Tony Blair And Political Islam: Blurred Vision Or Genuine Plea!
By Iftikhar H. Malik
02 September, 2006
Countercurrents.orgIt is interesting to note that whenever British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, wants to make a policy statement on global politics, he chooses some American platform. Such a venture offers him wider audience especially when in this age of strong anti-Americanism, he remains quite popular among the Americans, who cherish him as their closest ally and accept most of his punditry without any rebuke or reservations. Given the profile and outreach of the United States, Blair also relishes to be seen as a global visionary a la Churchill, especially when his following in his own country keeps on dwindling.
To be fair to Blair, his speech dilating on "the third way" in Chicago in 1999 was delivered at the moment of his strength unlike his speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles on 1st August 2006, chaired by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state governor and an appropriate symbol of the American physical largeness. Here was the British Prime Minister at his best but totally harrowed by some of the worst nightmares given the deaths of four British soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq earlier that day and a global critique on stalling the ceasefire efforts in Lebanon following a sustained and immensely devastating Israeli invasion. Lebanon, paraded both by Bush and Blair as a showcase in democracy following the elections and the exit of the Syrian troops, was now being statedly and brazenly pushed back by twenty years and its pro-West Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, kept sending frantic appeal to save his country and populace from a total decimation. While Washington and London wilfully dithered on stopping the Israeli aerial, naval and land onslaught on Lebanon--still emerging from the civil war and eighteen years of Israeli presence--the global opinion, the United Nations and the ordinary Muslims kept agonising over their own helplessness.
Blair, deeply damaged by an illegal and equally controversial and costly invasion of Iraq, could, once more, well afford to defy his own critical public opinion besides protests elsewhere. It appears as if the imagined "Shia arc of crisis" was being challenged by Israel with a tacit support from two permanent members of the UN Security Council. There were news reports of some cabinet ministers being angry over tacit appeasement of Uhud Olmert's troops in their daredevil approach to the Palestinians besieged in Gaza, followed by similar punitive campaigns against the Lebanese civilians for no fault of their own. The saddest part of this invasion has been that the world leaders just sat and watched as if the deaths of hundreds of the Lebanese civilians-43% of them children-were nobody's business.
Tony Blair's speech had been prefaced with an energised discourse by the Neoconservatives on an impending Third World War with "the Shia arc of crisis" presumably overshadowing West Asia all the way from Lebanon to Balochistan. Certainly, with the resurgence of resistance in Afghanistan and grievous fragmentation of Iraq, despite all the promises to the contrary by the Anglo-American alliance, Al-Qaeda was by now an old story which needed to be supplanted with another enemy in the same region. It all follows a well-familiar pattern. Accordingly, a full-throttle propaganda preceded othering of an enemy so as to create an alarmist threat perception. Subsequently, follows a regimented demonisation by applying political, ideological and moral yardsticks mainly to dehumanise the enemy, which then is subjected to a full-blown military invasion.
Such a policy evolved in North Atlantic regions during the last century and Israel has been resolutely pursuing it to a letter. Suspicions about Muslims soon after the dissolution of the Cold War outgrew within an ideological vacuum to eventually mature into Huntingtonian clash of cultures as the Balkans, Caucuses and the Middle East were posited as the fault line. Concurrently, Al-Qaeda, a dubious trajectory, emerged in the war-torn Afghanistan and, at least in the propaganda warfare both by its own proponents and the Western antagonists, tried to assume a flagship and even hegemonic role for a wider array of Islamist movements. The Neoconservatives and Al-Qaeda soon engaged in an open confrontation involving similar holy warriors on both sides who have been adept in using similar symbols and selective historical evidence.
However, Al-Qaeda is not an exception in this age of religio-political populism as the Jihadists, Hindutva karsevaks, Ultra Nationalists, Likud Zionists and Christian evangelicals, despite their divergent objectives, still share common strategies and feel no qualms in applying violence to obtain them. They all grow on hatred and violence pitting people against people.
Tony Blair's speech in Los Angeles was next day headlined by the Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul and a close friend of the Prime Minister and Israel. Murdoch was himself present in the session and so were several other leading American business and political magnates who usually value Blair's closer alliance with Washington even to the extent of annoying his own party and a significant section of European public opinion. Blair, while referring to Muslim groups resisting the Western military presence across West Asia and elsewhere, reiterated the need for a "complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those who threaten us". As is the usual feature of reductionism coming from Washington since 9/11, Blair chose to obfuscate the serious differentials within the Islamist movements. To him, the cases of resistance in Chechnya and Palestine were the building blocks of a unilinear, inherently anti-West and anti-modern political ideology irrespective of the fact that the geo-politics is not so clearly divided between good and bad, or black and white as there are several grey shades in between.
