Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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Islam after Manhattan

Islam a year after Manhattan

The Scotsman, 12th September, 2002

At the start of the Clinton administration, I, an Iranian-born journalist working for The Times in London, had no trouble at all obtaining a visa to America. On one occasion, the embassy delivered the document to me by motorcycle courier after only three days, even though I did not have a passport but used a British Home Office Certificate of Identity that said, in effect: "This Iranian lives in the UK. If he gets into trouble in your country, you can always send him back to us".

After the first attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993, for which a number of Muslim activists and an Iraqi agent have been convicted, the regulations changed drastically. Each time, my application was sent to the CIA for a thorough examination of every association in my past and, once, my wife and I lost an expensive flight and holiday booking because the report took several weeks longer than anticipated. Even the venerable ambassador in London, Admiral Crowe, could not help. "They've taken it out of our hands", he said. Today, with a full British passport, I am not sure I would even dare to plan a visit to America.

All of this was, of course, predictable. Very few among the billion or so people born in Muslim lands turn to violence to make a political point, but those who do are still numerous enough to pose a large-scale threat to the front-ranking countries of the west, and that consideration must be put before all others. A by-product is the danger of alienating the majority of peaceful Muslims who used to dream of a visit or two to the fabled lands of freedom and prosperity in Europe and North America, not to mention producing even more fire-breathing zealots.

The Americans are aware of this and have recently decided to expand their broadcasting services to the Islamic world to regain some of the lost good will. Will it be largely a waste of money? I fear so, but not because of the new wedge driven between Islam and the West by last September, though that will not help. The drift began some time ago.

The approximately 40 countries that have a Muslim majority population lag behind their neighbours in what the United Nations calls the Human Development Index. This includes not only prosperity and social services, but also freedom of expression, civil society and clean government. In the whole of the Islamic world, there is not a single country that one might describe as a democracy, including Turkey which is a member of the Council of Europe. In this respect, Muslims have fallen behind even the new states in southern Africa. What are the reasons for this failure, which embitters so many Muslims as they watch the world go by on satellite television?

"Our number one problem", says the Pakistani writer Suroush Irfani, "is the modernity crisis". He told the BBC World Service recently: "We have access to the artefacts of modernity, but we do not have the intellectual underpinning of it. We have its hardware, but not its software". He means the banishment of doubt and scepticism, which have propelled Europe forth since the time of the ancient Greeks, as cardinal sins in Islamic society. In the whole of the Islamic world, there is not a single humanist association devoted to the propagation of ethics without Allah.

Mohsen Sazgara, an Iranian reformist dissident, puts it another way: "The modern world is based on a key concept, reason. But in the Islamic world, we have not accepted this. As a result, the modern institutions we have set up, such as parliament, republican government, political parties and newspapers, are not real".

It is quite clear what he means. Iran has a reformist president who is elected with 70 percent of the popular vote. Yet, even though he is himself a Muslim clergyman, his wings have been clipped by the country's constitution than requires every new policy to be in line with an strict interpretation of scripture written down in the seventh century. Parliament has similarly been reduced to impotence and many a mild newspaper editor wastes away in jail.

Take another example from Egypt, a pillar of American policy in the Middle East. Its government recently used an obscure law that says citizens must not receive money from abroad without official permission to imprison a writer who criticised the rigging of elections and the discrimination against Egypt's Christian minority. The sentence of seven years that was given to Sa'ad ad-Din Ibrahim (sic) was twice as harsh as the punishment meted out to leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood who advocate an overthrow of the state, and when an American official hinted that Washington's aid to Egypt might not be increased from its present level of $2bn a year, because Ibrahim has US citizenship, the protests that followed in the Cairo press shocked every outside observer for their venomous hatred of everything Western.

Other factors compound this inbuilt tendency of Islamic society to clamp down on any thinker whose reasoning might cast doubt on the wisdom of tradition, and the population explosion that has afflicted the poorer world since the coming of modern hygiene and antibiotics must be one of the most crippling. I remember that when I began school in the Kurdish highlands of western Iran in the 1940s, we were told that our country's population had reached 12 million. That population is now 85 million, including the ten million who have fled the land since the overthrow of the monarchy in the Islamic revolution of 1979. I cannot think of any political system that could have fulfilled the aspirations of so many new citizens in such a short time. The net result is that the Muslim world, including those parts of it that are endowed with huge natural resources, becomes even more embittered every year as it witnesses the extent of its backwardness compared to the rest of humanity, whose images it watches every day thanks to modern electronics. The scale of the problem is just too huge for foreign aid to solve it, let alone increasing the budgets of the Voice of America and the BBC World Service.

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