[api] Hume Horan, The U.S. and Islam In The Modern World
Russil Wvong
From: David Fischer <ex...@pacbell.net>
Author's Subject: Ambassadors: Failures or Scapegoats [Fischer]
Date Posted: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 21:56:27 -0800
I'll leave it to others to defend Hume Horan's specific actions
regarding Saudi acquisition of the missiles. However, the real
reason he was asked to depart was his incredible knowledge of the
Saud family, the internal politics of Saudi Arabia and his
willingness to meet with (and listen to) Saudi's of all political
persuasions.
He was (still is) the best Arabist the State Department produced
for 30 years. His Arabic is nothing short of astounding and was
often cited as one of the reasons the Saud family wanted him
out. He spoke, I have heard it said, better Arabic that they. I do
know his hobbies include translating 8th and 9th century Arabic
poetry. I have personally witnessed his linguistic and political
skills when he was the US Ambassador in Khartoum.
It was always a joy to travel with Hume anywhere in the Arabic
speaking world. In short order he would have ferreted out
interesting people with non-official points of view which he would
sift in assessing the local political situation.
Finally, he was one of the two or three best writers in the
foreign service. A telegram from Horan would often end up in the
Secretary of State's evening reading folder not because it held
some nugget about a foreign policy crisis but because it was so
well written.
We would all be far better served today if Hume had remained as
Ambassador in Saudi Arabia.
Ambassador David Fischer
Diplomat in Residence
San Francisco State University
I thought I'd do a search for articles by Horan, and found the following:
http://www.afsa.org/fsj/feb02/horan.html
Russil
--
The U.S. and Islam In The Modern World
AFSA Foreign Service Journal, February 2002
The solution to the current tribulations of Arab Muslim civilization
must be found in the inner resources and recuperative powers of Islam
itself.
By Hume Horan
The months that have passed since Sept. 11, 2001, have prompted much
reflection among Arabists, like all Americans: "Why have young, male,
Arab Muslims figured so prominently in the terrorist annals of the
past quarter-century?"
To name but a few incidents, there was the 1970 assassination of
Defense Attache Bob Perry in Amman, that of Ambassador Cleo Noel and
his DCM, Curt Moore, in Sudan in 1972, the bombing of the U.S. Marine
Barracks in Beirut in 1983, the two separate bombings of Embassy
Beirut in 1983 and 1985, the 1985 murder of Leon Klinghoffer aboard
the Achille Lauro, the 1988 murder of Col. Rich Higgins in Gaza, the
1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 destruction of our
embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the 2000 attack on the USS
Cole, then . . . the awfulness of Sept. 11. And this is by no means
all!
There are various reasons for the anger that some young Muslims,
raised in the sterile hatcheries of the refugee camps, or the
religious schools of Saudi Arabia, feel toward us. Most often
mentioned is our support of Israel. But this issue deserves a closer
look.
It is sad but true that America has never gotten much credit for what
it actually does for the Palestinians. For half a century, we have
provided a plurality of the funding to the U.N.'s Relief and Works
Agency for Palestinians. For nearly as long, we have led international
efforts to advance the Middle East peace process. President Clinton
personally oversaw the intensive negotiations that led to the 1993
Oslo agreement and the creation of the Palestinian National
Authority. He devoted two weeks, moreover, of his waning presidency to
sketching out and attempting to cajole the parties to endorse the
outlines of an imaginative agreement -- only to have Yasser Arafat
refuse even to accept it as a basis for discussion. And we rarely hear
of U. S. efforts to succor Muslims in Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia and
Kosovo.
Yet once, when I appealed to Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud to
give more assistance to UNRWA, he replied only that "You Americans
created the refugee problem. You solve it." In response, I asked if he
could imagine, had a catastrophe driven half a million Canadians into
North Dakota, Idaho and Minnesota, that three generations later, those
populations would still be held in refugee camps? How differently the
half-million Jews driven from Arab lands in 1948 were received by
Israel, compared to how the half-million Arabs driven from Palestine
that same year, were received by their Arab neighbors!
