One Good Thing About The Cairo Speech
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There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, stretching from India to Indonesia and from the United Arab Emirates to the United States, which makes Islam perhaps the world’s most heterodox faith [bold mine-DL]. ~Lee Smith
Via Matt Feeney
I will leave the speech itself for another time, but this sentence in particular has to be one of the more odd responses to it I have seen. It is all very well to acknowledge that Islam is not monolithic and that there is a variety of sects, traditions and ethnicities among Muslims around the world, but this does not imply a greater degree of heterodoxy than there is in the other comparably large (indeed larger) world religion of Christianity. Smith really means to say heterogeneous or diverse or perhaps multifaceted. Heterodox is simply the wrong word. Given that there is no single recognized teaching authority in Islam and no widely accepted institutional authority, one might expect there to be a great deal more difference of belief among Muslims than there is. That said, this does not have the political implications Smith fears.
Smith worries that Obama will lend credibility to Pan-Islamist forces by addressing Muslims in general, but Smith need not be so concerned. Hawks are always complaining that Muslims fail to show sufficient Pan-Islamic solidarity when it comes to showing gratitude to the U.S. for having come to the aid of this or that Muslim group over the years, but if we ignore for a moment the one-sided nature of such complaints we can see that a lack of Pan-Islamic solidarity is normal, much as most Christians around the world are not much bothered by what has been happening to the Copts or Chaldeans. As I remarked during the last round of caterwauling about Obama’s speech in Ankara:
It is apparently an additional requirement that anytime the U.S. fights a war that may benefit some Muslims, all Muslims must similarly be grateful, even if the U.S. wages other wars and backs other policies and governments that harm and kill many other Muslims. In other words, Americanists want Muslims to think like Pan-Islamists when it serves Washington’s purposes (i.e., when it is supposed to make Muslims favorably disposed to us), but Muslims must never think like Pan-Islamists when it doesn’t.
In any case, the fear of building up Pan-Islamist power is misplaced for the same reason that fretting about the threat from latter-day caliphalists is misguided. Smith has already hit upon one of the reasons why politically active Pan-Islamism will go nowhere: the internal divisions and differences among Muslims, which separate them by ethnicity, language, culture and sect, make Pan-Islamism as non-viable as a movement as the fictitious construct of “Islamofascism” is nonsensical propaganda. Like the fiction of a unified communist world, which conveniently ignored the national rivalries and hatreds that actually shaped the policies of communist states, the Pan-Islamist menace that Obama has supposedly helped to build up with today’s speech is imaginary and the product of exaggerating the size and nature of the threats to our security. If there is anything encouraging about the speech, which I found underwhelming for all kinds of reasons, it is that Obama showed no signs of defining America’s real enemies according to the outlines of jihadist self-presentation and refused to lend credibility to a simplified definition of jihadism that encompasses any and all Islamic resistance and revolutionary groups under some overarching banner that obliges us to make all of them our enemy.
Filed under: Islam, foreign policy, politics
29 Responses to “One Good Thing About The Cairo Speech”
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Lee Smith is one of those writers that make you scratch your head and go “how on earth did this guy become one of the medias’ go to voices on Islam?”. It’s almost as if the media don’t actually want Americans to understand Islam. I’m not all surprised that Smith doesn’t know what “heterodox” means. I am surprised he knows how to spell it.
I’m not sure why you’re “underwhelmed” by the speech, or that it even matters, since you’re not the audience. The Muslim world is, and their response is what counts. One thing you’re right about is that the Muslim world will appreciate being seen as an heterdox group, rather than a monolith, and they will appreciate the American President forcefully acknowledging this, and pledging to deal with the Muslim world accordingly, and not as some kind of single nation, people, or movement.
Except that heterodox is still the wrong word to use here, I don’t really disagree. Their response is what counts. One of the reasons I was underwhelmed is that I think it unlikely that his remarks will be all that well-received by the target audience because of where he gave the speech and some of the things he said (or didn’t say) in it. Reza Aslan has already made this point elsewhere today.
Guess what? Obama told the Muslims what they want to hear because paradoxically he cares little about what they think. Obama knows that America carries the big stick and he’s happy to throw greater Islam an oratorical bone just to keep them quiet.
