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I S L A M A N D T H E S T R U C T U Rh e D e e p e n i n o

f a c i l i t a t e d b y P a u l E c k s t e i n

T HE FOLLOWING is an excerpt from a roundta-ble discussion that aired on Novemb er 25, 2007,on the WBAI-NY radio program Equal Time forFreethought. Produced by Barry F . Seidman, coeditor of theanthology. Toward a New Political Humanism, this portionwas facilitated by Paul Eckstein, professor of philosophyat Bergen Community College in New Jersey. Participantsincluded Gilbert Achcar, professor at the London School

of Oriental and African Studies and auth or of T h e Clash ofBarbarisms: The Making of th e New World Disorder; LarryPintak, author of Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America,Islam and the War of Ideas and Deepa Kumar, professor ofmedia studies at Rutgers University and author of severalarticles on Islamophobia, the media, and the "war on ter-ror." This condensed excerpt has been specially adapted forthe Humanist.

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Paul Eckstein: We're talking about how the DemocraticParty doesn't really seem to be in any kind of position tomake a significant change in the policies that have beenfollowed by the current administration. I really wonderwhether we could expect much in the way of moderatinginfluences, should the Democrats win the next presiden-tial election.Deepa Kumar: I want to connect this to a point ma de ear-lier, and that is (of Americans not having) a long histori-cal memory. Because, if you look at the twentieth century,there is a tendency to look at the Democratic Party as apeace party and that isn't true. It was W oodrow W ilson whotook the United States into the First World War, runningon a platform that he would not take us to war; of course,he gets elected and takes us to war. The Second W orld War,we have Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat. ThenLyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, and then JimmyCarter comes along with a policy that continues the legacyof previous adm inistrations.

In all of these cases, what becomes clear is that whilethere are differences of style and rhetoric, fundamentally,the two parties are war pa rties because they both get theirfunding from the same sources. Democrats and R epublicansare both very much agreed that the United States has alegitimate right to pursue this so-called war on terror. Andmore recently, both parties voted to make the IranianRevolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. That is stepone towards legitimizing war on Iran. So I really think thehope is in the people's movem ent and antiwar m ovement.Look at Vietnam. What is it that ultimately led to theUnited States pulling out? It was a couple of things. Firstit was resistance within the country that was being occu-pied. It was the National Liberation Front in Vietnam thatshowed that the United States could not go in, despite itspower and strength, and simply steamroU people. In 1968the Tet Offensive showed quite clearly that the administra-tion's argument, "Just a few more troops, a few more troopsand we will win," was a lie. It really has a resonance todaywhen you're talking about the surge and so on.

What happened in that context is you had a strong anti-war movement composed of students on various campusesbut also, crucially, sections of the militarysoldiers whowere turning their guns against their officers, who wererefusing to fight in that unjust war. I think you're seeingthat today as well. The Iraq Veterans A gainst the War g roupis calling the lie to what's going on in Iraq, and I think it'sfrom there that we can actually build the momentum neededto stop the plans that both Democrats and Republicanshave for the Middle East.

Eckstein: One of the differences I see between what hap-pened du ring the Vietnam era and what happens now is theenor mo us difference in the kind of television coverage thattakes place in the United S tates, with respec t to what's actu-ally happening on the g round.

The Vietnam War was in our living rooms every nightand we could see what was going on; whereas today youdon't get those kinds of pictures in the American mediaabout the enormoas destruction that's taken place in Iraq.What you get instead, of course, are embedded correspon-dents. And that's a fundamental shift in the way the war iscovered.Larry Pintak: Certainly in the lead-up to the Iraq warduring the first year or twoAmericans received com-pletely antiseptic coverage and had no real sense of whatwas going on. Now, it's inordinately dangerous for Westernor Arab correspondents to cover that conflict.

The militants first started targeting Western journal-ists because they saw them as an extension of the U.S. warmachinethey saw the kind of coverage the Americanswere turning out. Now the m ilitants target everyone becausethey have their own m edia operations and they want theirversion of truth to be the only version of truth. But what isan even bigger factor is that the communications landscapeoutside the United States has changed dramatically.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the U.S. Marineinvolvement in Lebanon, the birth of Hezbollahall of thattook place in a way that Arabs w ere watching, but the A rabsand the broader Muslim world were all depende nt on West-

ern media for their news coverage. So the Sabra and Shatilamassacre in 1982they saw that through a Western lens.They were horrified, but it was framed in a Western wayand not through an Arab reporting it.

