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| Volume XV, Spring 2008, Number 1 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization
by Akbar Ahmed. Brookings Institution Press, 2007. 301 pages. $28.95, hardcover.
Antony T. Sullivan
President of Near East Support Services, a consulting firm focusing on international affairs.
Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, holder of the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, has written a profoundly personal and moving analysis of the anguish and ideological deformations through which the Islamic world is currently passing. Journey into Islam is a spiritual odyssey reaching far back into Professor Ahmed's own past while detailing his dreams for the Muslim world of today and tomorrow. Professor Ahmed's vision, unrealizable as he himself realizes it probably now is, is one of a reborn, pluralistic, tolerant and cosmopolitan Muslim world, rooted in a restored understanding of the monotheistic commonalities shared by the three Abrahamic faiths. The author is a social scientist with the soul of a poet who has probably done more than any other scholar resident in the West to combat the egregious stereotypes and hate-mongering that are all too common in public-policy circles today. While readers of this book may rejoice that such an individual moves among us, they will also most likely come away from it depressed by the probability that history is moving in the very opposite of the direction that Professor Ahmed desires.
Born in British India, raised in Pakistan, and educated in the UK, Akbar Ahmed has been living in the United States since 2000. He is an authority on the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan and Pakistan and the author of such books as Islam under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World, Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin, and After Terror: Promoting Dialogue among Civilizations. Professor Ahmed has served as high commissioner of Pakistan to Great Britain and has held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton as well as at Harvard and Cambridge Universities. He is also a filmmaker (the Jinnah Quartet) and is currently composing a play entitled “Noor: Dreaming of Paradise.” Perhaps most remarkably, Ahmed has developed a warm friendship with Judea Pearl, the father of the Jewish foreign correspondent Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. The two have made a number of joint appearances before interreligious dialogue groups. All this constitutes the deeply moving story that Professor Ahmed recounts in Journey into Islam.
This book is the story of Professor Ahmed's on-site assessment of elite opinion in eight Islamic countries (Turkey, Syria, Qatar, Jordan, Pakistan, India, Malaysia and Indonesia). Assisted by a core research and support team consisting of three of his best students, he collected data through questionnaires and conducted interviews with a broad range of Muslim intelligentsia in each of the countries visited. Questionnaires were distributed in universities, hotels, cafes, mosques and homes. Interviews were held in most of these venues, most especially in private homes. The data are tilted toward educated youth (18-28 years old), male and female, especially as represented on the campuses of such institutions as the University of Jordan, Qatar University, the International Islamic University of Malaysia, and the State Islamic University in Jakarta. Responses averaged 120 per country. A most useful appendix presents portions of the data, with detailed assessments of their significance, for each of the countries visited. This book takes readers almost by the hand, unwrapping the Islamic world before them as they travel jointly with Professor Ahmed and his assistants on a voyage of discovery and reclamation.
Globalization (and its discontents) is a leitmotif of this volume and a theme that Professor Ahmed unfolds with unsparing honesty. He points out that the world may indeed be very "flat," in Thomas Friedman's words, between New York, London, Tel Aviv, Bangalore and Tokyo, but for traditional societies everywhere it is "not flat but uneven," with "valleys, ravines and mountains" (p. 85). "Culture, customs and ideas inherited from the past," he reminds us, "are highly prized marks of identity and determiners of behavior" (p. 85). Globalization "presupposes the dissolution of boundaries; tribalism defines itself on the basis of boundaries" (p. 86). And much of the Third World is willing to fight to the death to keep it that way. "Waziristan refuses to be flattened" (p. 87), Ahmed observes, and this refusal is shared by much of the Third World.
Professor Ahmed vividly describes the "asymmetry" between the developed and underdeveloped worlds: in the latter, one billion people earn less than a dollar a day. There are 358 individuals (of course, not all of them are in the West) who own more financial wealth collectively than one-half of the world's population. The poverty and hopelessness of much of the Third World is attributed, rightly or wrongly, to globalization (read Americanization). "That is why so many young Muslims in the age of globalization," Ahmed remarks, "prefer Usama bin Laden to Bill Gates" (p. 16). Little of this seems to be understood in Washington, D.C., or at least American foreign policy does not indicate any such awareness.
