Possible partners, probable enemies: why the US is losing the Islamic mainstream.

• Author: Baker, Raymond William

THIS ARTICLE ARGUES THAT THE UNITED States, in particular, and the West, in general, fails to recognize the Islamic mainstream as a potential partner in world-wide struggles for freedom and democracy. As in the past, the West is missing the reality in the Middle East of the everyday struggles of ordinary people for better lives in more just national and international frameworks. This reality is obscured because increasingly, across the Arab Islamic world, these emancipatory struggles are waged under centrist Islamist banners. As a consequence of US policies, the United States government is alienating these Islamist centrists and turning them from potential partners to probable enemies. While it is unlikely that US official policies will change any time soon, there are openings for Western civil society institutions with democratic and anti-imperial orientations to offset these damaging consequences of US policies and to create cooperative openings to the Islamic mainstream. At a minimum, the academic study of the Middle East must be rethought to create the body of humanistic scholarship that could provide intellectual support and guidance for such efforts.

I began my serious study of the Islamic world as a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-sixties. With the required course work for my doctorate completed, I set out in 1968 to engage face to face the world I was studying at one of the West's great learning centers. My preparation, or so I thought, was excellent. In my course work I drew on the proud Gibb legacy of Islamic studies at Harvard, represented for me by the late Nadav Safran, a student of Gibb and then a leading figure in Middle Eastern studies. Safran, though a political scientist with close ties to Israel, encouraged my interest in Arabic language and literature and supervised my independent reading of the classic texts on which his generation of scholars had focused. To these classic studies I married what I took to be the best of the new social scientific studies in modernization. In Safran's courses I began my reading in the burgeoning development literature focused on the Middle East. My major guide, though, was Samuel Huntington, exceptionally well-known as a conservative intellectual even then, who became my academic mentor and thesis advisor. I had prepared myself to witness the intellectual, moral, economic, and political transformation of backward societies into modernized states. Egypt, as the "lead society" in the Arab world, would be my case study in "political development." Cairo would be my vantage point from which to witness up close this march of history.

I do not mean to suggest that I accepted these perspectives uncritically. Quite the contrary, as a working class boy from Jersey City, New Jersey, I brought to Harvard a very strong set of leftist intellectual and moral commitments. Those commitments prompted a critical stance to both the old Orientalist tradition and the new development literature. From the first I understood both approaches as mainstream and my own positions as critical. In formulating my independent stance I drew on dependency and world system critiques of dominant approaches, as well as the variants of Marxisms and phenomenology that suffused the New Left political and intellectual movements in which I was active, all centered at the time on opposition to the American assault on Vietnam.

Still, though fortified with the critical perspectives of the left, my encounter with Cairo was a major shock. The world laid out so completely and so transparently in Cambridge, whether by the mainstream or its critics, simply did not exist. Realities on the ground bore no resemblance at all to the fixed historical trajectories and ideal types with which I was armed. Nor, I should add, was I prepared emotionally and intellectually for the powerful attraction that Arab Islamic culture exerted on me. With my studio and art history background, I had not failed to notice the intellectual thinness of the treatment of cultural issues, in the broad sense of this term, in both the mainstream and critical social sciences. Moreover, neither the mainstream nor the left ever broke with the unstated assumption that the world, whether accepted as is or as object to be transformed, was essentially the world as the West had come to know it.

