An Alternative Voice is not a Hostile Voice 
-M J Akbar 

What is the first thing that you do at an international conference of Islamic scholars? Count the beards, of course. The ratio was fifty-fifty at Jakarta, where we had gathered at the invitation of the Nahdlatul Ulama to discourse on Islam as Rahmatan lil Alamin — or, roughly translated, as a message of peace for the world.

But the beards made one point more forcefully than the clean-chins: That Islam was spread across dozens of civilizations, colors and tongues. The most splendidly-groomed instances of hirsute fashion belonged to a pair of strikingly handsome clerics from the Balkans, their high, round, white turbans touched off by green redolent of the glories of the Ottoman Empire. The most learned beard I encountered was a brooding imam from Kenya, who explained the creative way in which jihad was being used to fight AIDS in his country. The array of faces and cultures made an obvious nonsense of the “clash of civilizations” thesis. Islam is a single faith spread that draws upon a multiple range of civilizations, just as Christianity has a breadth that extends across the globe. Muslims live in dozens of nations with separate histories, motivations and ambitions. They are a single brotherhood when they bow toward the Kaaba, but they become different at the doors of the Holy Mosque in Makkah — just as Catholics become seamless in the Vatican and national in Rome. It is absurd to treat Muslims as some kind of single international horde thirsting for a Western enemy.

So why was this thesis put about, and why does it get the respectability that an American secretary of state can provide by using the analogy in a major speech, as Colin Powell did recently?

If only ignorance were the answer. Ignorance is understandable, if not always defensible. But there is more going on.

The most interesting aspect of this theory is when it was floated. It might seem as if it was a reaction to Sept. 11; in fact it was a consequence of two American military victories in quick succession. The first was the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet empire. The second was the war in which Kuwait was freed from Saddam Hussein’s occupation, in 1991. The phrase emerged in its present manifestation in an essay by Samuel Huntington in the spring 1993 issue of the respected American magazine Foreign Affairs.

In Afghanistan, America had financed and armed a jihad by disparate armies to defeat the Soviets. Some of these armies consisted of radicalized Muslims; and one of them was led by Osama Bin Laden. Against Iraq, America mobilized the international establishment. In both cases America had a strong formal case: Moscow and Baghdad had violated the independence of recognized nation-states.

But in neither case could victory be taken for granted. The Soviet Union was still a fearsome power when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979; and Saddam’s feet were thought to consist of steel rather than clay. Is it a coincidence that American troops are back in Afghanistan and Iraq within a decade of their first overwhelming victories? No. The Americans declared victory but forgot to define it. Euphoria encouraged vague feelings of invincibility; and a group of extreme ideologues, known now as neocons, began to set the agenda of triumphalism. The 21st was declared the American century. It was the mood of a conqueror in search of an enemy.

No one conquers a poor nation — or at least no one sensible does, which is why even the Russians are bewildered at their occupation of Afghanistan. The returns are not worth the investment. Who wanted to conquer sand, until they discovered that it was floating on oil? It is obvious enough that by a strange coincidence some the world’s biggest reserves of oil and gas lie in Muslim nations, whether in the Arab world, Iran, Central Asia or indeed Bangladesh and Indonesia. The critical golden center of this subterranean wealth is Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Central Asia. Access to Central Asia was exploited within months of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and easily available through the colorful dictators of the region, who knew a thing or two about discretion before the mighty. Iran and Iraq were headaches.

Direct colonialism has become unfashionable after two world wars fought for the control of the world, but neocolonialism is a familiar sight, even when it uses pseudonyms like Halliburton. But one tactic remains in use from the more honest days of colonialism: Give a dog a bad name if you want to hang him. The British only but conquered in the cause of civilization and progress. They became limp bearing the brown man’s burden. The dialectic that was once used to justify the conquest of “brown” and “yellow” peoples has been transferred to patronize, undermine and squeeze selected Muslim nations.