Although he originally planned to organize this volume around the insights of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, Professor Ahmed ultimately opted for another course. In fact, Journey into Islam is based on three "models" of Islam, variously designated by the names of three towns in India: Ajmer, Aligarh, and Deoband. These three cities symbolize different interpretations of Islam and, according to Professor Ahmed, are universally applicable. Ajmer represents the soul of Sufism, or the sort of mysticism and transcendence perhaps best captured in the immortal verse of the Persian poet Rumi. The Ajmer approach is rooted in pluralism and the acceptance of others, Professor Ahmed maintains, and is strongly opposed to the materialist and consumer philosophy behind globalization. Today, Ambassador Ahmed believes that the Ajmer model is the "only one that can lead Muslims out of the ethnic, religious and political conflicts that globalization has thrust upon them" (p. 40).
Then there is the Aligarh model, based on the thought of such reformers as Sayyed Ahmed Kahn and Muhammad Abduh. Aligarh was long ago a pillar of support for parliamentary democracy, as historically represented by India's once-great Aligarh University. Akbar Ahmed was himself trained in the Aligarh tradition, although there is evidence today that he may be moving away from the Aligarh approach to embrace that of Ajmer. With great sadness, Professor Ahmed admits that he is today "amazed at [Aligarh's] slow but steady decline over the last decades" (p. 224). In fact, the Aligarh model in his opinion has now essentially collapsed. In this regard, he notes tellingly that "had the Aligarh model been dominant, the Muslim response to the Danish cartoons and the Pope's remarks would have been to engage in debate and write letters" (p. 219).
The Deoband model, representing all varieties of "fundamentalism," has in Ambassador Ahmed's judgment largely replaced that of both Ajmer and Aligarh during the last three decades. Inspired by such figures as Abu Ala Maududi, Hassan al-Banna, Hassan Nasrallah, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Deobandis are today the inspiration for millions of young Muslims across the Islamic world. The Deobandis are winning, Professor Ahmed argues, and there is an urgent necessity to engage them in debate before time runs out. "Time is of the essence here," he observes. "The poisons are spreading so rapidly that without immediate remedial action, no antidote may ever be found" (p. 47). But Ambassador Ahmed understands well enough that no effective remedial initiatives are remotely likely to be adopted by the present U.S. administration, mired as it is in the formulaic repetitions of such imprecations as "Islamofascism." He correctly observes that the "Deoband model…will continue to pray for Bush and his long life, because everything [the President] is doing…rejuvenates and reunites the Muslim world" (p. 72).
Despite the fact that so many have said so much over so many years about the sense of pluralism, brotherhood and "dignity of difference" embedded in the Abrahamic tradition of monotheistic commonality, the hard truth today seems to be that this is an understanding whose time has past. Bouthaina Shaban, Syrian minister of expatriates, may repeat that Muslims "shouldn't think of East and West. [One] can't be a Muslim unless [one] believe[s] in Abraham and Christ. The oldest synagogue in the world is in Damascus. The oldest church in the world is in Damascus" (p. 19). And Professor Ahmed may add that Damascus has a shrine dedicated to the head of John the Baptist, who is revered as the prophet Yahya in Islam, where Christians and Muslims still do pray together, and another shrine for the head of Hussein, grandson of Muhammad, and even one for the remains of Saladin al-Din al-Ayubbi. Nevertheless, Deobandis everywhere seem to be listening less to the varied voices of such "People of the Book," drowned as they increasingly are by the imprecations of the resurgent Kharijites of our time.