In the same vein, terror by private groups is certainly not the only form of violence since several states including the democratic ones have been pursuing collective and even more questionable forms of violence at places including Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, both the simplification of Political Islam as a sheer terrorism and absolving states of collective violence do not reflect an objective political analysis nor do they represent any unbiased vision at a time when the world seeks a fresher perspective away from self-righteousness rooted in a fixated binary imagery.
Most of Blair's speech dealt with Islam and the relationship between the Western powers and the Muslim world, though the differentiation between the two is not so explicit. He knows that given the growing anarchy in West Asia the entire dream of the New World Order has long evaporated; the Road Map for Peace was already abandoned by its own architect; and both Blair and Bush face hard time explaining their policies when so many people on all sides are dying each day. Jackie Ashley, in her column in the Guardian on 7 August, reflected on a severe damage to British standing in the Muslim world owing to the invasion of Iraq: "By tamely following Bush into the biggest foreign policy mistake of modern times, Britain has too much blood on its hands to be taken seriously in the region, and Blair is seen as too one-sided". The war on terror has gone on as an open ended onslaught characterised by unilateral militarism and deeper suspicions of Muslims per se and, in the process, the world has become more insecure. Amidst this dismay, Blair still wanted to rekindle some hope among his American admirers besides shoring up his own profile back home, where the invasion of Iraq and several other sordid developments have engendered a serious credibility deficit even among his
Labour loyalists.On the heel of questions about financial donations for Labour Party for peerage by tycoons and facilitated by a close friend, Lord Levy, the dithering on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and strangulation of the Gazans have shadowed Blair at a time when more and more British soldiers are getting killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not only the two major military adventures have turned into inexplicable quagmires for President Bush and Tony Blair, they continue to spawn grievous violence within these two unfortunate states. The Muslim critics have been raising serious moral issues about this latest spate of Euro-American military involvement in the Muslim heartland, justified on flimsy grounds and surely without any apparent clear, rational and persuasive objectives. They believe that by overthrowing the theocratic Taliban regime and a secularist Baathist set-up in Baghdad, and then by allowing Israel to debilitate a democratic and otherwise staunchly pro-Western Lebanese regime in Lebanon, London and Washington have only affirmed pervasive Western official incompatibility and insouciance towards all types of Muslim polities. Such a widely-shared consensus is only helping to essentialise a clash of cultures.
Prime Minister Blair, in his address, highlighted the need for reenergising the peace process in Palestine on the basis of two-state formula while again committing himself to the official British policy rooted in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It appears as if by reiterating the need for peace in the Holy Land, the British Prime Minister was inviting Washington to revive peace plan yet without criticising the unreserved US support to Israeli policies vis-à-vis the Arabs. Certainly, Blair could have afforded some more forthrightness on this yet it seems as if by merely referring to this reenergisation he was, in fact, trying to silence his critics back home who have been resolutely abhorrent of his kowtowing to President Bush. Given the record of relationship with Presidents Clinton and Bush to the extent of taking Britain to wars and invasions over and above public opinion, Blair's reticence is understandable. It was an empty gesture given the backdrop of Qana tragedy where Israeli air attack cost 61 civilian lives including 34 children. John Kampfner, in a column in the New Statesman (7 August), accused Blair of making Britain "an accomplice" in Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Blair's speech in Log Angeles reaffirmed his belief in globalisation which, to him, means democratic liberalism being challenged by forces which disallow individual freedom and are ignoring modernist imperatives such as market-based economy at their own peril. Opposition to his idealised version of liberalism, according to Blair, came from Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizbullah, all the major actors in this "arc of extremism". Perhaps, such a premise offers nothing new as it was a sheer reverberation of the official American and Israeli policies, where unrestrained judgemental verdicts are routinely dished out on "the axis of evil". Blair's speech was certainly meant to shore up support for the ill-fated and immensely counterproductive ventures in West Asia, and here he put the blame on intra-Muslim divisions. To him, "reactionary" Islam was geared up to eliminate "moderate" Islam and that is where the West and the rest of the world must make their choices. He called for rallying around a strategy of values to help fight extremism, earlier defined by him as an "evil ideology", and which now has engulfed the Middle East and beyond.