The truth is that for Arab governments, the Palestinian issue is --
among other things -- a convenient tactic. By "waving the bloody
flag," Arab governments can distract their subjects from misrule,
oppression and misery at home. In particular, Palestinians' grievances
against Israel have their match in the half-century of neglect and
oppression they've endured from supposedly "brother" Arab regimes.
The Challenge of Modernity
In fact, as things stand now, even if the Palestinian-Israeli dispute
were quickly solved by exterior diktat, we would still be the target
of alienated young Arab Muslims. Why? Because the Arabs' dispute with
Israel is only a symptom of a deeper problem, one that cannot be
solved by shuttle diplomacy, special envoys or conferences at Wye
Plantation.
This deeper problem exists at two levels: superficially, it has to do
with the failure of Arab political and intellectual institutions to
address the needs of their young populations. How can being a citizen
of Syria, or Lebanon, or Egypt, or Algeria, or Sudan give young Arabs
the sense of patriotic identity that we get from being citizens of the
United States? Arab states have little emotional hold on the loyalty
of their populations; most Arab regimes are corrupt and morally
discredited. This particularly applies to Saudi Arabia, which has
shored itself up externally through its ties to the U.S., while at
home, it both has placated and suppressed opposition by giving "power
of attorney" for social affairs to reactionary, xenophobic Muslim
clerics (ulama). What personal attachment can Saudi Arabians -- 60
percent of whom are under 18 -- feel for their rulers? The king and
many of the leading princes are all in their seventies, and must seem
more remote from most Saudis than, say, George Washington is from us.
Young Arabs, moreover, are failed by their intellectual leaders. Where
are the Arab Reinhold Neibuhrs, Christopher Dawsons, Karl Barths,
Martin Bubers? Where are the politically engaged intellectuals who can
help a young Arab make coherent, responsible sense of a troubling
modern world? They scarcely exist in the Arab world. The few that even
try, are threatened, jailed, flee to exile -- or worse. In January
1985, I contacted the Sudanese Presidency to plead for the life of a
free-thinking Islamic reformer, Dr. Mahmoud Muhammad Taha. During his
trial for heresy under Muslim canon law (Sharia), Dr. Taha had refused
to recant his liberal views, and was condemned to death. I was told
that the president would not speak to me and that no appeal was
possible from the ruling of the religious tribunal. Dr. Taha was
publicly hanged.
Accordingly, many young and sensitive Arabs -- especially members of
the educated elite -- are deprived of moral and intellectual
leadership from their own religious institutions. Bereft of
meaningful guidance, they use violence to fill the void, to provide
some sort of an answer -- even a negative one -- to "Who am I?"
Jellyfishes, many of them are drawn to the rocks of Osama bin Ladin's
Luddite worldview.
More fundamentally, though, all Arab Muslims -- and not just young,
educated males -- are challenged cosmologically by the modern
world. From the start, Islamic society was seen by its members as a
"City of God" upon earth. Islamic society was built upon the perfect
teachings of God's own revealed word, dictated and unalterable: the
Koran. In a spirit reminiscent of Leviticus and Deuteronomy,
instructions for even the minutiae of everyday life were divinely
vouchsafed therein. Conveniently, Islam's immediate rapid expansion,
its political and cultural triumphs, represented incontrovertible
evidence to Muslims that God had provided mankind with His perfect and
final instruction, for the present and evermore. And God's having
revealed the Koran to the Arabs and in Arabic was seen by Arabs as a
mark of special divine preference.
From a Muslim's standpoint, the challenges before Mohammed were of a
magnitude that, indeed, could only have been overcome by divine
guidance and inspiration. He was the Prophet, the bearer of God's
final revelation -- but given Arabia's political anarchy, its social
and intellectual disorder and the proximity of the Sassanid (Persian)
and Byzantine empires, he also had to found the Islamic state. He
needed to establish the political and legal institutions that could
protect and give lasting expression to his teachings.