Now, they see everything through an Arab or Muslimlens. So whether it was the US. siege of Fallujah, wherethe American media were reporting it embedded with the

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Ma rines, well, the Arab re porters were in Fallujah with thedefenders, w ith the civilians. And this is where the idea thatan Am erican peace move ment is going to change the worldis very simplistic. Because it may have an im pact on gettingthe Un ited States out of Iraq or preventing the United Statesfrom bombing Iran, but the reality is that the landscape inthe world h as changed to such an e xtent. You have this vastlabyrinth of communications tools that link people aroundthe world instantaneously and that's changed everything.Eckstein: So where does this leave us? The policy debatesseem to be split between factions that want to reestablishcontrol by being super aggressive, and a faction which wantsto try to reestablish con trol by somehow manip ulating situ-ations throug h third p arties. It strikes me as a period th at isreally fraught with crisis and danger.

While we're on this subject, one of the things we weretalking about was the balance of forces in Pakistan. In thefinal analysis, what's happening is that lots of people whowere frustrated over Pervez M usharraf's regime and its tiesto the reactionary policies of the United States felt that therewere no viable alternatives except for Islamist kinds of orga-nizations. The progressive forces ten d to be rather small.

One of the things we all know is that part of the rea-son the progressive forces tend to be small throughout theMuslim world is because they were systematically elimi-nated during the Cold War era by the struggle between theUnited States and th e Soviet Union for hegemony. So whatwe wound up doing in effect was destroying most of theprogressive forces that might have been able to play it genu-inely. Is the re is a viable Left left in any of the se coun tries?Gil ber t A chcar: W ell, first of all it's impor tant to add an ele-ment to what you said about the fact that the United Stateswas instrumental in repressing, defeating whatever kindof Left progressive movement you had in this part of theworld. 1 think it's very important to add that there is muchmore than that actually and it's the fact that the UnitedStates used Islamic fundamentalism in order to defeat thismovement.

The United States had been promoting for decades

Islamic fundamentalism through its key alliance with theSaudi Kingdom, which is by far the most fundamentalist,most reactionary, obscurantist, anti-women state in theworld; and this is a key U.S. ally. The people in the Westdo not realize that enough because when you realize that,you can measure the extent of hypocrisy behind all thesespeeches and discourses about Iran. In many respects,regarding the situation of womenwhich is a very impor-tant criterion to gauge democracyIran, comparativelyspeaking, is far better than the Saudi Kingdom.

But the Saudi Kingdom is the key ally of the UnitedStates, and these are the peop le who have fostered Islamicfundamentalism against the Egyptian Nationalist Move-ment led by Nasser, the Arab nationalist movement, allkinds of nationalist and left-wing progressive movementsand the communist movement in Muslim countries. Andwhat is now going on is that the United States is reaping thefruits of what it had been prom oting for all this time.

Now we're in a very difficult situati on. For the timebeing, the progressives have been reduced to marginality, toa very small movem ent. Islamic fundam entalists have beenable to absorb or to attract, to channel all the mass resent-ment a gainst Western do min ation , as well as repressive andcorrupt local gove rnme nts. And you can have a sense of themajor setback from a progressive point of view when youcompare the kind of forces that were waging the struggleagainst Western imperialism or aggressive Israeli policy inthe area in the 1960s, and what you've got today.

Kumar: I think the first step in actually ensuring peace inthe M iddle East or anyw here else is for the United States toget out of there, because it has never played a progressiverole in that region and it is not doing so now. If anything,the United States is exacerbating sectarian differences,threatening to bring about a region-wide conflict betweenShi'a and Sunni.