Daniel is right about the infeasibility of a coherent “Pan-Islamism”. But not because of the heterogeneity of individual tribes and nations, but because of the homogeneity of Islamic dysfunction.
When the great arc of Islam is defined by learned helplessness or nihilistic Jihadism, there is not a whole lot of opportunity for the Islamic cross sections to be “Pan” about anything except bitching and moaning.
It seemed to me sort of an empty, platitudinous speech. The kind of speech that could be, and has been, said by every American President since 1980. “The Muslim world must….,” “Palestine must….,” etc.. A tabula rasa that the usual voices, pro and con, project their hopes and fears upon.
The only real policy change is that it would seem that Obama really has had enough of this Israeli settlement business. Of course, we’ve heard this before, too. We’ll see. Color me skeptical.
Count me an idiot for using the word “heterodox”. It’s an example of trying not to think of pink elephants. I meant to say, “highly variant” or something like that, but my brain inserted heterodox, precisely because that is what I was trying not to say. Oy, mushugah, I will now go to detention.
I think the only thing that actually does create a “pan-Islamic” consensus is the Palestinian issue. Take that away, and the whole thing crumbles. Which is why, I think, Obama wants to do just that. If the Palestinian issue gets resolved, Islam falls apart as a political force with any united set of values and intentions. Then, find a way to stop being dependent on oil, and then the economic force behind it falls away as well. Pretty soon you are just left with people and their various forms of culture. Then it becomes much easier to deal with them on a human level.
“I think the only thing that actually does create a “pan-Islamic†consensus is the Palestinian issue. Take that away, and the whole thing crumbles.”
I highly doubt that political Islam would wane in influence with the resolution of the Palestinian issue. It might wane in influence if a cheap alternative to oil is discovered but It is an ideology and ideologies do not just disappear until they are either exhausted or stop having patrons to promote them.
Yes, but if by “political islam” you mean jihadism, that’s already a marginal influence that’s highly dependent on the feeling of victimization, which in turn is largely dependent on the Palestinian situation. What keeps that “political islam” in place as a unifying Islamic rallying cry is this concerted conflict in Palestine. Without it, Islam will obviously remain, and obviously have a political dimension, but it won’t have a center, a rallying point for opposition to the west. It will become ordinary. And without huge amounts of petrodollars, it won’t be able to sustain the political influence it currently has, either externally or internally. In many of these states, political Islam is a luxury sustained only by oil revenues and organized around the Palestinian victimization symbolism.
The Palestinian situation is indeed a focal point for Islamic politicization. But if that problem were solved, the Islamic world would simply shift its pathological focus back to the very existence of Israel. As long as Israel exists, Islamic leadership can conveniently ignore the rot within their own individual countries. The problem is intractable, because political Islam is intractable.
“it is that Obama showed no signs of defining America’s real enemies according to the outlines of jihadist self-presentation and refused to lend credibility to a simplified definition of jihadism that encompasses any and all Islamic resistance and revolutionary groups under some overarching banner that obliges us to make all of them our enemy.”
Wow, give the group a little push at the end of the post and they go running off the cliff.
Political Islamic groups’ goal, like all other political groups, is to get power. [conradg - that does not make them jihadis] The Arab practitioners currently have none because the political power in Arab countries has squashed it. (Petro-dollars?!? Which Arab Islamist group has state oil revenues?) The Palestinian situation is actually used by those Arab states to redirect home-grown anger toward Israel and the West. Take it away and Political Islam will redouble its efforts for local political power. al-Qaeda’s strategic brilliance is to embrace the Arab states’ redirecting game and focus on the “Far Enemy,” us. But that doesn’t change the fact that al-Qaeda does not recognize the legitimacy of a single Arab state.
Obama’s speech contained statements that drive a wedge in between legitimate (non-violent) Islamists and Salafist jihadis. That is one of many reasons to be very whelmed at his speech.
BTW Daniel, that last statement is way off base, a rarity for you. Can you elaborate?
Oops, I’m an idiot – missed the “no.” Daniel, I completely agree with your last statement. The other commenters didn’t seem to get it though.
I am assuming that a resolution to the Palestinian situation can’t happen unless arab governments acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, and this becomes accepted by the Palestinians themselves. Israel is certainly not going to participate in the creation of a Palestinian state if the right of the Israel state to exist is not fully acknowledged.