As a religious figure, Mohammed was more a Moses than a Christ. Yet in
Sunni Islam, both the secular and religious sides of Mohammed's
mission came to be equally sanctified and immutable -- and in theory
have remained so to the present. Muslims were supreme in worldly
affairs because they were right, and they were right because vice
versa. Only in the 18th century did this comforting, complacent
alliance between revelation and power begin to break up. That breakup
has continued -- and accelerated -- ever since.
Under Christianity, on the other hand, the relationship of politics to
revelation was very different. The Christian revelation came to pass
under the Roman imperium, and Rome's established legal and political
institutions. Early Christianity tended to accept them as givens. It
expected an early return of the Messiah, and sought its center in the
spiritual, other-worldly aspects of Christ's
revelation. Christianity's development, accordingly, was not much
constrained by divine prescriptions for the practical organization of
man's life upon earth.
Making Sense of God's Will
So how should a young Arab Muslim today answer the great question,
"How then should I live?" and its corollaries: "How to reconcile the
Koran's assurance of divine favor and worldly power with daily proofs
that we Muslims are falling behind? And falling behind not just to the
United States and Western Europe, but even to its despised
`step-child' Israel? Where today are the happy, successful, and above
all, POWERFUL states of Islam? How can God allow His people to be so
confounded? Are our tribulations a punishment for our flawed practice
of His teachings?" An increasingly common answer to all these doubts
is: "I should resolve to become ever-more-and-more intensely and
rigorously observant. "
Alas! This prescription will never bring relief to the sense of
political or moral abandonment of many young Arabs. They are trapped,
so to speak, at the bottom of a well, and try to escape by excavating
downward -- to China. The solution only makes the problem worse. Their
anger and frustration at the West grows, and particularly toward its
standard-bearer, the U.S. Our worldly success, our mere existence,
threatens to refute those beliefs and traditions that give meaning to
the lives of Arab youths.
What is to be done? The longer-term solution to the tribulations of
Arab Muslim civilization must be found in the inner resources and
recuperative powers of Islam itself. But here we encounter another
problem: the passive, rigid, uncreative way in which Islamic culture
has been transmitted since the Islamic Middle Ages. Modern Arab
societies lack a tradition of self-criticism, of rational
analysis. Without the ability to analyze successfully the doings of
the world around them, or even of their own societies, the Arab public
ego has experienced many reverses. It has become defensive and
insecure. Public discourse is dominated by a zeitgeist that
attributes any bad news to the workings of various exterior,
malevolent powers: British intelligence, the Zionist conspiracy, the
CIA. Never to one's own shortcomings. Such an alibi absolves Arab egos
from any blame or responsibility for every setback.
Consider one fairly recent example: the Egyptian government's refusal
even to consider the possibility that on Oct. 31, 1999, the pilot of
Egypt Air Flight 990 deliberately flew his plane into the ocean,
killing himself, the other crew members and the 271 passengers
aboard. To investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board,
the cause of the crash was obvious: the pilot had intentionally pushed
the aircraft to its doom. But to this day, the Egyptian government
uncritically pursues ever-more ingenious and far-fetched strategies of
denial. Multiplied across any number of similar instances, however,
Arabs come to feel themselves to be impotent, the playthings of unseen
but always hostile forces.
It is hard for us Westerners, even "speaking as a friend," to help
heal the uncomprehending, wounded pride of a great civilization. We
will not be listened to. There is no ecumenical tradition in
Islam. There are mosques all over America -- there is even one in Rome
-- but Christians may not bring so much as a Bible into Saudi
Arabia. It is inconceivable that anywhere in the Islamic world, the
head of a divinity school would establish professorships in Buddhism,
women's studies, and the role of religion in international conflict,
as Father Bryan Hehir did at Harvard. In Islamic cultures, the
foreigner's extended hand receives no response; indeed, the gesture is
likely to be rebuffed or misconstrued.
Similarly, a Muslim might try to proselytize a Christian or a Jew. But
for him to engage in a genuine dialogue with them would suggest that
their faiths contained some fraction of truth not found in the Koran,
and from which Muslims might benefit for the more perfect worship and
understanding of God. And such a possibility is literally
inconceivable to a true Islamic believer.
