign off a chunk of his estate to clear up the arrears. Once a reputable man in public life, my ancestor now spent much of his time in stupor and isolation. Years later when my ancestor’s son returned home after completing his studies at a religious school, he was aghast. His father was nearly broke, having transferred most of his estate to the manager’s family. The son chased away the manager and took charge of the remainder of
the estate—and his old father.

Most of the goods that modern industry is churning out in their endless varieties— automobiles, television sets, video cameras, lawn mowers, automobiles, frozen foods, cosmetics, paper products and so on—are not essential for a healthy life. But modern man is hooked on them as my ancestor had been on opium. The price people have been paying for this unbridled economic expansion has been prohibitive.

The capitalistic orgy of production and the market economic distribution system are based on the assumption that Earth’s resources are inexhaustible. The assumption appeared to be holding for several centuries because the New World was new and bountiful, and it encouraged the notion that “the sky is the limit” for capitalist expansion. “Nothing seemed unattainable—” as one observer captures the mood, “even the moon, on which American astronauts set foot in the summer of 1969.”¹⁷ Besides, industrialized Europe had agrarian colonies that supplied its industries with raw materials and served as captive markets for its finished products.

Today the “sky-is-the-limit” assumption no longer holds. As the decolonized world begins to industrialize and the New World approaches the limits of its resource base, industry and commerce have begun to yield diminishing returns. The manufacturing bases of industrial societies are shrinking fast to make room for expanding service sectors. In 1900 the American service sector accounted for 30 percent of the American work force; by the 1980s it employed 70 percent.¹⁸ The industrial assault on resources and the environment has been accelerated in recent decades. At the present rate of the exploitation of resources, by 2050 the United States will have run out of “all extractable quantities” of tin, commercial asbestos, columbium, fluorspar, high grade phosphorus and many other mineral resources.¹⁹

Meanwhile, “pursuit-of-happiness” is fast replacing with consumerism the traditional Protestant frugality—and the habit of saving. The shift from a manufacturing to service economy and the preponderance of consumption over saving have increased Americans’ dependence on larger financial and government institutions: government-secured mortgage loans, credits from banks, Montgomery Wards, Sears, AT&T, auto companies, and so on.

Like the resources and environment, many social institutions, including those of civil society, have fallen prey to the forces of capitalist economy. The capitalist division of labor has wiped out many traditional social institutions. Its effect has been catastrophic on the family, the most important of all:

The universal marketplace has taken over functions and prerogatives long held by the family. Both the private and public (government) service sectors have increasingly expropriated even the most private parts of family life onto themselves. If a family member is facing emotional problems, he or she is immediately sent to a professional psychologist. If the parents’ sexual life is not what it could be, they are encouraged to seek “professional” help and instruction. If a child wants to learn tennis, he is signed up for instruction at a professional sports clinic. Parents are no longer guides or instructors. They are merely monitors in the home. Their job is to keep tabs on potential need areas and then locate the right kind of service in the marketplace or government to deal with them. . . . A recent survey asked three-year-old children whom they liked best, Daddy or TV? Forty percent answered TV.”²⁰

American divorce rate and out-of-wedlock birthrates are the world’s highest. The Lions, Rotary, Kiwanis and Zonta clubs are little more than momentary refuge for the overworked, divorced and unemployed.

Industrial Onslaught

The effects of the unbridled exploitation of resources and the scramble for material goods have been at least as severe in the rest of the world. Cropland, pastures, fisheries and forests are becoming scarce all over the surface of the Earth. Between 1600 and 1950 an average of one animal species was dying out every decade. By 1980 one species died every hour. By the year 2000, about one of every six animal and plant species will have disappear from Earth.²¹

I nurture many fond memories of the Pakistan city of Karachi. It is Pakistan’s business capital and the abode of some of Asia’s wealthiest families. Residents of Washington’s Georgetown area would envy those living in Karachi’s posh residential districts where my friends and I used to enjoy strolling on summer nights along spacious boulevards savoring the cool Arabian Sea breeze. Today, residents of those districts, like many Washingtonians, have stopped their nightly strolls. The more prosperous among them have private security guards to protect their furnishings, computers, fax machines and VCRs from looters. Murder, robbery, mugging and other violent crimes have proliferated in Karachi at almost the same rate as in the U.S. capital.

Two things have roughened Karachi’s once agreeable social life. First, the city’s population has increased from 400,000 in 1947 to more than nine million, creating a frantic struggle for resources and opportunities for living. Secondly, the struggle has been heightened since Pakistan made a transition from a mixed to a free market economy. This created a new breed of conspicuously consuming, often unscrupulous, nouveaux riches who excite the jealousy of those languishing in the lower economic echelons. The anarchy that has gripped Karachi fits the thesis that unrest in industrializing societies is caused not so much by poverty, as by relative poverty accentuated by the modernization process. Some sociological researchers warn that we are approaching an “age of anarchy . . . more in states that are experiencing unprecedented economic growth than economic decline.”²²

Parts of the Middle East and Africa seem especially prone to the Karachi syndrome. In much of the Middle East, unemployment is above 20 percent and rising, while populations continue to explode at the rate of three percent or more. The situation is expected to worsen as modernization picks up and more and more rural youth stream to urban shantytowns in pursuit of material prosperity. By the year 2000, more than 40 percent of North African youth will remain unemployed.²³ The age of anarchy, if it comes, will be a gift of liberalism and the capitalist market economy.

The liberal mind alone is not to blame for this frightful omen. Fertile flesh is equally responsible for it. The human population took two million years to reach the first billion mark. The second billion came in just 100 years. In the next 30 years—between 1930 and 1960—we had the third billion. The fourth billion was added in just 15 years, by 1975. The growth rate has since slowed a bit, but hardly enough to avert catastrophes unless humanity changes its ways. Our planet is now buzzing with a population of nearly six billion, and is expected to reach the eight billion mark in the next 15 years.²⁴

Islamic Values and the American Crisis

Humankind is fast losing the Earth’s resources in order to pay for the goods from the Smithian economic model. Moreover, we are losing ourselves in the process: Many of the values that make life meaningful—close family ties, friendships, voluntary group activities, leisure and reflection, and, yes, spiritual pursuits—have been sacrificed in the relentless stampede for material goods. The drug culture in zones of urban blight and the rapacity in the corporate headquarters are but two forms of the Smithian “pursuit of happiness.” Can human life be put back together again? Can society restore Koinoiaor moral harmony to help humankind use their freedom to make life more fulfilling?

Hindus have a goddess named Lakshmi to bring them prosperity. In olden days when they did her due homage, India was one of the world’s most bountiful lands. As Hindus became indifferent to the goddess, harder times befell it. Today, India’s per capita income of $500 is one of the world’s lowest. Yet the Indian social mainstream retains its vibrant cultural rhythm set in motion nearly half a millennium before nomadic Israelites, under David and Solomon, began trying to make the transition to a settled, agrarian culture. This is because, the Hindus could argue, India is also blest with Lakshmi’s husband,Vishnu, the Preserver god, to keep a vigilant watch:

He watches from the skies, and whenever he sees values threatened or the good in peril, he exerts all his preservative influence on their behalf.²⁵

The Abrahamic traditions do not have the equivalent of a Vishnu to preserve the values underpinning society when it is periled by the sins of the Enlightenment prophets. But the children of Abraham—Jews, Christians and Muslims—have abundant social glue in their own traditions.

