“America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr Council on Foreign Relations

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT

“America & Islam After Bush”

Dr. Vali Nasr Council on Foreign Relations

Jeffrey Goldberg The Atlantic

December 2008

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Professor Nasr is one of the leading scholars on politics and religion in the Middle East, and his books are cited as the best on the topic, especially his recent book, The Shia Revival. We’re delighted, Professor Nasr, that you could be with us this morning. Thank you for coming.

VALI NASR: Good morning, it’s great to be here. For our discussion today, I want raise a number of issues I think will be important in considering how a new administration may approach the thorny issues in the region and how religion fits into those.

It goes without saying that two major challenges, or threat areas, face the new administration. One of them is encapsulated in the Iranian challenge, although beyond the nuclear issue we have very little grasp of what that actually means. I would like to delve much more into that. The second challenge revolves around the question of al- Qaeda, which we know a lot more about and maybe have a better grip on.

A key issue that has bedeviled American foreign policy and is a challenge for the new administration is, first of all, to understand the nature of each of these threats, but more importantly to understand how they relate to one another. Are they the same, or are they different? And which is actually more of a threat, and in what regard? How do they impact one another? We have to think about these questions to avoid going around and around, and still find ourselves back to where we were at the beginning. Answering these questions are key, not just for American policymakers, but also for the American public, to bring us to a level of understanding beyond the one that we’re currently at.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008

The world has changed significantly since 2003, as we know. The Middle East has changed in a very significant way. Part of the problem is we have never really understood we are dealing, post-Iraq, with Middle East 2.0: that there are some fundamental, and in my opinion irreversible, shifts in the balance of power of the region.

First, there is a palpable, significant, and, I think for the time being, irreversible shift of power and importance from the Levant — the area of Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Egypt and Syria — to the Persian Gulf and the Afghanistan/Pakistan corridor. The region that for 50 years was the basis of our foreign policy — we thought its conflicts mattered most, our alliances there mattered most — does not matter as much to peace and security anymore. When the Lebanon war happened in 2006, the country that had most to do with it was not in the neighborhood. It was Iran. The countries in that neighborhood could do nothing to stop the war, and this was attested to by Israel, the United States and the regional powers themselves.

Everybody today thinks the Palestinian issue has to be solved because it is a surrogate to solving a bigger problem, which is somewhere else in the region. Once upon a time we used to think — and some people still do — that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to solving all the problem of the regions: terrorism, al-Qaeda, Iran or Iraq. I don’t believe so. I think the Persian Gulf is the key to solving the Arab-Israeli issue. All the powers that matter — Iran, Saudi Arabia, and even the good news of the region: Dubai, Abu Dhabi, et cetera — are all in the Gulf. And all the conflicts that matter to us — Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran — are in the Gulf and then to the east.

So the Arab-centeredness of the Muslim Middle East is gone. We haven’t caught up to that in our foreign policy. The Middle East now is far more Iranian and Pakistani and Afghani in terms of the strategic mental map we have to deal with. Trying to deal with the Middle East as if we’re in 2002, before the Iraq war, is one of the main reasons why we haven’t been able to bring the right force to bear on the problems in the region.

The second shift, connected to this, is a palpable movement from the Arab world toward Iran. The Arab world has declined very clearly in its stature and power; Iran is a rising force. You don’t have to take my word; just listen to the Iranians and the Arab leaders. You don’t hear the Iranians worried about the Arab world; you don’t hear a single Iranian leader express any kind of anxiety; in fact, in a very patronizing way they constantly say

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 to Arab countries, “don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You don’t need to rely on the United States; we’ll protect you.”

Then listen to Arab leaders. The first thing every American official hears when he or she arrives in an Arab capital is worry about Iran. It’s clear that the balance of power — and a lot of power is a matter of perception — has moved eastward. The center of gravity has moved eastward. It’s a problem for us because most of our alliance investments were to the west, in the Arab world. Now, those alliances have not done for us as much as we hoped they could, even in the Arab-Israeli issue, where they were supposed to be the ones providing all the help.

The third and connected shift is that after Iraq there is a palpable shift in the religio- political sphere from the Sunnis to the Shias, a sect of Islam that has been completely invisible to us. We all of a sudden discovered them, but I don’t think we quite understand what we discovered and what it means for us going forward. A fourth, related shift is that many of the conflicts we are dealing with, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, involve insurgent Sunni forces.

The losers in America’s battles in this region are not evenly distributed among the actors I’m mentioning. The Sunni powers, the Arab powers, have clearly lost as a consequence of our wars of choice and necessity in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran and its allies and the Shia forces have clearly gained. So when we look at Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re essentially facing revanchist forces — forces who lost and refuse to accept what has happened and believe they can come back. All of these dynamics are now embedded in the power structure of the region, namely this Shia-Sunni issue. The Arab-Iranian issue is encapsulated in the Saudi-Iranian rivalry around the Gulf and in Iranian-Arab rivalry over the future of Lebanon and the Palestinian issue. These conflict-area issues are going to continuously reflect those dynamics.

Lebanon, for instance, is going to reflect the power play in this region. The winners and losers in these wars are not only the local people. A larger force has been unleashed since the Iraq war. This Iranian-versus-Arab, Shia-versus-Sunni, Persian Gulf powers-versus-the Levant dynamic is going to play itself out. The insurgencies going against the United States are also connected to this, because, as I mentioned, they are intent on turning back the clock in the Middle East to before 2003. So these insurgencies will be ongoing until the

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 final shape of this region is settled. It’s not just a matter of troop numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, we’re dealing with something larger going on in this region.

Connecting these geo-strategic issues to what’s happened in this region religiously is very important. We talk about Iran and Saudi Arabia as countries in secular terms, but in the mental map of Muslims, they also represent two large civilizational blocks within Islam. Namely, Iran stands for Shia power, whether or not it wears it on its sleeve. Saudi Arabia and the Arab world essentially represent the Sunni face of Islam. In many ways we think there is a single Islamic threat out there, but that’s not the case.

There is an intense rivalry between these two sects of Islam, between both the radical elements of each and the establishment elements of each. This civilizational or cultural or religious battle within Islam is now very clearly tied to everything that’s happened after Iraq.

Therefore it is not going to stop, because it’s not a matter of getting a couple of clerics in a room to say nice things about one another; it’s not an ecumenical exercise. There is a huge power play associated with this.

We all know how Iraq opened this fissure. It ended up being a turning point for a variety of reasons. First, it is of symbolic value: Post-Saddam Iraq is the first Shia Arab state in history. That represents a major turning of the tide. Now, 60 to 65 percent of Iraq is Shia, which means about 80 percent of its Arab population is Shia. In Lebanon, 30 to 40 percent of the population may be Shia, which makes it the single largest community in the country. Seventy-five percent of Bahrain is Shia, and 10 percent of Saudi Arabia is Shia, roughly speaking. Shias makes up between 20 and 25 percent of Pakistan, 30 percent of Kuwait, 20 percent of the United Arab Emirates and about 20 percent of Afghanistan. Yet for so long, when we looked, we didn’t see the Shias, particularly in the Arab world.

So where was this invisible population? It was there. What the U.S. did in Iraq was to show a way to reverse this trend; namely, it showed a path to empowerment for the Shia, first through regime change and secondly through elections. The Shias took to elections very aggressively after Iraq. I remember the very first thing Hezbollah’s television stations said after elections in Iraq was, “We want exactly that — one man, one vote — not this

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 democracy where at the end of the day the minorities end up ruling.” The Shias in Saudi and the Bahrain said the same thing.