I'll not forget King Feisal's polite but frosty dismissal of my naive
suggestion -- as a young charge d'affaires in Jeddah in 1973 -- that
much benefit might accrue to both the West and to the Arab world, were
Saudi Arabia to send some young Islamic scholars to divinity schools
in the United States. A royal adviser afterwards reproached me for
raising the question: "You were asking His Majesty to mingle truth
with falsehood!"
Terms of Engagement
What could Muslims themselves do to rejoin the modern world on terms
consistent with our times and with Islamic revelation? Some thoughts
follow.
First and foremost, Muslims must try to escape from the flies-in-amber
position in which history has placed them. What was revealed
ever-so-long ago as canonical for Islam's secular and spiritual life
has become its prison. Islam, like other religions, dazzled and
overwhelmed by the Deity's transcendent force, has elaborately wrought
to tame and to confine it so that it may be safely observed, or even
put to useful work, by mortals. Or to put it another way: not unlike
the clerical class of other faiths, the Islamic ulama has made of
religion a sort of divine "containment vessel" -- a rule book, a
mechanical code that promises power and salvation to true believers.
The various Muslim clerics and their supporters throughout the Arab
world will naturally fight any challenge to the lucrative monopoly of
interpreting the Koran they have enjoyed for well over a
millennium. But meanwhile, the world is changing ever faster about
them; it is leaving them, and the societies they purport to guide,
further and further behind. The latest catastrophic failure of
militant, political Islam may represent the death throes of a crusade
that went badly astray. After Sept. 11, and after the Taliban's
destruction in Afghanistan, will many young Muslims still want to
emulate Osama bin Ladin? Who now remembers the Mahdi, defeated at
Omdurman by Kitchener in 1898, or the much-feared Assassins of Alamut,
destroyed by Hulagu Khan in 1256?
One may hope that the Taliban's destruction, in particular, will clear
the way for Muslims to look again at where they are headed. At the
"macro" level, young Muslims may begin to see the heretical nature of
aggressive, "political" Islam, which diverts its followers from the
worship of God, and the pursuit of social justice, to a distracting
crusade for power in this world. There is an idolatrous quality to
political Islam that makes earthly power the principal object of
Muslim aspiration. One thinks of Livy's denunciation of any religion
"in which the will of the gods is offered as a pretext for crimes."
And at the "micro" level, one sees young Muslims not refuting, but
simply ignoring, the dysfunctional aspects of their tradition. Many
sincere, pious Muslim men and women, are making their own "right
reason" accommodations to modernity. They are acting as many Catholics
do, following their own consciences on birth control and other social
issues -- despite papal claims to infallibility in faith and morals.
With the Koran widely accessible to more-or-less educated Muslims,
Sunni Islam may be ready for its own "Protestant Reformation." God in
Islam has always had a personal, direct relationship with His
believers: "I am closer to you even than the artery of your neck,"
says the Koran. Might Muslims -- from the ground up -- be ready to
break from the orthodoxy fastened upon them so long ago? The present
moment may be right for the appearance of a chastened, realistic, more
flexible Muslim approach to the 21st century. If individual Muslims
can strike out for themselves, and if necessary, re-open the "Gates of
Ijtihaad" (that is to legitimize) new interpretations by contemporary
scholars, there may be hope for their community's reconciliation with
our time. In Islam's Arab heartland --Egypt, Syria and Jordan -- such
an initiative might creatively be led by educated, assertive, Arab
professional women. Elsewhere, such an effort might occur in the
Muslim diaspora -- in Indonesia, or India, or even the United
States. And what about the Shi`ite branch of Islam? It would be ironic
if Shi`ites, who accord great interpretive authority to their
juriconsults, the Great Ayatollahs, should lead the Islamic world to a
more relevant and better adapted form of Islam.
