October 5, 2001
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About Scott Appleby:
Scott Appleby (Ph.D. University of Chicago,1985) examines the roots of religious violence and the potential of religious peacebuilding. He is the Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and teaches courses in American religious history and comparative religious movements at Notre Dame University. From 1988 to 1993 Appleby was co-director of the Fundamentalism Project, an international public policy study conducted by the American Academy of arts and Sciences.
The transcript follows.
FPA: Today we are speaking with Dr. Scott Appleby of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Appleby has written extensively on the subject of religious fundamentalism and global conflict, and one or two of his publications have been written for the Foreign Policy Association. Thanks for being with us today Dr. Appleby.
SA: Thank you.
FPA: Ok, let's start at the beginning. First off, if you could talk to us a little bit about the roots of radical fundamentalism, particularly within Islam, and why it seems to have experienced a resurgence in many parts of the world recently.
SA: Radical Islam in the Muslim world begins in the 20th century with the writings of Maulana Maududi, who is a Pakistani scholar and began to recognize that the Islamic world needed to compete with the new modern nation states of the world, and so he proposed something called a theodemocracy. He sees Islam as a complete way of life – political, cultural, literary, religious – he doesn't differentiate among those aspects of life, and so he is really the great theorist of Islamic state in the twentieth century, Maududi. He was influential, this Pakistani intellectual, on a number of people in the Middle East in the 50's and 60's where the Muslim Brotherhood was in its third decade by the mid 50's. This was an association of Muslims who believed that in Egypt in particular the government had become too secularized and too beholden to the West, particularly to Britain and to Europe and then eventually to the United States. The leader of one of the more radical wings of the Muslim Brotherhood was a schoolteacher named Sayyid Qutb. It's interesting that both of these figures, Qutb and Maududi were layman so to speak, not religious scholars. Anyways, Said Qutb wrote a number of manifestos that really became the foundation for radical Islam in the Sunni world, and these were based on the notion that much of the Islamic world had become corrupted by the West, and by the colonial presences and by modern materialism. So the first principle of this Islam fundamentalism or radicalism was that you can't even trust a fellow Muslim. That was a radical departure, and these groups began to organize themselves, even in the 1960's when Nasser was the leader of Egypt and was persecuting them. They developed this notion, that is, ‘we must name the infidel and flee society to regroup and then to re-Islamisize society,' and some of the radical groups thought that the strategy for doing that would be to assassinate leaders and to do violence. So the roots of the contemporary movement in the Sunni world go back to the 50's and 60's when Qutb himself was executed by the Nasser regime in 1966. In the Shiite world, and Shiite Islam is 1/10 of the Islamic world, most Sunnis constitute 90 percent of the almost 1 billion Muslims in the world, but that still leaves 100 million or so Shiites in Iran, and Lebanon and elsewhere. And fundamentalism really becomes a prominent feature in the Shiite world of Islam with the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution, the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978 and 1979. There is a different kind of approach in Shiism, there is the same kind criticism of the west and critique of moderate Islam or compromising Islam, and a call back to traditional Islamic virtues, but Khomeini, because he is Shiite was able to move more quickly into a kind of political leadership, because of the relative independence and strength of the Ayatollahs in the Shiite system. So that revolution took on a very different cast.
FPA: These revolutions, when they first came about, how did the general public receive them? Were they immediately popular, and if so what were the attractions?
SA: No, they were not popular in a widespread sense, either in the Egyptian or Arab case nor were they in the Iranian case. In the Iranian case they were the focal point of discontent with the Shah, but that discontent was among the Bazaariis who are against Shiites, and they were more discontented because their way of life was being threatened. Also the Shah had just gone overboard in terms of attacking Islamic culture in Iran, and although many Iranians did not share every element of the Ayatollahs philosophy they were nonetheless insulted and aggrieved by the attack on their culture, and a kind of rapid modernization program for the Shah, so that it was a widespread coalition that at its core had a radical Islamic movement. But even today that core is very much a minority and there are concentric circles of support for different elements of the regime but you really have a lot of discontent.
