perpetual war for perpetual democracy Frum may have a better handle on things than Doherty.
From the speech of the outgoing Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Comference:
oic-oci.org us just call them?awkwardly, perhaps, but anything to avoid gross misunderstanding?
%202004/SG-istanbul.htm
Just a quick glance at our political, economic, informational, technological, ideological, or civilizational position in the world today is sufficient to fill some with an overwhelming feeling of bitterness. Therefore, it is evidently high time for the Islamic world to take a decisive position on democracy since much hinges on that position, if we are to move away from being the passive objects of others? influence to the active agents of a positive influence on international affairs. [I'll return to the rest of this paragraph further below]
His language is far more temperate and less ideological than that of the Malaysian PM last year but he still describes a catastrophe in Muslim affairs:
Just a cursory reading of the statistics purveyed by these reports shows the gravity of our responsibility to keep abreast with other countries of the world, including developing nations we have fallen behind, even with their modest progress.
Over 30% of our peoples still live below the poverty line while the aggregate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the Islamic world, which covers a sixth of the world?s surface and is inhabited by more than a fifth of its population, does not even attain 4.5% of the global GDP, and that includes oil production. Nearly half the poorest nations of the world are among the OIC Member States while 22 OIC States suffer under the heavy burden of indebtedness. In addition, Muslims account for 70% of the refugees of the world. Suffice it to say that the aggregate GDP of all our Member States remains lower than that of one single advanced country, such as France or Britain, despite the number of our inhabitants surpassing their respective populations by at least twenty times.
As for other development indices?such as education ratios, health and social services, life expectancy, adequate housing, unemployment, poverty, and professional, digital, and computer illiteracy, they also paint a gloomy picture that does no honor to our Ummah and is no different from the preceding portrait.
Conditions are dire and the Muslim world is going to have to embrace modernity or be embraced by it. That's his message. It's not going to be easy - here is the whole of the paragraoh first quoted with some commentary:
Just a quick glance at our political, economic, informational, technological, ideological, or civilizational position in the world today is sufficient to fill some with an overwhelming feeling of bitterness. Therefore, it is evidently high time for the Islamic world to take a decisive position on democracy since much hinges on that position, if we are to move away from being the passive objects of others? influence to the active agents of a positive influence on international affairs.
Surely.
That is because in our very civilizational heritage, we enjoy a system that not only fully integrates spirituality with secularity?concerned as it is with the beginning as much as it is with the end and with man?s journey through life here as in the hereafter?but also governs relations between the members of society, between them and the ruling group, and, for that matter, our interaction with the other and with time and space.
This a serious problem for a good part of the Muslim community both for those who wish to take up modernity and for those who reject it. Islam as conceived by many of it's adherents makes no distinction between holy and profane, between religion and government.
Such a rich heritage has proved, through centuries of experience, its ability to generate an Islamic discourse that certainly vies with the greatest of modern secular systems. That is why our Islamic world of today is in no way wanting for an ideological interpretation of Islam that is capable of fully embracing modernity in all its aspects by enabling our specialists to derive from that Islamic heritage an Islamic system rooted in the immutable principles of the moderate and tolerant Hanifite school. For this school epitomizes the path of moderation and balanced rationality in that it repudiates fanaticism and extremism and stands lofty?with all its ramifications and offshoots?in the horizon of what is today described as modernity.
The Hanifite school of jurisprudence is the most liberal of the four schools in the Sunni tradition and there is sympathy for it in much of the Shiite tradition. (The abu Hanifa mosque and tomb are in Iraq -he lived in Kufa - and are the object of great reverence for many Iraqi Sunnis and sympathy of many Shiites because of his death at the hands of a tyrannical ruler). The Hanifite school is also opposed tooth and nail in thousands of Saudi financed Wahabbist mosques and madrassas throughout the world.
Thus, we can work such a renewal of our systems of government that guarantees the peaceful, legitimate alternation of power while ensuring the respect of public rights, justice, equality, as well as intellectual and cultural openness. Then and only then can we become part of the fabric of the world-wide moderate movement.
?Thus We have made you a moderate nation so that you may testify against mankind? (Surat Al-Baqara, 143).
He's dropping turds on a lot of tables here. He's suggesting that Saudi and Iranian rulers give up the their constrictive interpretations of fiqh , that Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood give up their terrorst ideology, and that the tyrannical Muslim rulers give over to democracy.
His proposal has merit in that the majority of Muslims probably are Hannifite in their persusasion. But what about the other schools? What about the small but significant number of Muslims who will fight it to the death?
Anyhow, to get back to Doherty's take on Frum and the neocons:
Let us just call them?awkwardly, perhaps, but anything to avoid gross misunderstanding? "advocates of the war in Iraq and a further continuing war in the Middle East in order to impose civilizational change in the Arab world and protect ourselves from terror." Whatever you call them, their prescriptions do not seem to be furthering the interests of citizens of the United States, and will guarantee a perpetual war for perpetual democracy. This means they have earned?at the very least?a rest from driving U.S. foreign policy thinking.
One thing their prescriptions and actions have done is wake up the Muslim world to the immense nature of the disaster that's befallen them and to the alternative to US attention. I quote again the Secretary General:
Therefore, it is evidently high time for the Islamic world to take a decisive position on democracy since much hinges on that position, if we are to move away from being the passive objects of others? influence to the active agents of a positive influence on international affairs. |
