Turkey’s experiment with Islamists-turned-democrats might be coming to a tragic end. When the Justice and Development Party (AKP), rooted in Turkey’s Islamist opposition, came to power in Turkey in 2002 and declared that it had become a democratic movement, nearly everyone gave it the benefit of doubt. At that time, the party pushed for European Union (EU) accession, and followed a liberal reform agenda. The party also reached out to non-Islamist constituencies, suggesting a pluralist understanding of democracy and alleviating concerns about its Islamist pedigree.

Seven years later, the AKP’s democratic credentials are under doubt. On September 8 the AKP slapped Doğan Media, Turkey’s largest media group, composed of liberal and secular voices, with a record $2.5 billion tax fine. The AKP has also made a habit of arresting its opponents and critics, connecting them to the Ergenekon case that alleges a coup plot against the government. Turkey-watchers are waking up from a dream that started well in 2002, but has since become an illiberal nightmare.

The AKP’s slide away from its liberal stance began in 2005. As Turkey started accession talks with the EU, the AKP decided that the talks necessitated reforms that would erode its popular support, and shied away from pursuing Turkey’s EU dream. Following the party’s landslide victory in the 2007 elections, with 47 percent support, it moved from a pluralist to a majoritarian understanding of democracy. The AKP began to interpret its popular mandate as a blank check to ignore democratic checks and balances, and crack down on dissent, using the financial police to intimidate liberal businesses and the Ergenekon case to harass its opponents and critics.

When the AKP came to power, Turkey’s liberal business lobby group TUSIAD, whose members control a large chunk of the Turkish economy, supported the AKP’s liberal pursuit of the dream of a European Turkey. However, relations between TUSIAD and AKP soured as the new majoritarian-thinking AKP abandoned consensus building policies—for instance telling TUSIAD to “shut up” during the 2007 debate for a new constitution.

TUSIAD members have since come under fire from government-controlled tax police. For example, Doğan Group, a prominent TUSIAD member, was targeted after Doğan’s newspapers covered a court case in Germany that dissolved a Turkish-German charity for illegal transfer of funds to various Islamists in Turkey. Tax authorities selectively audited Doğan’s businesses for a year, and slapped him with a $600 million fine in February, alleging improper business dealings. AKP leader and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan then called on Turks to boycott Doğan’s media outlets, exposing the political nature of the fine.

The AKP’s stance against Doğan is a move against independent media. Turkish media continues to be free, but its independence is now checked by a government that wants political subservience.

The case against Doğan is also a move against liberal businesses. In this regard, Vladimir Putin’s heavy-handed treatment of his billionaire opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a telling example. When Putin jailed the Russian businessman on corruption charges, he sent other Russian oligarchs a strong message. Soon thereafter, many embraced self-imposed exile or turned into subservient figures like Roman Abramovich. The AKP’s actions against Doğan suggest a striking parallel to the Russian case. The new fine brings the total charges against Doğan to $3.1 billion, an amount larger than Doğan’s worth. Should Doğan meet Khodorkovsky’s fate or come close to it, the remainder of the country’s rich—the safety valve of pro-Western Turkey—will be hard-pressed not to take inspiration from Abramovich.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s intellectuals worry about Ergenekon. When the case opened in 2007, AKP watchers saw it as an opportunity for Turkey to clean up corruption and investigate coup allegations. But the case has become much more than that.

For starters, the case is nebulous. In a recent study, Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based analyst, described Ergenekon as a case that charges people “with membership of an organization which, as defined in the indictment presented to the court, does not appear to exist or to ever have existed.”

Instead of prosecuting criminals, the AKP is using this fluid case to persecute its opponents. Since 2007, AKP-controlled police have taken over 150 people, including university presidents, journalists, and women’s activists, into custody without evidence of criminal activity, only to release them after a few days of harsh questioning with no charges. Most have become docile intellectuals following their release. Meanwhile, some AKP opponents have been held in indefinite police custody for over a year, demonstrating to Turkey’s intellectuals the cost of not supporting the AKP.

Wiretaps are another tool for harassment of liberal and secular Turks. In Turkey, it is a crime to wiretap private conversations or publish conversations captured by the police. Yet pro-AKP media outlets regularly publish wiretapped conversations of the AKP’s opponents, compromising their private lives and even alleging that they are “terrorists” connected to Ergenekon. The AKP does not prosecute these crimes, which terrorize liberal intellectuals.

In truth, Ergenekon has devolved into a witch hunt, reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings in the United States. Most Turks refuse to even discuss the case on the phone or via e-mail, out of fear that just by speaking of it they might be implicated in it.

This state of fear and intimidation in Turkey is nightmarish. However, things could still end up well. Whenever Turkey goes through a political spasm, analysts warn about the collapse of Turkish democracy. Yet Turkey has pulled through numerous crises in the past, thanks to the balancing power of its fourth pillar. With coup allegations, arrest of government’s opponents, and a media crack down in the background, only free and independent media can clear things up. Never before has media independence been so crucial to Turkish democracy.

From David L. Phillips

U.S. officials must be steely-eyed in confronting terrorist threats. However, we simply cannot kill all our adversaries. An effective counterterrorism strategy must go beyond confrontation and coercion. It must also be based on a deeper understanding of the disenfranchisement that gives rise to despair and the conditions that delude individuals into believing that sensational violence serves their cause.

My book is a post-mortem of George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policy. It is also intended as a guide for the Obama administration. Part of it consists of case studies of groups that are at various stages of abandoning violence and seeking their goals through political means: the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, Free Aceh Movement, and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. Some of these groups are making progress; others are back-tracking; while some groups are dividing into various factions. These case studies are considered within the context of world affairs since Bush declared his “Global War on Terror,” of which the book is deeply critical.