So Iraq is symbolically very important. But the process in Iraq broke down; they ended up fighting one another. The fighting was very polarizing because the Sunnis in Iraq and their supporters in the Arab world cast the Shias as the cat paw of Iran; they referred to the Maliki government and its predecessor as Iranian stooges and routinely referred to them as the Safavid government, referring to the Shia empire that ruled over Iran and southern Iraq in the 1500s and 1600s. And the Iranians did invest heavily in creating these ties within Iraq.

But it’s not just about Iraq. We should all take heart in the fact that violence has stopped, although I for one don’t believe we’re out of the woods. We have a ceasefire in Iraq; we don’t have a deal yet. And when you don’t have a deal between fighting factions, ceasefires are, by definition, unstable. So at some point we either have to find a way to convert the ceasefire into an agreement, or we’ll go back to fighting. There is no two ways about it. Or we’re going to sit there indefinitely with the same troop numbers or higher to prevent them from fighting. The reason for fighting hasn’t gone away, partially because it goes to exactly what I said: The final solution in Iraq will either confirm Iran’s ascendance or confirm some kind of Arab restoration.

Therefore a lot rides on that final solution. In fact, it’s a singular mistake to think you can have a deal by having only Iraqis agree to it, because what they agree to will have much broader implications for where the power in that region will lie. A final deal in Iraq is monumental to the Middle East. It will be the deal that decides the shape of the Middle East. But we don’t think in those terms; we think extremely narrowly, as if it’s a matter of getting two warring factions in the room.

As a side note, we should have learned by now from Afghanistan and Iraq that Middle Eastern governments have enormous amounts of patience to wait us out. Just because we beat Pakistan out of Afghanistan didn’t mean they agreed to give it up, and, seven years later, they are taking it back whether we like it or not. Therefore a deal that doesn’t reflect some buy-in from these neighbors is not going to last, and — maybe not next year or the year after but eventually — we’ll go back to having fighting in Iraq.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008

So it’s bigger than Iraq now. It’s become this Shia-Sunni issue because it goes to the heart of who, ultimately, will be the major power in this region. There are areas of conflict in the region around this issue. Lebanon is very fragile, because the issue in Lebanon is exactly the same. There is a Shia population that believes it is the majority, in the political sense; they believe they have 40 percent of the population but only 18 percent of the parliament and none of the executive offices of the state. The commander of the army, the prime ministership and the presidency all go to non-Shias.

Here too, the Shia are going after a minority Sunni government, in its mind, along with its Christian supporters. Similarly, Bahrain is extremely fragile, not just because Iran is investing in it, or because it’s the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet, but also because these tensions are very much there. We see this problem surfacing: Only two months ago the eminent Sunni cleric, popular on al-Jazeera, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, gave a very nasty fatwa against the Shias, arguing they are on a binge to convert Sunnis to Shiism. He came under very severe criticism, and then he refined his arguments, saying he was really referring to Iranian Shias.

He went to the heart of the matter. He was saying not that the Shias are a threat, but that Iran is a threat. We don’t have a sense of whether any Sunnis are converting to Shiism, although we do hear a lot of rumors of that, particularly after the Lebanese war in 2006. The aura of power is with Shias, and there is now talk of communities merging in Algeria, in Senegal, in Nigeria and in Syria. Even in Saudi Arabia there is talk, including among high society, that there are either nominal or real conversions to Shiism going on.

For those of you who might not know the difference between Shias and Sunnis, let me give you a quick sense, because we bandy these terms about. Those of you familiar with Christian history can think of the East Church/West Church divide, while at some other levels it’s like the Protestant/Catholic divide. It’s a division in Islam that goes back to the very first century of Islam. It’s very old. Like the Eastern Church and Western Church, Shias and Sunnis each believe they hold the original orthodoxy. They got it right, the other guys got it wrong; it’s not that one is the reform of the other.

The reason they separated early on probably looks trivial now; namely, they disagreed over who would succeed the prophet Mohammed. The Sunnis said the community would

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 choose the best among them, while the Shiites came to believe the charisma of the prophet would go by bloodline through his progeny, which was then his cousin and son- in-law Ali, who’s buried in the shrine of Najaf, and then Ali’s children. Regardless of where it began, as with all religious divides, the split grew and they developed a very different sense of history and theology. So their minor separation at the beginning has made them into very different sects today.

It’s true that Shias and Sunnis both read the same Koran. The trouble is they don’t agree on the interpretation of a single page of it. That’s not unique to Islam, of course; different churches approach biblical interpretation very differently. So with Sunnis and Shias you have different methodologies, different histories and, over time, these have become very different interpretations of Islam. There are basic ways that they differ: for instance, Shias stand differently in prayer than Sunnis do.

The Shias and Sunnis differ on points of law, which is very important because Islam is fundamentally a religion of law, much like, say, Judaism. You’re a Muslim not by faith. You’re a Muslim by practice. It is practice that defines a Muslim and practice is defined by law. So your everyday actions are based on law, and law is interpreted by your clerics based on a set of methods and interpretations. So the everyday life of the Shia is guided by Shia law.

Much of the law is the same as the Sunnis’ but there are points of difference. For instance, Shia law is far more permissive on inheritance to women and that’s why in countries like Pakistan the feudal lords all become Shia right before they die because they want to give inheritance to their daughters, and it’s permissible under Shia law, or much more so than under Sunni law. But there are other points of difference in commerce, in criminal law, et cetera.

One of the most important differences is that Shia law, like Anglo-Saxon law, is open- ended. Namely, the clerics, or ayatollahs, continuously interpret the law going forward, whereas Sunni law is much more like French law: It’s canonical; it’s closed. So Ayatollah Sistani will make new law on a daily basis if he’s asked, much like the Supreme Court, whereas Yusuf Qaradawi or al-Azhar cannot make new law. They don’t have the authority to make new law. The law is codified. There is no interpretation to create new law.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008

So the function of clerics in Shia and Sunni Islam is very different. Ayatollahs hold far more authority than Sunni clerics do. Sunni clerics are like your Protestant bishops. They minister to the affairs of the community and advise on law whereas as the Shia ayatollahs are more like Catholic bishops or the rabbis in Eastern Europe. They have a very powerful communal relationship with the population, in part because Shias have been a suppressed minority but also because they carry within them a certain religious charisma that Sunni clerics do not.

At the popular level, they are very different. As you may have seen in Iraq, Shia believe in the visitation of shrines. They have a very direct and personal relationship with their saints. There are parallels with Catholicism, like the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico or Fatima in Portugal. Shias visit their shrines and have a sense that they will be healed, or that their prayers will be heard. There is a very direct, immediate and passionate relationship with these shrines that seems to go above and beyond religion.

At a time in the Middle East when religion matters, then what religion you are, by definition, must matter. You should put aside the rhetoric of the Arab world that this is all in the mind of the West or that somehow the U.S. did this. I don’t believe that. I’d seen this long before, particularly after 1979, when Islam became so important to the Middle East. It’s impossible that as more and more people practice Islam, whether it’s in Egypt or Iran or Pakistan, that the way you practice doesn’t become an issue. Muslims don’t convert to another religion and become religious like Koreans did. They turn to their own religion to become religious and that makes it much more, if you would, engaging.