FPA: Could you talk a little bit about the ruling Taliban [in Afghanistan]? I know that they are Sunni Muslim, and what are some of the major differences between them [and Shiite Muslims?]. For example we know that Iran opposes the Taliban regime because of the differences within Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
SA: Sure. The Taliban are an expression of Sunni Islamic fundamentalism and they really in a sense came out of nowhere into the public consciousness fairly recently, really in 1997. Taliban means a religious student, that's what the word means, and they were studying in Deoband seminaries. Deoband is a particularly strict school of Islamic law on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, so they are very traditional, militant interpretation of Sunni law, of Islamic law, in the Sunni tradition and they moved into really kind of a power vacuum in Afghanistan in the mid-90's. But they actually were able to defeat a previous wave of Islamic fighters, Islamic freedom fighters that we, the United States, among others had trained to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan, but the Taliban were actually much purer actually, and much more rigorous that these mujahideen freedom fighters. Those freedom fighters really misbehaved terribly and contravened all the dictates of Islam. They raped women, they stole from the people, they were really just thugs. The Taliban are not going to get any golden medal awards for citizenship in Western terms, but they came in and actually protected women from violence. They veiled them and kept them out of the public sphere, and in many ways oppressed women, but they nonetheless protected the fundamental rights of women from the sexual exploitation and physical abuse. They also opened up food lines and they actually restored some order. They are extremists. They are the version of Sunni Islam, which wants to go back and reimpose Hudud law, the most rigorous penalties in Sunni Islamic law for theft and adultery, so they are primitivists in that sense. But they really moved into a power vacuum and also took advantage of the moral corruption of the mujahideen.
FPA: Let's talk in broader terms for a minute here. I know it's difficult because there are so many different types of radical fundamentalism, as you just noted, but to bring it up into the modern times. Is it an attraction? Are people attracted to this? Or is it something that is taught at a younger age as part of a culture? Do people become entwined with fundamentalism as children or do they convert to it at an older age?
SA: Well, it's important to recognize that the vast majority of the Islamic world is traditional in its religious outlook. It's devout in a way that we in the West – Christians, Jews, and others in the United States and Europe may have a hard time understanding unless you've been in those worlds and walked among the streets of Cairo or other parts of the Islamic world where the day is already regulated by prayer. There is strict observance of Islamic law that is revived within the last 30 to 40 years, but is at its high water mark. Those folks are not fundamental or radical, but they are part of a culture that takes the Koran and the Islamic law and Islamic preaching very seriously, and it guides their lives. Within that general consciousness then, most of the majority of Muslims undergoing a religious and spiritual revival are not interested directly in political matters and they are not engaged. They are certainly not ready to take up arms and do violence.
FPA: When does it move from a religious movement into what you call a “religious nationalism,” or a political realm?
SA: Well, aside from Qutb and Maududi and Khomeini, there have been small cores of politically engaged Muslims who are well down the road of promoting an Islamic state and that it is really time to fight back against those compromising Muslims and Western agents and so forth….
FPA: When you say compromising, could you expand on that a little bit?
SA: Well I mean the Sheik, the leading Islamic cleric of Al Azhar, whose rulings on various matters kind of echo the Egyptian government and don't go so as far to say the Egyptian government should be governed in every respect by Islamic law that it can have some exceptions to that. Well, that's compromising. They are in the back pocket, or they are perceived to be in the back pocket of the regime so they become corrupted by their alliance with a state that is only nominally Muslim. Under most circumstances these radicals don't have a broad based appeal but it's the radical strategy to create crisis to dramatize what they think to be the reality anyways, namely that the Islamic world is colonized, it's being colonized in the most insidious way, they think, by these compromising religious scholars, by governments that are really not Islamic and are doing business with the West. So the radicals try, either through terrorist acts or through dramatic protests. What they think they are doing is trying to wake up millions and millions of Muslims who are deeply devout, but who are not politically engaged.
FPA: So in some regards it's an internal movement?
SA: Yes, very much so. It's a movement to try to recruit. The reason that the Islamic fundamentalists have a much better chance of recruiting that fundamentalists in other traditions, is that Islam remains, in the year 2001, a very literal and supernaturally oriented religion in its practice. It has not undergone a kind of church/state separation process, or an enlightenment that would differentiate religion from other realms of life and so it is a very strong religion in that sense in terms of holding its people under the canopy of belief that is genuinely Islamic.
FPA: What about states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, where there is a political administration and then also the fundamentalist clerics, and many times I think the United States, and countries like the United States in the West, have a difficult time using diplomacy because of our lack of understanding of this type of interaction between the two groups. Could you talk about that?