Judaism began as a tribal religion and the Jews have stood unswervingly by one another during exile, pogroms, the Holocaust and lately in their confrontation with the Arab world. “Love thy neighbor” is the heart of Jesus’ message. Its unique social import lies in the fact that “the love Jesus proposed . . . is to be absolutely free, geared entirely to our neighbor’s needs, not his due.”²⁶

Islam accepts the essentials of the Torah and the Gospels; Muhammad emerged as a reformer of those two earlier Abrahamic traditions. In fact, American Muslim scholar Ali Mazrui terms Islam “the first Protestant revolution.”²⁷ The Islamic concepts of community, brotherhood and charity, praised by the converts to the faith quoted above, are variations of Judeo-Christian precepts.

Apparently, liberalism and the market economy have had a lot to do with the erosion of th communitarian Abrahamic values in America and the West. Liberalism appears to have had a much greater effect on Christian societies than on Jewish or Muslim ones. The Muslim world has been away from the theater of the Enlightenment and, for most of its history, hostile to the nations that participated in it. One may cite this as the reason for Muslims being less affected by the Enlightenment’s mischiefs (consumerism, erosion of communal relationships and values, damage to the environment) and blessings (freedom, democracy, scientific and technological advances). It is argued the relatively stronger community bonds among Muslims are little more than a feature of a premodern lifestyle.

But the Ashkenazi Jews were all over Europe since long before the Enlightenment, and especially the German Jews have become secularized and modernized under its impact. In the United States, beginning in the early 19th century, Jews have made it an individual and communal goal to accommodate American society and culture. They have followed the caveat of Reform Judaism’s early champion, Isaac Mayer Wise: “America is our Zion and Washington is our Jerusalem.”²⁸

And yet Jewish Americans, unlike Irish or Italian (Catholic) Americans, retain strong communal bonds and identity. Irish Americans, for example, occupy many positions of power in America as do Jewish Americans. But the festering turmoil and terrorism in Northern Ireland has hardly created a ripple in American politics. Israel’s security interests, on the other hand, have frequently influenced the American political agenda, because of the vigilance of the communally conscious Jewish Americans. Is it simply because the Reformation and Enlightenment were launched to reexamine Christian doctrines that their impact has been the most profound on Christian peoples?

The Muslim Community

The Muslims’ community life cannot, of course, be divorced from their historical experience. Conceptually, the individual in Islam is as autonomous as proposed by Kant. Historically, however, the Muslim individual freedom has been far more inhibited by the weight of moral order than the Kantian doctrine would allow. The assertion of freedom, says E.F. Schumacher, has been a feature of periods of growth, while the quest for order is associated with those of decline.²⁹ Except for the latter half of the Abbasid period (A.D. 750-1258), Muslim societies have rarely experienced periods of growth (growth should not be confused with prosperity from gifts of nature such as the current oil boom in the Persian Gulf), and hence intellectual ferment. Traditionally, Muslims have practiced their faith under tribal, feudal socioeconomic structures. Besides, Muslims have interpreted the doctrine of viceregency, or the responsibility to take care of God’s creation, as a heavenly mandate to be responsive to the environment and local culture.

Thus, Arab Muslims retain their Bedouin social structure that prizes allegiance to the tribal chief. This accounts partly for the resilience of the Arab autocracies in the face of the whirlwind of democratic movements. South Asian Muslims follow their local cultural and social idiom and share the freer political ethos of the land. Hence, democratic institutions are growing faster in Pakistan and Bangladesh than in the Muslim polities of the Middle East and Africa. African American Muslims, on the other hand, nurture much of the cultural markers and social outlook of their American community. Naturally, affirmative action and social welfare programs are among their priorities.

In America, these and other ethnic Muslim groups retain their distinctive cultural identities within a broader American Islamic community. John Esposito aptly calls them “communities within a community.”³⁰ During the past three decades, as the American Muslim population has tripled, community activities have increased manifold. Islamic schools, retreats, picnics and other activities are being organized by most of North America’s 1,046 mosques and student groups.³¹ Besides, three country-wide Islamic organizations and numerous smaller ones organize periodic conferences and put out numerous publications to foster Islamic religious, moral and cultural institutions in America.32 These organizations are carrying on vigorous campaigns to preserve Islamic values among American Muslims: prohibition of promiscuity, alcoholic and other intoxicants; respect for parents and community elders; mutual support in hardships; aid for the needy; building Islamic institutions and so on.

Also during the last three decades, Christian America is pulsating with a resurgence of Christian spiritualism. Although mainline churches have lost following, evangelical, charismatic and fundamentalist Christian movements have caught on. Even after several “televangelical ministries” were disgraced and shut down, the “re-Christianization” movement retains its momentum. Evangelical ministers and others are telling Christians that the country’s many economic and social problems are God’s warning against heeding Godless liberals. Their admonition is falling upon increasingly receptive ears. The common man may not reflect on the philosophical inadequacies of liberalism, but he sees and suffers its outcome each day:

In the 60s and 70s liberals promised they could end poverty, crime and a host of other social blights by tinkering with the system, and they failed. The public watched as liberals ushered in a proliferation of new legislation, government agencies and bureaucratic red tape. After it was over, the sweeping and unrealistic promises went unfulfilled. The American people, in turn, began to equate liberalism with incompetence, naivete and the squandering of public moneys on every social problem in sight.³³

Christian Re-awakening

Just as Islam is attracting some alienated Americans, Christian evangelical and fundamentalist movements, too, draw their share of the socially disillusioned: Paul Stockey, the 1960s protest singer; Eldrige Cleaver, the former Black Panther leader; and Watergate figure Charles Colson are among the many prominent Americans who have turned to evangelism after high-profile forays into secular social and political movements. The overwhelming majority of the born-again Christians (like Muslim converts) are mainstream Americans in quest of spiritual answers to their lives’ predicament.

The growing surge toward Christian spiritualism is demonstrated in the increased attendance at evangelical and fundamentalist forums and rallies. Membership in these organizations has increased dramatically over the decades. In 1978, for example, a Christian Century magazine survey found 22 percent of Americans to be evangelicals. A 1986 Gallup Poll listed 33 percent of Americans as evangelicals.³⁴ A 1994 Newsweek survey found 58 percent Americans yearning for spiritual growth while one in every three Americans reported some religious or mysterical experience.³⁵

One does not need these statistics to learn about Americans’ deepening and widening search for a moral sheet anchor. It is visible in one’s surroundings. Gregorian chant is a feature of many music stores. Bookstores abound with religious and spiritual titles. Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, and Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II have been on the New York Times bestseller list. More and more Americans are joining religious retreats and courses on spiritual themes. References to the divine increasingly are creeping into creative writing and Hollywood scripts.