Coming back to the current time period, this is about a game of power. The Shias in the Middle East are far more numerous than official numbers suggest. Globally Shias are about 10 to 15 percent of the Muslim world, but about 90 percent of that Shia population lives in the Middle East, right there between India and Lebanon. In that arc, sectarian affiliation matters to us.

They are not few, but they have not held on to power. Iraq has opened up a discussion about a power shift, as has the rise of Iran. Iran benefits from the fact that a large population outside of its territory, without necessarily receiving direction from Tehran, benefits from the rise of Iran and therefore will support it and give Iran soft power on the

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 streets. By the same token, those who resist Iranian power are very worried about this cultural extension of Iran outside its boundaries.

This game of power, as I said, is likely to play itself out until we know where the ultimate lines will fall. This Shia phenomenon in the Middle East is of extreme importance in this region but it’s one that by and large flies under our radar. We still don’t understand it beyond the narrow sectarian fight in Iraq. I think it is one of the most significant trends in this region, the other one being the rise of violent al-Qaeda-type Salafism. That one, as I said, is all across our headlines. It is easily visible to us, and we at least think we understand it.

This one we don’t understand in large part because we don’t even see it. Maybe 10 or 15 years from now, or further, we’ll look back and say this was the force that shaped this region, beyond the immediate headlines we saw. The change in the dynamic in the Middle East obviously benefits Iran. For Iran, the glass is half full. For those who have been downsized, the glass is half empty.

Now, Iranians know the Shia-Sunni issue is a problem for them, and that’s exactly why forces that resist the Iranian rise are investing so much in the sectarian war, whether it’s in South Asia, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Iraq, on the airwaves or on the Internet. In all those places there is a concerted effort to heighten attention to the Shia issue.

Ahmadinejad may have started this vitriol against Israel for a variety of reasons but it has political capital for the Iranian government. That’s one of the few reasons why he may still endure as a politician in Iran, because he addresses this fundamental issue for the Iranian power play in the region: to rally people around the region who are not Shia but who learned after the execution of Saddam and the sectarian war in Iraq to distrust and dislike Shias and who continuously read anti-Shia literature and hear anti-Shia sermons from Riyadh to Beirut to Damascus. The one reason they may accept Iranian leadership is the Israel issue. So the Iranians, at the same time as they’re benefiting from the Shia card, don’t like to play it. They like it to be implicitly supporting them. But they would like to explicitly divert the region’s attention to the one issue that brings them together.

Therefore there is a method to the Iranian madness over Israel. Let me put it this way: confronting Israel represents the potential for gaining an enormous amount of political

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 capital and soft-power for an aspirant Middle Eastern power whose national and religious identity is not that of the Arab world. Iran needs a cause to lever in the Arab world. It needs a comeback to sectarianism.

Look at Iraq. The sectarian vocabulary was not invented by Iraq. It was invented by the other side. In Lebanon, it was not Hezbollah that proclaimed its war on Israel as a Shia power play. It was the Arab governments who put it that way. It was the Arab clerics who gave it that name. Iranians would like to focus this on Israel. So the two forces are competing to define the struggle. Money is going to Salafis because Salafis are the sharp edge of anti-Shiism. You can see that in Afghanistan, Pakistan and around the Arab world.

And the Iranians are matching that radicalism with an anti-Israeli radicalism of their own. These two sides are egging one another on, and we, in some ways, are collateral damage here, because this is essentially a play for the hearts and minds of the Arabs. It’s power politics on the world stage.

MR. CROMARTIE: Jeffrey Goldberg is the national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine. Before that, he was with The New Yorker where he was the Middle East correspondent. His 2006 book, Prisoners:A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide, was hailed as one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Playboy magazine.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Thank you, Michael. I thought I would tell a couple of quick stories about encounters with very divergent types of Muslim radicals as a way of illustrating the points I want to make. The first is about an interview I did in June of 2000 with a person who’s been in the news the last two weeks. His name is Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, and he is the head of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that’s responsible for the Mumbai massacre. I went to see him in Muridke, outside Lahore, which is the headquarters of Lashkar.

Lashkar was founded as a Sunni extremist or Salafist — actually a Takfiri — group. The group was founded with terrestrial aims in mind, the “liberation of Kashmir.” But by 2000, it is apparent in hindsight, the group, like many Salafist extremist groups, was moving away from mere terrestrial political concerns toward a more cosmological understanding of its role in history.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008

He wanted to talk about the role of jihad in Islam. People like Saeed tend to believe jihad — external jihad, not the internal jihad of self-improvement but actual warrior jihad — is almost the sixth pillar of Islam. As you know, Islam is built on five pillars: charity, Hajj, et cetera. He talked about jihad as a sixth pillar, and he gave me a long lecture about how Muslims don’t understand the proper place of killing in Islamic doctrine.

He quite obviously was a Takfiri, and I’ll give you a brief explanation of what that means. There’s Salafism, which is Wahhabism, the Saudi-inspired, overly literal reading of the Koran; it’s a very arid literalism that leads to extremism. Takfirism is like Salafism on steroids. Takfir means to declare others apostates and one of the many issues that separates Takfiris like bin Laden from Salafists, such as many of the people who run Saudi Arabia, is the obsession or preoccupation with killing Muslims who aren’t good Muslims in their eyes. Obviously, the embrace of murder-suicide — which is un-Islamic, against the rules of traditional Islam — is another manifestation of Takfirism.

We talked about the role of violence in Islam and the role of violence against infidels in particular. He said, “It’s morally wrong to kill even a non-Muslim unless he’s hurting Islam.” But as the conversation went on, it became clear his definition of “hurting Islam” was evermore elastic. He explained, “America favors India. The Indians in America have captured the minds of the American leaders.” That made me think that in his mind, the “I” in AIPAC is for India, not Israel. He had this very elaborate conspiracy theory about that.

We talked about the Islamic justification for the murder of civilians, the civilians of your enemy, and he said, “In a democracy, you say the people choose their leaders. So the people are responsible for the actions of the leaders. Therefore, they are responsible for the aggression of their leaders.” In other words, the definition of who was a combatant, of who was the enemy, is growing to the point where it can take in children.

Then I asked him, finally, “Could you foresee, in any kind of circumstance, a better relationship with America?” He said — and this is the really striking part — “our ideas are better. If you want to compete with us, we will compete with you. But our ideas are rooted in the truths of God. Therefore, our way will be triumphant. We do not plan to

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 attack America with guns to make you see this. But I know that one day, the people of the world and the people of America will revert to Islam.” There’s a belief that all people are Muslim; we just don’t know it. So it’s not conversion, but reversion. “And then the people of America will know the truth of God.”

Let me jump ahead two years to a conversation with a very different sort of Muslim radical. It was in the summer of 2002 in Baalbek, in the Bekaa Valley, and I was having lunch with a member of the Hezbollah Shura Council. The Shura Council is the religious and clerical elite of Hezbollah. The guy I was eating with was a very, very difficult man. In the course of talking to him, I asked him a very naïve question, especially after 9/11; it had a naïve, very American assumption built into it. I said, “What do you hope to gain after having a better relationship with the United States of America?” He laughed. He said, “What makes you think we would want to have a better relationship with the United States of America?” I said, “Well, there are obvious political and material” — maybe not so much anymore — “benefits to having a relationship with the world’s sole remaining superpower.” He looked at me as if I had no grasp of the world I was living in. He said, “You just don’t understand. We don’t want to be friends with you; we want to beat you.”

