Engaging the Muslim World discussion

Q: In Engaging the Muslim World you set out to debunk myths and misconceptions about the Muslim world. Talk about a few.

A: I think there was an attempt by politicians and pundits, especially after September 11th, to reconfigure the Muslim world as a kind of monolithic block. And of course the Muslim world is not monolithic. Nor is it unrelentingly hostile to the United States; in fact, I can’t think of another culture region outside Europe that has as many active allies as the Middle East does or as the Muslim world does.

Q: You have a chapter titled “The Wahhabi Myth,” referring to the puritanical strain of Islam most prevalent in Saudi Arabia. What is the Wahhabi myth?

A: The thing I was concerned to dispel [in that chapter:] is the idea of Wahhabism as some sort of special nexus for the rise of Muslim terrorism or radicalism. I can’t find a stronger connection between the Wahhabi tradition and the terrorist groups than I can with regard to the Sunni Muslims of say Egypt or Syria or the Shiites of southern Lebanon or Iraq and Iran. Often nowadays in Washington people say Wahhabi, and they really mean “terrorist.” Of course, they’re reading off Osama Bin Laden as a Saudi, but actually his family is from southern Yemen and I’m not even sure he is a Wahhabi.

I have no brief for Wahhabism as a tradition, but its main emphases, which are on puritanical morality and direct relationship of the individual to the Almighty with no intercession and no intermediary—no saints, no tombs, no shrines—strikes me as quite Protestant. When we study western civilization in our textbooks, the Protestant movement is not depicted as the font of western terrorism; it’s seen as some kind of achievement. But these same emphases, when they are in Islam, are regarded as especially menacing.

Q: You make a distinction in the book between Muslim activism and Muslim radicalism. How do they differ?


A: There are many fundamentalist political movements in the world of Islam that have very substantial backing from the population and which avoid violence and engage in essentially parliamentary kinds of activities or civil society activities, soup kitchens and development work in communities and so forth. There was a big to-do when Stenny Hoyer in the congress met with a parliamentarian in Egypt from the Muslim Brotherhood a couple years ago. The people who condemned the meeting were reading the Muslim Brotherhood as some kind of terrorist organization, which is simply not true. It is a parliamentary organization in Egypt. It was alleged that the terrorist movements hived off from it, and that is true; but they hived off because they found the Muslim Brotherhood too moderate.

Read the rest of PBC's interview with Engaging the Muslim World author Juan Cole here

Check out the Must-Reads on Iran here

Learn more about Engaging the Muslim World at Progressive Book Club, where you'll find reviews, interviews, discussions, articles, and more.