There may be hope. But as our distinguished late ambassador to Saudi
Arabia, William Porter, used to say, "Hope is a good companion, but a
poor guide." As fellow monotheists, as admirers of Islam's
contributions to civilization, we may hope that Islam will not let
itself be trapped in an obscurantist cul-de-sac. History, however, is
unsparingly Darwinian toward societies disfavored by natural
selection. History serves up winners and losers. Where now is
classical civilization? In our cultural genes, in our
museums. Byzantium? It survives as a truncated, disputatious fraction
of "that which once was great." The tempo of the modern world is
accelerating. It is harder and harder for non-performing societies to
keep up, much less catch up. And imagine the violence, the pain, the
awful grinding, if Islamic civilization, half-brother to the West,
were to be drawn into history's rock crusher! As friends of Islam, we
can stand watch by the bedside . . . and hope and pray.
How The West Can Help
But there are a few other things we could do. I'd propose first, that
when speaking or writing in English, we all stop using "Allah" when we
mean "God." A reader or listener might conclude that the God of
Muslims is horrific, a Moloch, or something drawn from Aztec
mythology. If we can't agree that we worship the same God, and that He
listens equally to all our prayers -- the prayers of Jews, Christians,
and Muslims -- we'll never agree on the smaller issues . . . such as
the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Second, the United States, with its never-equaled political and
economic and military might, should peremptorily put a stop to the
Arab-Israeli conflict. It has already wasted too many lives, taken up
too much of our attention, and consumed resources that could have
helped move the area forward. It has been too much of a
distraction. The expression "confidence-building measures" has a
fantastical, even cynical air of unreality to it, at least as applied
in the Middle East. The so-called "peace process," has proven to be
little more than a diplomatic perpetual-motion machine. It provides
excuses for all to keep things on hold. Between Arab anti-Semitism,
and Jewish fear of Arab revanchism, no agreement is likely to be
reached or to hold unless we take a strong hand.
To us and to many other friends of the region, the outlines of a
settlement are pretty clear: they would resemble the Camp David
proto-accords. There would be a Palestinian state committed to living
in peace with Israel; Israel's West Bank settlements -- a bone in the
throat to any peace effort -- would be dismantled. There would be
security guarantees for both Israel and the Palestinians. As a
corollary to any agreement, there should be measures in place to
monitor the sort of Palestinian state that would emerge; one
Taliban-dominated state has been enough.
We should work hard to enlist the association and support of our
Western allies in this effort. But we should not get bogged down in
details. We should ignore and bypass by those who would slow our peace
efforts by reviving objections drawn from over 50 years of failed
peacemaking. It has been my experience, that when the United States
makes it clear to all the world that we are utterly determined that
something must be done, reality tends to rearrange itself in a
complaisant pattern. Once we do, Arab and Israeli leaders could turn
to their populations, and say with a shrug, "What could I do against
the might and desire of the United States?"
Third, our foreign policy should more forcefully and consistently
reflect America's ideals. When Secretary Powell eloquently denounced
the Taliban's oppression of women, was I the only listener to think he
would have made just as much sense if he'd said "Saudi," whenever
"Afghan" was mentioned? Our government wants, it says, to reach
Muslims' hearts and minds, to reach "the Street." But how to do it?
There is a lesson for us in the political landscape of the Middle
East. Where governments are unfriendly to us, we are often unpopular
with "the Street." And vice versa. The reason may be that in one case
we are seen as a government, as an accomplice to the unpopular local
power, while in the other we are viewed as a liberating civilization.
American "exceptionalism" has never been more clearly demonstrated
than after the events of Sept. 11, and our victory in Afghanistan. We
stand unique in world history, virtually unconstrained by traditional
considerations of the balance of power. For the moment, we face no
credible adversary. We are therefore free to make fuller use of the
source of our strength and our appeal. Yet, in Reinhold Niebuhr's
words, "We should be humble hawks." We should seize this millenarian
moment, and work for an international community that better reflects
our ideals, which are neither of the East nor of the West, and whose
appeal transcends most cultures.
Hume Horan was an FSO from 1960 to 1998, serving as ambassador to
Yaounde, Malabo, Khartoum, Riyadh and Abidjan, as well as Deputy Chief
of Mission in Jeddah and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the
Bureau of Consular Affairs. He is the author of To the Happy Few, a
novel about terror and the Sudan (Electric City Press, 1996), and
currently serves as a consultant on Middle East affairs for MSNBC, NPR
and Fox News.