So for obvious reasons, I’ve always linked these two conversations in my mind; thematically, they were very similar.

I should mention that on Friday at the Saban Forum in Washington, President Bush gave a speech, a summation of all of his accomplishments in the Middle East over the last eight years. One of the things he said was quite interesting. It sounded very wrong at first and then not quite so wrong when I thought about it. He made a reference to the gathering storm that America was facing in the 1980s, and he said: “The terrorist movement was growing in strength.” I thought, “That’s very typical of the Bush administration, oversimplifying who the enemy is: there is no terrorist movement; there are terrorist movements.” Then I thought back to these two conversations, one with a Sunni extremist, the other with a Shia extremist. And I thought to myself, these men, if they met, would be sworn enemies. These groups are wildly divergent and yet, these two interviews, because of the thematic similarities, stay in my mind.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008

A couple of observations I make out of that similarity. One is the utter surprise, from a historical perspective, that I feel in thinking about them. Not because of the Sunni extremism, but the cosmological extremism, the extremism that cannot be satiated by the ceding of a political point or territory, but only by the restoration of the caliphate, the complete elimination of Christian and Jewish influences in the Middle East and so on.

The surprise is that the Shia sounded like the Sunni, because this is ahistorical.

The second observation is, our great debate in Washington now about the engagement of Iran — whether we should or shouldn’t — and the subsidiary discussion of, can we engage, in some way or another, the Taliban; in both cases, the conversation is unidirectional. It assumes Iran wants to be engaged. It assumes various forces in the Middle East, who are our adversaries, want this kind of engagement. This goes into the condescension contained in my question to the Hezbollah leader. The assumption that he would want a better relationship with us in the right conditions is an assumption we have to guard against as we move into this next phase, when we’re trying to figure out a way to talk to, among others, the Iranian leadership.

All of this points to a central question for me. If you could recommend to the Obama administration to work on only one issue of import in the next four years in the Muslim world, would it be the Takfiri challenge, meaning the Sunni extremist challenge, or the Twelver challenge? The Twelvers are people who believe that the Twelfth Imam went into occultation 1,000 years ago and is coming back. These are Shia who are very millenarian, very apocalyptic, and who believe the Mahdi is coming back with Jesus. Obviously, Ahmadinejad is a huge Twelver. So the question is, when you have these two very, very complicated challenges — this challenge from Sunni extremism and this challenge from Shia radicalism — which one is more important to grapple with? I ask this question for the obvious reason that America, very often, is not good at doing even one thing at a time.

I have no certain answer to that myself. I tend to think the Takfiri challenge is ultimately a bigger problem for the United States than the Shia challenge. I also tend to think the Shia challenge is probably the one to work on because it’s more concrete; there’s something to be done with it. Let me use just one more example to frame a way to think

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 of these two challenges. The challenge of Twelver extremism — of Shia extremism — is the challenge of the Iranian nuclear program, and asking yourself, can the world — can the West — live with an Iranian nuclear bomb?

The Takfiri challenge is also a nuclear challenge. It asks the question, what would be the consequences of a Takfiri takeover of Pakistan, and what would that mean for Pakistan’s nuclear program? Another way of asking the question is, would you rather have Ahmadinejad in charge of a nuclear weapon, or would you rather have Lashkar-e-Taiba in charge of a nuclear weapon?

I don’t know the answer. I do think that the Shia side of this equation is something that can be worked on. I’m not overly sanguine about it. I had this very bizarre breakfast a couple of months ago in New York with Ahmadinejad and several other journalists. I had never met him before, and going into it, I just assumed that he was crazy; I came out of it realizing he was just cunning, which is scarier, in some ways, than crazy.

I think his presentation was, from a Shia perspective, ahistorical. He is as global and insatiable, in some ways, as bin Laden or Zawahiri: “We are here to give the news that the American empire has come to an end. This is helpful to the American politicians; it’s really a help to them so that they can change their behavior. They need to know the empire is coming to an end.” And he goes on, “of course, you can see the signs very well. We see the news. Like a vehicle that’s about to drive off a cliff, if a traffic sign that says there’s a cliff here, the driver shouldn’t object to the traffic sign,” and he was equating himself to the traffic sign. And then he went on in this very triumphalist, arrogant discourse about the end of American power. He said, “Western countries believe that they can solve all issues with force and the power of weapons and economics. This is a big mistake. These tools belong to the past. The history of our region has no recollection of a foreign military group entering Afghanistan and leaving it victorious, or entering Iraq and leaving victorious. I’m surprised. What sign have they found that they think they — the Americans — are the exception?”

So he’s talking in enormous terminology, in a way we’re used to hearing Salafist extremists talk. Nevertheless, for a couple of reasons, I think that, unlike the very chaotic and diffuse Salafist threat, which manifests itself across the Muslim world and in Europe, the Shia threat has an address. It has concrete problems. The address, of course, is

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Tehran, and the concrete problems are problems of uranium enrichment. I also think — and I hope if you disagree, you’ll tell me — that in Shia history and theology, there are seeds of moderation. Because what we’re going through now, in the last 30 years, is a very ahistorical process in the Shia world.

Let me end by mentioning a couple of points that mitigate or undercut the whole idea that there’s anything we can do about these problems. This is about the need for American or Western humility.

We are, in many ways, collateral damage. There is an enormous crisis in one of the world’s great civilizations — the civilization of Islam — a crisis of identity. Islam, in many ways, has become its own enemy. The radicalism of the extremists is, generally speaking, not met by enthusiastic moderation. We saw yesterday in Mumbai a smallish demonstration of Muslims who are upset with what happened. But it’s really quite remarkable when you sit back and think about it, how the incredible savagery and cruelty that’s committed in the name of Islam is not met by a revolt of the silent majority of Muslims. There are things we can do, I think, to mitigate the damage the West suffers as Islam goes through this very long and very deep crisis, but I’m not confident we are sophisticated enough to influence the outcome of this cataclysmic debate in the Muslim world, and I’m not sure there’s much we can say or do to affect the outcome even if we had the sophistication to try.

Fighting Takfirism means dealing with Saudi Arabia and its export of Salafist, Wahhabi ideology. It’s very hard to convince the Saudis to do things when we’re essentially their client state, depending on them in ways they don’t depend on us. I don’t mean to be overly depressing at the end, but I think we’re in for a 20- or 30- or 50- or 100-year period in which we, essentially, stand by and watch the world of Islam, in all its complexity, with two mainstreams and other subsidiary streams, decide what it is. And the job of an American president, at a certain point, is to figure out ways to encourage moderation without drawing too much attention to our role. These are very, very hard things to do for Americans, who believe there’s a solution to every problem. What I’m suggesting is there might not be an American solution to the problems we are facing in the Middle East.

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E.J. DIONNE, The Washington Post: I’d like to ask Professor Nasr three interrelated questions. Is the main effect of the Iraq war a strengthening of Iran; and if yes, what does that mean, and how should that affect our way forward? If not, why not? I also wanted to talk more about what the rise of the Shia in Iraq means, by way of describing what the ideal should look like. You said the United States needs to look at a solution in Iraq not just as it affects the parties, but as it affects this entire conflict. Would you lay out what that deal might look like, or what the differences might be between those deals? And the last question: what is more likely to serve America’s interests, heightened Shia-Sunni conflict or diminished Shia-Sunni conflict? And I suspect you can argue that either way.