Only one part of my Harvard education proved helpful. My supplemental studies in Arabic language, literature, and philosophy had taken on a parallel life of their own at Harvard. In the long run, they proved indispensable. At the time, though, I thought of these cultural studies as a kind of reward for slogging through the oppressive social scientific literature, not realizing then that I had mistaken the main course for desert. But I do remember the contrast the works I struggled through with my Arabic language and philosophy professor, Ilse Lichtenstadter, provided to my regular studies. I found the Arabic of the Quran, despite its difficulty, to be of incomparable beauty and power. I was also captivated by the passages we read from the splendid Arab travel and the philosophical literature of the golden age. From these fragments in my Arabic tutorial (in those days there were only two students in the advanced Arabic courses) I caught my first glimpses of the richness, complexity, and diversity of Islamic and Arab culture. It was the human element that touched me most. The openness and wonder of an Ibn Batuta, that great 14th century Arab traveler and raconteur, stood in such sharp contrast to the closed, self-referential attitude of the Western specialists who dominated my formal studies at Harvard. While Ibn Batuta did occasionally whisper in my ears his doubts that another cultural world could ever really be so transparently available, it was unfortunately the development literature that I packed for my first trip to Cairo.

Inevitably, I found myself quite unprepared by the simplistic formulations of so much of Western social science for the astonishing rich, layered society into which I plunged in Egypt. My leftist critique of the dominant literature did help somewhat to open some much needed space for thinking closer to Egyptian ground. I wrote my thesis and first book, Egypt's Uncertain Revolution on the Arab world guided by Egyptian Marxist thinkers who helped me come to terms with Safran and Huntington, from a grounded leftist and Egyptian perspective (Baker 1976).

Still, even with these advantages, is it any wonder that I, like so many of my Western counterparts, failed to take serious note of al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya, Islamic Awakening, in retrospect the major development of those years. Throughout the area at that time Islamists movements were emerging to reshape the Middle East in ways so completely at odds with Western expectations, not to mention those of the Egyptian left. They were there, fight before my eyes, and I missed them. In my study of Egypt, I focused instead on the secular forces, nationalist and leftist, that were driving Nasser's revolution. I juxtaposed the views of Egyptian leftists and their impressive critique of the Nasserist experience with the truths I had acquired at Harvard. Most importantly, in Egypt's Uncertain Revolution I regrettably left the Islamic movements, notably the Muslim Brothers, in the shadows. However, I do note with some small pleasure that even then I could never quite manage the hostility to all things Islamic that animated the work of my mentors at Harvard as well as my new friends on the Egyptian left. It took some time and a great effort of unlearning before I could shake these ideological prejudices and get a reasonable grasp on the Islamic Awakening and an appreciation of just why Egypt has been so central to it.

However, what concerns me today is not my disillusionment with so much of the Western scholarship on the Islamic world in which I was trained. Rather, what is far more troubling is the fact that we are not doing much better today. In fact, the rampant hostility in the US to Muslims and to Islam itself has made the situation much worse. My courses are now flooded with students motivated by a "know thy enemy" impulse that I had seen only once before as a student myself of the Soviet Union. The enemy in those days was Soviet communism and the "totalitarian" models of the day explained it fully. Today, the enemy is "Islamo-facism" and pretty much the same model is at work, now tinted green instead of red, though equally abstract, comprehensive, self-serving, and unrelated to realities on the ground.

In the sixties area studies were motivated by a sense that the United States was an emerging superpower, faced with global responsibilities and an intense competition with the Soviet Union. We needed people to understand the world beyond our borders to help facilitate its transformation along the modern lines that we had pioneered, lest the communist model take hold. To be sure, the rhetoric of global responsibility was a screen for a rising imperial assertiveness and talk of underdeveloped countries slid easily into condescending assumptions of underdeveloped peoples. Yet, however unhappy these pretensions and their racist implications in the sixties, things are worse today. Now, the call is for terror specialists, fluent in Arabic to serve national security interests. In my worst moments, I wonder whether my recommendations of students for language study programs now simply increases the crop of Arabic speakers for ease-dropping and interrogation purposes. The terror specialists, with their special focus on the Arab world, are preparing themselves to face a vast and nameless army of Islamic extremists that must be confronted abroad they are told, with as much violence as is needed, in order to avoid another 9/11 at home. America's aim now is not to develop backward societies but rather to demolish the territorial strongholds of imagined enemies in order to protect the...