Fundamentalist Muslims Between America and Russia
When President Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev met in Geneva last November, the fundamentalist Muslim rulers of Iran devised their own interpretation of the summit conference. "The biggest worry of the two superpowers," Radio Teheran announced, "is neither the star wars' nor the speedy buildup of nuclear weapons, but the revolutionary uprising of the world's Muslims and the oppressed." Iran's President Sayed Ali Khamenei asserted that the two leaders, fearful of revolutionary Islamic ideology and the disturbing effect it has across the Third World, met to figure out "how to confront Islam."
Daniel Pipes is the incoming Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and Editor of Orbis. Copyright © 1986 by Daniel Pipes.
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Both in public and underground, Iranians are debating the legitimacy of the Islamic state that Khomeini built. Students challenge the notion that Islam has all the answers but evince pride in an Iran free of the shah and under no foreign master. The religious and secular elites are increasingly willing to contemplate pluralism and openness to the world, though most makers of the revolution remain obdurate and appeal to anti-Americanism to stir up the masses. Washington needs to listen to the new voices of Iran.
The Arab world has squandered its political inheritance of secular nationalism. In the 1980s, autocracy and young theocratic brigades overtook and exiled the older generation of liberals. The rise of political Islam was accompanied by severe economic decline in the region. But the Middle East is ripe for a post-Islamist era. A modernist Arab alternative requires large-scale economic and political reform and a coming to terms with the two bogeymen -- America and Israel.
There is a dark side of freedom in the USSR, and 'glasnost' has released the expression of sentiments, notably anti-Semitism, that communism claimed to have eradicated. Emigration to Israel is a safety-valve, but perhaps intensifies the risk to Jews who remain.
