ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. Jeffrey Goldberg The Atlantic April 2011 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Our speaker is the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States. He’s the author of a highly praised academic book called Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military. He is a former journalist, but also a former academic at Boston University where he was an associate professor at the Center for International Relations. We could not have anyone both as a practitioner and as a scholar better to speak to our subject this morning than Ambassador Haqqani. AMBASSADOR HUSAIN HAQQANI: Thank you very much, Michael. Let me just start by saying that there are two or three things about Radical Islam that need to be understood and are not all widely understood in the United States. Radical Islam has to be distinguished from Islam as practiced by over a billion people. One billion Muslims are not radical, and that needs to be understood, nor have many of the things that are associated with Radical Islam been part of normal Muslim practice for 1,400 years. There is a tendency in the United States these days to try and sort of link things that are happening in the modern times to things that happened in the medieval times, ignoring the fact that in the medieval times whether you were Christian or Muslim, you behaved a certain way which you do not do in the modern times. The Radical Islam phenomenon has to be understood in its actual context, which is political and not religious. Until recently—I don’t know if it’s still operating—the radical ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg April 2011 group Hizb ut-Tahrir ran a website which was www.1924.com, and I don’t know how many people in this room would be able to tell me why the website was called 1924. It’s the year that the Ottoman caliphate or the Ottoman Empire came to an end and the republic was proclaimed in Turkey. So for a lot of Radical Islamists, it is all about restoring a mythical glory from the past. It’s all about a reaction to a world in which the Muslims are not the key players. It’s all about restoring a world in which Islam is not just a religion of private practice, but a faith that drives a community that has global influence. And that needs to be understood. The big setback in Islamic history was 1258, the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols, and it is very interesting that all Radical Islamists today find their theological justification in the writings of a man who in his time was not considered very significant as a religious interpreter or scholar, a man by the name if Ibn Taymiyyah, who wrote in response to the 1258 defeat. And so this obscure scholar was rediscovered at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by people like the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, the Salafist Movement that you have probably heard of, at least the term, and then a man by the name of Abul A’la Maududi, who founded what became the Islamic Party of Pakistan or the Islamic Party of India. So the Muslim Brotherhood and these Islamic parties that arose at the beginning of the 20th century also saw Islam as the vehicle through which they would reorder the world. And then out of this grew many groups, et cetera, and I always say that somebody, some creative director at the risk of getting a fatwa against him should come up with a new version of Monty Python’s sort of Life of Brian with Islamists, you know, as the protagonists, in which sort of the front for the Liberation of Judea and the Judea Liberation Front have totally different and arcane ideological arguments between them over what happens. And you see that all the time. You see that between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, between the near enemy and the distant enemy. Who do you topple first? Who do you fight first? A distant enemy is America because it’s the global hegemon. The near enemy are the regimes or the governments, and then there is a nearer enemy which is the guy in the village who plays music, and so that’s a philosophical and ideological debate here. 2 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg April 2011 The problem in the United States has been twofold. Most Americans didn’t pay any attention to Islam until 1979 when you had the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and then you had people from the Muslim world, mainly political leaders, who had agendas who helped you, quote, unquote, understand the Muslim world. So from ’79 to about until recently, there was a sort of little, simple thumbnail—until 9/11 actually—you had a thumbnail explanation of Radical Islam. Oh, you know what? The Shi’ites, without going into the history of Shi’ism and Sunnism, the Shi’ites are the bad Muslims. The Sunnis are the okay Muslims. The Saudis are our partners. The Iranians are the bad guys, and you had that oversimplification over time. And part of it was also politically driven here. For example, the war in Afghanistan, at that time Radical Islam was seen as a potential ally, a recruitment tool for people to fight the Soviet Empire, and again, without understanding the ideological dimensions of it. I recall I was in a minority, a very small minority that at that time bothered to write in the English language that the United States should pay attention to the decommissioning, disarming and reintegration of the Mujahedeen because in 1989, ’79 to ’89, you armed, trained, supported the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, and you know, in strategic terms, it was not a bad policy. It made sense. But then you also have to see about what are these tens or hundreds of thousands of people that have been trained to fight in the name of Islam for a global Islamic revival. What are we going to do when you walk away because they are ideologically motivated. They are not like other people who will just go home, and their ideology also has a hereafter dimension. It is not just here. Last night there was a bombing in Pakistan at a shrine. Now, Pakistan, India, Central Asia, most of them have an Islamic radiation which is essentially Sufi in which you have these— it’s a bit like reverence for saints and thinking of them as interceders between God and yourself, you know, for prayer. And the Radical Islamists do not consider people who believe that, which is the vast majority, as fellow Muslims. So one approach would have been if they were really fair 3 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg April 2011 players, they would say, “We’ll try and convert the others. You know, we’ll tell them that this is not true Islam. Islam is this way. This is not the way to God. This is the other way.” But, no, they won’t do that. They will blow them up, and so 42 people were killed, but here, how insignificant it is to the understanding of the phenomenon within the Muslim world, to the United States is, the story is just a one paragraph in USA Today on page 10- A, you know, A10, whatever. Because 42 people getting killed at a shrine by Radical Muslims is not the big story. However, if an American soldier had got killed in Afghanistan, that would have been a page 1 story. So it doesn’t enable you to understand what we are going through, which is actually a civil war of ideas. It’s a civil war of ideas within the Muslim world. It’s a clash between those who consider Islam their faith and those who consider or want to articulate political ideologies in the name of religion. It is a politically motivated philosophy couched in religious terminology. That’s how I see Radical Islam. Are some of these people religious? Yes, they are, but then they also have other doctrines. For example, Islam prohibits many things specifically, like all religions do, and they justify them on grounds of, oh, this is dissimilation. We can do it. You can lie for the greater good. Now, that’s a very political view because, you know, in faith usually you do things out of moral purpose, not out of expediency. You don’t do things out of what will help you in a particular political combat. You’re not allowed to kill people just because. You see, the asymmetry of power between us and the Super Power allows us, you know. A suicide bomber is a poor man’s F-16, which is one of the clichés that these guys have, you know. And all of that is essentially political. So that’s my two cents worth on Radical Islam. That’s what you have to understand, that it’s essentially a big battle within our own societies, within our own communities. Here is where the radicals are much more assertive. There are areas where they are less assertive. 4 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg April 2011 Then there is a second sort of concentric circle of problems, which is that in some of the societies because of political reasons, again, there is anti-Americanism, and Pakistan is one of the countries where there’s rampant anti-Americanism.