And so Muslims were recast as “anti-modern” if not positively backward. The demonology is long, and often pernicious, and there is not enough space to examine them all. One uses “pernicious” because surface arguments to justify a case seem eminently persuasive. Let us examine a central canard, that Islam and democracy are incompatible. This is an absurdity. There is nothing Islamic or un-Islamic about democracy. Democracy is the outcome of a political process, not a religious process. It is glibly suggested that “every” Muslim country is a dictatorship, conveniently forgetting that the four of the largest Muslim populations of the world, in Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Turkey, vote to change governments. Pakistan could easily have been on this list. Voting does not make these Muslims either less or more religious. There are dictators among Muslims just as there are dictators among Christians, Buddhists and Hindus (check out Nepal). Robert Mugabe is not a Muslim, but no one suggests that Christianity is not compatible with democracy. Christian Latin America has seen ugly forms of dictatorship, as has Christian Africa. Is Christianity to be blamed because the Nazis were Christians? That would be preposterous. There are more than one billion people who have never enjoyed the slightest whiff of democracy since Adam — the Chinese — but no one organizes seminars on Confucianism and democracy. Nor should they.

What is unique to the Muslim world is not the absence of democracy but the fact that in 1918, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, every single Muslim in the world lived under foreign subjugation. Every single one, from Indonesia to Morocco via Turkey. The Turks resisted and threw out their invaders within a few years under the great leadership of Kemal Attaturk, but the transition to self-rule in other Muslim countries was slow, painful, uncertain and full of traps planted by the world’s pre-eminent powers.

The West, in the shape of Britain, France or America, was never interested in democracy when a helpful dictator or king would serve. When people got a chance to express their wish, it was only logical that they would ask for popular rule. It was the street that brought Mossaddegh to power in Iran and drove the Shah of Iran to tearful exile in Rome. Who brought the Shah of Iran and autocracy back to Iran? The CIA. If Iranian democracy had been permitted a chance in 1953, there would have been no uprising led by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. In other countries, where the struggle for independence was long and brutal, as in Algeria and Indonesia, the militias who had fought the war institutionalized army authority. In other instances, civilian heroes confused their own well being with national health. They became regressive dictators. Once again, there was nothing Islamic about it. Seokarno might have been as nominal a Muslim as Julius Nyerere was a nominal Christian. Muslim countries will become democracies too, because it is the finest form of modern governance. But it will be a process interrupted by bloody experience as the street wrenches power from usurpers. Democracy has happened in Turkey. It has happened in Bangladesh. It is happening in Indonesia.

It almost happened in Pakistan, and the opportunity will return. Democracy takes time in the most encouraging environments. The democratic spirit prevailed across France during its revolution in 1789, but it took more than a century for that spirit to become flesh. Democracy came to America in 1776 but it was not an even reality: Democracy did not mean the same thing to Dwight Eisenhower and Rosa Parks, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Democracy has become the latest rationale for the occupation of Iraq, after the Weapons of Mass Destruction were found only in the imagination of the neocons and their preferred leader, President George Bush. Granted, democracy is always preferable to tyranny no matter how it comes. But Iraqis are not dupes. They will take democracy and place it at the service of nationalism. A decade ago, victorious America was careless about the definition of victory. Today it is careless about the definition of democracy.

There is uncertainty and apprehension across the Muslim nations — uncertainty about where they stand, and apprehension about both American power and the repugnant use of terrorism that in turn invites the exercise of American power. There is also anger that a legitimate cause like that of Palestine can get buried in the debris of confusion. Muslims do not see Palestinians as terrorists. They have a different take: You cannot drive a people to desperation and then accuse them of being desperate. But the real tragedy of that region of course is that both Palestinians and Israelis are becoming desperate.

There is only one message for whoever lives in the White House. An alternative voice is not a hostile voice. If there is a burden anywhere, brown or black, share it. Peace is the objective of every religion. (Prosperity might be irreligious.) The answer to complex and complicated problems is understanding. That is possible through a dialogue. But a dialogue is possible only between equals.