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Political Islam and the West: a New Cold War Or Convergence?

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Political Islam and the West: a New Cold War Or Convergence? ThirdWorld Quarterly, Vol 18, No 4, pp 729± 742, 1997 Political Islamand the West: anew ColdWar or convergence? MICHAELE SALLA Thispaper has twoaims. The ® rst is toargue that US, and more generally Western,triumphalist explanations for the end of the Cold War will in¯ uence foreign-policyresponses toperceived challenges to Western liberal democratic norms.This in¯ uence will be arguedto bemostclearly identi® ed in terms ofthe USA’sandits Western allies’ response to a contemporarydebate concerning politicalIslam. I willassert thatarguments posited by oneside of thedebate will beviewed more favourably since these arguments are moreconsistent with the triumphalistunderpinning of Western policy makers. The second aim is to suggestthat the debate needs to beextendedso as toaccommodatethe view that politicalIslam offers achallengeto liberal democratic norms at the `ideational’ or`discursive’ levels, rather than solely at the `contingency’ levels. Extending thedebate in thisway challenges Francis Fukuyama’ s thesisthat liberal democ- racyrepresents the `end of history’. Notto extend the debate in thisway, I will argue,is tomake the path clear for the triumphalist underpinning of Western policymaking to exercise decisive in¯ uence in determining policy responses to politicalIslam. The essentialist-contingencist debate Therise ofpolitical Islam as aforcein global politics has ledto numerous depictionsof it as athreatto the continued dominance of Western liberal democraticnorms in shaping the political, economic, social and cultural life in vastregions of the planet. 1 PatrickBuchanan for instance has written:`For a millennium,the struggle for mankind’ s destinywas betweenChristianity and Islam; inthe 21st century, it may be so again.For as theShiites humiliate us, theirco-religionists are ®llingup the countries of the West.’ 2 Theend of the ColdWar and the collapse of the USSR has givenadded salience to such assessments andled to claims that the spread of political Islam marks theonset ofanewcold war where the West’ s liberaldemocratic norms are pittedagainst thereligious revivalist norms of politicalIslam. As LeonHadar writes: `the fear ofIslam couldembroil Washington in a secondCold War’ . 3 Itin fact has been pointedout that the very term `cold war’ was ®rst usedby a 14thcentury Spanishwriter to describe the con¯ ict between the Christian and Muslim worlds.4 Notsurprisingly, such claims have led to intense debate over the MichaelE Sallais atthePeace andCon¯ict ResolutionProgram, School of InternationalService, TheAmerican University, 4400Massachusetts Ave, NW,Washington, DC 20016±8071, USA . 0143-6597/97/040729-14$7.00 Ó 1997Third World Quarterly 729 MICHAEL ESALLA varyingmethodologies and assumptions used by the respective authors in reachingtheir conclusions. Whilefar reachingin terms ofvarying foreign policy recommendations and nuancedunderstandings of Islamic culture and history, it is fairto describe the debateas polarisedaround two key methodological approaches. On oneside are the`essentialists’ Ð or`orientalists’ as theyare pejorativelylabelled by their opponentsÐwho use alimitednumber of conceptualcategories and apply these universallyin their analyses of political Islam. 5 Themain methodological assumptionis thatthe Muslim world is `dominatedby a set ofrelatively enduringand unchanging processes andmeanings, to be understoodthrough the textsof Islam itselfand the language it generated’. 6 Theleading scholarly ® gures onthis side of the debate are BernardLewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Indyk and SamuelHuntington. Lewis, for example, argues that political Islam `offers aset ofthemes, slogans and symbols that are profoundlyfamiliar and therefore effectivein mobilising support and in formulating both a critiqueof what is wrongand a programfor putting it right’ . 7 Atthe other end of debate,`contingencists’ abjure any conceptual framework witha universalapplication as reductionist,and instead emphasise the contingent natureof thefactors behind political Islam. 8 Thisside is ledby scholarssuch as JohnEsposito, Edward Said and James Piscatori.Esposito, for example, argues: Thechallenge today is to appreciate the diversity of Islamicactors and movements toascertain the reasons behind confrontations and con¯ icts, and thus to react to speci®c eventsand situations with informed, reasoned responses rather than prede- terminedpresumptions and reactions. 9 Thedebate is notnew and elements of it can arguably be traced to the ® rst attemptsto studythe social and political life of theMuslim world. Indeed, Fred Hallidayis correctin arguing that the debate is aspecies ofa broader methodologicaldebate in the social sciences. 