Joan Smith: I want to start with good news. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian academic and human rights campaigner who has already spent fourteen months in prison, convicted in two separate trials on charges of corruption and defaming the country, has just been released from prison with his sentence overturned and his name cleared.
Gilles, you know Professor Ibrahim, and indeed began your return to the Middle East after 9/11 with a visit to Egypt. Why was that?
Gilles Kepel: My very first book was on Islamic movements in Egypt. The Society of the Muslim Brothers, created in 1928, was the cradle of the Islamist movement in its present form. After the trauma of 11 September, a certain spiritual need arose in me to ‘go back to the roots’, in two senses: first, to the country where it all began (even if the Muslim Brothers today cannot be held accountable for 9/11); and second, to the roots of my own investigations into this universe – because of course, 9/11 challenged everyone’s views about those phenomena and about the relationship between the Muslim world and the west.
A return to Egypt
Joan Smith: You describe your meeting in Egypt with the Muslim Brother Issam al-Erian, who was imprisoned for five years for his views. What reactions to 9/11 did you expect from him? Were you surprised?
Gilles Kepel: No, I wasn’t surprised. I first met Issam al-Erian in Egypt in the 1980s. Indeed I wrote about him in that first book. He is perhaps slightly older than me – in his fifties – and was then a leader of the Islamist Association of Students’ Movements. But at that time, those people did not meet foreigners, and I only met him later.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Issam al-Erian are at opposite ends of the spectrum, but the latter has said publicly that he thought the trial of Ibrahim unjust. In the book I discussed at the Institut Francais last year, Jihad – the trail of political Islam, I tried to explain the rift within Islamist movements in the 1990s: between the radicals who had launched themselves on a crash course leading indeed to 9/11, and the moderates who were trying to extend a hand to middle-class secularists. So, when al-Erian expressed his sympathy for Saad Eddin Ibrahim, I was interested in seeing to what extent this was precisely what he was doing.
He too had spent some time in prison. I wanted to know whether this had allowed him to rethink his Islamist credentials and their legacy. In short, I wanted to know if this had put some water in, if not his wine, then at least his tea. This would be a sign that there were changes in the movement.
Joan Smith: There are of course many Islamists in prison in Egypt, something like 16,000 political prisoners, many of whom don’t support violence and have never advocated violence. Would you have expected that factor to increase in response to the events of 9/11?
Gilles Kepel: These are two separate things. 9/11 was perceived as something not really related to what was happening in Egypt. How shall I put it? It was a spectacle which took everybody by surprise – those twin towers exploding was a kind of show which came suddenly out of nowhere.
But the relationship with Islamism was not apparent at the beginning. The event appeared to strike a chord in a number of young people. They felt they could identify with this image: it gave expression to their feelings of resentment, of frustration. Some young people were happy that the west had been dealt a terrible blow. At the same time, they were full of remorse at the 3,000 dead. At that point they would say: “It’s not us. It’s our enemies who did it – the Mossad, or the Israelis, or a CIA plot”. It was all very confused.
Then you had Osama bin Laden making his declaration on al-Jazeera television on 7 October 2001, saying that there was this brave vanguard of Muslims who had attacked the impious west and that the west would not sleep in peace for as long as Israeli troops were in Palestine and Iraqi children were under attack.
So 9/11 was only vaguely related to Egypt at first. But after a while – mainly through the person of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s second-in-command, an Egyptian who has had a long history of involvement in Islamist movements in the country – people slowly started making the connection.
Joan Smith: One of the interesting things you find travelling around the Middle East in the wake of these events is young people expressing sympathy for bin Laden – even if it does not last very long?
Gilles Kepel: Many young women in particular were really enthusiastic about bin Laden. He became a sort of symbol, even with a certain aura of sexual potency.
I heard a famous nuqta or joke in Egypt: “A woman in a restaurant needs to go to the toilet. She goes to the men’s toilets, but the waiter says ‘Oh no, Madame, you cannot go there, you have to use the other one’, and she asks ‘Why? Are you telling me that bin Laden is hiding in those toilets?’ ‘Why no, he isn’t there’, and so she replies, ‘Well I can go then – because he’s the only man left in the Muslim world.’ There are different versions, more in tune with traditional mores, or more refined versions where she goes to the hamam on the men’s day. This is something for anthropologists of the nuqta in the future!