The United States missed a golden opportunity after 9/11. The headline of Le Monde read: “Nous sommes tous Americains.” But instead of building on international sympathy, Bush squandered the world’s goodwill through a series of foreign policy blunders.

The UN Security Council supported U.S. military action to topple the Taliban. It also welcomed our pledge to democratize and rebuild Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the Bush administration’s failure to expend the required resources stirred doubt about the sincerity of its commitment.

The debacle in Iraq fueled further speculation. Using democracy to justify the U.S. occupation convinced detractors that democracy promotion was a Trojan horse for toppling governments averse to U.S. interests. Conspiracy-prone Iraqis were astonished by the post-war reconstruction fiasco. They wondered how the United States could vanquish Saddam’s Republican Guard, but fail to keep the electricity and water flowing.

Nothing eroded America’s credibility more than neglecting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Waiting until the final year of his administration to announce a major push for peace in the Middle East compounded concerns arising from the Bush administration’s support for corrupt, tyrannical, and (in the eyes of devout Muslims) impious regimes in the Muslim world.

I wrote From Bullets to Ballots in order to encourage the Obama administration to develop a deeper appreciation and different balance between confrontation, coercion, and co-optation of extremists.

The book is far from soft on terrorists. To be sure, every U.S. president has had the option—indeed the responsibility—to preempt an attack against the United States. I make the case, however, that Bush discredited this approach by conflating preemption and prevention. Preemption is justifiable when attack is imminent, whereas preventive war involves military action when there is no urgent threat.

The book insists that the United States can never condone torture, rendition, extra-judicial execution, or political assassinations. However, it acknowledges that targeted killings of armed combatants may be necessary under dire circumstances to prevent the killing of civilians.

When it comes to coercion, I advocate smart sanctions, which are more effective by targeting individuals with travel bans, freezing their overseas assets, and curtailing commercial operations in countries that sponsor terror. Financial intelligence can be used to choke off financial flows, and partnerships with local law enforcement can help disrupt hawala banking used by terror groups to move money. It is possible to interdict financing at its source by screening alms to radical clerics who misuse contributions as payments to “martyrs” or to support militant operations.

While observing the principle of free speech, the United States cannot stand idly by while the Internet is used to incite hatred, raise funds, recruit killers, and facilitate the command and control of terror operations. Unleashing viruses and computer worms can help address security risks. So can bombarding servers, redirecting traffic, and using a password assault to disrupt communications and penetrate websites used for nefarious purposes.

These confrontational and coercive measures are necessary options, but in the book I maintain that democracy and development assistance are also vital to the realization of US national security and global interests. All options explored in the book are explained in the context of case studies and the discussion of actual country conditions.

Democracy assistance has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. To be effective, however, the United States should avoid arrogance and tread softly. In the book, I insist that leaving a heavy footprint alienates allies, risks undermining local initiative, and fomenting further violence.

Moreover, I underscore that democracy assistance is not about empowering leaders of whom the United States approves. One of Bush’s failings was to equate democracy with elections. Democratization is a process, not an event—one that must go beyond elections by including assistance to promote the rule of law, minority rights, and security sector reform, and enhance independent media and civil society thereby ensuring transparent and accountable governance.

Development assistance must also take into account national security considerations. The book points out that strengthening the formal education sector and increasing educational access for young girls undermines radical madrassas. I also advocate greater access to information and science education to help cultivate analytic thinking as a bulwark against extremism.

The most vulnerable persons must not be allowed to slip through the cracks and become victims of manipulation. To this end, hardship and resulting radicalization can be mitigated via a social safety net focusing on health services, as well as steps to develop community and national health systems. Additionally, viewing humanitarian assistance through a conflict-prevention lens both addresses basic needs and enhances stability, which is necessary to break the cycle of violence and counter extremism. Aid, trade, and debt forgiveness stimulate economic development and the emergence of a moderate middle class, thus helping to eradicate poverty, which is a potential breeding ground for extremism.

Eliminating the conditions that cause instability and give rise to extremism requires both U.S. leadership and international cooperation. Terrorism will continue to be the defining issue of our times. From Bullets to Ballots is grounded in the conviction that America will not be safe unless it finds the right balance between security, development and democratization. Moreover, foreign aid must be based on more than altruism. In light of today’s financial crisis, expenditures on democracy and development assistance are even more valuable when they also enhance U.S. national security.

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A trap awaits Turkey analysts seeking to explain rising anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Turkey. There is a tendency to look into the historic roots of both phenomena and to explain both as hardwired in the Turkish polity, not as products of current politics.

To be sure, there are anti-Western instincts in Turkish nationalism, not unlike most post-Ottoman nationalisms. Turkey has had past episodes of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism as well. However, these phenomena were never grassroots movements and never politically sanctioned. Moreover, the Turks have historically supported strong ties with the United States. They also did not oppose intimate ties with Israel, which Turkey recognized in 1949.

Today, though, this is no longer the case, as the Turks view the United States as the country’s chief enemy. A recent poll shows that 44 percent of the Turks consider the United States the biggest threat to Turkey. And the number of people in the country who have anti-Semitic views is rising dramatically. In 2004, 49 percent of the Turks said they did not want a Jewish neighbor; in 2009, this number climbed to 76 percent.

So why are the Turks suddenly spiteful towards the United States and Israel, Americans and Jews? Anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are surging in Turkey because the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government sanctions both phenomena. This combination of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism is not a coincidence. The Islamist thinking is as follows: The Jews are evil, they run America, and therefore America is evil.