SA: Yeah, it's a very complex and, as you point out Robert, difficult relationship because we need the Saudi government, and part of this can be understood as 'better to work with a devil you know than with a devil you don't know.' I don't mean to disparage our allies that way, but it's a slogan. That is, while Saudi Arabia is not the ideal partner for the United States in so many ways, in part because it follows a policy, or it has in the past, of funding movements that are anti-U.S., including Islamic movements. So it's not ideal and it is also not the kind of government we want to uphold. It is a monarchy that is fairly oppressive. But on the other hand, Saudi Arabia is willing to enter into a military alliance and needs our protection, and is in a situation of actually having spawned a whole host of movements that are ungovernable and now turn their own weapons against Saudi Arabia, because it is elitist. These Islamic movements will claim to be, if not democratic in the way we understand it, certainly popular and reflecting popular sentiment.
FPA: That seems to be the case in Pakistan.
SA: It is certainly the case in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and in other regimes that we support, the Islamic extremists want to pit this as a battle against the oppressive regimes that are anti-democratic, backed by the United States on the one hand, and then their people-loving, democracy promoting movements as they describe them. So they see themselves as the good guys, and Saudi Arabia as a monarchy that has not fully supported their cause.
FPA: Let's go back for a second to the movements themselves, and you had mentioned the internal role that they play in an attempt to change the Muslim world itself. But how does this transform into anti-Americanism? You hear a lot of arguments that these people are anti-Western and anti-Western values. Where does that come in?
SA: Well, it's very much part of the recruiting mechanism, and there is substance to the criticism in this sense that it's not difficult for Muslim radicals to point to modern advertisement and Western products and media that have begun to appear more prominently in those societies. Or to point more directly to fellow Egyptian citizens or members of the Islamic oma, the worldwide community, who are living a upper-middle class or elite kind of lifestyle in a very Westernized style. They have either discarded the veil or they have more loose attitudes towards sexual relations or whatever. There is no lack of material, raw material. Just as there is in the United States, there is even more material. If a fundamentalist preacher wants to say “this society has lost its moral bearings, and that's why there is corruption, and that's why there is poverty,” etc. If you walk down the banks of the Nile in Cairo you are struck by, on the one hand by these beautiful high-rise hotels, Marriotts and so forth that are oases, and literally across the street is some of the worst poverty, that goes on for miles and miles and miles, that you've ever seen, and the inequity and injustice and materialism that is on display right before their eyes is wonderful raw material for recruiting radicals.
FPA: So would you say it's more of a tool – this anti-Westernism?
SA: It certainly is an instrument for recruiting, but I'd say it's effective because the people who are doing the recruiting truly believe it. Certainly there are manipulators and there are political opportunists and self-interested charlatans in any movement, including Islamic movements. But my judgment on this, for what it's worth, is that whatever we want to say about the Islamic radicals and their violations of human rights and their murderous tendencies etc. etc, that they are not true Islam – all this is true – but they are nonetheless motivated by the very powerful force of conviction, which is much more difficult. The inner core of these movements is sincere.
FPA: I guess that would be a good place to pick up on something I had read that you have written. You said that if religious zeal is part of the problem, it should also be part of the answer. So after this terrible event that has occurred here in the United States, it has sort of forced us to look into these movements, obviously at a much deeper level. My question to you is - how can we sort of intervene in these movements before they reach that radical stage? Before that zeal becomes destructive to human life?
SA: Well that's a very difficult question because your word intervene is the problem…..
FPA: I struggled with exactly how to ask that question……
SA: I mean it's the word that should be used in a sense because that's what we mean. Something has to change is what a word like intervene means, but what the difficulty is the Islamic world is a world unto itself, and the only ones who can intervene are those from within. The real hope is for outsiders like American Christians to find appropriate ways, and I should say also subtle ways, of lending support to and encouragement to those authentic voices in the Islamic world, those religious scholars and preachers and others - and there are many of them – who are courageous enough to denounce the extremists, but who also have credibility with the people. The point here is that the extremists are pointing to real injustices and real problems they wouldn't be so popular, or as popular as they are I should say, if they were works of fiction. So you need leaders who can speak with an authentic Islamic voice from within these societies who understand the problems, but who also say that the Islamic way of solving them or addressing them is not through terrorism. For our part we have to give credibility to those kinds of messages by being willing to think about a Marshall Plan or economic incentives, or real alliances with the Islamic world that are based in hope. Real hope for people to be lifted out of poverty and begin to participate democratically. What happens to Islamic scholars when they live in Westernized societies they don't slough off their Islamic practice, but they know how to work the system. They know how to improve social conditions through participation and democratic processes. Most of the Islamic world has not experienced that.