The notion that some problems are intractable only exists as long as the problems exist. Once they are resolved, we miraculously discover that the problem was never actually intractable. I can point to numerous recent intractable problems – the Cold War, Apartheid in South Africa, the Northern Ireland, to name just a few – which turned out to be in reality quite tractable.
Re: “The notion that some problems are intractable only exists as long as the problems exist.”
Well that solves everything.
Nothing like a shot of twisted logic to kick off a weekend…
Steve, you’re the guy with the twisted logic, as if giving some problem the label “intractable” makes it so. There are solved problems, and unsolved problems. None are intractable.
conradg, I see what you are saying. But if pigs had wings they could fly. And statistical thermodynamics tells us that a poker put into a fire has a positive probability of becoming cooler on the hotter end.
Validating the feasibility of an improbable event is all well and good. Just don’t put any money on it…
SteveM
I just gave your three examples of political problems that were previously thought to be intractable. Somehow, those pigs did acquire wings and fly. Fancy that.
In fact, let me elaborate. The basic notion you seem to be operating under, is that the longer a problem remains unsolved, the more likely it is that the probem is insoluable, and will never be solved. I’d suggest that opposite is the case in politics. When a problem is new, there’s very little chance of it being solved. However, the longer a problem persists, the greater the odds of it being solved. Unless, of course, the problem never gets very bad at all, and can be tolerated. But when a problem persists for a very long time, and it gets very bad, the chances of it being solved get pretty good – just when people like you think it’s “intractable”.
Take a look at the problems I cited. THe Cold War was actually at its worst just before it was solved. Reagan’s military escalation had the Soviets in desperation mode. Andropov was seriously considereing a nuclear first strike, just before he died. It’s probably the case that he was murdered by Kremlin insiders to prevent that from happening. And then, viola, in a few short years the whole thing is basically solved and goes away. I never expected that to happen in my lifetime. WHich is just the point.
No one ever expected South African apartheid to end peacefully either. But just when things were getting to their worst state, the solution dawned to this “intractable” problem and it was over.
I’m not an optimist about the Middle East, but the very desperateness and length of the problem is the very reason there’s actual hope here. Politics is not like physics. Nothing that happens is an independent random event, as the molecular heating of iron rods is. Solutions tend to appear when things are worst, not when conditions are best.
Another example would be health care in the US. We are probably very close to a health care bill precisely because this problem has dragged on for so long.
The basic notion is that stress builds slowly, but when it cracks, it happens quickly. Long term stressful problems are actually less likely to stay that way forever. Something usually gives at some point. People are always wrong when they call a problem “intractable”. It’s a false analysis of the situation. There are many ways the middle east situation could be resolved in a reasonable period of time, like the ending of the cold war. It just takes a little imagination, and applying the right kind of force.
conradg,
Well OK, the world can wait patiently for some kind of “reversion toward the mean” related to dopey, dysfunctional Muslims and Jim Crow wanna be Israelis. But the fundamental question is, what is the U.S. stake in it?
Cold War – our business. Northern Ireland – not our business. South Africa – not our business.
“Rescuing” Islamic dysfunctional dopes – our business?
Subsidizing Israeli Jim Crow Wanna Be’s – our business?
Hand me the hot poker on the cold end…
Problem would have been solved long ago but for the stranglehold of AIPAC upon our craven Congress. Let’s see how long it takes for Obama to cave on the settlement issue. My prediction is under 2 weeks.
Regurgitating the strange history of America’s involvement in the Middle East is a long story, but however irrational it might seem, we are where we are, as are the Israelis and Palestinians, and there’s little question that right now, these things do indeed factor into our own national security and national interests, on many levels. Resolving the problem would greatly help us, whereas not resolving it has obvious drawbacks for us, and keeps us very vulnerable.
The U.S. can’t just “go paleo” all of a sudden. Even if one wants that as a goal, getting there means resolving these kinds of entanglements, and not creating new ones, until we are free of this kind of mess.
Hal,
You are quite right on the first point. On the second, it appears Obama has a lot more support than you might suspect. I don’t think he’s taken this tack without considerable forethought, and getting considerable backing. AIPAC is finding it harder than they thought to find allies on the settlements issue. More likely scenario is for Netanyahu to either cave, or be voted out, and Kadima comes in.