And of course our political life is taking on a spiritual ambiance. In 1994 Republicans led by Newt Gingrich tapped the country’s “conservative mood” to seize congressional leadership. Two years later the Christian Right was no longer the extremist GOP fringe that it has been in the 1988 election. It was now embraced by the party’s mainstream in the Robert Dole presidential campaign and by and large the news media and intelligentsia acquiesced. The Christian Right, argued aWashington Post columnist, had been “expanding its influence” and deserved “a place at the table” of American national politics:

A lot of Americans, have a vague but strong sense that what is going wrong in American life is not just about economics. It also entails an ethical or moral crisis. Evidence for this is adduced from family breakdown, teen pregnancy, high crime rates (especially among teenagers), and trashy movies, television and music.³⁶

The Christian Right may or may not have the answer to today’s “ethical and moral crisis”. To be sure, it is not yearning for the Holy Roman Empire or even the New England village green where the church and the meetinghouse collaborated in each other’s agenda. Neither does any other religious movement propose a religion-based political order. Muslim theocratic fervor, epitomized by the Iranian revolution, has peaked in much of the Muslim world.³⁷ And American Muslims, despite their campaigns for the pursuit of Islamic morals and idiom, are as committed to the American secular, pluralist democracy as anybody else. The religious and spiritual currents stirring America today reflect, if anything, many Americans’ realization that material goods are inadequate to lend meaning to life.

And the search a meaningful life is not confined to the Abrahamic religious traditions and spiritual schools. Many Americans are seeking it in Buddhist, Hindu and Bahai faiths and a variety of esoteric cults and creeds. Others do not care to belong to a particular faith or creed, but cluster around personalities who claim to know the answers to their spiritual inquiries. One such group— mostly from Jewish and Christian denominations—has gathered around Swami Sachidananda and learned Hindu-style meditation. Some have no interest in Hinduism or meditation, but are impressed by the holy man’s advocacy of peace and social harmony. The group is now collecting funds to build a pyramid-shape “peace monument” in the vicinity of Washington where people can meditate or pursue spiritual growth in some other fashion.

The industrial damage to nature and the fatigue from martial pursuits also have triggered a proliferation of environmental movements in America and other parts of the world. These movements draw support from both the religious and the secular. Apparently, they are aimed at stemming the erosion of Earth’s resources and preserving its ecological balance. Environmental issues are debated vigorously by the news media, voluntary groups, the environmental lobby and an increasingly vocal public. Deep down, all of them are inspired by the desire to connect their lives to something larger, represented by nature. As religious philosopher Loyal D. Rue put it, “The Epic of Evolution tells us whence we have come, what our fundamental nature is and what possibilities are open to us.”³⁸ Indeed, some of the world’s oldest religions are based on the perception of the sacredness of nature and prescribe the worship of natural forces and icons. It is no surprise that some of the environmentalist literature calls for the preservation of “Mother Earth,” a term used in Hindu scripture and Andean lore.

The quest for “something larger” has been innate for humanity. The driving force behind human enterprise is self-expansion—pursuit of wealth and glory, participation in community life, raising children and hope for an eternal life in heaven. Man now has begun to realize that liberalism threatens to shortchange him on all these counts. It is dwindling the economy and thereby decreasing one’s chances for fame and fortune. By reducing his means of livelihood it has diminished his capacity to raise children. By atomizing society it has nearly destroyed community life. And for many, it has abolished a blissful heaven.

The quest for new spiritual and secular vistas stems from a recognition that consumerism does not fulfill life, but threatens to destroy it by eroding its material and moral support systems. Naturally, it also spotlights the need for a transition from the consumptive to a preservative lifestyle—one that values frugality, conservation and appreciation of inner resources. A lifestyle cannot, however, be changed without a change in social priorities. The individual cannot do it. In a free society the state cannot do it. And if the fate of the Communist, Fascist and Nazi models are any indication, neither can an authoritarian state. It is a communal task—the job of civil society of which spiritual and secular voluntary groups are a vital part. Of late, civil society seems to be waking to the challenge. Can it restore the meaning of human life and save the remainder of the human “estate” from the market economy “managers”?

Notes

1. Judith Miller, “The Islamic Wave,” The New York Times Magazine, May 31, 1992; Daniel Pipes, “Fundamental Questions about Muslims,” The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 1992; Amos Perlmutter, “Wishful Thinking about Islamic Fundamentalism,” The Washington Post, January 19, 1991; Martin Kramer, “Islam and the West (including Manhattan),”Commentary, October 1993; Charles Jacobs, “Arab PR: How the Arab Viewpoint Is Promoted in America,” Moment, June 1991; American Attitude toward Islam: A Nationwide Poll (Washington, D.C.: American Muslim Council, 1994), Taking America’s Pulse: A Summary of the National Conference Survey on InterGroup Relations (New York: The National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1994).
2. Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History, revised edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 43.
3. Quran, 2:177; 3:103; 9:71.
4. Ibid., 2:30.
5. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 16.
6. Ihsan Bagby, Muslim Resource Guide (Fountain Valley, Calif.: Islamic Resource Institute, 1994), p. 22.
7. Author’s interview with Imam Talib Abdullah, Laurel, Md., June 18, 1995.
8. Author’s interview with Sam Bennett at Masjidun Nur al-Thani, Detroit, November 8, 1995.
9. Victor M. Perez-Diaz, The Return of Civil Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 56-57.
10. Manfred Riedel, “In Search of a Civic Union: The Political Theme of European Democracy and Its Primordial Foundation in Greek Philosophy,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. X # 2, (1983), p. 104.
11. George F. McLean, “Philosophy and Civil Society: Its Nature, Its Past and Its Future”, Chapter I above.
12. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson of London, 1960), p. 25.
13. Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, The Emerging Order: God in the Age of Scarcity (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1979), p. 24.
14. Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1993), p. 25.
15. Georg Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979), p. 61.
16. One Nation under God, p. 25.
17. Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 9.
18. Emerging Order, p. 191.
19. U.S. Long-Term Economic Growth Prospects: Entering a New Era, Studies for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, January 25, 1978), p. 75.
20. Emerging Order, p. 206.
21. Eric Eckholm, “Disappearing Species: The Social Challenge,” Worldwatch Paper 22 (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, June 1978), p. 7.
22. Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Sources of Conflict: Highlights From the ‘Managing Chaos’ Conference(Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1995), p. VII.
23. Ibid., p. 10.
24. Eric Eckholm, “Disappearing Species: The Social Challenge,” Worldwatch Paper 22 (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, June 1978), p. 6.
25. David S. Noss and John B. Noss, Man’s Religions, 7th Edition (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1984), p. 202.
26. Huston Smith, The Religions of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 308.
27. Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam and the End of History,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 10 (993) p. 525.
28. One Nation Under God, p. 25.
29. E.F. Schumacher, A Guide to the Perplexed (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 127.
30. Author’s interview with John L. Esposito at Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., January 17, 1996.
31. Muslim Resource Guide, p. 20.
32. The three largest North American Muslim organizations: the Islamic Society of North America based in Plainfield, Ind.; Ministry of Imam Warith Deen Muhammad based in Chicago, Ill.; and Islamic Circle of North America with head offices in Brooklyn, N.Y. Emerging Order, p. 6.
33. Cited in James Davidson Hunter, American Evangelism, Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity(Newark, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983), p. 49; and Larry Martz and Ginny Carroll, Ministry of Greed (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 23.
34. “In Search of the Sacred,” Newsweek, November 28, 1994, p. 54.
35. E.J. Dionne Jr., “Spirit Over Morality,” The Washington Post, March 26, 1996, p. A13.
36. John Lancaster, “Calmer Mideast Weighs Signs of Less Militant Islam,” The Washington Post, March 25, 1996, pp. A1.
37. “In Search of the Sacred,” p. 62.

