About a week back, I pointed to a quote from outgoing Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir and suggested this was a clear opening to a diplomatic strategy to address moderate Islamic countries. All we had to do was take the statement seriously. We also had to ignore a lot of the distasteful aspects of Mahathir's regime, which imprisons political enemies. Here are the relevant quotes from an interview with the BBC:
"A lot of people think the teachings of Islam make them confrontative (sic), but in fact, if you go to the fundamentals of Islam, we are urged to live in peace," he said.He said that in this "true sense", he considers himself a "fundamentalist" Muslim....
He appealed to Muslims worldwide to go back to the "original, true teachings of Islam" and embrace values such as "peace, friendship, brotherhood, and tolerance of people".
Malaysia, he said, did not have a problem with Islamic militants because it had acted to stop the "teaching of the politics of hatred" in religious schools....
"It is a lack of understanding of Islam that has led to this present situation," he said.
But he admitted that there was a problem within Islam with "wrong" interpretations of Islamic teachings.
"The result is that Islam appears to be an obstruction to progress," he said, adding that he believed there was a need for better unity within the Muslim world.
Then, a few days ago, "Dr. M," as he is known in the pages of his state-controlled newspapers, went and said that "Jews rule the world" by proxy. And he refused to recant when criticized. Now, this is bad in several ways: It's anti-semitic; it's not true, and; it's incendiary. All reasons, very good reasons, to condemn such nonsense, which President Bush, among others, has done.
The president has been congratulated for his response and rightly so. Dan Gillmor also points out a Washington Post editorial that suggests Bush's own failure to respond adequately to stridently pro-Christian and anti-Islamic remark made by an American general about a Somali warlord makes his criticism of Mahathir hypocritical. This is also correct -- President Bush has demonstrated repeatedly that he oversimplifies statements by other nations' leaders in order to paint black-and-white pictures in which the United States, but more particularly, he himself, is the man in white.
The general, William Boykin, told an audience of the Somali: "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." Boykin's explanation is that he meant the Somali warlord worshipped Mammon, that he idolized money. But at another event, also taped, he told a church in Oregon:
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your enemy," he tells the Good Shepherd audience. "It is not Osama bin Laden, it is the principalities of darkness. It is a spiritual enemy that will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus and pray for this nation and for our leaders."
And, according to Cybercast News Service, he went on to say:
"And we ask ourselves this question, 'Why do they (radical Muslims) hate us? Why do they hate us so much?' Ladies and gentlemen, the answer to that is because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian," Boykin was quoted as saying before the Good Shepherd Church in Sandy, Ore., June 21. "Ladies and gentlemen, we will never abandon Israel, we will never walk away from our commitment to Israel, because our roots are there. Our religion came from Judaism, and therefore these radicals will hate us forever."
In other words, our fight is with Islam. And as a fundamentalist, Boykin apparently shares the belief that we have help Israel fulfill its role in Christian prophecy, which requires the rebuilding of the Temple to bring on the End Times.
However, a lot of us live in the real world, one full of greys between various views, where global famine and death aren't high on our list of things to experience in life. We have to address Islam realistically, too.
Having had the surprising experience of seeing Mahathir up close, coming to the event with an American's view of his Islamic views that were characterized as "extremist" (this was pre-9/11), I am absolutely convinced that, despite his incendiary anti-semitic remarks, U.S. foreign policy has to take this guy seriously. When he says these things about Jews, he's playing to his fundamentalist audience, just as the Bush Administration does in its public pronouncements about our "crusade" against terror.
It would be convenient to blow off Mahathir as another Islamic crank, as much of the American media does, but this is the Muslim center talking, like it or not. I've read several of Mr. Mahathir's didactic books on Islam and the state, and it is clear that he is trying to balance a variety of forces to ensure the survival of his regime, which President Bush has lauded as a force for good in the War on Terror, as well as his -- Mahathir's -- historical legacy.
Mahathir may be stepping down as Malaysia's prime minister, but he is the de facto elder statesman of the quasi-democratic middle in Islamic society and we have to deal with him. Now, we can damn him for the things he says to keep his fundamentalist constituents in the Mahathir big tent or we can take that for what it is and challenge him to live up to the statements he makes about the peaceful nature of Islam. Doing the latter requires we swallow our tendency to announce our moral superiority (it's fine to do this at home, say when an idiot like Rush Limbaugh shoots off his mouth about black quarterbacks) and acknowledging that Christianity, Judiasm and Islamism all have a right to exist and a responsibility to their peoples to co-exist.
So, instead of writing off this transaction between President Bush and Prime Minister Mahathir as a clash of extremists, it is time for Americans to call on the President to exercise some of that humility he promised us during the 2000 campaign and challenge Mahathir to use his position as elder statesman to bring about the peace he says he wants.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at October 22, 2003 11:49 AM | TrackBack