I am second to none in enjoying conrradg’s comments here. But SteveM is, I think , correct. The Palestinians do not accept Israel’s right to exist….and why should they?….and Israel does not accept their duty to lay down and die. You can’t just wish that away.
It also is not helpfull blaming everything on AIPAC and likeminded entities…. I am far from a friend to the Israeli govt., but even I am not willing to see them wiped out.
So…..I think we pull a China….Let the parties know that their are some things that will get out attention, such as actual combat, and that otherwise we will steer clear. As Israel has a vast military advantage to begin with, that wouldn’t even be as even-handed as it sounds.
The israel/Palestine situation is Tar-Baby. You don’t have to be Pat Buchanan to realize that you don’t want to be stuck there. Ignore Krauthammer, NRO, Frum. et al.
jetan,
thanks, and thought I’m not optimistic, I think the basic path to resolution involves letting go of the past and looking at where one’s own best interests lie. At some point, the Palestinians do have to accept Israel’s existence, like it or not. They have nukes, for God’s sake. They aren’t going anywhere. And at some point Israel has to accept the fact that they can’t keep on as they are and find peace and happiness. Both parties have much more to gain by making a peace than they do from continuing war. They could actually create a very prosperous region, rather than a hellish one. They don’t have to address all previous wrongs, they just have to create something that works for now and into the future. I’m not saying they’ll wake up tomorrow and forget all that’s happened, but it’s probably getting easier, just by the sheer weight of all that’s gone on. At a certain point, you can’t carry all those resentments around anymore. It’s backbreaking. One desires relief. And there’s no other outlet for relief other than peace. Decisive war is simply not possible in this situation, and that should be obvious to everyone.
Now, of course we don’t want to be stuck there, but we are. Failing to recognize that, and fantasizing that we can just walk away, doesn’t get us out of the situation. We have huge commitments there, and constituencies much larger than AIPAC that demand we stay involved. The only way for us to get out is to get the situation resolved. Otherwise, we are just dreaming. The fact that we don’t want to be stuck there should motivate us to get it resolved, because that’s the only way for us to get disentangled.
Well, I don’t see that the Palestinians have to accept anything. Time is very much on their side. Every day their hand gets stronger, demographically speaking. Israel’s nukes are meaningless…..can you imagine how convulsive the world’s reaction would be were Israel to use nukes on any of its neighbors? I don’t believe that they will use nukes except in their last extremity. Besides Iran will be nuked up in a minute, and then maybe the whole region.
And the Palestinians really do believe, from the very bottom of their hearts, that Israel is illegitimate. Talking about how much better off the Palestinians would be if they just made nice sort of misses the point….they are acting on a super-rational level and they don’t, collectively, care about being better off – they care about winning. This is how Fatah ends up being the moderate party.
Let me point out, if it isn’t clear already, that I am deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian position. I don’t look forward to the destruction of Israel or anything like that but I do understand where the Palestinians are coming from. As to backbreaking resentments, the Serbs and Croats seem to have no problem carrying their monkey around, so I can’t see why the Palestinians couldn’t do it for another century or so.
I invoke Israel’s nukes to show that the state of Israel is impervious to any military attack. That state isn’t going to be destroyed by insurgents lobbing rockets over the border. The days when Arab nations banded together to attack Israel en masse is forever over. Israel is here to stay.
The demographic issue is troublesome to Israel, but by any objective messure, the Palestinians have been getting weaker and weaker over the years, not stronger. But certainly they are not going away. That doesn’t mean Israel is going to let demographics overwhelm them. They will simply continue with a paralyzed West Bank and Gazan occupation, keeping them utterly weak and divided with checkpoints and walls and blockades.
Look, I’m sympathetic to the Palestinian cause as well. It made no sense to compensate the murder of millions of Jews in Europe by creating a state for them in Palestine. Why not give them Bavaria or Sudentanland? But that’s all past, we are where we are, and the solution won’t come by pretending Israel and the Jews in Palestine are going away. It really doesn’t matter what the Palestinians believe in the bottoms of their hearts, any more than what the Jews believe in the bottoms of their hearts. Politics is rather heart-breaking. How many more hearts must be broken on both sides? Eventually, they both have to accept the reality of a livable compromise.