In Gulf, US Wants the Oil But Not the Responsibility

Some Arabs see a ‘double standard’ in American foreign policy

The Christian Science Monitor
December 9, 1996

FBI director Louis J. Freeh went to Saudi Arabia to take a close look at the recently completed Saudi investigation of the Dhahran bombing. Nineteen Americans were killed in that June 25 terrorist blast. When he returned, he would not tell Americans what he had learned. Significantly, Freeh would not confirm the investigators’ conclusion – which the Saudis said was based on “confessions and other evidence” – that Iran had engineered that dastardly deed.

FBI officials knew that in Saudi Arabia, as in many other Arab states, suspects are routinely tortured into confessing. The FBI wanted to talk with those who had “confessed” to the crime. The Saudis did not allow it.

Hence Mr. Freeh’s discussions in Riyadh centered on “other evidence” which, according to informed sources, is not much evidence at all.

Apparently the FBI can’t trace the blast to Iran; if it could, it would announce it at the top of its voice and use the information to tighten the global economic squeeze on that country.

The FBI also does not want to talk about the trail it saw, which discredits the friendly Saudi monarchy sitting on the world’s largest oil reserve. The suspects in the Dhahran blast, like those who killed five Americans in Riyadh earlier, are Saudis. They belong to the hard edge of a fast-growing antiregime movement, some of whose members I interviewed during trips to Saudi Arabia and Europe. They are working underground overseas and inside Saudi Arabia.

Even if the Dhahran terrorists had Iran’s blessing, they did not kill those Americans for Iran’s sake. They did it because they resent the US military presence in their country which, they say, shields their repressive monarchy against pressures for reforms.

But Iran and Islamic revivalism are the only sources of Middle Eastern violence that seem to interest the American government and news media. Recently, at a seminar on information technology at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, a Pentagon official sounded the alarm that “Iran is putting out the Quran and other provocative materials on the Internet” in an effort to incite terrorism.

I hope this official’s views about the Muslim holy book don’t reflect the Pentagon’s, but unfortunately he was not the first US official to link Islam to terrorism. Meanwhile, the US news media are looking for clues to the Dhahran blast in the Lebanese hideouts of the Iran-backed Hezbollah, showing little interest in the activities of the myriad Saudi dissident groups in Saudi Arabia and abroad or in the political suppression radicalizing some of them.

The specter of Iran and Islamic revivalism has become so pervasive in America that any serious public discourse about volatile Arab politics has become nearly impossible. Arab autocracies that depend on US military or economic support have successfully played to Americans’ Iran-phobia. Egypt has announced – based largely on suspects’ “confessions” – that it has unearthed Iranian links to an abortive ambush on President Hosni Mubarak during his June 1995 tour of Ethiopia. The Bahraini monarchy also says it has discovered, again based on “confessions,” Iranian complicity in the continual unrest there. The report on the Saudi investigation of the Dhahran bombing fits this pattern.

The Saudi opposition movements are spearheaded by people who, though xenophobic about their brand of Islamic culture, aspire for the basic rights to assemble, speak their minds, learn about the affairs of their country, and participate in politics. They resent Americans’ callousness about their aspirations.

The feeling is widespread among educated youth throughout the Gulf. In May, when Bahrainis were agitating for restoration of their parliament, dissolved since 1975, US Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. John Shalikashvili rushed to that sheikhdom to “condemn acts of violence” and announce US support for the embattled Bahraini monarchy. Not long after, a Qatari activist in London faxed me two news clips. One was about General Shalikashvili’s Bahrain trip and statement. The other said an American diplomatic mission to Asia was mounting pressure on the Burmese military government to restore that country’s dissolved parliament. He asked me to note the “double standard” in US foreign policy.

MANY Gulf Arabs also resent the US security cordon around the Gulf which, they say, has turned their states into American “colonies,” draining their oil to maintain the West’s high living standards while letting millions of Arabs and Muslims languish in poverty. To underscore the argument, they cite official American statements that US troops in the Gulf are serving “vital American interests.”

Of course, they could be reminded that without the American security umbrella the Gulf might have slipped under Iraqi tutelage. Yet Americans seem less sensitive to Arabs’ welfare than some European nations were to that of their colonial subjects. In many of their colonies, especially in South Asia, Europeans initiated social reforms, ensured social justice, and introduced democratic institutions.

In the Gulf today, Americans appear content to underwrite the security of repressive autocracies in exchange for oil without taking any responsibility for their repression. Many are just too busy fighting the ghost of the late Iranian Islamist leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to think about such a responsibility.

The Rising Tide Of Fundamentalism

St. Louis Post – Dispatch
October 10, 1996

The Taliban, a pugnacious brand of Islamic revivalists, have taken over government in Afghanistan. As they entered government offices, their followers jeered at the body of former communist President Najibullah hanging from a post overlooking Kabul’s main square. Later they shut down girls’ schools, barred women from outdoor jobs and ordered men to grow beards. They think those actions are supported by the Islamic faith. In reality, they reflect a mixture of the tribal Afghan culture and social norms of early Islamic society.

The Taliban are a rough edge of the Afghan revolution, which, I hope, will mellow in the course of time. Most revolutions do. But we must remember that Afghan Muslims fought and defeated the communists not because of a yearning for Western capitalist democracy.

They spurn both systems as offshoots of liberalism, which is concerned mainly with man’s material needs and ignores his religious values. I bet they would also resist the American political model based on church-state separation.

If Islamic revivalists have rejected the corrupt, communist brand of liberalism in Afghanistan, they have bested liberalism’s Western variety in Turkey and Iran. In Turkey, the government of Islamic revivalist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan is trying to Islamize the country’s liberal, or secular, democratic system. In Iran, the 1979 revolution has transformed a secular monarchy into an Islamic theocracy.

Meanwhile, Islamic forces have emerged as the only viable opposition in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. Said K. Aburish, an Arab historian and journalist, told me during a recent meeting in London that he believes that Islamic forces will be coming to power in “much of the Arab world.”

Religious revivalism is not confined to Arab or Muslim societies. In Hindu India and Jewish Israel, religious parties have made unprecedented electoral gains over liberal establishments. The three religious parties represented in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist government are pushing for the Judaization of Israeli laws. India’s Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which won the most seats at the last parliamentary elections, plans to establish a “Hindu state.” And since the mid-1970s a re-Christianization movement is simmering in Europe, spearheaded by such evangelical groups as the Communion and Liberation, Student Youth, Company of Deeds and People’s Movement. Earlier, Catholics brought down the Polish communist regime.

A more widespread religious and spiritual drive is sweeping North America. Mainline church deserters, agnostics, atheists and socialists are returning to God in droves through evangelical and fundamentalist Christian denominations, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Bahai faith and so on. A Newsweek poll taken two years ago found that 58 percent of Americans were yearning for spiritual growth, up from 33 percent in 1986 and 22 percent in 1978. Today the Christian Right is no longer an ignored political fringe. It is entrenched in the GOP presidential campaign.

I tend to agree with economist E.F. Schumacher, who says liberalism is a feature of a period of growth and the quest for order is a feature of decline. This explains, at least partly, the yearning for a religious and moral order in parts of the developed world.

Liberalism and structures of freedom were born in an age when Europeans had just discovered the unspoiled New World and set about colonizing and exploiting the resources of other continents. The need to tap those reso urces sparked momentous scientific inventions, technological innovation and an orgy of industrial production and consumption that has lasted a half-millennium.

That period of growth has peaked in many societies where a relentless industrial assault has reduced resources, producing diminishing return on labor. People are working harder for poorer wages. The growing hardships and uncertainties of life have triggered a stampede for the security of a religious or moral anchor.