I went to Egypt, then back to Paris to teach, then travelled again to Lebanon, Syria and the Emirates. Most of the book was written between early October and mid-December: the span of time when the attack on Afghanistan took place. I was in the Emirates, Dubai or Abu Dhabi when Mazar-i-Sharif fell and Kabul was conquered. At that point, enthusiasm for bin Laden and the Taliban regime disappeared. Back in Egypt, I revisited the same groups of students I had seen in early October when there had been some level of enthusiasm; by December it seemed totally extinct.
What struck me was that 9/11 had proved unable to trigger a significant mobilisation – these were just words, enthusiasm and fantasies. They went nowhere.
Joan Smith: Can you expand on this interesting suggestion that bin Laden is in some ways a phallic figure, a successful masculinising figure, in the Middle East?
Gilles Kepel: There is a saying about Saudi Arabia, that it is a country with many ‘zeros’ – people with neither political influence nor money. Counterposed to them, there are the heroes, and bin Laden is the ultimate heroic figure, a point of identification for many: the fighter.
To some extent, this illustrates the demise of the former heroic figures of the Middle East, like Gamal Abdel Nasser. In many cases – particularly in the socialist or ex-socialist countries – military regimes were seen as embodying the resistance of the Arab world against colonialism, against the west, against Israel. However, over time, they came to be regarded as doing nothing, as being impotent in the face of Israeli or US policy.
Into this vacuum surged the figure of Osama bin Laden, and this struck an immediate chord with the masses.
Joan Smith: This question of imagery seems to me important. When I went to Syria last May, I thought there was slightly less iconography of Bashar al-Assad than there had been of his father – though still quite a lot. The example of Iraq is well-known. These leaders consciously compare themselves with figures in the past: so Saddam Hussein has used the fact that he comes from the same town – Tikrit – as Saladin. This is a very regressive form of reinvention, is it not?
Gilles Kepel: Yes. In Syria today, there are a number of places where images of Hafiz al-Assad (the father) are presented along together with Basil (the dead son) and Bashar (the son who survives, and current ruler). This reminds the Alawi minority in power in Syria of their own holy trinity.
On a similar level, bin Laden’s 7 October 2001 declaration on al-Jazeera television is highly revealing. First you see him sitting in front of the cave in the mountains of the Hindu Kush or Tora Bora, with his few companions; then the camera pans onto the skies and on the cave. The way he talks, the way he is dressed, his style and demeanour – all these in my view are designed precisely to make his believing viewers identify him with the Prophet Mohammed.
The latter fled from impious Mecca (modern Saudi Arabia), run by the ‘hypocrites’. Bin Laden took the path not to Medina, but to its symbolic counterpart, the Hindu Kush mountains. As the Prophet had a small group of partisans – and because he was courageous, wise, and a believer – he was able to return to Mecca after the hijra, the ‘holy flight’. In the same way, we are meant to believe that bin Laden will be able to defeat the superior forces of his enemies, the pagans of the day – the Americans – and come back to reconquer Mecca for Islam. In short, this film was a very careful and thoughtful use of traditional imagery, through the most modern of media, satellite television.
Joan Smith: Yet when you travelled around the Gulf states, talking to a range of authorities on Islam, most of them seemed keen to distance themselves from bin Laden’s version of Islam.
Gilles Kepel: This is true of the ones who would talk to me. But others would not necessarily want to talk to me, or the local authorities would not help me gain access to them. The ulema who had real scholarly status and also significant popular outreach and charisma would certainly distance themselves from 9/11; other more minor or radical ulema would not.
The one I particularly wanted to see was a scholar who had been with the Muslim Brothers in the 1980s and is still associated with them: Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He is the most prominent, not televangelist but tele-agonist in the region. He has a weekly programme on al-Jazeera TV, on Sundays, Al-Shari’a wa al-Hayat (‘Sharia and Life’). It is very popular, and unlike religious programmes on English or French television which preach moral values at you, it covers absolutely everything.