Take, for instance, the billboards that Istanbul’s AKP government put up during the Gaza war in Istanbul’s mixed Muslim-Jewish neighborhoods. These oversized billboards depicted a burnt-out child’s sneaker, with a sign saying “humanity is slaughtered in Palestine” over it. Under the sneaker, in large print, the billboard quoted the Old Testament commandment “Thou shall not kill” and added “You cannot be the Children of Moses.” What on earth does the Gaza war have to do with Jewish law? Is it an accident that a day after these billboards appeared in Istanbul’s cosmopolitan Nisantasi neighborhood, vigilantes distributed fliers calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses? Or that the next day, Jewish businesses in the neighborhood took down their names?

The outrage sparked by the Gaza war has failed to subside. In early February, the AKP government of Istanbul opened a cartoon exhibit in the city’s downtown Taksim Square metro station―Taksim Square is to Istanbul what Times Square is to New York City―which included many cartons depicting bloodthirsty Israelis killing Palestinians with American help, such as one in which a satanic-looking Israeli soldier with white pupils washes the blood on his hands of a faucet, labeled the United States. Each month, millions of Turks pass through the Taksim metro station—a government-owned public service.

Unsurprisingly, such black propaganda is not without consequences. A sage once told me that a society is truly anti-Semitic when teachers say bad things about Jews in school. Last month, a group of Turkish schoolteachers distributed sweets in the Central Anatolian town of Kayseri to commemorate Hitler’s blessed memory. During the Gaza war, Israelis, including Israeli teenagers who were visiting Turkey to play volleyball, were attacked. Shops plastered signs on their windows, saying that “Americans and Israelis may not enter.” What is more, Turkish Jews felt physically threatened for the first time since they found refuge in the bosom of the Ottoman Empire.

All this has nothing to do with whatever historic causes one might seek for such developments. Popular anti-Semitism is driven in Turkey by the acts of the AKP government—and that is a fact. Analysts should follow Turkey’s current politics closely in explaining the Turks’ shifting political attitudes. If we fail to point out how anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are spiked up by the AKP, once such sentiments lay roots, we will have no other explanation but to say that anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are intrinsic to Turkish society and, god forbid, the Turks’ religion, Islam.

I call on fellow liberals to think twice before they bypass Turkey’s political transformation and turn to historicizing anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Turkey. The surge of these sentiments since 2002 demonstrates that, when in power, Islamists can corrupt even the most liberal of the Muslim societies. The singular example of a Muslim society that is friendly towards Jews and Americans risks disappearing in front of our eyes if we do not point out the political nature of Turkey’s current transformation.

If we ignore the political forces changing Turkey today, others will blame the change on the Turks and Islam tomorrow.

MESH Pointer: See the earlier thread, Behind the blow-out at Davos.

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I am one of more than 140 scholars and experts to sign a letter to President Obama, released today (March 10), asking him to take seriously his inaugural statement that leaders who “cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent” are “on the wrong side of history.” The question is, on which side of history will the Obama administration place itself in its policy toward the Middle East?

Early indications are for a return to traditional diplomacy and jettisoning of any serious efforts to promote democracy, freedom, and human rights. While the signatories of this letter might differ on some issues, we are joined by the belief that this early course by Obama and Secretary of State Clinton needs immediate correction. We understand that promoting Middle East peace enjoys a high priority in this administration, and we believe that it is entirely possible to cooperate with Arab governments in that endeavor while also pursuing improved human, civil, and political rights for Arab citizens. In fact, not to do so would be shortsighted and ultimately counter productive.

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From Gilles Kepel

Beyond Terror and Martyrdom is the English-language revised and updated version of Terreur et Martyre: Relever le défi de civilisation, which came out in French in the spring of 2008. That book is the third part of a trilogy that began with Jihad (French 2000, English 2001) and continued with Fitna (2004, English as The War for Muslim Minds)—all three published in English by Harvard University Press. The trilogy is an attempt to decipher the present state of the Middle East in its relation to the globalized world, through the lenses of its Islamist movements. Jihad dealt with a broader historical perspective, tracing the beginnings of radical Islamist ideology back to the mid-1960s with the seminal works of Sayyid Qutb, and questioning the rise and shortcomings of Islamist movements up to 2000. The latter two books dealt with a much shorter span: 2001 to 2004 for Fitna; the period from 2004 to the present for Beyond Terror and Martyrdom. (Click here for more on the trilogy, and other books mentioned below.)

When 9/11 occurred, Jihad was widely mocked: if, as the author had explained, radical Islamist movements had failed politically, how were they able to organize an attack of the magnitude of the ghazwatayn mubarakatayn (”two blessed raids”) on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon? He surely had underestimated the “Islamist peril,” probably for politically correct reasons, and was no longer worthy of any academic standing. Some demanded that he be fired from his university job—but (hamdullah) the poor guy had tenure. This was not easy to swallow, and I tried to respond with a short and ironical travelogue, Chronique d’une guerre d’Orient (English as Bad Moon Rising, Saqi, UK, both 2002).

But none other than Ayman al-Zawahiri finally came to my rescue, with his Fursan taht rayat an-nabi (”Knights under the Prophet’s Banner”), where the number-one ideologue of Al Qaeda explained that 9/11 was but an attempt to reverse the failure of the 1990s, when Islamist radicals couldn’t mobilize the masses. Attacking the “faraway enemy” was the true means to show that the United States was a giant with feet of clay. The masses, too afraid to respond to the call of the Islamist radicals in Algeria, Egypt, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, etc. would now stop being afraid and mobilize against their “apostate” regimes.