MR. NASR: I would say Iran has very clearly been strengthened. A number of immediate indices: Iran, before 2003, had no presence in an Arab country. Now, the southern part of one of the most important Arab countries is essentially an Iranian vassal, and Iran also has a significant amount of presence in the Kurdish north. So Iran has spread, if you would, into the Arab world. It now is a big player in Lebanon. Iran claimed to have made a huge favor to Egypt and Jordan and Syria, et cetera, by not putting forward its own presidential candidate in Lebanon. Iran now has an unofficial seat at the Arab-Israeli conflict. So Iran is inside the Arab world in a way that it wasn’t before.

Second, the fall of the Iraqi army in a sense removed the one military around the Gulf that could balance Iran. This is about hard power, not ideology. Those two armies balanced one another. Without the Iraqi army — and Iraq will not have an army for another generation — either the United States will stay there and balance Iran, or there has to be some agreement with Iran in terms of its presence. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how many billions go into UAE’s army or Saudi’s army; they’re not the balance against Iran. The third is a matter of perception; the Iranians feel they’re bullish; they feel they’re on the rise. And their competitors feel they’re diminished, and much of power politics has to do with perception.

This third gain is an issue of soft power. Namely, the Shia communities around the region, particularly between 2003 and 2006, believed that what came out of Iraq, even if they disagreed with it completely, even if they didn’t support it, benefited them. There was a model that things can change: Sunnis can lose power; Shias can get more than what they

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 have. The whole Lebanon thing was fueled by this. And it’s ongoing. In other words, I don’t think the sectarian war in Iraq has finished yet.

So in the Shia world, there are two tendencies. You have this Iran-Hezbollah political phase, but where the Shias are going religiously is not down a jihadi line. I fully agree with everything Jeff said about talking to that Hezbollah guy and Hafiz Saeed of Lashkar-e- Taiba, but where the difference lies is not with these generals and sergeants of Islamic activism, it’s in the population. The Shiites are, by and large, done with it. They had their revolution. Their mind is somewhere else.

There is no doubt Iran is on the rise. We’ve got to think very hard about what a final deal in Iraq means, because it’s not all about the Shia-Sunni part. A deal in Iraq cannot not reflect the balance of power in that region, in my opinion. We have to deal with facts. Any time we want to create our own facts on the ground, it’s going to be tough, and we’ve shown that we’ll fail at it. We cannot establish an Iraq based on parity between Shiites and Sunnis. We cannot establish an Iraq that essentially gives a lot more power back to the Sunnis; it won’t work because it’s not reflective of the power structure in the region, unless we are committed to downsizing Iran and restoring the Arabs to a pre-2003 status in the region, which would be a huge task involving massive military action.

I think the deal in Iraq has to reflect the reality that the Shias are a majority and that Iran has the upper hand. It’s not going to be easy to do because Jeff is correct: dealing with Iran is not going to be easy. Also dealing with the Arabs in this is not going to be easy. But if we’re not even looking at it that way, and we see at as a very narrow deal, then it’s going to be difficult.

Now, this question of what benefits us in the region, whether these guys are fighting one another, is good — others have raised this. Based on what we’ve seen so far, I don’t think the Shia-Sunni rivalry is beneficial because it radicalizes both sides. If we really take terrorism seriously, then any dynamic in the Muslim world that accentuates radicalism is not a good thing.

Of course there are many drivers for radicalism, and Jeff suggested some of them, but one driver, in my opinion, right now, is this geo-strategic power rivalry, the Iran-Arab rivalry. The intensification of that means more Ahmadinejads and more Hafiz Saeeds on

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 both sides, because if you’re in a competition, politicians who speak that language have a comparative advantage. In other words, if Iran wants to play the radical card, it cannot have Khatami as president. It needs Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad has destroyed Iran’s economy; he’s highly unpopular among the broad population. There are even Iranian clerics who hate him; he’s persona non grata at home. No ayatollah worth his salt meets with him or his representatives. Even Khamenei has fears and trepidations about him. But Ahmadinejad excels in one thing: the kind of rhetoric Jeff heard in New York gets him on t-shirts in Cairo. That is political capital, and it is only useful if you’re competing with the Sunnis. Now, we might alternatively argue for a divide-and-conquer strategy, but that would depend on whom you are dividing and whom you are trying to conquer. I think we’re trying to conquer the wrong side.

In the Arab world, we know that leaders are nice, and the population is, by and large, anti- American and more open to radical ideology. With the Shias, their leaders are not nice but the populations are, by and large, post-fundamentalist. They’ve done it; they’re over it. What we’re doing is trying to go with the radical population in order to contain the moderate population. I fully agree with Jeff, it’s not easy; but in the long run, it would be better to find a way to bring Iran out from the cold or to get in at least a much better position with us and to leverage what we see as the less revolutionary side of Islam, which listens to Sistani and already had its revolution in the ’70s and would be able to stand up to this revolutionary side. The worst thing we could do is lump them together, get them to compete, and then get them both to oppose to us.

There are also big differences which are very important. The Shiite forces are fighting over tangible things: territory and power. Also, they rule over people, which means, ultimately, they have to respond to popular dynamics. I don’t see how declining oil prices impact al- Qaeda; they’re not paying anybody’s salary. Maybe they lost some money in the market, but that’s about it. They’re not responsive to bread-and-butter issues.

But Iranians have to respond to the reality that their budget threshold is at $95 a barrel and now oil is at $40 a barrel. There is no domestic savings, and there is no international credit. So there is a hard meeting between ideology and economics in Iran, at the end of the day, or in Hezbollah, that doesn’t exist in the Sunni world. I think there’s a difference between Sunni and Shia radicalism. The violent nihilism of radical Sunnis is cosmological,

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 it’s unrealistic, et cetera. But with the Shias, the rubber meets the road; there are things these people want. It’s called power. It’s called influence. And you’re absolutely right, they don’t see any reason they need to talk to us, for two reasons, I think.

One is they will only be interested in relations with us when they can get what they want from us, which means when the discussion is about Iran’s regional power and not about the nuclear issue. That’s the conversation the Iranians would like to have, namely, their power over the Gulf, their power over Iraq, their position in Afghanistan, et cetera. The other issue is that, obviously, they’re going to run a hard bargain. The Shia clerics and the Shia establishment we’re dealing with all come from the bazaar background. These guys know how to hustle. Right now, Iran thinks they have us over a barrel but that we’re not softened enough yet.

All of this suggests we have to be a lot more sophisticated and nuanced about approaching what Jeff describes as a 30- or 40-year problem to understand where we can leverage what we have. But I think the Shia world right now is a problem that at least we can put in frameworks we are familiar with, whereas the Sunni one is much more difficult.

MR. GOLDBERG: It’s true that the recession we’re experiencing now, is very useful in foreign policy, in particular, in the way we will deal with Iran. We will have them over a barrel, literally, if oil prices stay where they are. This is actually something President-elect Obama can exploit.

We should have a better reputation among Shia than we do. I think a clever president can figure out a way to communicate that in some sophisticated and quiet way to the Iranians, saying, “Look, we can continue to battle you on these issues that might diminish Shia empowerment, or we can work together.”

LAUREN GREEN, Fox News: You talked about the conversion of Sunnis to Shia. Is that more from proselytizing or from politicizing? Is this coming from a revelation that it’s the truth or from a practical side that says this is where the political power is? Does that make a difference, or should it make a difference, to the USA in how they deal with the issue of Islam in the Middle East?

