By Patricia H. Kushlis
If I were teaching a class in Islam and Politics, Emile Nakhleh’s A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World (Princeton University Press, 2009, pp 162) would be required reading. In fact, if I were advising the new administration on US foreign policy towards the Islamic world, I would make sure that I had carefully read and digested Dr. Nakhleh’s book before opening my mouth or applying fingers to keyboard.
The book in and of itself carries the weight of authority. First, its author was Senior Intelligence Officer and Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program in the CIA’s Director of Intelligence until 2006 when he retired and moved from Langley to New Mexico where, he tells readers, he curtailed hikes in the Sandia Mountains to write this book. Second, the book is tightly constructed and written for the educated lay person. It contains neither bureaucratic language nor political science jargon.
And third, what Nakhleh writes and the proposals he offers are based on careful research, analysis, lengthy personal experience and reflection. Furthermore, most, if not all of his proposals are doable. Some will be expensive; others far less so. Some will require major adjustments in US government and private sector thinking, training and structure. All make eminent sense, however, and are crucial for the future well being of this nation.
This small book is grounded in Nakhleh’s vast historical knowledge of Islam as well as today’s Islamic world. Most importantly it is based on interviews that he conducted - often in Arabic - with hundreds of Muslims in more than thirty countries around the globe during his government career. The Muslims he talked with ranged from the person in the street to religious clerics, journalists and university professors and even two Guantanamo prisoners. He corroborates the findings of his interviews with analysis of numerous surveys of Muslim attitudes since 2001. An aside: Nakhleh, a native Arabic speaker, was born in Galilee. A Greek Catholic, he was educated by Roman Catholics and his higher education was in the United States. Before joining the analytical side of the CIA in 1991 after the Agency became concerned about the political dimensions and implications of radical Islam for the US, he was a professor of international relations at a Catholic college in Maryland. As an academic and a Fulbright scholar, he wrote scores of articles and books on the politics of the Muslim world.
No Bush administration fan
It is clear that Emile Nakhleh is no fan of the Bush administration and I don’t blame him. His eye-witness testimony in the book’s second chapter concerning Dick Cheney’s bullying of Agency analysts to produce the story the administration wanted to hear as opposed to the story that was true regarding Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of WMD and his supposed links to Al Qaeda prior to the 2003 invasion rings loud and clear.
No administration, repeat, no administration should ever again be able to “cook the intelligence evidence” like the Bush administration did in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Nakhleh refutes charge after erroneous charge that the administration and its neoconservative supporters have flung at agency analysts in the right wing’s attempts to cover up for its own failings – false charges that they continue to trot out today to rewrite history in their favor.
Yet what makes A Necessary Engagement particularly well worth reading is
Nakhleh’s nuanced description of the developing political awareness of the 1.4 billion people – many young, undereducated and unemployed – in the Muslim world but, in particular, the increasingly important and largely constructive role being played in that world by reformist thinkers and mainstream Islamic political parties – from AKP in Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, the Islamic Party in Malaysia to Hamas in Palestine. Many of these parties, he points out, have won elections fair and square, and despite rhetoric to the contrary, participate in the rules of the democratic game. Nakhleh further argues that for the Israelis and the Bush administration to have refused to recognize the Hamas electoral victory in Gaza after insisting upon free and fair elections there is perceived as the height of hypocrisy throughout the Islamic world.
Nakhleh writes that it is crucial for Americans to distinguish among the relatively small number of secularists with whom the West is most comfortable, the vast pool of mainstream Muslims, the reformist Muslim thinkers and the tiny percentage of militant Muslims whose unrealistic goal it is to turn the multiethnic, multidimensional Islamic world into a one-world caliphate governed by the most backward and repressive interpretations of Islamic law.
Fissures within Islam
He stresses that we need to be cognizant of the fissures within Islam – not only from the perspective of the Sunni-Shiia divide but also the importance of struggles for power within Muslim majority and minority nations and of “mainstream reformist Islam” in the battle for Muslim “hearts and minds.” His point is that much of the Muslim world is engaged in its own internal, nationalist struggles waged against corrupt and incompetent elites who gained power in the post-colonial period. These regimes have clung to power in the name of nationalism, through control of the levers of repression and in certain cases links to and support from the US government. These battles are not, Nakhleh stresses, nor should they be seen as, part of Al Qaeda’s Herculean battle against the US.