It is both a religious programme and a Saturday night talk show. The week before I interviewed him, he had discussed oral sex – is it licit or not in Islam between a married couple? In Islam, as in Judaism, the codifying impulse of legal-religious strictures is a prominent feature of society; even intimate acts are declared licit or illicit. And he said oral sex within marriage was licit. So, this kind of thing brings him a huge constituency, as you can imagine.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi told me that the perpetrators of 11 September 2001 could not lay claim to the mantle of martyrdom; they had committed suicide, and hence they were burning in hellfire. He himself had seen that it was not necessary to wage jihad against the west, because the west was clearly a hunting ground for converts, ripe for proselytisation.
He complained that people like himself had made so many converts in the west, only to have Osama bin Laden pull the rug from beneath his feet. He told me that Islam was against the slaughter of civilians.
The problem with this, is that he had previously issued a religious edict – a fatwa – saying that suicide attacks against Israel were licit and their authors were indeed martyrs. How to resolve the contradiction? He replied that Israel is Muslim land (Dar al-Islam), taken over or usurped by infidels: it was legitimate to wage jihad to reclaim it. Moreover, Israelis are not civilians, because all citizens are drafted into the army, even if they are in civilian clothes.
This is a fine example of how casuistic systems of religion and politics function. This allowed me to understand how the conservative establishment of scholars leaning towards the Muslim Brothers would deal firmly with the bin Laden issue, whilst standing firm on the Palestinian issue – even giving the latter’s suicide attacks legitimacy.
Negotiating the clash of civilisations
Joan Smith: An aside about Samuel Huntington in your book amused me. His notorious book A Clash of Civilisations shot up the New York Times best-seller list after 9/11. It is a quite tendentious thesis – but you point out that it is actually quite popular amongst the Islamists themselves.
Gilles Kepel: It is a best-seller in the Muslim world also. Islamists precisely feel legitimised by his view – because if there is a clash of civilisations, then those putting up opposition to the west are the rightful spokesmen of Muslim identity.
Huntington takes no account of the fact that Muslim identity in the world today – just like British or French identity – is largely a social construct, made up of tradition, inherited data, how people see, feel, eat. All this is brushed away by a Huntingtonian view that is fascinated only by the ‘essence’ of civilisations.
In discussion about Islam, recent works of sociology and anthropology are all too often ignored. By this logic, all Muslims are alike; they see Islam as their driving force; and they face ‘the west’.
In my own, more down to earth, travelogue, I tried to grasp the fragile reality of the construction of personal identity among some Muslims, some Middle Easterners today. I wanted to point out that this involved more than just putting someone into a box because of his religious origins. Of course there may be conflict and clash; but the lines of conflict are drawn not only between the so-called west and so-called Islam, but within the Muslim world itself.
And, I might add, also within the west! You only have to look at the clash of civilisation today between the ‘Brits’ and the ‘Frogs’ – far more in evidence than it is between Islam and the west!
Joan Smith: Well, I would say that a lot of us here tonight are probably on the side of the French! But this spat within the UN Security Council is very interesting, isn’t it, because the old colonial powers, France and Britain, are having to decide their stance on what many see as the new imperial power. How do you feel as a French Arabist – does it make any difference to you, than if you were, say, an English or an American Arabist?
Gilles Kepel: Well, I did not choose to be a French Arabist. But most of my British colleagues fled to America in the Thatcher years, and in America today, the world of ‘orientalism’ is in a sort of crisis.
The key problem is that in the US you have to take sides, much more than in France. Research funding and tuition payments in the US invariably have strings attached. Either you are the Custodian of the Two Holy Places professor or the Jewish Foundation professor of Middle Eastern studies; you are obliged to start all your courses either with ‘In the name of King Fahd’ or ‘In the name of Sharon’. So to a large extent, research in the US has become hostage to these two camps.
There is furious debate about that. The pro-Israelis take issue with those they consider hostages to Arab money, and vice versa. This is something we in France have not had to go through. We are ‘poor but dignified’, if you will (laughs). In this field at least, nothing much has been done to enable private money to enter the education system. So we have felt much less need to be aligned.
And I must say, I take great pride in being insulted from both sides. In my first book, The Prophet and the Pharaoh, I argued that Islamist movements were an important phenomenon, and had to be reckoned with (not that I gave them sympathetic treatment). This was not at all well-received. The Arab left thought that I was proposing that there was an alternative to them, and lambasted me as a reactionary Zionist – an example of the kind of reductive orientalism that argues that Islamists are the true representatives of Muslim identity, and so on. Afterwards, there came attacks from the other side, the pro-Israelis.