But 9/11 paved the way instead to the American-led “War on Terror” and the invasion of Iraq. Bin Laden & Co. saw it as their golden opportunity for a global jihad-win-all against impious invaders of the abode of Islam, something they were sure would re-enact, on Arab land, the Afghan jihad of the 1980s against the Red Army. (That had proved in retrospect to have been the cradle of Salafi-Jihadism, the ideological construct that led to Al Qaeda. The first book in my trilogy was entitled Jihad as a tribute to the central place of the Afghan “jihad” in the shaping of Islamist movements post-1980s.)

Beyond Terror and Martyrdom focuses on two main issues: first, the rise of “martyrdom” (or suicide) operations, which I believe actually led to the political suicide of Sunni Islamist radicalism, ripe with betrayals such as the so-called Sahwa (”awakening”) movement in Iraq and disputes on whether the shedding of “Muslim blood” was a major political failure; and second, the renewal of Shi’a radicalism in Iran under Ahmadinejad, who made the best possible use of the U.S. quagmire in Iraq.

Now I believe Zawahiri & Co. are not faring well, and I devote a long chapter in the book to an in-depth analysis of his cyber-proclamations; while in Iran, the radical rhetoric of Ahmadinejad, who had promised to put “oil money” on every Iranian dinner table, fell short of its populist promise. Just as Barack Obama’s victory is a typical “post-Bush” phenomenon, which doesn’t relate only to the sorry state of the economy but has to do with the cardinal sin at the core of the Gitmo-centred “GWOT,” I expect we’ll see in 2009 a “post-Ahmadinejad” political phenomenon in Iran—provided the West makes an offer to the new Iranian post-Islamist (though staunchly nationalist) elites, to reintegrate the Gulf security system.

Last, but by no means least, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom deals at length with issues of Muslims in Europe, which had been of particular interest to me since I published Les Banlieues de l’Islam (”The peripheries of Islam,” in 1987, no English translation). To cut a long story short, successful politics of integration are contrasted to failed politics of multi-culturalism—a taste of French schadenfreude and Fox News-bashing… which you may imagine I did relish!

Writing this book involved a lot of suffering—I believed wrongly that aging would make writing easier; well, quite the contrary—but reading it in English, in Pascale Ghazaleh’s great translation, is a pleasure! I wish I could write in English like that—though in the multipolar world, might there be some room left for obsolete dialects such as French or Arabic? I hope you’ll enjoy reading it too, and please send me your reactions, negative, critical or positive, here. I promise I’ll answer the relevant ones! A bientôt sur le web!

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The late Peter Rodman said and wrote many wise things on a wide array of topics. One set of remarks that stands the test of time is the following presentation he delivered at a Washington Institute conference in 1992. The triggering event was Algeria and the debate over whether the United States was right to accede to the Algerian military’s cancellation of the second round of parliamentary elections that almost surely would have brought Islamists to power. But, as was usual with Peter, the context was much broader—it was how the United States should approach the rise of radical Islamist politics across Muslim societies. Peter’s message—no less appropriate today, a time when the United States looks approvingly at political rules that enable Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood to gain ground, than when uttered more than fifteen years ago—is poignant, moving, and timeless: “Our response to Islamic fundamentalism is not only a question of foreign policy, but of our faith in ourselves.”

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Remarks by Peter W. Rodman to the Soref Symposium on “Islam and the U.S.: Challenges for the Nineties,” Washington, April 27, 1992.

There is no kind of issue as agonizing to a policymaker as this one. People in government are used to dealing with tactics—the last cable, the next meeting. This kind of problem forces them to think not only about strategy but about basic questions of political philosophy. Thus they naturally turn to scholars for guidance. But they also cannot escape the responsibility to ask crude questions like: Does Islamic politics pose a threat to us? If so, what can we do about it?

More than a dozen years after the Iranian revolution, it is now clear that Islamic fundamentalism has spread to the Sunni world as well as the Shi’i, and is a growing factor in regions from North Africa to the West Bank to Afghanistan and Central Asia. It is filling the vacuum left by the discrediting of other outlets for popular frustration, pan-Arabism, nationalism, and socialism. On its face, it looks to replace those “isms” as the main strategic challenge to moderate or pro-Western governments in the region.

Ironically, as the end of the Cold War seemingly marks the final victory of liberal democracy in a 200-year struggle in European political thought, the West now finds itself challenged by an atavistic force hostile to all Western political thought.

Experienced scholars remind us that militant Islam reflects deep-seated social grievances and causes. They caution us against looking for a new “enemy” now that Communism is defeated. They suggest it is a historical phase that will probably have to be endured. This is wise advice. Yet there is little comfort for the policymaker in the idea that this new source of anti-American radicalism will play itself out in twenty years or so. We do have a right to defend our interests. In doing so, there are some guidelines a policymaker ought to follow.