US policy makers, therefore, need to focus on identifying and eradicating the tiny hard core, unredeemable anti-American terrorist elements in Islam while engaging the vast body of fundamentalists and reformist Islamists – in particular the mainstream Islamic political parties – by encouraging them, among other things, in their own struggle against local militant Islamists.
He points out that the reason that Al Qaeda’s message continues to attract young, single, under educated and unemployed men is because of its “simplicity, clarity and repetitiveness” and its ties to specific hated US policies with which these men on the road to nowhere easily identify. And he further argues that “moderate activists who reject the radical message have been themselves subjected to harassment and imprisonment by so called moderate regimes and therefore have become reticent to speak out against the Bin Laden message lest they be accused of being either pro-regime or pro- United States.”
What is to be done?
Nakhleh’s fourth chapter entitled “Public Diplomacy: A Blueprint” lists ten core themes that resonate in the Muslim world. He recommends that the US needs to enunciate these themes if it wants to gain traction with the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. The themes, he argues must revolve around commonalities rather than differences between religions. He suggests that “specific policies that produce immediate and tangible results in localized communities can also be effective tools of communication.” The most important theme – with which I also wholeheartedly concur - is that “the United States is not engaged in a conflict with Islam” and that “the international community is fighting terrorists who in the name of Islam bring untold suffering on Muslims and non-Muslims alike.” He also argues that the rhetorical enunciation of these themes must be coupled with “a new American foreign policy committed to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ending the conflict in Iraq and pushing for economic and political reforms in the region.”
While I question whether Nakhleh’s remedies all fall within the realm of public diplomacy – or at least public diplomacy as I know it – his proposals themselves make good plain foreign policy sense. They begin with the appointment of an American Ambassador with an office in the White House who is well versed in Islamic issues, speaks fluent Arabic or other “Islamic” languages and is seen as the president’s point person on Islamic affairs – but lest the State Department feel neglected, the Ambassador, he says, should also report to the Secretary of State.
Nakhleh’s other remedies
His remedies also include an increased dialog with mainstream Islamic political parties through a variety of methods – some of which, in my view, are the purview of any good embassy political section but with programmatic aspects that are part of the traditional public diplomacy tool box and the institutionalization of America’s commitment to democracy which he argues will require major reconfiguration of the bureaucracy at the State Department and other agencies involved although he offers no specifics in how this should be done.
He stresses the need for the expansion of academic and professional exchange programs including the growth of sister university programs (PHK Note: grants to American universities to help develop university-to-university linkages were eliminated by the State Department sometime the past decade according to the US Ambassador to Indonesia just a couple of weeks ago. Maybe State should do a rethink?); the encouragement of American universities to build campuses in Muslim countries and to establish an Imamate university in the United States to train well educated and moderate Muslim clerics to counter the exponential growth and influence of radicalized clerics; the empowerment of moderate Muslim reformers to confront radicalism; the expansion of American Cultural Centers throughout the Muslim world along the lines President Obama proposeded during his presidential campaign; and finally systematic partnering between Homeland Security and local communities here in the United States.
Admittedly, some of Nakhleh’s prescriptions are tall orders that will require major readjustments in how the US foreign affairs community conducts business with the Muslim world. But these are some of the most sensible suggestions I’ve come across in a long time. I don’t necessarily agree with all the fine points, but overall, Nakhleh gets it right.
A postscript
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Obama administration understands the basic problems which Nakhleh outlines – far more so than its predecessor. This is evident in the rhetoric in Obama’s Inaugural Address, his subsequent interview with Al Arabiya television, and his appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now let’s hope the new president and his foreign policy advisors read Nakhleh’s book, review his recommendations – and act on as many as of them as possible and quickly.
New Mexico author book talks and signings: Garcia Street Books, Santa Fe, NM Tuesday, February 24, 2009 5-6pm: and Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW, Albuquerque,NM Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 7pm.
Photo credit: PHK Kushlis, New Mosque at Berzigan, Turkey, September 2006.