I learnt then that one way of surviving as an Arabist is to be a sort of tightrope walker. If suddenly one side stops attacking you, you need to wonder what you are doing wrong, regain your balance, and start saying the things they do not like.
The American neo-conservatives’ project
Joan Smith: Edward Said, not long after 9/11, referred to a sudden US interest in the Koran, though he said he would not recommend it to the west as an introductory guide. Has there been a real upsurge of intellectual interest in the US in Islam, or do you think it has been curtailed by the idea that Islam is a religion of terrorism?
Gilles Kepel: I do not want to sound anti-American – I am not. But in my experience as a professor in the United States in the 1990s, I was amazed at how little the graduate kids I supervised – who were supposed to be specialising in the Middle East in Ivy League universities – actually knew.
Some of my American colleagues said that it was not surprising – standards had fallen because the Middle East was no longer perceived as an area of crisis, thus there would be no jobs in it, so good students were ill-advised to choose this area of study.
The levels of funding also went down. A friend of mine, a professor in Middle East studies, told me a story. When he was trying to raise funds in the late 1990s he called a man in charge of a foundation. The big man said ‘No, I’m sorry, I’m interested in China – I have no time to see you.’ This same chap called my friend on 12 September 2001 and said ‘I’d like to have lunch with you’. The professor said to him ‘I thought you were interested in China,’ and the caller hung up.
Not everyone feels able to act like this; and now there are millions of people with doctorates. But what mainly interests them is either anti-terrorism, or polemics about the Koran, or seeking the key to social behaviour through reading the religious scriptures.
It is definitely the case that an understanding of the essentials and the interpretations of the scriptures is essential to understanding the drama and rhetoric which bin Laden deploys to such good use – such as his mimicry of the Prophet on al-Jazeera. To understand how this use of cultural tools might be able to mobilise people, you have to know what the texts are about, and what kind of images they ignite in people’s minds. Nevertheless, in my view, the key to understanding people’s attitudes lies mainly in the social fabric. If you think that reading the Koran will help you to understand bin Laden – well it is not untrue, but it is partial.
Moreover, I would say that equally a grasp of the American neo-conservative world view is essential. I was forcibly struck by this when I met a number of its proponents on a recent trip to America: there is an account of this journey in the English edition of my new book.
What struck me was that they have, as everybody is now beginning to see, a sort of strategic world view which to some extent is a remake of the world view they had in the days of the Soviet empire. Many of them are, after all, the same people. They have no significant knowledge about what is unfolding, culturally and socially, within the Middle East. They think of this region as another former Soviet Union – as if civil society in the Middle East and Poland or Russia were comparable. Of course there are elements of comparison: we are all human beings. Nevertheless, there are a number of disparities which the neo-cons simply have not taken into consideration. And this is probably one reason why things in the Middle East might turn out to be a little more complex than the Pentagon people expect.
Joan Smith: Jacques Chirac was greeted by enthusiastic crowds on his recent visit to Algeria. As you pointed out, a lot of the shouting was about visas. Is that one of the things which in your view the Americans haven’t taken into account – the pressure from people who want to get out, but can’t?
Gilles Kepel: In a way, the Americans have understood this. The hawks’ belief in the need for a new order in the Middle East precisely responds to an assumption that that the whole of Middle Eastern youth today is disenchanted with their respective regimes, seeing them only as slave elites which they want to escape from.
To some extent 9/11 signalled the end of the ‘visa period’. In France it had already ground to a halt before that, after the bombs planted in the Paris metro by an Algerian radical Islamist group in the mid-1980s. After that, there were significant restrictions on visas for people from north Africa. Now America and the rest of the world have caught up. If you are a young Arab male who is not connected with someone who has a visa, it is almost impossible to travel to the west. People feel trapped; they can’t escape.
What are the alternatives? Either they turn to violent movements of social revolt that could be taken over by Islamist radicals, or try and make what they see on TV come true. In the Middle East today it is hugely important that everyone can watch satellite television. In the most retrograde, toughest parts of Algeria, or even the Gulf, you have satellite dishes, access to Turkish porn channels late into the night, not to mention CNN or BBC World. This shapes your identity. All the good life and bounties of the west are there in your home, on the street, but they are not available. It is all the more frustrating.