A moralist person with deep religious convictions, Blair has continued to perceive the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as just campaigns-something that certainly goes well with an embattled White House and the hyped-up Neoconservatives. He must have given some timely boost to rather demoralised warriors, when he observed: "We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in the applications of those values to the world. At present we are far away from persuading those we need to persuade that this is true". Such a moralism has been certainly a major anchor of an all-too-familiar White Man's burden all through modern history where slavery, slave trade, colonialism, conversions and cultural transformation were packaged and justified as a moral campaign among the lesser humans. To be fair to the British Prime Minister, Blair did refer to the issues of poverty, climate change and dissension over trade, though most of his speech was devoted to the Middle Eastern politics and deals with the world of Islam. He urged his audience to "bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Palestine and Israel...and it is a battle we must win".
While reporting Blair's speech in Log Angeles, the Guardian, on the same day (2 August), carried a piece by Karma Nablusi, a Palestinian, who herself has been both an observer and a victim of Israeli campaign in 1982, and is now based at Oxford. According to her, the previous war and invasion of Lebanon "did not give Israel the security it claims to seek, and nor will this one". Instead, to her, Israel was "producing generations of refugees who will also resist" without letting it turn the corner. She concluded: "Israel has failed to understand that it cannot expel a people and call itself the victim; that it cannot conquer its neighbours and treat any and all resistance to that conquest as terrorism; that it cannot arm itself as a regional superpower and annihilate the institutional fabric of two people without incurring the fury of their children in the years that follow". Such apprehensions have been often aired by several noted American analysts, who question a rather persistent and equally harmful Israeli influence over the US foreign policies and its serious multiple ramifications. For instance, Professor John Mearsheimer of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Professor Stephen Walt from the University of Chicago, in their documented study, "The Israeli Lobby and the U.S. Foreign Policy" (Harvard, 2006) have raised serious issues in reference to acute disadvantages that their country has been incurring due to its partisan policies in the Middle East.
Blair's convenient and equally simplistic division of Islam into reactionary and moderate moulds has reminded many Muslims of the binary approach since 9/11 of seeing them as "good Muslims and bad Muslims". Blair is not the only to leap for this reductionist syllogism. Martin Bright's documentary on Channel Four and several of his writings in the New Statesman and Observer including a detailed paper, "The British State's Flirtation with Radical Islam", published under the auspices of the Policy Exchange, reflect a similar cursory view of a complex situation where good Muslims are seen inherently docile and apolitical while politicised and purist Muslims are deemed to be perennially troublesome. The Sufis versus the Scripturalist duopoly is a rather recent and quixotic reading of Muslim intellectual history ignoring the historical fact that the founders of purist religio-political movements such as Shah Wali Allah Dehlavi (d. 1763) and Syed Abul Ala Mawdudi (d. 1983) also valued Sufism. Unlike the pervasive image of Sufi Islam being non-political to the extent of being submissive, Sufis have led sustained political resistance in India, Algeria, West Africa and Central Asia, and certainly there have been mystical orders which, over the years, became tainted and feudalist.
One of the most powerful Sufi-Pirs in Pakistan today is Pir Sibghatullah of Pagaro in Sindh whose father led a constant armed struggle against the British until he was hanged in the 1940s. The late Pir led resistance by thousands of his disciples against the Raj much like the descendants of Shah Wali Ullah who carried out guerrilla warfare against the British from the tribal Pushtun regions all through the nineteenth century. In the official propaganda, they were all caricatured as Wahabbis though their connections with the Arab Peninsula were almost non-existent. In the same way, Imam Shamil, the spiritual mentor in Chechnya, pioneered the anti-Moscow campaign a century and a half ago, and which still goes on unabated. The resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan came both from the purists and syncretists and same was the case with the anti-Rushdie protesters in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Thus, historically speaking, an idealisation of Sufism as a non-political docility is fallacious.
In addition, exceptionalising Islam as the only driver behind Muslim political sentiment is overlooking similar combinations of religious and political forces at several places including the United States, India and Israel. Of course, there are groups among Muslims like they exist in other communities, who adopt violence as a strategy to gain political objectives but in several such instances, it is the official and external violence through sheer oppression or invasions, which spawns such violence in the first place. Islam, thus, emerges as a social vehicle and a political mobiliser to displace this collective violence where both surrogacy and external intervention have to be defied. In these hard and turbulent times when about 100, 000 Muslims are incarcerated in jails across the world owing to the fall-out from the war on terror, several Muslim states are being decimated through full fledged invasions and the daily toll of Muslim lives just in West Asia goes over a hundred, more and more Muslims across the globe are earnestly appropriating Islam as a soothsayer. Many of them seek spiritual solace in it while others feel that it is the only global resistance to a callous hegemony. If the world is to seek a way-out from this vicious cycle of wanton violence and polarity, its leaders will have to be honest enough to accept their own responsibility in othering and incriminating communities. A just world cannot be ascertained through unjust means.
