The middle east is changing. Inept, autocratic secularism is on the run and strident, populist Islamism is on the rise. Across the region, long-disempowered constituencies are finding their voice and demanding an end to repression, occupation, corruption and nepotism. In two key nations, Palestine and Iraq, Islamists have taken power through the ballot-box. Shocked into action by 9/11 and swept along on a surge of neo-conservative conviction, the United States – for so long an unquestioning supporter of Arab authoritarianism – has suddenly and unexpectedly found itself in the paradoxical position of ideological ally to the prospective Islamist democrats.
Against this backdrop, the fourth US-Islamic World Forum convened on 18-20 February 2006 in the plush halls of Qatar's Ritz Carlton hotel, a marble megalith standing curiously isolated from the enormous construction site that is downtown Doha. Participants in the event, which was organised by Washington's influential Brookings Institution, came from a relatively broad geographical and professional spread, with American policy gurus and CEOs sharing floor-space with Pakistani Islamists, Palestinian civil-society activists and other prominent Muslim figures from Senegal to Indonesia. Appropriately, the forum's professed premise was to serve both as "a convening body and a catalyst for positive action", with an emphasis on practicable action rather than dialogue for the sake of it.
The objective is without doubt a noble one: to work jointly on practical measures to reduce tension and mistrust through the medium of peaceful listening and dialogue, rather than violent invasion and occupation. The combination of Hamas's election victory, the continued anger and hurt over the Danish cartoons, the deepening strife in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impending Iranian nuclear crisis meant that there was hardly a shortage of fuel for debate. With all these hot issues melting into each other through transnational networks of information and discontent, the mounting resentments between communities at all levels have been brought into sharp relief.
Open and honest debate is key to solving such issues. From the perspective of the United States, the policy of democracy-promotion in the middle east – albeit inconsistently applied – is the major new initiative designed to achieve this, overturning decades of ignoring Arab and Muslim public opinion. In that light, it was a little surprising that the theme of this year's forum was "leaders effect change". After all, surely if anyone it is the region's leaders who have consistently shown themselves to be resistant to popular demands for change. Furthermore, the idea that democracy might be a panacea that would assuage nationalist, Islamist or anti-American sentiments appears – at least in the short term – seriously mistaken. How the combination of democratic openings and Islamist popularity will affect the region, no one seems quite sure.
Perhaps, then, the theme was less an observation than a desperate call, an expression of American exasperation at the lack of internal change in many Arab states. Perhaps the carefully selected "leaders" were being urged to prove themselves to their respective constituencies back home as examples of intercultural tolerance or enlightened reform. Either way, it is a very long way from the polished ambience of elite Gulf hotels to the crowded streets of Cairo, Damascus or Tehran. Bridging this intra-regional gap between haves and have-nots is no less important an issue than bridging the perceived west-Islamic divide.
Dialogue on whose terms?
While such events are arranged with good intentions, the very notion of a US-Islamic World Forum raises three awkward concerns. First, since an estimated 7 million Americans are Muslim, and American culture – for better or worse – pervades deep into Islamic countries, the two worlds are not at all discrete, but in fact clearly overlap. For both "sides", the supposed dialogue is therefore to some extent a dialogue with oneself. This seems appropriate, since before preaching to others, those on each side might be well advised to look themselves in the eye and tackle their own shortcomings.
Naturally, this does not preclude the potential for a fruitful exchange of ideas. But (the second concern) the very terms of the debate can easily foreshorten or even obscure the variety of issues over which the nebulous idea of east-west relations casts its long shadow. Reduced to the categories of "Islam" and "the west", the dialogue risks drawing a misleading analogy between geographical and religious entities. If "the west" denotes not geography but a metaphysical value-system, this effectively implies a dichotomy between the latter as everything positive, progressive and enlightened, and Islam as negative, closed, even barbaric. Accordingly, the statements of Muslim leaders are often caught between the need to be defensively apologetic and the urge to be aggressively outspoken.
This raises the third concern, the danger of simplifying vast and complex realities into simple boxes. Which "Islamic world" are we talking to or about? To what extent is it internally coherent? Who are its spokespeople? Using the term "Islam" as a collective noun for all Muslims puts a highly diverse federation of peoples and cultures into a vague and often unhelpful basket, suggesting a misleading equivalence between the socio-economic and political development of countries as far removed as Algeria and Azerbaijan. Religious motivation is but one among many factors at stake: Islam is usually no more at fault for the errors of Muslims than Christianity can be blamed for the policies of George W Bush.