The agenda of the neo-cons responds directly to this. Its line of thinking is: “Right, we must engineer regime change in Iraq. We’re going to put those modern middle classes in power, and they will be in charge of some sort of take-off in the Middle East which will make some goodies available to the lower orders in the area – so they will not have to emigrate. And we will also thereby remove this threat of violent insurgency, motivated by the idea of an anti-western alternative.”
For other neo-cons, this is wishful thinking – they are only concerned with control of the oil fields. We will soon see how all this works out. But it seems clear to me that the neo-con view of the world very much takes into account the fact that the elites on which the west in general (and the US in particular) have relied in this region since 1945, have not been able to deliver. They are ‘failed states’, or just ‘failed ruling groups’. Whatever we may think is the ultimate cause behind the Iraq war, we cannot ignore this part of the hawks’ diagnosis. If these are failed states, 9/11 was thus the ultimate symptom of the pathology of the Middle East today.
At first the US dealt with the symptoms militarily, tracking the Taliban down and getting rid of them. Now they say they want to deal with the causes of the disease. Whether there is a further hidden agenda – well, that is open for discussion. But clearly, whether or not there is a stronger pro-Israeli faction in government than before, key people in Washington believe their own diagnosis that there has to be a major change in the structure of power in the Middle East. I guess this is a hard fact.
Dialectics of control and freedom
Joan Smith: I have noticed in my recent dealings with the British Foreign Office more and more references to ‘failed states’. The attitude is, ‘We don’t have to worry about the old-fashioned strong, centralised state any more, because the problem is the failed state.’ I actually think it is both – certainly from the human rights point of view. The kind of countries we in PEN still have most problems with are the old-fashioned, great, tough nation states. But the neo-con theory assumes that democracy in one country can be inserted successfully into another – a kind of benign domino theory – where it will then spread. But is there any kind of civil society in Saudi Arabia, say, that is ready to be friendly to democracy?
Gilles Kepel: Well, this is not certain even in Iraq itself. There is an old saying in the Arab world: ‘Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes, and Iraq reads’. Iraq had an educated class, water and oil in abundance; it had an urban, educated society. Many among the Pentagon hawks considered it a more reliable ally than the so-called ‘tribes’ of Saudi Arabia.
Now the problem is that after twenty-four years of Saddam Hussein in power, with the massive successive purges, and the flight of anyone with something to say; after twelve years of embargoes, which have hit those middle classes very hard – is there in Iraq today some sort of a civil society on which a decent regime can be built?
This is the quandary for the US, seeking a regime change which nonetheless keeps the national fabric of Iraq together. The logic of their concern with power, order and control is of course hardly consistent – it is indeed very detrimental to any ideas of civil society. For if you need the former Ba’ath officers, who suddenly turn pro-American overnight, to keep Iraq together so that people will not settle scores – then why talk about civil society? The American fear is that if it opens the gates of social upheaval, the only people who know how things work in Iraq and have a chance of building obedient constituencies are those currently in power. The returning exiles have no roots in society any more, and so will be unable to control the civil order. The decisions facing the United States here are crucial.
Joan Smith: We now have an international criminal court – even if the Americans have not signed up to it – and the upper echelons of the Ba’ath party are people who have committed war crimes. Is there a way forward here?
Gilles Kepel: Sure. Some people will want to apply the standards that were set for Yugoslavia and Rwanda to, now, Iraq. This will be difficult in the context of opposition from within the Arab world and allegations that George W. Bush himself is the author of an illegal war against Iraq which makes him liable to prosecution. This is a Pandora’s box.
Joan Smith: But can the Ba’ath party be removed from Iraq and then left in place in Syria?
Gilles Kepel: I would say that the Syrian regime, like other regimes of the area, is trying to buy an insurance policy for its survival. The Saudis, who have been targeted in the US media over recent months and even years, are now furnishing evidence that they alone can produce enough oil for America to sustain its military campaign without the price of oil skyrocketing. This is a sign to American business that whatever the hawks are saying about their connections with bin Laden, you will have a problem if we are ousted.