So the first step is the United States bringing back all itstroops, shutting down all its bases. Now out of this, magi-cally, there is not going to appear a Left, but I think thatwill create the conditions under which Left traditionswhich are strong in the Middle Eastcan begin to starttaking hold again. Despite all their mistakes and prob-lems and so on, they've done some good work in leadingstrikes and struggles in the w orking class as well as studentmovements.Eckstein: But you don't actually expect that to happen;that were simply going to get out of the Middle East andshut down all our bases? The fact is everybody knows thatthe reason we're there, unlike the situation in Vietnam, is

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because there's a genuine resource at stake that has a pro-found impact on the world economy. Nobody in Washing-ton is going to say, "Oh , well, we're just going to have to pullout of the region."Kumar: As was said earlier, the Iraq war has cost over $1trillion. Yet we do not have health insurance in this coun-try for 47 million people. Schools are deteriorating, bridges

An M1A1 Abram stank in Baghdad, Iraq

and levies are crumbling due to disrepair, and so on . Thereare so many problems that could be addressed right here,and 1 think that demand of getting the United States outof the Middle East has to come from a people's movem ent.That is wh ere it is going to com e from; if at all, if it is goingto succeed. But 1 want to go back to what was said earlierabout fundamentalism.

I do not like the term "fundamentalism" because it'sso broad. It cannot explain the particular historical condi-tions that have given rise to a variety of groups and parties.Islamist groups span the gamut from the moderate IslamistJustice and Development Party in Turkey, to the MuslimBrotherhood in Egypt, the Jihadi Salafists in Pakistan, andHamas and Hezbollah. Each of these groups were born ofdifferent circumstances and have different politics, tactics,and strategies. Some are fundamentalist, oth ers are not.

The return to Islam Islamic revivalism, if you w i l l -happens in a modern context. In the nineteenth century,you had people like [Jamal al-Din] al-Afghani. He was anIslamic modern ist who look ed at the incursion s that West-ern colonialism made in the Ottoman Empire, the PersianEmpire and said, "Alright, we're going to go back to thefundamentals of Islam, but we also have to look at what isgood in the West and emulate that." And so he called for a

constitution and so forth.So you have figures like him who have been referred to

as Islamic mo dernists. And then there are those like RashidRida, who takes part of what both al-Afghani and Mu ham-mad Abduh said but offer a conservative worldview. Ridathen lays the basis for the Salafi mo vem ent, a very strict sec-tarian interpretation of the Quran. And when you put boththose in the same camp, it explains nothing as much as itexplains everything.Achcar: When people use the term Islamic fundamental-ism, they do not refer to al-Afghani. They refer to peo-ple that you can label as fundam entalist. That is the tr adi-tion of Rida, the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood andall those organizations and people who call for Sharia tobe implemented as the key solution to everything. Thatis why 1 stick to this term (fund amen talism), becausethis is a much better term for the education of Westernaudiences than whatever other label. It avoids giving theimpression that this is a peculiarity of Islam (like in theterm Tslamism') and points to the fact that we are dealingwith a phenomenon comm on to most, if not all re lig io ns -including Christianity and ludaism.

But of course, even w hen you speak of Protestant fun-damentalism, you shouldn't mix up everything and every-one who is Protestant under this label, so it's the same withIslamic fundamentalism. Organizations like those I men-tioned, or like Hezbollah or Hamas, whatever the differ-ences between them, are all fundamentalist organizationsbecause they adhere to a fundamentalist type of programwith their ambition of imposing the religious remodelingof society as a solution to everything.Kumar: I would disagree with that and prefer instead touse the term "political Islam" to describe a modern phe-nomenon where Islam is reinterpreted to serve a politicalgoal. Look for instance at Khomeini's particular interpreta-tion of Shi'a Islam. Traditionally, under the Shi'a sect therehas been a tendency towards political passivity and quiet-ism. Wait, suffer, wait for the next messiah to come along,flagellation, and so on. Well, what you see is that peoplelike Ali Shariati, RuhoUa Khom eini, and so on , turned thataroun d and said that, "No, actually there is a genuine posi-tion to stand up against the Shah." So they have taken Islamand they have interpreted it in a way that suits their politi-cal objectives.

I think the real fundamentalists are the Taliban, theJihadi Salafis in Pakistan, and so on. Why? Look at whatthey actually did. These are fantastically antimodern forces,right? When the Taliban takes power, they shred any sort of

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WIconstitution that existed; there is no more modern nation-state. All they're interested in is in warfare, religion, andsome basic commerce. They get rid of everything mod-ern. They prevent people from watching films, they forcewomen to wear the veil, and they enact a fundamentalistprogram in a very literal sense. You compare that to Iran,which has all the trapping s of a mo der n n ation . It's involvedin internatio nal p olitics, prom otes a capitalist economy , and80 percent of women are educated. That is not true of whatthe Taliban did in Afghanistan.