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And Jeffrey, I wanted to ask you about your breakfast with Ahmadinejad. Did he give a laundry list of why America’s power is coming to end? Did he give reasons?

MR. NASR: There is no evidence of proselytizing. I think there are two forces at work. One is clearly political: Hezbollah’s performance in 2006 and Iran’s current position. That’s partly why Ahmadinejad holds these kinds of conversations, making a bullish show of power. He’s very appealing. There have been symbolic conversions in Syria, the Arab world, et cetera, but we don’t know how lasting they are.

MR. GOLDBERG: Ahmadinejad does represent something truly radical and dangerous. I don’t think he’s completely an outlier in the Iranian stream of thought. That’s what makes it so difficult and dangerous. On your specific question, he cited his correct interpretation that we’re losing in Afghanistan, his incorrect interpretation that we’re losing in Iraq, and the economic downturn.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI, The Weekly Standard: How do you see the future of the Iranian regime over the next 10 or 20 years? How do you see the Iranian regime changing?

DR. NASR: It’s not a given that negotiations with Iran will be successful. The Iranian regime does have serious domestic vulnerabilities; it has points of leverage, and it has points of weakness. There is serious political competition and debate within Iran. We have often hoped the Iran problem would solve itself before we ever had to engage with it. We hoped Iraq would undo it, or that the economy will undo it. It’s not a given that there is a clear path to negotiation now.

I think the most important value of diplomatic engagement with Iran is to throw the Iranian calculation off its mark. The Iranians have calculated that the U.S. doesn’t want to talk to them. All of their policies have been built on certain assumptions going forward, particularly within the Ahmadinejad faction. And we haven’t done much to try to disturb that. I think an engagement, if it happens, will mess up the Iranian approach and open up fissures within the regime and also among leaders inside the regime.

I wouldn’t be too thrown off by the posture. There is a style in Iranian language of talking about the West. There is a style in America’s approach to Iran. If and when they actually

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 talk, they will have to talk about one another differently. There will have to be a period of flirtation. The United States sent serious signals to China for about two years before it engaged them. It began with actually referring to China by its name, which is one of the things the Iranians constantly demand. There has to be a period of selling the policy at home, which means both governments have to back away from the way in which they characterize one another. A lot of things have to happen that haven’t happened, and which, if they did happen, could be quickly undone.

About a change of regime in Iran, it can happen. But I take the view that Iran is not going to be more stable or unstable than any other dictatorial regime in the region. This is a region with an enormous amount of authoritarian resilience. Let’s not divert our attention by vesting hope in change inside Iran. We have to take it that Ahmadinejad may go, and somebody else may come, but it may not really change the situation in a significant way. Therefore, we shouldn’t be distracted with that. It would be excellent if you had a very different phase rising in Iran, but ultimately we have to deal with the regime we’re confronting today because the set of issues we’re dealing with are happening right now. We can’t wait five years to deal with the nuclear issue, with the terrorism issue, or with Iranians ruling the region.

I think we have to take it as it is. I see many, many weak points for this regime, including the economy, including the demography but also Ahmadinejad’s group’s calculation that everything will be settled in the short run. The regime-change issues will come in the medium to long run. Iran is eager to establish its footprint — on the nuclear issue and everything else — within an 18-month to two-year time period, during which time they think they can hold it together.

EVE CONANT, Newsweek: Are there ways in which — for all of their anti-Western rhetoric — the Iranians are using U.S. techniques, both to encourage Shias to be more optimistic and also perhaps for Sunnis? Are there little ways in which they’re pursuing this rise such as giving scholarships to Sunnis to travel home? Or with women in urban centers, saying you’ll have more inheritance in the Shia system than you would in the Sunni system? Are there little ways in which they’re using women’s rights or religion that mirror the way the U.S. has tried to export its ideas of democracy and success in other countries?

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DR. NASR: The simple answer to the last part is no. For a variety of reasons, they are not doing what we do, which is preach values. Bringing students home is a whole different issue and a lot of times it’s done through seminaries themselves, which are quite wealthy; they are not government run. But there is a side to Iranian soft power that is very important, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that’s trade. The volume of trade between Iran and Iraq is over $2 billion. So at one level they complain about militias, et cetera, but the reality is that the bazaar and commerce runs on Iran.

It’s the same in Herat; it’s the same even in Azerbaijan and Dubai. There’s a huge Iranian business footprint. With the Shias, it’s just a matter of cultural affinity. Shias everywhere look at Iran as the holy country.

Elsewhere, there are two things. One is the whole issue of creating an aura of power. Iran is very, very keen on showing an aura of power — Hezbollah as well. Like what Jeff was saying: standing there and talking cavalierly about the decline of American global power. This bullishness has an appeal and Iran clearly pumps it and plays it. They are much more eager to talk secretly than talk publicly. Everybody who has dealt with Iran is very clear that their one demand in coming to table with the United States is that they come as equals. That creates certain respect for them.

The other thing is riding the anti-American way. They’re very cognizant there’s a lot of unpopularity with the United States. There’s a rejectionist mood in the region. They are playing into that, and it has paid them a great deal of dividend. It’s very clear that Iranians are competing aggressively with al-Qaeda for who is the main anti-American force in the region. That stance, in many quarters in the Muslim world, does translate into a sympathy and support for Iran.

But no, the Iranians have not made tremendous amount of investment outside of southern Iraq or western Afghanistan in institutions that promote soft power such as cultural centers, community centers, et cetera. That you see in southern Iraq. There they pay money to every village leader, every municipal authority, every person. They’ve built hospitals; they’ve built schools; they’ve built whole varieties of things. Then in Syria, they have some mosques and other things they’ve built but their institutional footprint in

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 much of the Muslim world outside of this immediate neighborhood is very thin. And as a consequence, they put a lot more emphasis on image rather than institutions.

MR. GOLDBERG: The reality today is their main export remains terrorism. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the various ways they try to destabilize the Gulf and on and on and on. It’s important not to forget what they are doing right now. Jordanian intelligence people talk about Iran as the octopus, with seven or eight tentacles in different parts of the Sunni world, and that they can use those tentacles to destabilize areas. So they are very good at exporting hard power as well, I think, and that’s their particular expertise at the moment.

SALLY QUINN, The Washington Post: I’m confused about the whole Israel-Palestine issue. I was surprised when you said everyone thinks that’s the main issue and it’s not, and then you went on to say Iran likes to exacerbate this problem, with Hamas and Hezbollah, because it binds Arabs in the region together. You said you felt that if that problem went away, there would still be a problem. I don’t understand that because it seems to me this is such a divisive issue, and it inflames the Arab world and the Muslim world everywhere you go. How do you solve the problem? How do you diminish that issue without solving it? Until that goes away, how is that not going to be the big sticking point in trying to negotiate peace with any of these countries?

DR. NASR: It’s an extremely important issue at the emotional level across the Muslim world. There is no doubt about it. But it’s no longer the only issue. Imagine if tomorrow there is actually a peace deal, and it’s done. That wouldn’t change the fact of, as Jeff mentioned, fear among Arabs about Iranian power in the Gulf. The Iranian power in the Gulf is based on simple facts. It’s about Iran’s investment in hard power, as Jeff said, including militias in southern Iraq. It’s about Iran’s military capability in the Gulf, and it’s about nuclear investment. The Arab-Israeli issue — the Palestinian issue — will not solve Saudi Arabia’s power deficit. It will not take away Iran’s hard power in the region. The Saudis care about Iran a lot more than the Palestinians, in reality, because the Palestinian issue is an emotional issue. It does impact public opinion; it does have a great deal of bearing on their status and image but it’s not of vital national interest to Saudi Arabia. The vital national interest to Saudi Arabia is what’s happening in Iraq and what’s happening with Iran.