But you’re right, the Palestinians could continue to base their entire politics on resentment virtually forever. I just think there’s at least more hope than appears to be the case. The cold war could also have gone on for another century, so could apartheid, or segregation, or the troubles of Northern Ireland. But even the Croats and Serbs have made compromises for long periods of time. The Jews and Palestinians, comparably speaking, have a much milder history than many other conflicted groups. The Israeli occupation, nasty as it has been, has been much milder than many other military occupations and land disputes in the past. And the Israeli culture is much more amenable to genuine peace settlements than many others. Look at the deal with Sadat and Egypt. If Palestinians ever get the good sense to go Gandhi on the Israelis, they will win far more than they ever could by violence and resentment. Not that they will. Much as I sympathize with their plight, I think it remains the case that they are the greater obstacle to a peaceful settlement than the Israelis.
Sadat was murdered. Likewise Rabin. Both the victims of deep atavistic impulses. What folks think in the bottom of their hearts matters a lot if it means that the most progressive figures involved are going to be executed in broad daylight.
The Cold War and South Africa are not, I think, examples that support your thesis. Those were zero sum games in which there were clear winners and losers, wouldn’t you say?
I further think that your confidence in the impregnability of Israel is quite misplaced. Yes, at this juncture no one can contest them in battle, though it would appear that Iran has “good and realistic hopes” to rewrite that equation. Once Iran nukes up…..and it seems to me quite clear that no one is prepared to stop them….well, then, game on as we used to say. But even minus frontal military action, there are enough loose nuclear weapons that I wouldn’t buy any property in Tel Aviv.
I applaud your (comparative) optimism. We need that, and I wish that I shared it. My read, unfortunately, is that Israel is in deep shit….pretty much the only thing that I agree on with that Netanyahu thug.
You assert that the day is past when all the Arab and Persian nations could band together to fight Israeli forces. It is possible we may soon see…..I would imagine the idea of a preemptive strike on Iran has some non-theoretical currency within at least some voices in the govt., to say nothing of in the Knesset. What do you think the reaction would be on the part of the Saudis or the Egyptians? I think they would have to attack. I further believe that Russia and China would support. Daniel Larison is correct when he says that a pan-Islamic combination can’t happen on it’s own initiative, but that doesn’t mean that one couldn’t be created. Needless to say, the scenario I am devising would immediately put Iran in pole position as de facto leader of the Muslim world.
Maybe I’m just engaging in paranoid fantasizing, a la Robert Stacy McCain. I certainly hope so, and the folks here are just the people to bring me back to reality if I am. But all of the above sounds depressingly realistic to me.
P.S. -
For some reason the idea of a Jewish homeland in Sudentanland tickled my funny bone. Thanks for my first smile of the day.
At a certain point, I think, atavistic impulses self-destruct, and the impulse to live a better life takes over. How else to explain South Africa’s decision to end apartheid? They could have fought that out to the bloody end as well, but they didn’t, because they realized it would end badly for all of them that way. The Cold War is more complex, but ending it was good for both sides. The fact that Russia declined is not due to having “lost” the Cold War, but to having mismanaged their country in its aftermath. No one in Russia today actually thinks that returning to Cold War tensions is in Russia’s interests.
At a certain point, atavism exhausts itself. I can’t say when that will happen, but it certainly could be sooner than most people think. There will always be dead enders, but we’re talking about the mood of a people here, not the extremists alone. Yes, Sadat was killed, so were Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but what they died for lived on and triumphed. I hope the same can be true of Rabin.
As for nukes, I can hardly imagine that Iran would actually launch a nuclear war against Israel. If they did, they would certainly lose, and their country would be destroyed, and what remains would not be at all friendly towards the clerics who brought on their country’s nuclear annihilation. Israel has over 200 of the most sophisticated nukes. Iran will have at best a few crude fission weapons. And no, I can’t imagine Saudi Arabia or the Egyptians attacking Israel if they pre-emptively strike Iran. In fact, I think they would secretly love it if Israel did that, since Iran is their regional rival, not their ally. They don’t want to see a nuclear Iran any more than Israel does. And they certainly don’t want to be drawn into a nuclear war with Israel, especially in that they don’t have any nukes themselves. You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.
And yeah, a Jewish State in the Sudentenland does have a certain light-hearted ring to it.