And that's why we need to reserve the term fundamen -talism for those who are really fundamentalist. PoliticalIslam, as it emerges in the 1970s in various cou ntries a rou ndthe world, is a modern pheno men on and it recruited highlyeducated people like engineers and doctors who turned toIslam to find a solution to the crises that their so cieties werein. These recruits had a modern outlook and orientationand are not fundam entalist in the strict sense of the term .Pintak: It is a reflection of the way in which we reduce thingsto categories, and we redu ce our foreign p olicy to black andwhite. This is how we end up with foreign policies wherepeople are being driven into the arms of Islamist move-ments, people becoming radicalized where these govern-ments very successfully eviscerate the secular opposition.

last year, it was a complicated situation . For progressives inthe United States the question was, which side do we take?I think with a lot of criticism, you've got to suppo rt Hezbol-lah against the Israeli invasion.

Similarly in Iraq, look at the forces that are fighting inthe resistance movement. As Arundhati Roy put it, theseare not forces that would welcome progressives. But if youhave to sit down and wait for an anti-sexist, pro-gay, secu-lar, democratic resistance movement to come about, you'llhave to wait a while. Du ring the Cold W ar, the U nited Statessaw progressive nationalists and others on the Left as athreat and did all in their power to marginalize these forces,including supp orting and funding Islamists. The result thenis that you have a mu ch w eakened Left in the region. So, forus in the West, we have to make a choice and decide who isthe greater threat; who is the greater force of destruction?Is it the United States that is responsible for over 2.5 m illionIraqi deaths since 1991, or the Islamists? And T think in thatcontext, the term fundamentalism confuses people in theLeft in the United States, because we would never supportfundamentalists here, so why support th em there?

Achcar: Relabeling movements is not the way to educatepeople on the Left. You have to educate people about thisvery simple idea that the U.S. governm ent has no business

Regarding the Situat ion of women, I ran is far better than the S a u d i K i n g d o m ,You want to call that a leftist opposition or a mainstreamopposition, it is the opposition that is representative ofother voices.

And so they set up dichotomies of us or them. There'sno choice in the middle because those people are in jail,they are in exile, they have disapp eared, w hatever it may be.And by the United States buying into this black-and -whitementalityand we have historically in the Middle Eastwe end up with good guys and bad guys.Kumar: The word fundamentalism itself comes from theProtestant movement in the early twentieth century, andwas really an attempt to translate and understand the Bibleliterally. Of course, in the context of the advanced West, toactually do that is fundamentally reactionary. And I thinkfor those of us in the antiwar movement in the UnitedStates, you have to look at the connotations that a word likethat has when it has come from C hristian fundamen talism,because I cannot think of any instance in the United Stateswhere we (the Left) would be on the side of the fundamen-tahsts regarding any political actions they engage in.

On the other hand, the situation of the Middle East ismuch more complicated. So when Israel invaded Lebanon

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in occupying other countries, even if these countries are100 percent fundamen talist.

I have no problem being antiwar if I'm faced with a fun-damen talist movem ent fighting a foreign imperialistic inva-sion because I cann ot see any justification for the UnitedStates to occupy any country in the world, whatever kindof movem ent you have there. I stood against the U.S. inva-sion of Afghanistan though I hadn't the slightest sympathyfor the Taliban. Standing against imperialist war and occu-pation should not be conflated with supporting the forcesfighting it on the spot, in the same way that respecting apeople's right to self-determination does not mean that yousupport whatever choices they make.Pintak: The world is a messy place. As long as we look forsimplistic solutio ns, it is only going to get w orse. We're hav-ing a conv ersation about Islam and C hristianity, so I'll mud -dle things by throwing in Bu ddhism as well. There is a Bud-dhist prayer that says, "May all beings have happiness andthe causes of happiness." I'll just warrant that if we thoughta little bit more about how things actually look to otherpeople out there and w hat they felt about things, maybe ou rcoun try and our w orld would be a happier place. GI

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