The present is dark, and the future may prove even gloomier, Professor Ahmed reluctantly admits. He agrees that 9/11 represented the "collision of two civilizations: that of the West, led and represented by the United States, and that composed of Muslim societies…" (p. 9). Indeed, it is "difficult not to believe that political scientist Samuel Huntington may have been right," he notes. "Perhaps a 'clash of civilizations' [is] underway between the West and Islam, from which there [is] no escape" (p. 195). Professor Ahmed voices a fear that has struck many of his fellow combatants for peace in those lonely moments of introspection: "I [feel] like a warrior who [knows] the odds [are] against him," he writes, "but [has] never quite realized that his side [has] already lost the war" (p. 192). These are honest but very depressing words.
Especially distressing are the ways in which religious symbols and traditions are now manipulated in the West to serve predetermined ideological or political objectives. Professor Ahmed itemizes a litany of ills that many others have also identified: the apocalyptic messianism of the Left Behind books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, 63 million copies of which have been sold; the video game that accompanies the Left Behind saga that identifies all non-Christians as the enemy; the unalloyed anti-Islamic tirades of CNN's Glenn Beck; and Fox TV's enormously popular program "24," which depicts torture as necessary for hero Jack Bauer to extract the information from the "terrorist" in time to save America. Ambassador Ahmed notes that this attitude of arrogance and venomous contempt for Muslims extends into the highest echelons of the Bush administration. Recall Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's observation, when questioned about the looting of the Baghdad Museum, that "stuff happens," and the president's own crystal clear directive to the first American viceroy of Iraq, Jay Garner: "Kick ass." Much of this is merely an echo of exactly what the Deobandis themselves are saying, from their very different perspective. If all this is not the mark of at least the beginning of a true "clash of civilizations," pitting the West against the Islamic world, what is?
Nevertheless, such obdurate ignorance is of a piece with the radically misleading simplification by President Bush at the very beginning of the "war on terror:" You are "either with us or against us." All else might be said to stem from that initial formulation. Such phrase-mongering, combined with the administration's refusal to understand the complexity of the tribal, sectarian and religious identities with which it would inevitably have to deal, has been characteristic of President Bush and those around him from the beginning. Worse, the administration has largely refused to retain as counselors those area experts who do understand such matters but are not necessarily Bush political loyalists. These failures doomed the effort from the start. Meanwhile, Professor Ahmed notes, Americans largely failed to "understand that their culture [was] drawing critical notice in other parts of the world," a failure "worsened by the seeming 'casual arrogance' of their leaders" (p. 201). He adds that, even more than the issue of Israel and the Palestinians, it was Iraq that convinced Muslims everywhere that "Islam was being maligned in the West" (pp. 16-17).
Professor Ahmed goes further. He denounces by name such neoconservatives as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton and Daniel Pipes, in addition to the Project for a New American Century, as the authors of many of the United States's current woes. Notably, he scores what he considers the malign influence of Professor Bernard Lewis on American policy toward the Middle East over the past three decades. "Despite being ethnocentric and outdated," he remarks, "Lewis' ideas [have]…become the accepted and indisputable foundation of U.S. foreign policy" (p. 136). The result has been that "any kind of a popular movement in the Muslim world finds itself on a collision course with U.S. interests. Democracy in the [Islamic] world and American foreign policy just do not mix" (p. 228). The great irony here is, of course, the fact that the Bush administration, whose "war on terror" which was meant to fight and contain radical Islam, has "turned out to be its strongest supporter, through its arrogance, lies, and blind support of Israel" (p. 228).
Professor Ahmed notes that Benjamin Franklin once remarked, "Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame" (p. 209). But Franklin's was a voice speaking directly from the heart of the Old America. In the new, crusading, neoconservative America, the prudence of a Ben Franklin has been replaced by the "Bring it on" challenge of President Bush. This has catalyzed the progressive radicalization of the entire Islamic world, which Professor Ahmed has so brilliantly depicted in this important book. "The sleeping giant of the East [is] stirring," one of Ambassador Ahmed's interlocutors told him. "The world needs to take notice" (p. 15).
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