• First, it is true that we should not initiate hostility where there is none, and we should coexist with whoever is willing to coexist with us. The burden of making our relationships hostile, if hostile they are to become, should rest with the Islamic forces themselves.
• Second, however, we cannot avoid taking Islamic ideology seriously. Where a radical anti-Western philosophy is coupled with concretely hostile policies, we have a problem. It is patronizing and even insulting to dismiss as mere rhetorical exuberance a philosophy one of whose central tenets is rejection of the West as corrupt and evil. Much of the Islamic world is indeed bitter and resentful at Western cultural influence, driven by what Bernard Lewis calls “the politics of rage.” Iran’s military buildup and support for terrorism make it still a strategic threat.
• Third, we must recognize that a political movement can come to power through democratic means and not itself be democratic. Constitutional democracy means, at a minimum, political pluralism, limitations on government power, guarantees of individual and minority rights, the possibility of alternating parties in office. No Islamic leader subscribes to this. Islamic parties, rather, seek (out of moral conviction) to make institutional changes that would negate the possibility of their removal once in power, not only through political action but by reshaping educational and cultural life. Such movements do not deserve enormous deference from us for their political virtue. There is an abject quality to much Western discussion of this issue, which reflects a collapse of belief in our own democratic values.
• Fourth, the way to encourage moderates and weaken radicals is not to try to find three guys in the leadership entourage to bribe with TOW missiles, but to demonstrate by our firm resistance that radical policies are counterproductive. Hostile foreign policy moves must be resisted and penalized. That’s the way to strengthen the hand of any moderates there may be.
• Fifth, Western fatalism as to the inevitability of the Islamic trend is a grave disservice to the millions of moderate, modern men and women in Muslim countries whose own reasons to fear fundamentalism are even greater than ours. Appeasement would sacrifice them as well as our own principles.
• Sixth, we should be wary of pushing friendly governments into risky experiments. It is not our job to accelerate the delegitimization of friendly governments that seem not to meet our standards, only to have them succeeded by something infinitely worse, as happened in Iran.

In sum, our response to Islamic fundamentalism is not only a question of foreign policy, but of our faith in ourselves. We should not be paralyzed by guilt as to our own presumed inadequacies or those of our friends as we face a movement whose most basic tenets reject the best of what the West has to offer. We may well have to coexist with it in a literal sense for a long period, but the notion of coexisting peacefully is more our concept than theirs. The rage against us is too great, as is the concrete threat of the nuclear, conventional and terrorist weapons it continues to marshal against us in the service of its rage.

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Remembrances of Peter Rodman are posted here.

Much of today’s backlash against democracy promotion in the Middle East can be traced to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 2006, and its effect of reinforcing the “Algerian nightmare” complex among nervous Washington policy makers about the prospect for political takeovers of Arab countries by illiberal and anti-American Islamist movements.

While many would see Hamas and the Moroccan Justice and Development Party, for example, as occupying two points on a spectrum, I reject this view and reject the notion that Hamas’s victory has much to tell us about the prospects for Islamist behavior in (hypothetical) democratic elections elsewhere in the Arab world. In a recent piece for the Journal of Democracy, I argue for the importance of seeing that there are differences in kind, not just degree, among Islamist movements in today’s Middle East. I describe three distinct categories of Islamists, and focus on the last of the three as the only one from which a potentially democratic Islamist politics might emerge. In evaluating this final category, I argue that the democratic credibility or capacity of a given Islamist movement can only really be tested and assessed in a more open political environment, and that ultimately the quality of Islamist political discourse will hinge on the quality of the political system in which it resides.

Others, however, would argue that these distinctions are not meaningful, on either philosophical or pragmatic grounds. The philosophers might argue, like my friends Hillel Fradkin and Hussein Haqqani, that the common ideological roots of today’s Islamist parties present them all with a rather high bar to clear before they could act as “normal” political factions. This is because their founding ideology doesn’t draw a basic distinction between the Muslim umma and the political state, and thus sets up all kinds of bars to basic principles of democratic politics. Pragmatists, for their part, might say that all Islamist political groups evident in the region today are really some form of hybrid, exhibiting elements of violence and of “normal politics,” and aspects of religious movements alongside of political parties. Even those that don’t engage in violence themselves, they note, either have violent pasts or condone/celebrate the violence of others.

Below I lay out the three categories I describe in the Journal of Democracy.

The first category—and the easiest to dismiss for the purposes of this discussion— comprises the relatively small but important group of radical, ideologically driven movements that we can call takfiri, for their readiness to label other Muslims heretics, apostates, and therefore justifiable targets of violence. Such groups include Al Qaeda, of course, along with its affiliates and allies in Algeria, Iraq, and elsewhere. These groups take no interest in formal politics save for the strict pan-Islamic state that they envision setting up once they have toppled their region’s existing governments. They glorify violence as a religious duty and reject democracy as a violation of God’s sovereignty. Such violently irreconcilable groups are irrelevant to the question of whether Islamist movements can be successfully integrated into a democratic Arab future. The takfiris will endanger that future, just as they endanger the present.

A second category includes what we might call “local” or “nationalist” militant Islamist movements, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, or the Shiite militias of Iraq. Two characteristics set this type of Islamist movement apart. First, they combine their Islamist ideology with a specific set of local political demands that are the focus of their activity and the core concern of their supporters—unlike the takfiris, they seek and benefit from the vocal support of a given local community. Second, they all exist in weak or failing states (or non-states, in the case of Hamas), where the central government has proved incapable of providing basic security for all its citizens or where the state itself is an arena of contention between competing groups in society. The lack of state capacity enables these movements to wield their weapons with a good deal of support from their local communities. Their armed activities serve not only to advance the ideological cause, but also to protect local constituents from depredation at the hands of the state or communal rivals.

Thinking of Hamas and Hezbollah primarily as Islamist groups rather than as nationalist militants obscures the search for solutions to the problems these groups pose for democratic politics. The fundamental challenge that these groups pose to Arab democratization is their use of violence, not their Islamist character or ideology (although the latter is used to justify the former). Such movements could not have emerged into this dual role of militant political party in a strong state like Egypt; indeed, whenever the Muslim Brotherhood or its offshoots in Egypt developed violent capabilities, the government crushed them mercilessly. Only regimes with insufficient capacity to enforce their monopoly on violence and with weakened capacity in their political institutions are compelled to allow such compromised groups to participate in politics with their weapons in hand. Hamas is a perfect example. According to the formal rules of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas was not qualified to participate in the parliamentary elections because it did not accept the signed agreements with Israel. But the PA could not enforce this rule.

