HEART OF DARKNESS AND RADICAL ISLAM

                         By Kazi Anwarul Masud( former Secretary and ambassador)

        PUBLICATION ON FRIDAY THE 4TH APRIL 2014      

In 1899 Rudyard's  Kipling poem The White Man's Burden exhorting then "civilized" community to take up the burden of helping the colonized people  created controversy because of the presumed superiority of the colonizers over the colonized. Some felt that on the face of it the poem conveyed a positive view of the idea that "The White Man", generally accepted to believe that  the colonial powers (Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Italy and the United States), had a duty to civilize the more "brutish and barbaric" parts of the world. Though the term colonialism  lost its importance following the end of the Second World War in global narrative intellectuals like Princeton historian Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington of The Clash of Civilizations fame have rekindled the idea of a crusade between the "defeated Islam and the victorious "Christianity" and the superiority of one faith over the other. Columbia Professor late Edward Said,  best known for the book Orientalism (1978), an analysis of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism, a term he redefined to mean the Western study of Eastern cultures and, in general, the framework of how The West perceives and represents The East, in an article ( The Clash of Ignorance-The Nation) scathingly critiqued both Lewis and Huntington of being opportunistic for supplying  the Americans with   an original thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war. Said accused both of " the personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam"  recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. Said found unacceptable Huntington's challenge for Western policy-makers to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular .  He found Lewis' views of history  as being " crudely Darwinian one in which powers and cultures vie for dominance, some rising, some sinking. There isn't much left to what Lewis says, therefore, than that cultures can be measured in their most appallingly simplified terms (my culture is stronger—i.e., has better trains, guns, symphony orchestras—than yours).  Edward Said was unrelenting in his criticism of the neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and others who crowded George W Bush's inner circle to push forward an agenda of crushing "them" by "us" having failed earlier with Bill Clinton with an appeal to teach the Arab Muslims a lesson of the superiority of the Western culture and religion. Said writes: " At some level, for instance, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts of identity and nationality about which there is unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations entirely, doesn't make the supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs". True President Barak Obama demolished the myth of confrontation between Islam and Christianity in his Cairo speech in June 2009 when he called for cooperation between the West and the Islamic  world " based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings". Gilles Kepel, a French political scientist and expert on Arab affairs  ( The War for the Muslim Minds: Islam and the West)  considers Islamist terrorism as a reflection of its desperate attempt to hold on to diminishing appeal of Islamism—the movement to replace the existing Muslim governments with the ones that rule according to Sharia or Islamic laws. “Desperate terrorist attacks” Kepel writes “do not translate easily into political victory and legitimate power. And(late) bin Laden and Mullah Omar’s hopes to ignite in their fellow believers the fire of a worldwide Jihad failed miserably”. Equally Oliver Roy( The failure of political Islam) thinks that political Islam( drive for political power) has lost out to neo-fundamentalist( focusing on the family and the mosque)--one supported by Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia. Yet Oliver Roy's assessment  "that the recruitment of large numbers of alienated young men without much hope in the future has transformed political Islam into what he calls "neo-fundamentalism " cannot be ignored. Unlike the Islamists, many of whom were serious intellectuals who tried to adapt to aspects of modernity, the neo-fundamentalists do little more than channel the discontents of urban youth into political opposition. Roy thinks that  if they come to power they will resemble the repressive, one-party regimes that they are likely to replace, and will in turn face the opposition of these same disaffected classes.   He sees contemporary Islamic movements not as serious efforts to return to the classical paradigms of Islamic governance but rather as a result of a failed modernization. Can one rationally equate the terrorism perpetrated by handful of renegades as representing the culture, hopes and aspirations of the  global Muslim community? Obviously for doctrinaire secularists and moderate Muslims the answer would be resoundingly negative. One could wonder if Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness--1899) could give some answer to the primeval activities of the malcontents. In his book the central figure-Kurtz-freed from  taboos  and societal mandates is dehumanized and in his final moments he realizes that " Congo is not the "heart of darkness", but it is actually the heart and soul of every human. One learns that the natives in their primitive and brutal ways are actually more pure and good, than the Europeans and their greed". Conrad uses Kurtz, an ideal human of remarkable mettle and impervious morals, and demonstrates what lies beneath all men, the evil that is present and waiting in all of us. Fittingly  Edward Said whose  first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966) and  expanded on for his  doctoral dissertation, aptly observed " It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the distinctions between civilized London and "the heart of darkness" quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of European civilization could instantaneously fall into the most barbarous practices without preparation or transition"  However since in the ultimate analysis more conflicts have been waged in the name of religion than any other reason we have to remain on guard against the al-Qaida, the Taliban and their cohorts till they cease to inflict murder and mayhem on the innocent and put the blame on Islam--a religion of peace that has been co-existing peacefully with other  religions for centuries. The advanced countries would be well advised to ignore the words of the likes of Bernard Lewis of the Muslims hating the Christians ( They've been hating us for a long time. In a sense, they've been hating us for centuries, and it's very natural that they should. You have this millennial rivalry between two world religions, and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems to be winning. So the hatred is something almost axiomatic--What Went Wrong). But then would the  West necessarily abandon these intellectuals just because the Muslim ummah would demand it? Would not Western thinkers question the compatibility of Islam with    democracy, sovereignty, fundamental human rights in particular the issue of  gender equality, and other  factors related with modernity? Iranian intellectual Abdul Karim Saroush quoting Radwan Masmoudi of the Washington based Center of the study of Islam & Democracy asserts that there is no inherent contradiction between Islam and democracy and the  explanation of why so many Muslim countries are not democratic lies in historical, political, cultural, and economic factors, not religious ones. Unfortunately dysfunctional, corrupt, repressive states are neither willing nor capable of reform. Apathy and despair breed radicalism. The failure of secular politics in Muslim countries provides fertile ground for the rise of political Islam. Again as Saroushi points out the rise of political Islam has made the concept of Islamic sovereignty central to Islamic political theory and that concept is often presented as a barrier to any form of democracy. The Quranic concept of sovereignty is universal (that is nonterritorial), transcendental (beyond human agency), indivisible, inalienable, and truly absolute. God the sovereign is the primary law-giver, while agents such as the Islamic state and the Khalifa (God's agents on earth) enjoy marginal autonomy necessary to implement and enforce the laws of their sovereign. The  separation between the Church and the State, central to Western thought and governance, is absent in Islam. Yet 750 million Muslims live under democracy in Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Europe, North America, Israel, and even Iran.  One must also remember that it took the West several centuries to reach Francis Fukuyama's controversial End of History thesis. There is, therefore, no reason for the Islamic ummah to be apologetic for the deviants  who terrorize in the name of Islam.