A missed opportunity
Into this treacherous terrain stepped the United States under-secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, the long-time Bush aide Karen Hughes. Hughes's reputation in the Arab world has already been tarnished by the well-publicised disaster of her first diplomatic trip to the region, during which she was criticised for a lack of basic knowledge and condescending manner with Saudi women. Unfortunately, her speech here, replete with vacuous statements about democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan while both countries continue to battle fierce insurgencies, failed to redress the balance.
The difficulty with Hughes's message to the Islamic world arose not so much through a lack of effort – she clearly believed every word she said, and even made the polite gesture of delivering one sentence in Arabic – as from naivety and inconsistent vision, compounded by an insistently preachy tone. The rather tired format of participants reading out prepared speeches is to some extent to blame for this, since it tends to produce a series of disconnected monologues rather than a genuine dialogue. Besides, Hughes's task of putting a positive spin on current US middle-east policy is hardly an easy one.
But the gap between rhetoric and reality would be comic if it were not so tragic: as the under-secretary spoke of the "tears in my eyes" at the sight of voters' purple-stained fingers in Iraq, a few hundred kilometres to the north that same country was sinking yet further into the most gruesome sectarian violence short of all-out civil war, with angry crowds marching through the streets shouting violent anti-American slogans. Was this merely a gulf in intercultural understanding, or was it sheer unwillingness to face reality?
Hughes's focus on the supposed American democracy drive in the region was to be expected, especially after decades of unquestioning support for Arab autocrats. Conveniently, any democratic stirrings in the region were routinely attributed to American influence, effectively discounting the variety of local and regional factors. These range from arbitrary events such as the death of Yasser Arafat to the groundswell of grassroots support for Islamist parties, many of whom have already significantly moderated their ideals. But the vital question of how far true democracy is possible without real sovereignty remained unanswered. In any case, Hughes was certainly not slow to congratulate the Lebanese for expressing their own popular will in ending the Syrian occupation, apparently unaware of the deep irony of her words.
An honest appraisal of the middle east's dignity deficit, and how best to solve it, would have been a far more convincing gesture of goodwill. Furthermore, at a forum aimed specifically at improving east-west relations, Hughes' hypocritical accusations of the "destabilising" role of Iran and scant recognition of the Iraqi reality elicited a less than rapturous response.
Hughes is well able to distinguish between process and outcome – supporting the idea of elections does not always mean cheering on the winners. But despite the heady talk of freedom and democracy, she could not bring herself to mention Hamas by name. Instead she accepted that the Palestinian people had conducted "free, fair and open" elections, but cautioned that a peaceful outcome depended on the two-state solution, which in turn meant the need for all parties "to renounce violence and terror, to recognise Israel's right to exist and to accept previous agreements and obligations, including the roadmap."
This may be so, but as a newly empowered and legitimised Hamas basks in its victory, such mantras cut little ice beyond the lavish lounges of Qatar's state-of-the-art hospitality. Despite the talk, no progress has been made on the Palestinian issue since 9/11, while a motley band of roaming jihadis has capitalised on popular discontent across the region to evolve into an increasingly sophisticated, media-savvy transnational force that threatens to destroy the neoconservative vision of the Middle East.
The cartoon controversy has, of course, been a colossal gift to the jihadi ideologues who are vying for moderate public opinion, and only makes Karen Hughes's job harder. But her somewhat moralistic stance on the relative absence of the cartoons in the American press ignored the inconvenient fact that some of the editors in question were under strict instructions not to do so, often in direct contrast to their wishes.
From the perspective of many Muslims, there is relatively little to distinguish between European suspicion and defamation of Islam and what is perceived – rightly or wrongly – as an outright American war on Muslim countries. As one attendee put it: "I'm willing to laugh at Osama to get my badge of respectability, but don't expect me to make fun of the Prophet."
The real issues
Honest, open communication between American and Islamic leaders is a necessary endeavour in the post-9/11 era. But dialogue and diplomacy are not the main issues. Above all, the diverse peoples of the middle east need hope for the future. They need to have their integrity, their dignity and their democratic will respected. They need social and psychological reconstruction and political and economic development. They need to be allowed to address the key challenges of poverty, knowledge and equality on their own terms. Those who might consider blowing themselves up need at least one good reason to live.
In that sense, the perceived gulf in values between the United States and the Islamic world doesn't really exist; the fact that Islamists want more democracy, not less, attests to that. As far as US influence is concerned, it is the vested interests, inconsistent policies and entrenched stereotypes that are the real problem. The Islamists are no longer at the gates, they are breaking through. The message from Muslim leaders at the US-Islamic World Forum was that constructive engagement is the only sensible option for external players who want to moderate the hardliners. As American policymakers make contingency plans for their middle-east vision, they would do well to remember the Arabic proverb: "Your friend is he who tells you the truth, not he who makes you sound truthful."
