The Foreign Service Journal, November 2011

38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 1 heresy under Muslim canon law (Sharià), 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 ap- peal was possible from the ruling of the religious tribunal. Dr. Taha was pub- licly hanged. Accordingly, many young and sensi- tive Arabs —especially members of the educated elite — are deprived of moral and intellectual leadership from their own religious insti- tutions. 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 Laden’s Luddite worldview. More fundamentally, though, all Arab Muslims — and not just young, educated males — are challenged cosmo- logically by the modern world. From the start, Islamic so- ciety 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 Deuteron- omy, instructions for even the minutiae of everyday life were divinely vouchsafed therein. Conveniently, Islam’s immediate rapid expansion, its political and cultural tri- umphs, represented incontrovertible evidence to Muslims that God had provided mankind with His perfect and final instruction, for the present and evermore. And God’s hav- ing 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 beforeMo- hammed 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 intellec- tual 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 insti- tutions 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 re- ligious 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, com- placent 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 rev- elation was very different. The Chris- tian revelation came to pass under the Roman imperium, and Rome’s established legal and polit- ical 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 corollar- ies: “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 andWestern 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 problemworse. Their anger and frustration at the West grow, and particularly to- ward 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 it- self. But here we encounter another problem: the passive, rigid, uncreative way in which Islamic culture has been U.S. - I S L A M R E L A T I O N S Even if the dispute were quickly solved, we would still be the target of alienated young Arab Muslims.