A New and More Dangerous Era Part III

 

By Anthony J. Dennis

3^rd part of 3

 

INSTITUTIONAL AND IDEOLOGICAL HURDLES TO REFORM

President Khatami faces both institutional and ideological hurdles to the realization of his vision of a more moderate, less confrontational Islam. He is like a man on a raft in the middle of a powerful and turbulent fundamentalist sea. On the political front, the power of the presidency in the Islamic Republic of Iran is overshadowed and circumscribed by the office of the Supreme Leader and the Council of Guardians. The President is not the most senior executive branch official in the Iranian government. As a result, President Khatami does not control Iran's foreign policy or its military and intelligence branches. He has also been powerless to prevent his own government's zealous prosecution and imprisonment of many of his allies and supporters. Scores of Khatami's allies from the press, the universities and from Iranian political circles have been sent off to prison for disagreeing publicly with the fundamentalist line. Khatami's lack of executive authority in Iran has proven to be a great source of frustration for the President himself and for his supporters.

These institutional limitations constitute significant stumbling blocks on Iran's path to reform. They may also discourage other governments from initiating a dialogue or having relations with Iran out of concern that the cordial words of Khatami by no means reflect the actual attitudes and intentions of the Iranian government, which is controlled by hardliners under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

President Khatami's political vision, a vision which acknowledges and incorporates important aspects of Western political thought, also faces significant ideological hurdles within the Muslim world. These ideological hurdles represent additional friction points between the Islamic and Western worlds. Islamic and Western conceptions of the state, the individual and society, are often totally at odds. According to Western political thought, governmental power arises from the governed. In contrast, in a theocracy such as exists in Iran, governmental power is presumed to originate directly from God. An Islamic ruler represents Allah's agent on earth. In such a setting, liberal democratic institutions – including a robust multi-party system, free and fair elections and freedom of intellectual expression including political expression – simply cannot work since all political disagreements are ultimately religious disagreements, the penalties for which can be severe.

For a Shi`a cleric living in the theocracy that is Iran, Khatami has made some daring and highly unconventional statements:

The legitimacy of the government stems from the people's vote. And a powerful government, elected by the people, is representative, participatory, and accountable. The Islamic government is the servant of the people and not their master, and it is accountable to the nation under all circumstances.¹⁵

Khatami's views on government are plainly at odds with those of his political opponents.

The profound gulf between Islamic and Western conceptions of the state extends to the individual and society. To the fundamentalists, there is "no doctrine of human rights, the very notion of which might seem an impiety. Only God has rights – human beings have duties."¹⁶ The whole Lockean concept of natural rights – or the more modern concept of universal human rights – that predate and are superior to the rights of any government to take them away, finds no place in fundamentalist thought. In fact, the fundamentalists view the West's insistence on certain basic and universal human rights as an arrogant attempt to place the rights and privileges of human beings above God, and above God's agents on earth (i.e. the government run by the fundamentalists).

Islamic rule as practiced in fundamentalist countries completely dominates both the individual and society. Islam in its classic formulation recognizes no separation between the religious and secular spheres. It represents a complete way of life for its followers regulating virtually every aspect of individual and group behavior. This leaves very little room to maneuver for reformers like Khatami.

Khatami's attempts to institute civil society and a fully functional democracy in the Islamic Republic of Iran encounter other troubles as well. Democracy and the whole concept of "human rights" are viewed by many as Western imports and as another legacy of colonialist rule. If the Muslim world which Khatami inhabits has any hope of reconciling democracy with religion, free speech with the authority of the religious establishment, and human rights (including especially women's rights) with the Qur`an, then ideally he and his supporters must find indigenous sources for such ideals in order to legitimize them in the eyes of the public and religious authorities alike. Otherwise, his program may be attacked and contemptuously dismissed by his fundamentalist opponents as "Western imports" whose adoption by the nation would represent a capitulation to the West and a betrayal of the Islamic revolution. In summary, Khatami treads a difficult path both practically and intellectually. President Khatami and his supporters will have to work energetically to point out how aspects of their progressive political program in fact have their origins in the Qur`an and the Hadith (the Tradition).

We can wish Khatami well and do what we can, at arm's length and from across the waters, to encourage the growth and development of politically moderate voices within the Islamic world. Western governments cannot do much more than that since a close embrace of Khatami and his program may give his hardline opponents an opportunity to criticize him as a puppet of the West. In the meantime, we must still deal with the hostile intentions of the fundamentalist government of Iran and the deadly threats uttered by fundamentalist groups around the world against the US and other Western countries.

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

Very briefly, several policy recommendations flow from the above state of affairs.

·         Condemn Words and Deeds not Religious Status: We should condemn words and deeds, not religious status. No one should be condemned as a terrorist or supporter of terrorism merely because they happen to be followers of Islam. The West must avoid falling into the trap of condemning a particular religion. Rather, Western governments should condemn those individuals and groups who interpret Islam in such a way as to justify their violent actions.
 

