Three quarters of the people who talk on television about the Islamic world, couldn’t find their way out of a bag in the Islamic world!

This is a short extract from a lecture given at Stanford University entitled: “Democracy and the Middle East: Prospects and Problems”. The lecture took place on Thursday, April 20, 2006 at 7:30-9:00 pm, and was part of Stanford’s “Aurora Forum” and open to the general public.

The extract covers a question regarding the relationship between Islam and Democracy and the answer given by Abbas Milani.

Abbas Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution with an appointment in Stanford’s Department of Political Science, Abbas Milani is the author of Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (1996), Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (1998); and Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran (2004).

Questioner:

“To what extent does Islam play a role in this? Much of the popular discourse focuses on the inherent inconsistency between Islam and democracy. Arab countries are always cited as ‘exhibit A’ [wherein the inconsistency is deemed to be most apparent]. Arab counties constitute 15% of the world’s Muslim population, and by my ‘back or the envelope calculation’ the countries of Turkey, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Malaysia, make up nearly half of the world’s Muslim population. So I’d like you to reflect a little bit on: to what extent is Islam a causal factor in the anti-democratic nature of governance in Arab countries. And I’d like to turn Bernard Lewis’* question on its head ‘What’s wrong with Islam?’ and I’d like to ask you: what’s wrong with the way we may be thinking about Islam and its role in democratic development?”

*Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and specializes in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West. He is also an advisor to the Bush Administration and to often also to other members of the Republican Party.

Abbas Milani:

“First of all, I think one of the great misperceptions that exist in the west about Islam, is that there is a monolith out there called ‘Islam’. We have as many varieties of Islam as there are varieties of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism. There are stridently fundamentalist, pseudo-fascist, Islamists, and there are democratic Islamists who want to live as much in a democracy as anyone, anywhere. That Islam has a unified-anti-democratic history is also, I think, a great miss-conception. When the West had never heard of ‘multiculturalism’, Islam had a multicultural empire. And Jews, according to the same Bernard Lewis, when they were being thrown out of Spain, and they were being thrown out of England* … the safest place for Jews, was the Muslim world, and this according to Bernard Lewis … and we had, a thousand years ago in Baghdad, a set up where Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians would have open philosophical discussions about the different merits of religion. Yet at the same time, during that same period, there were clerics who ordered the death of anyone who didn’t think like them. So, we don’t have ‘one Islam’, we have varieties of Islam, some of them very open to change, some of them very open to democracy, some of them completely opposed to democracy.

“Part of the problem, I think, in the way the West approaches it – and this is particularly true in America, I am sorry to say – America has an attitude that the Islamic world is ‘easy to understand’ and that anybody can be an ‘expert’ on the Islamic world. Three quarters of the people who talk on television about the Islamic world, couldn’t find their way out of a bag in the Islamic world! They don’t speak a word of Arabic, or Turkish, or Persian. They’ve never lived in that area! I know people who have written books about Iran, a whole book, describing 25,000 years of history, and the lady who wrote it wouldn’t know Persian from Turkish! She wouldn’t know the Turkish alphabet from the Persian alphabet.

“Think about this: in the last 25 year when the United States knew that the ‘Muslim phenomenon’ was going to be a problem the number of study centres in America had diminished (!) except for after September 11^th. The State Department did not teach Persian until after September 11^th – they had a handful of people speaking Arabic! When Ronald Regan was looking for the moderates in Iran, and brought a group of Iranians to the White House, they had to bring an Iranian business man to translate the discussion. The CIA didn’t have one person who could understand Persian.”

* These pogroms occurred in England at roughly the time of the signing of the Magna Carter in 1215, which is considered to be the foundation of ‘Civil liberties’ and habeas corpus, for all common law nations and states, including the United States, Australia and Canada, and for all international Human Rights legislation