That groups like this choose to run in elections is itself evidence of the extent to which electoral legitimacy is becoming a norm among Arab citizens. A role in formal politics helps the Islamist-nationalists to hedge their bets should they ever need to put away the gun. But they do not view political processes and institutions as authoritative, and have often shown themselves ready to threaten or even use force when it suits them—witness Hezbollah’s takeover of Beirut in May. As long as the region’s Lebanons remain too weak to control its Hezbollahs, there is little hope that full democracy or meaningful equality under law can blossom. States that can barely function or make their writs run throughout their own lands will never be robust candidates for democratic consolidation.

In the strong states that one more often finds in the Middle East, however, the forces of political Islam are a different breed from Hamas and Hezbollah. This third and largest category of Islamist movements—the category most relevant to discussions of democratic change in the Arab world—comprises groups that eschew violence (at least locally) and aspire to a political role in their respective countries, without voicing any revolutionary goals. Such groups may operate as legal parties, such as the Islamic Action Front in Jordan and the Party of Justice and Development in Morocco, or they may be excluded from formal political recognition but still engage in the political process, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) or Kuwait’s Islamist “societies.” They all want to transform society and government into something more “Islamic,” but aim to do so “from below”—that is, by persuading citizens to adopt Islamist ideas, demand Islamist policies from government, and behave as more closely observant Muslims.

There are, of course, a lot of questions to be raised and discussed about how to assess the democratic “credentials” or relevance of Islamist groups in this third category. But my point in this post is simply that Hamas and Hezbollah are not the same animal as the Egyptian MB, and we should not generalize from one to the other. The 2006 Palestinian elections indeed set back both peace and democracy for Palestinians and Israelis—but those elections have little to tell us about the prospects for Islamist politics elsewhere in the Middle East.

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At the recent inaugural conference for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), presenter LTC Joseph Myers made an interesting point that deserves further elaboration: that, though military studies have traditionally valued and absorbed the texts of classical war doctrine—such as Clausewitz’s On War, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, even the exploits of Alexander the Great as recorded in Arrian and Plutarch—Islamic war doctrine, which is just as if not more textually grounded, is totally ignored.

As recent as 2006, former top Pentagon official William Gawthrop lamented that “the senior Service colleges of the Department of Defense had not incorporated into their curriculum a systematic study of Muhammad as a military or political leader. As a consequence, we still do not have an in-depth understanding of the war-fighting doctrine laid down by Muhammad, how it might be applied today by an increasing number of Islamic groups, or how it might be countered.”

This is more ironic when one considers that, while classical military theories (Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, et al.) are still studied, the argument can be made that they have little practical value for today’s much changed landscape of warfare and diplomacy. Whatever validity this argument may have, it certainly cannot be applied to Islam’s doctrines of war; by having a “theological” quality, that is, by being grounded in a religion whose “divine” precepts transcend time and space, and are thus believed to be immutable, Islam’s war doctrines are considered applicable today no less than yesterday. So while one can argue that learning how Alexander maneuvered his cavalry at the Battle of Guagamela in 331 BC is both academic and anachronistic, the same cannot be said of Islam, particularly the exploits and stratagems of its prophet Muhammad—his “war sunna”—which still serve as an example to modern day jihadists.

For instance, based on the words and deeds of Muhammad, most schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that the following are all legitimate during war against the infidel: the indiscriminate use of missile weaponry, even if women and children are present (catapults in Muhammad’s 7th century, hijacked planes or WMD by analogy today); the need to always deceive the enemy and even break formal treaties whenever possible (see Sahih Muslim 15: 4057); and that the only function of the peace treaty, or hudna, is to give the Islamic armies time to regroup for a renewed offensive, and should, in theory, last no more than ten years.

Quranic verses 3:28 and 16:106, as well as Muhammad’s famous assertion, “War is deceit,” have all led to the formulation of a number of doctrines of dissimulation—the most notorious among them being the doctrine of taqiyya, which permits Muslims to lie and dissemble whenever they are under the authority of the infidel. Deception has such a prominent role that renowned Muslim scholar Ibn al-Arabi declares: “[I]n the Hadith, practicing deceit in war is well demonstrated. Indeed, its need is more stressed than [the need for] courage” (The Al Qaeda Reader, 142).

Aside from ignoring these well documented Islamist strategies, more troubling is the fact that the Defense Department does not seem to appreciate Islam’s more “eternal” doctrines—such as the Abode of War versus the Abode of Islam dichotomy, which in essence maintains that Islam must always be in a state of animosity vis-à-vis the infidel world and, whenever possible, must wage wars until all infidel territory has been brought under Islamic rule. In fact, this dichotomy of hostility is unambiguously codified under Islam’s worldview and is deemed a fard kifaya—that is, an obligation on the entire Muslim body that can only be fulfilled as long as some Muslims, say, “jihadists,” actively uphold it.

Yet despite all these problematic—but revealing—doctrines, despite the fact that a quick perusal of Islamist websites and books demonstrate time and time again that current and would-be jihadists constantly quote, and thus take seriously, these doctrinal aspects of war, apparently the senior governmental leaders charged with defending America do not.