Muslim and other developing societies have a different problem. Most of them have never left their religious moorings, which would loosen through modernization. A looming modernist threat to those moorings has now plunged the Afghan Taliban, Arab Muslim Brothers and others into their revivalist campaigns.

Some global demographic and social trends seem somewhat encouraging. The growth of world population is slowing down and is expected to stabilize in four decades. Environmental and other groups are guarding against the depletion of resources. And a communications revolution is helping to match resources with needs faster and farther than ever.

But how far could these global trends affect individual countries and communities would depend upon the dimension of this revolution. A thriving “global village” – a worldwide network of trade, commerce, investment and communications – would promote liberal values and institutions worldwide. A world driven by economic, military or cultural conflicts could, on the other hand, reinforce religious and ideological pulls.

Between God and Adam Smith

Chicago Tribune
October 9, 1996

The Taliban, a pugnacious brand of Islamic revivalists, have taken over the government in Afghanistan. As they entered government offices, their followers jeered at the body of former Communist President Najibullah hanging from a post overlooking Kabul’s main square. Later, they shut down girls schools, barred women from outdoor jobs and ordered men to grow beards. They think these actions are mandated by the Islamic faith. In reality, they reflect a mixture of the tribal Afghan culture and the social norms of the early Islamic society.

The Taliban are a rough edge of the Afghan revolution, which, I hope, will mellow in course of time. Most revolutions do. We should also remember that Afghan Muslims fought and defeated the communism not because of a yearning for Western capitalist democracy. They spurn both systems because both are offshoots of liberalism, which is concerned mainly with man’s material needs and ignores his religious values. I can bet they would also resist the American political model based on church-state separation.

If Islamic revivalists have rejected the corrupt, communist brand of liberalism in Afghanistan, they have bested liberalism’s Western variety in Turkey and Iran. In Turkey, the government of Islamic revivalist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan is trying to Islamize the country’s liberal, or secular, democratic system. In Iran, the 1979 revolution has transformed a secular monarchy into an Islamic theocracy. Meanwhile, Islamic forces have emerged as the only viable opposition in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. Said K. Aburish, an Arab historian and journalist, told me during a recent meeting in London that he believes Islamic forces will be coming to power in “most of the Arab world.”

Religious revivalism is not confined to Arab or Muslim societies. In Hindu India and Jewish Israel, religious parties have made unprecedented electoral gains over liberal establishments. The three religious parties represented in Isareli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s rightist government are pushing for the Judaization of Israeli laws. India’s Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which won most seats at the last parliamentary elections, plans to establish a “Hindu state.” And since the mid-1970s, a re-Christianization movement is simmering in Europe, spearheaded by such evangelical groups as the Communion and Liberation, Student Youth, Company of Deeds and People’s Movement. Earlier, Catholics brought down the Polish Communist regime.

A more widespread religious and spiritual drive is sweeping North America. Mainline church deserters, agnostics, atheists and socialists are returning to God in droves through evangelical and fundamentalist Christian denominations, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Bahai faith and so on. A Newsweek poll taken two years ago found that 58 percent of Americans were yearning for spiritual growth–up from 33 percent in 1986 and 22 percent in 1978. Today the Christian Right is no longer an ignored political fringe. It is entrenched in the GOP presidential campaign.

I tend to agree with E.F. Schumacher who says liberalism is a feature of a period of growth and the quest for order that of decline. This explains, at least partly, the yearning for a religious and moral order in parts of the developed world. Liberalism and structures of freedom were born in an age when Europeans had just discovered the unspoiled New World and set about colonizing and exploiting the resources of other continents. The need to tap those resources sparked momentous scientific inventions, technological innovation and an orgy of industrial production and consumption that has lasted a half-millennium.

That period of growth has peaked in many societies where a relentless industrial assault has dwindled resources producing diminishing return on labor. People are working harder for dwindling wages. The growing hardships and uncertainty of life have triggered a stampede for the security of a religious or moral anchor. Muslim and other developing societies have a different problem. Most of them have never left their religious mooring, which they would lose through modernization. A looming modernist threat to that mooring has now plunged the Afghan Taliban, Arab Muslims and others into their revivalist campaigns. Their reflex for religious and cultural roots has been reinforced by capitalism’s diminished lure in the West.

Some global demographic and social trends seem somewhat encouraging. The growth of the world population is slowing down and is expected to stabilize in four decades. Environmental and other groups are guarding against the depletion of resources. And a communications revolution is helping to match up resources with needs faster and farther than ever.

But how far could these global trends affect individual countries and communities would depend upon the dimension of this revolution. A thriving “global village “–a worldwide network of trade, commerce, investment and communications–would promote liberal values and institutions worldwide. A world driven by economic, military or cultural conflicts could, on the other hand, reinforce religious and ideological polls.

Saudis Change Attitudes Toward Americans

St. Louis Post – Dispatch
June 11, 1996

The tragic loss of American lives in two terrorist attacks in the Saudi Arabian cities of Dhahran and Riyadh calls for a reassessment of the U.S. Persian Gulf policy based on the social transition taking place in the region.

During three tours in the past five years, I have seen rather dramatic changes in the Saudi political outlook that I did not think possible in such a short time in that extremely conservative society.

In October 1991, a Saudi young man in a “Desert Storm” T-shirt told me in Jeddah that U.S. soldiers had done a “good job, very good job” in the war against Iraq. A year ago, he complained that his country has become “an American colony.”

The presence of the U.S. troops is resented by many Saudis who view them as abettors of repression and a symbol of the monarchy’s subservience to the United States. Five years ago, the Saudis often characterized their king, Fahd, as “wise,” “noble” and “intelligent.” Today many of them, once assured of the confidentiality of the conversation, refer to him as “our playboy king” and “an American puppet.”

The current succession feud among fun-loving princes, the government’s economic belt-tightening measures and democratic reforms in neighboring Yemen, Kuwait and Jordan also have heightened the Saudis’ resentment against their autocratic monarchy. The ailing Fahd has practically abdicated in favor of Crown Prince Abdullah, one of the late King Abdul Aziz’s 45 recorded sons by 22 wives. Abdullah, who so far has had more than 30 wives (though not more than four at a time), is resented by his three half brothers who are in the Cabinet and a fourth who is governor of Riyadh. Younger Saudis, exposed to the outside world, are galled by palace intrigues and the licentiousness of the royal family.

The monarchy’s staunchest critics are the post-oil boom generation. They are usually educated, widely traveled and in tune with the world. They admire Western freedom and democracy and resent being disenfranchised and muzzled. No Saudi talks politics in a public place – unless it is empty. Government spies are more ubiquitous in Saudi Arabia than anywhere in the Middle East.

The Saudis’ yearning for political liberalization is shared in much of the gulf, especially by the youths who make up more than 50 percent of its population. Neighboring Bahrain is reeling from a four-year-long struggle for the restoration of a suspended parliament. The Bahraini monarchy has been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to suppress the movement through arrests, jail terms and torture. On May 30, Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew in to announce “the United States’ support for . . . measures taken by the Bahraini government to confront acts of violence and sabotage.”

In other gulf sheikhdoms, sparse population and a tight security apparatus have so far enabled those dynasties to keep a lid on dissent.