10 Thedebate took on much of its contemporaryacademic salience with the publication of Edward Said’ s Orienta- lism in1978, which adopted a Foucauldianapproach in challengingthe dominant methodologicalassumptions found in the academic study of the Muslim world. Thedebate gained wider academic and popular recognition in 1993with Samuel Huntington’s`Clashof Civilizations’ thesis, 11 whichborrowed the idea from BernardLewis’ s 1990article, `The roots of Muslim rage’ . 12 Said’s approach,and the support and criticism it has attractedis noteworthy sinceit demarcates the debate in terms oftwo antithetical camps withlittle in theway of a middleground between them. The dif® culty in ® ndingthe middle groundin the debate is attestedto by the paucity and marginal in¯ uence of scholarswho have attempted to advocate a middleground or `third’ position. MarshallHodgson, for instance, has beenconsidered one who has successfully combinedthe two methodological approaches in hisidea that an essential feature ofMuslim civilisation, `is thecontinuous search andstruggle to achieve the Islamicideal in practice’ . 13 Similarly,Halliday argues a `third’perspective, one inwhich analysis occurs `of what actually happens’ in the Muslim world. 14 His suggestionis thatthe debate is largelyabout different `representations’ of the Muslimworld. While one camp focuses onthe role of texts and language in 730 POLITICAL ISLAM AND THE WEST paintingits essentialist picture; the other focuses on`discourses’ about the region.Both camps are thereforecharged with ignoring what is actually occurringin the region. Ithinkthat both Hodgson’ s andHalliday’ s attemptsto ® ndthe `middle ground’or a`thirdposition’ are unconvincing.As far as Hodgsonis concerned, hisnotion of the`cultural unity of Islam’ ,isnot,as LeonardBinder suggests, the middleground position of `pragmatic orientalism’ , buta notionthat is ®rmly locatedin the essentialist-contingencist debate in terms ofan essentialist cate- gorisationthat is sensitiveto cultural variation. It is thereforea variantof scholarlyapproaches that Said recommends in Orientalism ÐwhatBinder sug- gests are instancesof `goodorientalism’ . 15 Ontheother hand, Halliday dichoto- mises humanknowledge in terms of`representations’ or `discourses’ about realityand what is actuallyout thereÐ the real (Muslim) world. 16 Such a dichotomyis acriticalpart of the methodological debate and therefore fails to producea distinctivethird position. Thedebate between essentialists and contingencists is nota sterilemethodo- logicalargument among leading ® guresin an academic discipline, but is criticallyimportant because of theforeign policy directions each camp offers in apost-coldwar world. Both camps inthe debate are engagedin a struggleto capturethe hearts and minds of Western foreign-policy making elites so that policycan be crafted in terms whicheach camp views as themost appropriate responseto politicalIslam. It isnotsurprising that so muchhinges on the correct policyresponse to politicalIslam insofaras itisacogentforce sweeping through theMuslim world: rich as itis withpopulation, territory and natural resources. This® nallytakes me backto the Cold War analogy. The Cold War was characterisedby antagonistic political forces ledby two global hegemons: the USAand the former USSR. Each hegemon viewed the other as theprincipal representativeof, respectively, global economic market forces anda global revolutionaryideology based on Marxism± Lenism. As aconsequence,each hegemonengaged in a con¯ict that covered virtually all spheres ofhuman interaction.The extent of the con¯ ict was demonstratedby children in the `revolutionaryMarxist± Leninist camp’ denouncing their parents to party author- itiesfor `reactionary behaviour’ ; andchildren in the`free world’being indoctri- natedby government-sponsored media representations of the inimical threat posedby the `evil empire’ . TheCold War ended with the dissolution of theUSSR, and led to triumphalist explanationsof its end by USforeignpolicy elites. Former US PresidentGeorge Bush,for instance, argued: Sovietcommunism provided no match for free enterprise¼ itsrulers [could not] denytheir people the truth ¼ aboutus ¼ Kremlinleaders found that our alliance wouldnot crack when they threatened America’ s allieswith the infamous SS-20 nuclearmissile ¼ theycould not divide our alliance ¼ TheSoviet Union did not simplylose the Cold War, thewestern democracies won it ¼ bythe grit of our peopleand the grace of God, the Cold War isover. Freedom has carried the day. 17 Despitecritical examinations of triumphalistexplanations proffered by Bushand otherUS foreignpolicy elites, it ismorethan likely that the lessons learntfrom 731 MICHAEL ESALLA theCold War experience for foreign policy elites will re¯ ect triumphalist assessments ratherthan more sober and complex academic accounts. 18 As Ralph Summysuggests, triumphalist
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