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For the Pakistanis, it’s about Afghanistan. So we have to separate where and how the Palestinian issue matters from the other issues.

Secondly, the Arab governments are not going to come out of the Arab-Israeli issue looking good unless the peace actually gives them an aura of power. I think the Iranians are calculating that’s not going to happen, that this issue is too difficult and messy and that in the foreseeable future, there is not going to be a real, viable peace, one acceptable to the Arab Street, or a peace that would make the Arab leaders look as if they had delivered the impossible. I think, realistically, we’re not going to solve this problem in the near term. And even if we did, we would still have the balance-of-power issue in the region.

That’s not to say the Arab-Israeli issue is not important. But you have to put everything in the right perspective. If we go into the next two years thinking this issue is going to solve everything, then, first of all, we are setting ourselves up for failure because we are going to put world attention on a conflict we can’t deliver. Secondly, even if we solve it, we’ll be disappointed because we’ll realize it was a very important arena in which a large fight was happening and that that larger fight will not end just because this ends.

MS. QUINN: Isn’t it then to their advantage — the Iranians and the Saudis and all of the people in that region — to keep the war going between the Israelis and the Palestinians?

DR. NASR: Absolutely. If you are the Arab governments around Israel, and you depend heavily on security rent directly associated with the Arab-Israeli issue, and your whole power and importance and relevance to Washington depends on the Arab-Israeli issue, what does a solution do for you?

BYRON YORK, National Review: You have about a million-and-a-half adult Muslims in America, about 65 percent foreign born, 50 percent Sunni. The question is, with this big crisis in the Islamic world, is that playing out, especially if it gets worse, in the domestic American Muslim population? And how do they try to influence the United States government through lobbying and other ways?

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DR. NASR: We still have to learn a lot more about the community. By and large, its profile is very different from the rest of the Muslim world; it’s much more middle class. It’s much more professional and educated than the average Muslim population.

They are not organized around pushing religious issues but around pushing participation. Issues that are peak projects are visas or typical, if you would, minority issues about equality.

MR. GOLDBERG: In my own hierarchy of problems facing the U.S., the American Muslim population is not one of them. Yes, there has been some fundraising and activities for Hamas and other groups but American Islam can be seen, perhaps, as part of the solution rather than part of the problem. In America, there is the space and safety for Muslims to explore dangerous concepts related to the marriage of modernity and Islam. That’s what I hope America has become to some degree — a place where liberal Muslim scholars can think without fear of having their heads chopped off.

MARK KATKOV, CBS News: My question is about U.S. foreign policy in the next few years. One of the things that hasn’t received a lot of attention is the Bush administration’s program of democracy promotion in the Muslim world. During the Cold War, it had outsized results in Asia, Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union. About half-a-billion dollars has been spent in the last eight years, more or less. Do you see any point to continuing it? Is it going to show benefits?

DR. NASR: I think standing for democracy, advocating for democracy, is very important and that the United States should not abandon that goal. I don’t think we should approach democracy promotion in the short run as a solution to the problems we have — in other words, not to attach it to an American agenda. That has been counterproductive. But we also have to look at lessons learned, namely that we should look at democracy promotion not as pushing for a single election — Hamas or whatever else. It is not about elections; it’s about trying to change the laws.

I don’t think we shouldn’t go from being totally hot on democracy and to being totally cold, saying, “It didn’t work.” There is a lot to do. In Pakistan, for example, we could have done a lot more than what we did, and we still can. There are a lot of low-hanging fruits,

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 and I would say the Arab world actually is not the place to go. That’s one big mistake with the Bush administration’s democracy-promotion policies. You shouldn’t go where you have the most entrenched dictatorship, the most hostility to democracy, the least amount of experience with democracy. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the Muslim world. There are more elections in Bangladesh and Pakistan than in Egypt.

CATHY GROSSMAN,USA Today: I’d like to hear more from you about al-Qaeda and where its role is in this.

DR. NASR: There is no doubt we’re dealing with a wave of terrorism connected to a very specific ideology. It’s not the first time we’ve done it, historically. There are parallels in what happened with communism at its heyday, post-Cuba, and the varieties of communist terrorism that swept Latin America, Europe, et cetera. Right now, we’re in the middle of it. It’s a wave that ultimately will have to exhaust itself, and I think it will.

It’s connected to a number of things. One is, there is manpower, and there are assets left over from the war in Afghanistan. Everybody from bin Laden down, these are people who fought in that war and went through training camps. The training camps continued throughout the 1990s, so you’re still dealing with a lot of personnel trained in that war. There was never a plan to reabsorb them in their economies. The best is the story of bin Laden himself, who went back to Jeddah and his brother showed him a desk to get to work. After years in Afghanistan, he just could not fit in. He went back to what he knew best, and they all found their way to Afghanistan.

Two, Afghanistan was very important because it was the first war of liberation in which Islamist fundamentalism won. I like to think of Khomeini as the Lenin of Islamic revolution, of the whole Islamic ideology. And I think of the Afghan mujahedeen as being the Che Guevara phase of communism. And they won. They defeated a superpower. They believed they defeated a superpower. And this sort of liberation hasn’t been defeated. Even in Iraq it hasn’t been defeated. In the Muslim world, the argument is that ultimately the insurgents got the United States to come to the table. And until the day it is defeated somewhere — this Islamic liberation model that came out of the Afghan jihad — there will be a certain amount of pizzazz and momentum in it. It also has relevance to today’s

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Muslim world because in this region, for reasons I was mentioning, the breakdown in the balance of power has set off insurgencies.

There are ongoing insurgencies trying to restore power to those who have lost it: the Pashtuns and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Sunnis in Iraq. Al-Qaeda’s model of fighting against occupation is a successful one, with assets, knowledge, capability, and money, which, out of the box, could be implemented in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, you have the model, you have the manpower and you have arenas. So it’s not a coincidence that there is the upsurge.

Thirdly, in places like Europe and the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, the whole Salafi underbelly of al-Qaeda fits into an existing identity crisis. Salafism at its core, if you put aside the violence, is culture-less Islam. It’s so puritanical that it believes it is Islam divorced of any cultural context. That’s what Wahhabism was when it emerged in Saudi Arabia in the 18th century. It wanted to undo every single compromise Islam had made with any culture it had met. So you take Islam back to its imagined, pure origin when it didn’t connect with anything human. Now that makes it a very rigid, hard Islam. But it’s attractive to people who have no identity.

So if you are an Algerian, third generation born in France, you’re not Algerian anymore — you’ve never seen the mother country. You’re not French either. What are you? Salafism provides this virtual community. If you were born in a Palestinian camp, in Nahr al Bared, you’ve never been to Palestine but you’re not Lebanese either. As a result, what are you? You are a member of this community. So there’s a difference between those al-Qaeda guys in Nahr al Bared and the Palestinians in Hamas. Salafism is attractive.