If the history of Iran is any indication, U.S. support of repressive regimes would further inflame the public against them and would jeopardize Western interest in the region. On the other hand, the U.S. relations with Pakistan, Turkey, Yemen and Jordan show that this country can have productive relations with participatory Muslim governments.

The Clinton administration should announce its support for gradual liberalization in the gulf political systems and press the monarchies to follow up on the policy. Totally dependent on the U.S. security umbrella, they cannot resist such pressure. By promoting freedom in the gulf, the United States would best serve its own long-term interest in the region.

India’s Political Reality: ‘Market Economy, Stupid

The Christian Science Monitor
June 5, 1996

Last month India had three governments in as many weeks. Following its worst electoral defeat in history, the secular, centrist Congress Party government yielded power to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which had captured the most seats. But the BJP could not muster the required parliamentary majority and had to give way to a conglomerate of socialist and regional parties. As none of the parties won a majority in parliament, India appears headed for a period of political instability.

The new prime minister, H.D. Deve Gowda, presides over a shaky coalition of 13 political parties. The socialists in the coalition had criticized the former Congress government for inviting Western “economic imperialism” through its market economic reforms. They especially resented the American multinationals in India and import of consumer goods. While Indians wonder about the durability of the Gowda government, foreign entrepreneurs worry about the business outlook in India.

News of the socialist-regionalist government sent Bombay Stock Exchange’s blue-chip index down 3.5 percent. In Washington, an executive specializing in investor relations in India advised clients to “sit on the fence … until the political situation clears up.”

I think, though, that the pink scare will be short-lived. Mr. Gowda is no socialist. He spearheaded a campaign to convert his state capital, Bangalore, into the hub of India’s high-tech industries. His socialist colleagues know they are in a new ball game now. The coalition holds 190 seats in the 535-member lower house of parliament and needs help to retain a majority. Congress, with the second-largest bloc of votes, promised support. Economic liberalization is among the Congress’s proudest legacies, on which it plans to run at the next elections. The party is therefore unlikely to let the Gowda government reverse it.

Rhetoric notwithstanding, Indian socialists are a different breed from their comrades elsewhere. They harangue the public to rise up against economic “exploitation” and social inequality. But they follow caste rules and keep servants at starvation wages. Many are “successful businessmen,” which in India involves a lot of wheeling and dealing and, frequently, bribery.

Many Indian socialists still believe that capitalism is an inevitable transitional phase toward socialism. Among them is my fellow Bengali Jyoti Basu, chief minister of West Bengal state. Last month Mr. Basu turned down invitations to succeed BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister. Basu did so because it would have required him to compromise his Marxist policies. Yet Basu has long been an ardent advocate of foreign investments in India. Last June he criss-crossed the United States on a high-profile campaign to lure American capital to his state.

The strongest allies of India’s market economy will be its beneficiaries in the powerful middle class. Exports of computer software and services during 1995-96 achieved all-time record growth of 80 percent. India supplies software to 75 countries in all five continents. The liberalized economy made that possible.

Privatization of industries has exacerbated unemployment, and many still languish in poverty. Yet most Indians know that the command economy of the earlier era brought India to the brink of bankruptcy. In 1990 the budget deficit equaled 10 percent of the gross domestic product, inflation was in double digits, and foreign reserves dropped to $2 billion, which could not cover one month’s imports. The following year the government began to loosen controls on the economy, announced incentives for foreign investments, encouraged exports, and adopted other transition measures to a market economy.

As a result, last year industry grew by 8 percent, the GDP by 6 percent, and exports were running 20 percent ahead of 1994. Foreign-exchange reserves increased to $19 billion. Inflation is down to 6 percent. The middle class, benefiting most from reforms, spans the political spectrum and will guarantee continuation of the reforms.

The problems that post-Congress India will face are mainly social and political. Most of them will come from the BJP and its allies in the Hindu nationalist camp.

A poll taken after the BJP came briefly to power showed the BJP’s popularity had increased from 23 percent before the vote to 50 percent when the party was invited to form the government. The BJP and its cultural and ideological wings call for the creation of a “Hindu state” in India. They are rigidly anti-Muslim.

Muslims, the largest religious minority, make up 12 percent of the Indian population of 930 million. The BJP would introduce a common civil code to bar them from following their separate practices in marriage, alimony, and inheritance. It would introduce common Hinduized curricula in public schools.

Social dislocations caused by economic reforms and modernization bolster the BJP’s appeal. New economic opportunities are luring streams of Indian youths away from the countryside. Torn from old cultural ties, they are groping for a new cultural identity. Some fancy it in India’s glorious past, from which the BJP derives its political symbols. Urban ghettos are major BJP recruiting centers.

On his last day as prime minister, Mr. Vajpayee vowed to come back with “a majority in this house.” Maybe he will. But the BJP’s message, which has galvanized large numbers of Hindus in northern and western India, is likely to prove its Achilles’ heel. The party’s upper-caste values are resented, not just by religious minorities, but by Hindus in other parts of India.

India’s demography is the greatest obstacle to the “Hindu state” program. And economic reforms, which are exacerbating social tensions, will also help to alleviate these tensions. The worker laid off from a privatized factory will need the opportunity to start his own business and will want the same opportunity for his son.

The Consequences of Rushing to Modernity

Los Angeles Times
JUNE 2, 1996

Over the weekend, India’s 13-day-old Hindu nationalist government was replaced by a coalition of 13 leftist and regional parties after Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee failed to assemble a majority in Parliament. The new government has 11 days to produce a working majority.

The Indian Parliament today is a large quilt of numerous ideological, ethnic and regional patches. None of the parties represented in it has a countrywide following. Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the largest, could not muster more than 194 votes in the 535-member body. The new government of Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda is expected to gain a parliamentary majority with the help of the Congress Party, the second largest grouping in Parliament.

Scrambled as it is, the Parliament mirrors the endless diversity of the Indian population. Earlier this century, much of the country was united by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, under the banner of the Indian National Congress, in their fight against British colonialism. A semblance of that unity was nurtured by the Nehru dynasty through the Congress Party and its creed of secularism and socialism.

But the “Nehruvian consensus” has come unglued. Socialism is blamed for the country’s economic stagnation, and the government has begun to liberalize the economy. The dynasty is gone, and its political vehicle, the Congress Party, reeks of corruption. The BJP, which has stepped up to fill the void, offers Hindu nationalism as a substitute for secularism. It considers the Muslim culture the main challenge to its program. Muslims make up 12% of the Indian population of 930 million.

The BJP would introduce a Hinduized civil code that would bar Muslims from following their separate practices in marriage, inheritance and alimony. It would compel Muslim children to be instructed in Hinduized curricula at public schools. “There is only one Indian culture,” Vajpayee recently told the German newspaper Der Spiegel, “whose root is Hinduism, and the Muslims are only a part.”

Polls show that the BJP’s popularity has increased since the elections, from 23% in mid-April to 50% in mid-May, when it formed the Cabinet. After his setback last week, Vajpayee said that he will “continue our struggle till we attain a majority in the house.” The question is whether his “Hindu nation” is viable or good for India.

Islam has indeed proved to be a weak glue for Muslim nationhood on the subcontinent. The creation of Pakistan was predicated on the idea that Muslims were a single nation, different from Hindus. Two decades later, Pakistan’s eastern province broke away to become the subcontinent’s second Muslim nation-state, Bangladesh. Now Muslims in India’s Kashmir valley are fighting for a third Muslim nation-state, while a fourth Muslim nationalist movement simmers in Pakistan’s Sindh province.