Why? Because the “Whisperers”—Walid Phares’ all too apt epithet for many Middle East/Islamic scholars, or, more appropriately, apologists—have made anathema anyone who dares imply that there may be some sort of connection between Islamic doctrine and modern-day Islamist terrorism, such as in the recent Steven Coughlin debacle. This is a long and all too well known tale for those in the field (see Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand: the Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America).

But consider for a moment: though there are today many Middle East studies departments, one will be sorely pressed to find any courses dealing with the most pivotal and relevant topics of today—such as Islamic jurisprudence and what it has to say about jihad or the concept of Abode of Islam versus the Abode of War—no doubt due to the fact that these topics possess troubling international implications and are best buried. Instead, the would-be student will be inundated with courses dealing with the evils of “Orientalism” and colonialism, gender studies, and civil society.

The greater irony—when one talks about Islam and the West, ironies often abound—is that, on the very same day of the ASMEA conference, which also contained a forthright address by premiere Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis (“It seems to me a dangerous situation in which any kind of scholarly discussion of Islam is, to say the least, dangerous”), the State Department announced that it had adopted the recommendations of a memo stating that the government should not call Al Qaeda-type radicals “jihadis,” “mujahidin,” or to incorporate any other Arabic word of Islamic connotation (“caliphate,” “Islamo-fascism,” “Salafi,” “Wahhabi,” and “Ummah” are also out).

Alas, far from taking the most basic and simple advice regarding warfare—Sun Tzu’s ancient dictum, “Know thy enemy”—the U.S. government is having difficulties even acknowledging its enemy.

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Who speaks for Islam? This question forms the title of a new book authored by John L. Esposito, director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, and Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. The book is meant to answer it. According to the authors, their aim is to settle important disputes regarding the attitudes and opinions of contemporary Muslims on a range of pressing questions.

Of course, the most important dispute is whether terrorists, like Al Qaeda and other radicals, speak for contemporary Muslims and for Islam itself. According to the authors, understanding this issue—”understanding extremists and the nature of extremism”—”requires a global perspective that extends beyond conflicting opinions of experts or anecdotes from the ‘Arab street.’” We need to go beyond dueling op-eds and books, and ground our opinions in hard facts by finding out “What do Muslims polled across the world have to say? How many Muslims hold extremist views? What are their hope and fears? What are their priorities? What do they admire, and what do they resent?” In the service of the right approach, the authors invoke no less an authority than Albert Einstein: “A man should look for what is, and not what he thinks should be.” In accord with this motto and the highest scientific standards, “the data should lead the discourse.”

Happily, according to the authors, we can now heed Einstein’s advice, through the good offices of the Gallup Organization. The book’s cover proudly proclaims that it is “Based on Gallup’s World Poll—the largest study of its kind,” and presents itself as an account of that poll.

So who does speak for Islam? Apparently, Esposito and Mogahed do. For the book does not actually present the poll. It provides a very small and partial account of the responses to some questions, but fails to include even one table or chart of data. It does not even provide a clear list of the questions that were asked. The appendix, where one might expect to find questionnaires, charts, and tables, provides only a short narrative discussion of Gallup’s sampling techniques and general mode of operation.

To a certain degree, the authors admit the bias of their presentation: “The study revealed far more than what we could possibly cover in one book, so we chose the most significant, and at times, surprising conclusions to share with you. Here are just some of those counterintuitive discoveries.” But this admission is ridiculously inadequate. After all, this is a book, not an article. In the end, the authors betray their own standard that “data should lead the discourse,” because there is no data. A reader without deep pockets cannot easily remedy this deficiency: the Gallup Organization charges $28,500 to access the data.

If not data, then what fills the pages of this book? In effect, we are given an opinion piece by Esposito and Mogahed—one not unlike the op-eds they decry, only much longer. Like op-eds, it is buttressed by anecdotal evidence, much of which is not even drawn from the survey. Indeed, given the partiality of the material they do draw from the survey, it too must be counted as anecdotal, notwithstanding the percentage signs which are scattered here and there. Moreover, the conclusions that Esposito and Mogahed draw, as well as their policy prescriptions, are indistinguishable from Esposito’s opinions, as expressed and disseminated in his books and articles long before Gallup polled its first Muslim. As in almost every Esposito product, the book even includes a chapter devoted to a description of the religion of Islam.

But to accept this book as an extended op-ed is not quite adequate. After all, Esposito claimed to apply a higher standard—that of “a man [who] should look for what is, and not what he thinks should be.” Seen in this light, the book is a confidence game or fraud, of which Esposito should be ashamed. So too should the Gallup Organization, its publisher.

The defective character of the book makes it exceptionally risky to address any of its specific “findings” and the policy prescriptions derived from them. This is partially because the authors either misunderstand or misrepresent their “data”—or both. But overall, according to this book, Muslims turn out to be pretty much like Americans. There is no “clash of civilizations” and no need for one. Muslims are not even essentially anti-American. In fact, they admire America for its democracy, technology and prosperity, and would like to have these benefits for themselves—benefits denied to them by the authoritarian governments under which they presently suffer. They are particularly keen on freedom of speech and other features of democratic life, including gender equality. The only issue is how they might best succeed in achieving democratic governance, and how America might assist that. The real cause of Muslim resentment against us is not our principles but our policies, which impede their progress and persuade them that we view them with contempt. Democracy and respect (”R.E.S.P.E.C.T.”) are all they want.

Well, not quite. There are some wrinkles that reveal a certain confusion on the part of Muslims which may even rise to the level of self-contradictions. The authors do not regard these as major issues, perhaps because they are confused themselves.