Syrians more or less behave the same way. They have shared intelligence with the US, who know how little they are concerned about human rights (this is an understatement). They also indicate that they have some influence over radical groups in the region, and that if they are permitted to strike a deal with the US that allows them to survive, then they will be helpful in any situation where US or British forces are exposed.
The strategy and tactics of the neo-cons are not exactly on the same timetable, which makes things quite complicated. They have a long-term agenda, but to realise it they will probably have to make short-term compromises which run contrary to their original aims.
For instance, they say their primary aim is to build democracy. But in 1991, having already encouraged upheaval in the south and Kurdish regions of Iraq, they then did not lift a finger to prevent the Republican guard crushing those rebels mercilessly. There is a memory of these events in the region; people do not forget. So nowadays there is a widespread feeling throughout the Middle East that after toppling Saddam Hussein, the upper crust of the regime will simply be replaced by American generals, leaving the administration substantially in place: that in Kurdistan, to secure Turkish support, constraints will be placed on Kurdish self-determination. The major issues raised by this are so unclear. To date, you can hardly say that the message has been well managed.
After the interview there was a discussion with the audience. Here are some extracts.
1991 and 2003: pivots of geopolitics
First question: What do you think of the neo-con argument about an Iraq/al-Qaida link? Nothing has been proven. Isn’t Iraq only the beginning of their project for a reassertion of American hegemony in the world?
Gilles Kepel: Clearly, America’s assertion of its sole hegemony of America simply reflects the way it sees the post-cold war world. From 1945 there were two superpowers: now there is one. After 1991, however, the frontiers and the elites in the former Soviet bloc changed. They adapted to the new world order. Former Soviet republics and Muslims within those republics became independent, and eastern European countries clamoured to enter the EU or Nato.
The neo-cons believe that the Middle East has not adapted to that new reality – that the elites there are still those who were favoured because they were once seen as buffers against communism. Now communism is not a threat anymore. Hence the alliance with Saudi Arabia, for example, is no longer relevant.
For the Bush administration, there is no contradiction between the Middle East being kept in line with an American hegemony that will ensure future security in oil supplies from the area, and the belief that in order to bring peace and order to this area, the middle classes have to be in power.
It is precisely this US agenda that must be questioned. Do they really wish to have those middle classes in power? Or will they ultimately prefer to rely largely on authoritarian regimes, fearing that if there is a significant amount of democracy, this would turn anti-American?
As to relations between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, certainly, few people believe they exist. But from the hawks’ viewpoint, what is at stake is that they believe that 9/11 was a symptom of the malfunctioning of today’s Middle East, which impels them to act boldly.
The question is, where to take action? Tracking down al-Qaida only dealt with the symptom and has not been entirely successful, to say the least. Getting rid of the Taliban was not a major achievement. The other problem for the US in the Middle East is that you have to deal with two mutually exclusive things simultaneously: guaranteeing oil resources, and ensuring Israel’s security. Here is the contradiction: the rich oil exporters are anti-Israel. How to reconcile this?
This is why the US is so keen on engineering a peace process in the Middle East. This was something that it started aiming at in the 1990s. It was one of the reasons why the US did not go on to destroy the Saddam regime in 1991 after the war over Kuwait.
At the time, of course, the Americans said that they had no mandate from the UN. (As we now know, they do not necessarily need permission from the UN to act). In fact, uncertainties over Turkey and Iran were significant factors in their calculation, and even more important was that they wanted to use their victory as a lever to put pressure on the other front in the Middle East, the Palestinian/Israeli dispute.
This was possible because in 1991, Arafat had emerged naked from the war, having backed Saddam Hussein and encouraged the Palestinians in Kuwait to welcome the arrival of the Iraqi forces. After the defeat of Saddam, Arafat found himself in dire straits. Saudi Arabia would not pay any more: and the first intifada had ruined Palestinian society.
But the Israelis also were without bargaining counters, albeit in a different way. Israeli society had suffered enormously from the first intifada in terms of image, and its prime minister Yitzhak Shamir had not been allowed to retaliate when Israel was attacked by Iraqi scud missiles. So, both Israel and Palestinians were in a situation of weakness. If the US had attacked Iraq at the end of the war, it would have destroyed the consensus which had emerged from their victory. They chose rather to reinvest the capital from their military victory in Kuwait in coaxing the Israelis and Palestinians into the negotiation process.