But while Hindu nationalists scorn Muslim nationalism, they appear not to have looked at themselves in the mirror. The subcontinent’s Hindu society is far more ethnically diverse than its Muslim counterpart, and four times as large. Indian Hindus speak 15 major languages, 1,600 dialects. They are divided into thousands of castes and tribes. And India has been stalked by a half-dozen nationalist movements since its independence.

The concept of nationalism was imported by our British-educated leaders. Hindu leaders Gandhi and Nehru, along with their Muslim counterpart, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, studied law and politics in Britain and were fascinated by the debates in the House of Commons. When they returned to India, they set about remolding their country to conform to the European model of a nation-state. But Europe’s nations evolved over centuries. Trade, commerce and industry lured people from the countryside into urban polyglots. There, cross-cultural communication and interaction gradually weakened the hold of old religious and ethnic loyalties. National civic cultures were born. Catholics and Protestants became Frenchmen, Spaniards and Britons.

The 700 million Indian Hindus are no more a single nation than the 350 million European Christians. Still, much of India can evolve a common civic culture through economic modernization. But any attempt to produce a “national culture” by force-feeding Muslims and others the BJP brand of Hindu cultural froth would spell disaster. Muslim nationalism on the subcontinent was fueled by the same kind of anti-Muslim campaign that Hindu nationalists are carrying on today. And, unfortunately, the secular Hindu leadership fell into the nationalists’ trap.

On the eve of India’s independence, a British Cabinet mission proposed a confederation of what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It remains the best solution to the subcontinent’s nationalist ferment and should be debated afresh. Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan. So did Gandhi and other leaders of the secular Congress Party. But Nehru later spurned the idea because it would have given the Muslim-majority regions greater autonomy than he preferred. As a result, Muslims, ever fearful of cultural submergence, could not be swayed from their Pakistan demand.

Throughout history, the subcontinent has swung between periods of harmony, embodied in empires, and disarray. Modern economies are producing a truer regional harmony through trading blocs–the European Union, North Atlantic Free Trade Union, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, and so on. The economies of the subcontinent have begun to modernize. Our traders and industrialists of tomorrow will usher in the next age of subcontinental harmony. Meanwhile, Vajpayee would better serve India by helping to modernize its economy rather than trying to Hinduize its Muslim citizens.

Filmmakers Defend India’s Viewpoint on Kashmir

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
June 1994

Early in April, India dispatched a playwright and his actress wife to the United States on a month-long mission to counter American criticism of Indian human rights abuses in Kashmir. Gopal Sharman and Jalabala Vaidya, the couple who produced the Indian movie classic “Ramayana,” brought along a “horror movie”—a two-and-a-half-hour documentary on violence by Muslim insurgents in the Himalayan valley. It does not mention any of the atrocities committed by Indian security forces in Kashmir.

The Sharman-Vaidya U.S. tour was timed to coincide with a U.S. diplomatic fence-mending mission to New Delhi. Indians have been fuming for months over comments by U.S. officials about Indian human rights violations in Kashmir, and public reiteration of the U.S. position that Kashmir is a “disputed” territory.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Assistant Secretary for South Asia Robin Raphel flew to the Indian capital to calm things down. They blamed the media for creating a “misunderstanding,” and assured their hosts that Washington wanted good, productive relations with both India and Pakistan while seeking to halt nuclear proliferation in both countries. Raphel reiterated, however, that she had been “quite correct in my statements” about the need to improve India’s human rights record in Kashmir and that the issue needed to be resolved in a way “acceptable to the people of Kashmir.”

In Washington, Sharman asserted that Kashmiris are “our countrymen” and “Pakistanis are our brothers; I hug them.” Indeed he hugged some of them in the documentary, entitled “The Kashmir Story,” which nevertheless portrayed the Kashmiri movement as a Pakistani “fundamentalist” assault on Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent, secular political creed. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, hosted the show on April 8. It was attended by journalists, writers and others interested in South Asian affairs. The guests were greeted by William Clark Jr., CSIS senior Asia adviser and former U.S. ambassador to India, and Maya Ray, the wife of the Indian ambassador to Washington. The documentary was to be shown in New York, Chicago and other American cities.

The narrative and interviews of “The Kashmir Story” are punctuated by “Long Live Islam” slogans, crackles of Kashmiri militants’ guns, and moans of Hindus who fled the Muslim uprising. The scenes of Muslim terror and Hindu pathos are paced with melodious Indian songs and sights of Kashmir’s sparkling falls, placid lakes, and glittering, snow-capped mountain peaks.

The message: Muslim separatism, which tore up the old India to create Pakistan (and Bangladesh), is now causing new physical and moral havoc in the enchanting, once blissful Himalayan valley. Sharman’s solution, with which he concludes the documentary, lies in letting the secessionists know that “India cannot surrender Kashmir to Pakistan” and in trying to win over average Kashmiris with the Gandhian message of interfaith brotherhood. Reinforcing India’s I cultural unity,” he emphasized in a later conversation, offers “the only solution” to the Kashmir imbroglio and other interethnic, interfaith quarrels plaguing India.

Deflecting Attention

“The Kashmir Story” is an attempt to deflect attention from the crimes that Indians have committed in Kashmir. Since the uprising began in 1989, Indian security forces have killed thousands of Kashmiris, mostly innocent civilians; burned down numerous houses they believed were inhabited by militants; and on several occasions went about raping women indiscriminately.

More ominously, the documentary and Sharman’s subsequent remarks betray a fascination for the myth of India’s “cultural unity, ” which has been at the root of much of the subcontinent’s political travails. During the 1940s, resistance by the Hindu majority to Muslim demands for constitutional provisions to preserve their cultural interests led to the partition of the subcontinent into Muslim Pakistan and secular India.

Partition triggered interfaith carnage that cost 500,000 lives and created 12 million refugees. India’s population still is 12 percent Muslim. However, a campaign to absorb Muslims into the country’s Hinduized cultural “mainstream” has turned the country into a caldron of Hindu-Muslim animosity.

Post-partition India remains a kaleidoscope of 15 major languages, 1600 dialects, most of the world’s major-and many minor-religions, and an endless variety of castes, tribes and ethnic groups. Yet Indian statesmen imposed on the country a quasi-unitary, parliamentary constitution.

This enables the political party or parties that can scrape together a majority of seats in the lower house of the parliament to make the laws and rule the country.

Today, almost to a person, Kashmiris are alienated from India.

The many Indian voters to whom parties and other secular, democratic institutions remain alien vote along religious, regional, caste and tribal contours rather than on party lines. The minorities, unable to translate their votes and aspirations into party platforms and government decisions, often resort to violence. The result, in the words of V.S. Naipaul, author of several books on his ancestral homeland, has been a “million mutinies” by India’s religious communities, castes, and ethnic groups. They include the secessionist movements in Assam, Punjab and Kashmir.

The Kashmir independence struggle seems to be the most intractable of these “mutinies” because of the especially brutal treatment to which the Kashmiris have been subjected. When the Indian subcontinent was partitioned, the Jammu and Kashmir state, then a principality with a Muslim majority and a Hindu ruler, acceded to India on condition its future political status would be decided in a statewide plebiscite. Also, under its “instrument of accession,” the state retained wide political and economic autonomy.