For example, while Muslims say they are for democracy, they are repulsed by its apparent corollary in America: the corruption of personal and especially sexual morals. But no matter. The authors observe that many Americans object to such moral corruption themselves. The authors likewise lament the “well-meaning” but misguided and high-handed approach of American feminists to the status of Muslim women. (One cannot help wondering whether Esposito would lend himself to a movement for the reform of morals, and especially the restoration of “female modesty,” on Georgetown’s campus.)

It thus turns out that Muslims apparently want a different kind of “democracy,” one which avoids moral and other kinds of risks. For example, although they would like freedom of speech, they would not like it to be unlimited, such that it might permit speech offensive to religious sensibilities. In other words, blasphemy laws should limit it.

As for other “freedoms,” the authors provide no information. In particular, we do not know whether Muslims accept “freedom of religion.” This is a most peculiar omission since it is essential to a clear understanding of contemporary Muslim views of democracy.

But perhaps all of this is to be understood in light of the finding that Muslims—women as well as men—want to ground their “democracy” partly or entirely in Sharia or Islamic law. The authors hasten to assure the readers that this does not mean that “Muslim democracy” would actually be a “theocracy,” since their respondents largely reject the prospective rule of Muslim jurists.

But this leaves the matter totally confused. If Sharia is to be the partial or entire base of future “democratic” governments, who is constituted to decide what Sharia prescribes, other than the jurists to whom its interpretation has always been and is still entrusted? We are left totally in doubt as to whether the poll asked this kind of question. We are also left in doubt about a whole set of issues, including and especially whether or not “Muslim democracy” would permit religious freedom of the sort characteristic of American and other liberal democracies. Would the status of non-Muslims—especially Christians—be governed by traditional Sharia prescriptions for non-Muslim or dhimmi minorities, which involve various legal disabilities and inequities? Or would they be fully equal? Would non-Muslims be permitted to run for and hold public office?

We just can’t know the answers from what the authors choose tell us. But we and they do know how Americans understand and practice democracy. We also know that despite discontent with this or that consequence of democracy—including moral decay—Americans have been ready to run those risks rather than alter their fundamental principles. To suggest, then, that it is only our policies and not our principles which lead to a divide with the Muslim world is entirely wrong and extremely misleading. The authors’ dubious understanding of the issues, and especially the problem of “conflicts between the West and the Muslim world,” is summed up laughably in the book’s last paragraph. There we are told that 90 percent of Lebanese Christians and Muslims have a high regard for one another despite the long history of civil war. Perhaps this is so, but if Lebanon is a model of comity and harmony, it has escaped everyone’s notice except the authors.

And what about our policies? According to the authors, Muslims would like us to be supportive of their democratic efforts. Yet they also would like us not to interfere. This too presents a kind of confusion: they want to have their cake and eat it too. Well, who doesn’t? The interference is a consequence, not a cause. To suggest, as the authors constantly do, that the main problems Muslims face stem from outside does no service to Muslims or the truth. The book encourages Muslims and non-Muslims to avoid dealing with “what is,” and so ends up as a prime example of precisely that which its authors decry.

I would like to take up and elaborate somewhat Adam Garfinkle’s point (in a comment on an earlier post) about “a theologicalization of Islamic societies, defined as the process whereby the status of religion as a legitimate carrier of the public weal grows and the status of politics of a legitimate carrier of the public weal declines.”

The reason for this, I think, is clear [writes Garfinkle]: The pressures of modernization, greatly increased over the past few decades, are accentuating the internal divisions within most Muslim societies between secularists and nativists/fundamentalists, with traditionalists and the neo-orthodox… squeezed in between, and the vocabulary of dispute becoming increasingly moralist, in this case Islamic.

The tribal population of Iranian Baluchistan that I studied in the 1970s had, prior to conquest (or “state consolidation”) by Reza Shah in the 1930s, been entirely independent and had enthusiastically engaged in predatory raiding of Persian peasant populations. Since their “encapsulation” by the Persian state, they were forced to face the fact that they were militarily, politically, economically, and culturally weaker than the Persians, and that their pride as independent warriors and nomadic livestock owners could no longer be sustained.

Who were they now (after the conquest) and what could they take pride in? They turned to religion, not least because they were Sunni, and religion is a diacriticum between them and the Shia Persians. Religious intensification included increased and collective praying, going on the Hajj, and sending children to madrasse in Pakistan. The chief was no longer addressed as Sardar, his political title, but as Hajji, his earned religious title.

Perhaps this process of religious intensification in Baluchistan can serve as a miniature of what has transpired in the Middle East more generally. The Arabs, and Persians, and to a degree the Turks, have fallen in status, power, and prestige—and perhaps most important, in honor—as the West has ascended. (We must remember that honor in the Middle East rests with no less than full independence, and even better, with domination of others.) Middle Easterners were faced with trying to recover and reassert their position and standing. They tried nationalism, which failed (as shown in Fouad Ajami’s brilliant account, The Dream Palace of the Arabs), and they tried socialism, which, aside from transfers from the USSR, also failed.

What was left to them to try? How could they assert their equality, or, better, superiority? The answer, of course, is a turn, or return, to religion, for which it is ever possible to claim superiority. Religion of course is a diacriticum that distinguishes the Middle East from the West, and readily available is the non-refutable claim that Islam is superior to Western religion or non-religion, and therefore that the Middle East (and the Islamic world in general) is superior to the West.

It thus appears that a critical factor in “theologicalization” or religious intensification in the Middle East is Middle Eastern identity and its wounds under Western military, political, economic, and cultural superiority. The heartrending call among Arabs to save their honor is highly indicative. The re-turn to Islam and hope for redemption is the obvious consequence.