Today, there is a failure of this same process, as evidenced by the second intifada. Why then did the US decide to go back into Iraq? In the neo-con view, economic take-off in Iraq could spark a process leading to a new era of prosperity in the Middle East. If there is security in Iraq, its oil revenues can pay for the reconstruction of the country. This will in turn bring millions of immigrant workers from Egypt, even poor Saudis into Iraq (because now there are some poor Saudis), from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. This will re-engineer some sort of prosperity in the Middle East, in which Israel too will play its part.
So I think this is another attempt in the Middle East, from another angle, to restart what had failed in the Arab-Israeli peace process: a plan on a scale which goes far beyond the disarmament of the Saddam Hussein regime, and far beyond Iraq. Iraq, a potentially rich country, has been put in the big freezer of sanctions for twelve years. Now, the US wants to put it back on the chessboard of the Middle East.
Second question: Is there any way of getting American society to empathise with all the resentment brewing up in the Middle East?
Gilles Kepel: The Americans who planned the war in Iraq are convinced that this resentment is superficial, and that once Iraq proves that there is a pro-American way in the Middle East, it will evaporate. Joan mentioned the people greeting Chirac in Algeria and shouting, ‘Visa! Visa!’ Many people in the US, among them the neo-cons, genuinely believe that the younger generations in the Middle East want to lead the good life the Americans have, and that there is no other way.
Third question: What do you think of this thesis? The roots of jihad are the same as the roots of anti-globalist and anti-capitalist movements: both regard Americans as motivated by new markets and cheap labour. These two counter-forces are fighting the same war to split the corporation from the state in America and the western world.
Gilles Kepel: A number of anti-globalisation groups have sided with the jihad fighters. A former member of the Red Brigades was shot in a train in Italy; others were arrested a few weeks ago. One woman read a statement that they had sided with the exploited masses of the Arab world whose spokesperson was Osama bin Laden.
Tariq Ramadan, who is quite active in France – not a jihadi, but someone looking for compromise – recently published a piece in a journal which seemed to have adopted the vocabulary of Attac, the main anti-globalisation organisation in France, wholesale. I had a debate with him about it, and asked him what was Islamist about his position and why he was quoting not the Koran but Susan George. Definitely, we are seeing peculiar alliances carved out of some of these groups.
But the reverse is also true; as evidenced in Turkey where the new government of moderate Islamists has been embraced by the US. This is the point I tried to make in Jihad – that Islamism as an all-encompassing ideology which would bring together different groups simply does not function any more. Now, there are radical Islamists who are going their own way, trying occasionally to build some alliances with other non-Islamist radical groups. Meanwhile, bourgeois or moderate Islamists are trying either to be cooperative with the system or to strike deals with secularists.
I was struck in France, during the mid-February demonstrations against the war, that there were veiled girls demonstrating alongside the Trotskyists. Because there was opposition to the war, not only on the extreme left but more broadly, it was hard both for these veiled girls and the bearded guys to indulge in their usual displays of identity as such, for example behaving like ‘Islamists against the rest’. They had to look for alliances, and then, when you start allying yourself, you very often lose your purity, as the poor French Communist party discovered too late...
Fourth question: How intrinsically Islamist is a theocracy? What chance is there for Islam to move towards a secular state?
Gilles Kepel: The issue is more for Muslims than for Islam. The question is how will people of Muslim origin, who have been imbued with Muslim culture, interpret their religious legacy. Who will lead, what is the dominant interpretation? In the late 20th century the Islamist movements have clearly managed to hijack interpretation. But that may not last forever.
Muslims in Europe probably will play a particularly important role in this because here they are experiencing democracy, even if many of them think they are being disadvantaged unjustly in these societies in various ways. In the 21st century, there are more people in their thirties or forties who were born here – British, French, German citizens originally from India, Pakistan, North Africa, Turkey. They are going to be the vanguard of this attempt not only to be democrats, but to take part in a living democratic society while also reconciling that with their Muslim identity.
Of course this is an ongoing battle, because many Islamists don’t want that and are trying to take their co-religionists in the west hostage to their way of thinking. But I would say that the general trend goes in the other direction. That is why, in the end, I do not believe in the ‘clash of civilisations’ theory, except of course between the British and the French – which is clearly irreconcilable!