When they become Salafist, they adopt the bullet points they’re supposed to say, one of which is caring about the Palestinians. Yet they become what they become because of that hole in their soul — that identity hole. That’s the whole different way in which al- Qaeda relates to these people. I have a colleague who did an enormous amount of study on those who convert to Salafism in prisons in France. They know nothing about Palestine; they know nothing about the details. But it’s a surrogate way of explaining their own pain, to put it in the language of the Palestinians. It’s a very difficult thing to combat when

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 something appeals to youth because they’re disoriented, they’re alienated, and they don’t fit it.

So you have multiple drivers. There are facts on the ground al-Qaeda is appealing to and there are real fighters fighting, but it also appeals to a particular psychological identity crisis that exists in some quarters.

DAVID KUHN, Politico: Professor, I was wondering if you could touch on Koranic literalism. I would like to hear your thoughts on the extent to which you believe Koranic literalism prevails and that that it has geopolitical impacts. In other words, there are debates in Judaism or Christianity, but I would argue these debates actually don’t politically impact the nation-states that have these debates occurring within them.

KIRSTEN POWERS, The New York Post/Fox News: You said the United States is the collateral damage in what’s going on over there, that you have these rival factions and then you have the moderate Islamic people not rising up against it. Do you think the United States has played a role in what’s going on over there? Would you say it’s just a disagreement between these groups, or has the United States done things historically to inflame this or make it worse? And then, what do you think about the statement that Islam is a religion of peace? Do you believe that?

DR. NASR: I would say Koranic literalism is about more than just literalism; it’s about fundamentalism, particularly Salafism as this very puritanical streak, which includes not just literalism but also ahistoricism. Salafism denies the entire history of Islam and everything that has gone into it. So you pick up the Koran, which is a thin book, and you start completely fresh, essentially denying the whole tradition of commentary, interpretation, methodology, et cetera. Salafists, like Wahhabis and Takfiris, are literalists. And they are not just literally reading the Koran, but also every other text, like the prophetic traditions, Islamic law, et cetera.

It matters, first of all, to the extent to which Salafis, Takfiris, jihadis believe in this thing. Secondly, if they are to develop communities that sympathize with their approach and interpretation, then the proliferation of literal interpretation does matter. There is an

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 example: Saudi Arabia is a Salafi country. They don’t use that word, but Wahhabism is Salafism, and Salafism is a form of Wahhabism. So what does it mean, politically? Maybe you could say nothing, maybe you could point to Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy, the amount of money Saudi Arabia has spent. When the Saudis spend money, they don’t give it to Shias, they don’t give it to Sufis, they don’t give it to woolly-brained, culturally oriented Muslims; they give it to people who will either say what they like to hear or do as they do. Their money basically creates momentum for a particular interpretation of Islam, which, down the road, can have political implications.

Even if it doesn’t mean people are going to pick up guns, it can mean other things. Salafism or Wahhabism is less tolerant on women’s issues; it’s less tolerant on minority issues; it, as a principle, doesn’t like compromise. Religions do well when they compromise with cultures, whether it’s Christianity, Judaism, or Islam — you can look at their permutations around the world. They’ve been most successful and interesting in their civilizational and political achievements when they’ve compromised. If you have an uncompromising, puritanical form of faith, it’s bound to not only cause conflict, but also promote the wrong kinds of values. So Islam in a global, 21stcentury culture is best-equipped if it has its much more nuanced, historical, cultural side at its forefront, not its puritanical, simplistic, rejectionist side.

The effect of literalism is not always tangible, in obvious ways, but it does matter at the end of the day. Yes, I do think we are meeting the consequences of a much larger — not just civilizational but also hard power — conflict in the Middle East. But we are party to it. We forget we are a Middle Eastern country in some ways. We have more troops there than most countries in the region; we have a huge footprint; we’re sitting there; we’re part of its struggles; we have a seat at every single event that goes on there, so we have something to do with setting these off. Had Iraq not happened, maybe a lot of this discussion wouldn’t be had.

And then, post-Iraq, what we did and didn’t do is important. This Kissingerian moment Jeff described; we decided not to exercise it. We decided not to try to capitalize quickly with what we did in Iraq and establish the lay of the land; we let things go, and it became much larger than it is. We did lump, maybe, all the radicals in one direction against us. So we do have a certain say in our own destiny; it’s not true that we’re complete bystanders.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008

But it’s also not true that everything is about us. There is a happy medium here. We have to understand where the truth of it is.

I don’t think any religion is a religion of peace. Fundamentally, I think religions are open to interpretation; it really is a question of what interpretation is dominant and to what purpose it is being put. We’re in a time period when fundamentalism has made Islam very important in the Middle East, and it didn’t happen in 2003, it began in 1979. Fundamentalism is a particularly political beast. It’s a good question to ask, actually: is it a form of Islam, or is it a form of politics? It’s driven to achieve more power and to build states, believing it has a perfect blueprint in the way it reads religion. Its path to power has been conflictual. The Iranian Revolution was about hard power. It was, like all revolutions, about the redistribution of wealth and class conflict, and it was bloody.

And in the wake of that has come this wave of Salafism. The current language of politics in Islam is not about peace, it’s about conquest and power. It’s as peaceful as any conquest and power can be.

I think Muslims are most peaceful when there is business and middle-class economics in their midst.

MR. GOLDBERG: Yes, we do smart things in the Middle East, we do stupid things in the Middle East and, occasionally, we do evil things in the Middle East. I think those things operate, ultimately, on the margins of the biggest story. And the biggest story is this civilization struggling with its hard reality. You have a religion of very high self-esteem, let’s put it that way — a religion that believes it is the ultimate and final word of God. It had very early experience with huge success. So you have people who believe they should be in the superior position who are confronted by a reality all around them that suggests they are not in the superior position in the world.

The Arab component of the Muslim world, in particular, is at a standstill. It’s been taking a hiatus; it doesn’t develop. And out of that gap comes a lot of this destructive energy we’re experiencing. When I used the term collateral damage, we’re collateral and we’re not, also. I mean, there are things we could do to mitigate the situation; there are things we could do to make things worse. But the thing about fanaticism is it’s very plastic, and

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “America & Islam After Bush” Dr. Vali Nasr and Jeffrey Goldberg  December 2008 as soon as you solve one grievance, you have another grievance created because it’s in the best interest of the fanatic to make sure there’s an everlasting list of grievances.

On this question of Islam and peace, I understand why George Bush said it two days after 9/11 — it made political sense. The categories are wrong here, and part of the reason the categories are wrong is because we, as Americans, tend to refract what we understand the role of religion to be through the prism of Christianity. And if you look at Christianity and look at Islam, these are two very, very different things. The savior of Christianity went quietly, meekly, to his death for reasons we all understand. This is not possible to imagine in the story of Muhammed. Muhammed was his own Constantine, as the saying goes, and the history of Islam is not one of “the meek shall inherit the earth;” it’s the one who has the most horses gets to inherit the earth, and that was the lesson of early Islam. It’s a great question, and I’ve asked that everywhere I go. I ask these clerics, “Is Islam a religion of peace?” And they don’t get the category; they don’t understand what I mean. They say Islam is a religion of submission. You submit yourself to the will of God and out of that, all good things come. One of those things is peace. You have peace after people acknowledge and accept the rule of God over them, and God in the particular understanding that’s brought forth in the Koran. So I think that’s the slightly impolitic way of answering that question, but I think that’s the truth of the way serious Muslims see the question.

MR. CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, you know we’ve had a good session when we run over time for lunch, so please join me in thanking both of our speakers.

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The Faith Angle Forum is a program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For more information visit our website: www.faithangle.org or contact Michael Cromartie at [email protected]