·         Support Civil Society, Not Elections: Western governments should not rigidly support calls for immediate elections in certain Islamic countries today which would only serve to betray democratic principles tomorrow. The West must not be beguiled by the fundamentalists in places like Algeria into betraying its allies by blindly joining calls for immediate elections. We should instead support and rally around the concept of "civil society" which consists of those governmental and nongovernmental institutions that are the prerequisite of a mature and fully functional democracy. I am referring here to the ground rules of a democratic system such as recognizing the rights of opposition parties, allowing political opposition and dissent to exist without the threat of torture, imprisonment or death, allowing a free press, free speech, the right to demonstrate peacefully, the right of minority religions to co-exist with Islam without persecution or harassment, the establishment of an independent judiciary and so on. The institution of civil society ensures that a political culture will be in place that guarantees the orderly transition of power between elected governments and that future elections will in fact take place.
 

·         Deterrence is Dead: We must recognize that the military doctrine of deterrence is dead. The cornerstone of America's and NATO's Cold War defense strategy – the deterrence doctrine – is not going to be sufficient in dealing with the transnational fundamentalist movement. How does one deter a fundamentalist soldier, terrorist group or military detachment that believes the surest and swiftest way to heaven is to commit a terrorist act against a Western target and die in the course of that attack? You cannot "deter" that person or party in the conventional sense. You can only neutralize the threat.

Emphasis must be on thwarting such attacks, whether through the use of counter-terrorism measures or the deployment of missile defense systems to prevent a successful attack against America and its allies. The positive aspect of missile defense systems is that they are not offensive systems but defensive ones. They do not threaten particular adversaries or single out any one particular threat. They protect against all-comers, and there is very little danger that the Muslim fundamentalist countries or others will feel "threatened" or "discriminated against" as a result of the deployment of such defensive systems.
 

·         Money Does Not Always Talk: Money does not solve all political or foreign policy problems. It would be condescending and naïve to assume that the fundamentalists would give up their dearly held, core beliefs in return for more economic aid. Such a clumsy attempt to "buy them off" would likely be met with derision and contempt even as it was being cynically accepted and exploited. Fundamentalists have had many chances over the years to take the easier and more peaceful path. The luscious fruits of global trade and world economic prosperity sit like a table filled with bounties before them. Nonetheless, the fundamentalists have refused to holster their weapons, remove their gas masks and sit down at the feast. Quite the contrary. They view Western economic prosperity and the promise of easy living as the temptations of the Devil. Theirs is a different mental sensibility entirely.

 

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The Western democracies won the Cold War but they have not yet won the peace. While democracy and its economic corollary, capitalism, triumphed over communism in the twentieth century, these ideals have not yet won a definitive victory over Islamic fundamentalism which many around the globe have seized upon as a rival ideology. A sizeable portion of the world's populace – stretching from Indonesia and the southern Philippines in the Pacific through Central Asia to the Middle East and Africa – has shown a willingness to embrace Islamic fundamentalism as a governing ideology. Given the fundamentalist movement's openly jihadist foreign policy toward the West, the world has now embarked upon a new and more dangerous period in human history.

Anthony J. Dennis

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Endnotes

1. Anthony J. Dennis, The Rise of the Islamic Empire and the Threat to the West, Wyndham

Hall Press, 1996.

 

2. Ibid., p. 68.

3. "Russian Aide Says Gangsters Try to Steal Atom Material", The New York Times, May 26, 1994, p. A5; "The Plutonium Racket", The Economist, August 26, 1994, p. 39; Seymour M. Hirsch, "The Wild East", The Atlantic Monthly, June 1994, p. 61.

4. "Egyptian Jihad Leader Preaches Holy War to Brooklyn Muslims", The Wall Street Journal, January 6, 1993, pp. A1, A5.

5. "Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran", Middle East Journal, 1980, p. 185

6. "Jihad", The Economist, 42-43, August 7-13, 1993.

7. Reuters, October 28, 1991.

8. Op. cit., Dennis, pp. 61, 76; James A. Phillips, "The Saddamization of Iran", Policy Review, Vol. 69, Summer 1994, p. 7.

9. Reuters, March 11, 1993.

10. "A World Terrorist Link?", The Hartford Courant, June 20, 1993, p. C1.

11. See "Notable and Quotable", The Wall Street Journal, July 22, 1997, p. A14.

12. Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy, Palgrave, 1996.

13. Wright, "New Breed of Terrorist Worries US", Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1993, p. A7.

14. Mohammad Khatami, "Covenant with the Nation", First Presidential Inaugural Speech, in Islam, Liberty and Development, Institute of Global Studies, Binghamton University, 1998, p. 150. "The government must emphasize that in our world, dialogue among civilizations is an absolute imperative. We shall avoid any course of action that may foster tension. We shall have relations with any state which respects our independence."; Mohammad Khatami, "Religious Belief in Today's World", Islam, Liberty and Development, p. 96 "[W]e must shun the extremes of hating the West or being completely enchanted by it, so that on the one hand we can guard against the dangers posed by the West, and on the other hand utilize its human achievements." Khatami's most dearly held political beliefs mark him as someone outside the fundamentalist camp. He treads a very thin and dangerous line as the president of a staunchly fundamentalist government.

15. Op. cit., Khatami, "Covenant with the Nation", p. 150.

16. Bernard Lewis, "Islam and Liberal Democracy", The Atlantic Monthly, February 1993, p. 98.