FPA: So again you would say it's more of an internal problem? Something the U.S. can't really play a direct role in but something that we can sort of foster through awareness and better diplomatic relations.
SA: Exactly
FPA: Another question I have for you is about borrowing and mixing and matching, which you wrote is a necessary tactic in the plight against the secular movement. If the U.S goes ahead with strikes against Afghanistan, will the fundamentalist movements around the world from North Africa, to Pacific Asia and Indonesia, to the Middle East, will these groups get together and sort of rally behind their cause against the Western world?
SA: That's an excellent question. The mixing and matching I refer to is the relatively new trend of Sunni and Shiite radical movements to collaborate with one another and to join in common cause. Before, say, the 1970's that would have been unheard of, because they are rivals. But now they have a common enemy – the global markets, the United States of America and so forth – and so it is within the realm of possibility not that the entire Islamic world will unite in some fantastic way, but that a series of movements that stretch from West Africa to South East Asia will increase their collaboration, formalize it, systematize it and in that way it's plausible to imagine a kind of international jihad movement, which is already, in part, in an embryonic shape now. But if we make mistakes in our military response and kill innocent victims in large numbers and show a disregard for human life and Islamic culture, none of which we happily, seem to be in the offing. We've shown restraint thus far and we seem to be targeting very specific targets. Anyway, should we make the mistake of going anywhere beyond those targets, than it's possible that there will be more recruits, more interconnectedness between movements. While the whole popular Islamic world is not going to mobilize, we will have a more formidable opponent on our hands.
FPA: Is there a large population of more moderate fundamentalists who could be pushed over to the radical side by such a U.S. action?
SA: Yes. Right. There are a number of people like Rashid Ghannouchi in Tunisia and others who have kind of been trying to keep a foot in both worlds. Who have been trying to speak to the West but also keep up the Islamic pride and backbone, so to speak. But they are actually the source of hope, frankly, that there will be a movement in the Islamic world because those are the people who have the credentials. Should they be pushed over to the other side we lose potential allies.
FPA: Lastly, can we move beyond this or is it truly a clash of civilizations?
SA: Oh, I don't think it's a clash of civilizations, Sam Huntington's phrase, in the most extraordinary sense that he means it. But there are elements of truth in that thesis. There are real differences in the way cultures and religiously based civilizations think about issues from gender relations to sexual relations to education to military use to images of God, and these are not insignificant for the way these cultures make political decisions. What's too hand-fisted about that thesis, or about the way it is often interpreted, is that it overlooks the real fact of diversity within these civilizations and different levels of assimilation into a cosmopolitan version of Islam or any tradition. So it's a far more complex reality than just to kind of lump West Africa to South East Asia into one Islamic block and think that these folks are going to think alike and act alike.
FPA: If I could just follow up on that, and even go back to something we had touched on a little earlier. When you say that religious zeal could be part of the answer, what exactly do you mean?
SA: Well, I mean religious zeal in a sense of people who are willing to take bold steps, courageous steps and in some cases risk their lives and livelihood to promote a peaceful version and a non-violent version of Christianity, or Islam or Judaism. Those folks are also acting from deep religious commitments. They are religious scholars, they are priests, they are rabbis, they are lay people in these various traditions who say this is not Islam, this is not Christianity, this is not Buddhism, this is not Judaism. That is, the 'this' being violent expressions of them or punitive or extremist expressions. That requires zeal, that requires faith that requires courage. No less than it requires courage to fly your plane into the World Trade Center. These different kinds of courage and expression are nurtured by spiritual practices, by prayer, by prayers to the same God. We would believe that God is really supportive of those who want peace over war and refuse to do violence, but we'll learn more fully, those kinds of questions later. What we know now is that people who are in the dynamic of religion, that is, who have given their lives over to God in sincerity, may or may not interpret God's will correctly, but they are giving themselves to a kind of self-sacrificial zealotry which can work both for peace and for violence.
FPA: Dr. Appleby, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
SA: Thank you.