India subsequently reneged on its plebiscite commitment. Then it gradually usurped much of the autonomy stipulated in the accession agreement. Kashmiri resentment boiled over in the 1980s when New Delhi began manipulating the state’s politics.

India’s ruling Congress Party was playing off one Kashmiri political faction against another, engineering dismissal of Kashmiri governments and colluding in the rigging of the state’s elections. When Kashmiris rose in revolt, India unleashed its military and paramilitary forces on the valley and shut its eyes to their hair-raising brutalities. Today, almost to a person, Kashmiris are alienated from India.

There are arguments for and against independence for the land-locked, impoverished Muslim valley. The two other parts of the Jammu and Kashmir state the Hindu-majority Jammu and the Buddhist-majority Ladakh would oppose its secession from India.

They and many Kashmiri Muslims also would oppose joining Pakistan, still unstable ethnically and politically. Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, were both British educated barristers and shared a blind admiration for British institutions and a disregard for ethnic issues.

Jinnah thought of Islam, erroneously as it turned out, as an adequate “bedrock” for his multiethnic nation. The first post-partition Pakistan, ruled by autocrats, was racked by disputes between Bengalis and Punjabis over linguistic, economic and political issues. The disputes culminated in a bloody civil war and the secession of Bangladesh.

Today, what is left of Pakistan is reeling from continual strife between Punjabis and Sindhis, and between Sindhis and muhajirs, Muslims displaced from India. Hence many Kashmiris, while opposed to Indian rule, are unwilling to join Pakistan.

A Preference for Independence

The Kashmir tragedy and other centrifugal movements can indeed be overcome short of the disintegration of the multiethnic India. Ethnic and cultural groups do blend into nations and national states. But they do so through a long process of evolution.

France, the earliest national state, had to contend with regional and ethnic pulls until the mid-19th century. In fact, French peasants did not fully become French citizens until the introduction of mass education in the 1900s. Britain and other multiethnic West European nations took shape over similar lengths of time. The glue to their nationhood was provided in each case by secular, mass education; industrialization; and prolonged cross-cultural communication necessitated by division of labor.

Many experiments have since been made to short-circuit this process by providing ideology or force to propel multiethnic states. Some of these have failed, e.g., the old Pakistan, the old Ethiopia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R. In many other cases multiethnicity has been used as a rationale for the suppression of democracy and human rights, as in the cases of Iraq and Iran.

Even though fissiparous movements appear to threaten democracy and statehood in India, the country can preserve both by adapting its political structure to the needs of its regions, ethnic groups and religious communities. A far-reaching solution to the subcontinent’s political problems was proposed by a British Cabinet mission 48 years ago, when Britain was winding down its colonial rule. The Cabinet Mission Plan envisaged a confederation dividing the subcontinent into various regions and subregions, according to their religious and ethnic characteristics, and providing for various quantums of autonomy for the various tiers.

A subcontinental confederation would seem an impossibility today. For India, though, a confederation—at least between its secession-prone states and the central Indian heartland—appears to be a feasible arrangement.

If India can be held together through a covenant reflecting fairness and magnanimity toward its minorities—the real legacy of Mahatma Gandhi—it will over time evolve into a more integrated national state through the modernization of the economy and society.

The modernization process is accelerating since the liberalization of Indian economic and trade policies three years ago. The growth rate, for example, has nearly tripled, from 1.3 percent in 1991-92 to 4 percent this past fiscal year. Inflation has dropped from 13 percent to 7.5 percent. Foreign investments are gradually picking up after a setback in the wake of Hindu-Muslim riots and political uncertainty. Yet it all could be reversed by new ethnic and religious convulsions and secessionist movements.

India may follow the footprints of the French—or of its former friends, the Soviets.

Hostilities on a nuclear subcontinent

Chicago Tribune
May 24, 1990

President Bush’s special envoy, Robert M. Gates, was sent to India and Pakistan to try to ease the mounting tension between the two countries over the uprising in the Himalayan valley of Kashmir. The prospect of another India-Pakistan war has increased since late last month when Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers, who met in New York, failed to agree on an approach to the Kashmir dispute. And early this week the assassination of a top religious leader fueled more violence.

India and Pakistan fought three wars when neither had a nuclear weapons capability. Today both can deploy the bomb. U.S. officials are especially worried that the 5-month-old Kashmiri crisis could derail the 15-year-old U.S. effort to prevent a nuclear arms race on the subcontinent.

Islamic Pakistan insists that Moslem majority Jammu and Kashmir state belongs to it, and its invaders seized a third of the state, triggering the first round of India-Pakistan hostilities 43 years ago. The remainder of the state, including the nearly all-Moslem Kashmir, was grabbed by Hindu-majority India after it signed an accession agreement with the state’s Hindu ruler. That agreement provided for limited Indian jurisdiction over Jammu and Kashmir and for a plebiscite in the state to determine its final status. Later, India reneged on its plebiscite pledge and curbed the state’s autonomy, causing resentment among Kashmiris.

The Kashmiris have been enraged further by the high-handed rule of a corrupt New Delhi-backed state government and by a resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism threatening their distinctive culture. Now nearly the entire population of the valley has joined a bloody struggle to secede from India.

While both India and Pakistan claim Jammu and Kashmir, a majority of Kashmiris want their land reunified and made an independent nation-state. “I find danger to my Islamic identity from India,” says Kashmir Liberation Front chief Amanullah Khan, who recently visited the United States, “and I find danger to my Kashmiri identity from Pakistan.”

One solution, proposed by the late Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Kashmiri leader Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, would have the state reunified and linked to both India and Pakistan as a partner in a confederation. Pakistan spurned the proposal, and it would do so now. The subcontinent, however, has been politically unified four times in its history-the last under the British-and four times it disintegrated. One may wonder if Kashmiris will have to wait for the next high tide of subcontinental harmony to have their divided land put back together.

Meanwhile, the threat of a war between the de facto nuclear nations of India and Pakistan endangers the fate of one-fifth of mankind who live in the two countries. The Bush administration, besides trying to end the present confrontation, should step up its efforts to dissuade India and Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons. The time for such a drive was never more opportune than now.

Previous Western non-proliferation initiatives were hampered partly by a lack of active support from the Soviet Union and China. The Soviets needed to cultivate India as a counterweight to what they perceived as the U.S.-Pakistani-Chinese axis. They were reluctant to press New Delhi hard on non-proliferation. In fact, in 1985 India had 6.8 tons of Soviet “heavy water” smuggled on an Aeroflot jet to produce unsafeguarded plutonium. Moscow ignored the incident. Earlier, the Chinese, who share Pakistanis’ enmity with India, gave Pakistan the design for its nuclear device.

Now the onset of a new phase of superpower detente has diminished India’s strategic importance for the Soviets. It is significant that last month the Soviet official newspaper Izvestia criticized India’s refusal to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The Chinese have begun to warm up to both New Delhi and Moscow. For the first time in nearly two decades Beijing has adopted a neutral-instead of pro-Pakistani-stand on the Kashmir issue. Washington should seize upon this thaw in international relations and enlist active Soviet and Chinese cooperation in the U.S.-led drive to ward off a nuclear-arms race in South Asia. As Kashmir has been the main irritant in India-Pakistan relations, a South Asian non-proliferation regime should include a recipe to settle this festering problem. New Delhi should be goaded into a dialogue with the rebels aimed at restoring the wide autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir was ensured when it joined India.