A New Islamic Politics: Faith and Human Rights in the Middle East

Judith Miller masterfully deploys her insider’s knowledge of the events and personalities behind the Islamization of politics in the Middle East. Former Cairo bureau chief of The New York Times, Miller has spent 25 years reporting from the region. Hers is an extensively documented yet personal narrative with dozens of characters both ordinary and extraordinary, animated by the author’s compassion for the peoples of the Middle East. In ten chapters, each devoted to a different country, Miller combines sweeping historical surveys and a journalist’s reminiscences with examinations of militant Islamic groups from Hamas to the challengers of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi to the leaders behind the Islamic governments of Iran and Sudan. The book traces the militants’ intellectual and ideological roots back to the early years of this century and uncovers current political and financial connections within the region and beyond.

But how many names of God has Miller truly perceived and understood? Could she have missed what she was not looking for, and found only what she was seeking?

POINT OF VIEW

Miller says her reasons for choosing the countries she writes about are ‘obvious’ and does not attempt to justify her focus on Islamic militancy. Yet she claims to ‘convey . . . the mood of the countries within the region, the tone of their debates, and the forms taken by the struggle for dominance.’ Her selectivity, however, not only anticipates negative conclusions about Islam but may contribute to their validation.

The militancy Miller critiques so effectively is indeed bound up with the region’s persistent political problems and economic weakness. But that does not mean Islam is the problem (as against the Islamists’ chant, ‘Islam is the solution’). Writing on Islamism in the West has been unrelentingly negative. Certainly the militants’ violent and oppressive behavior must be shown to have no basis in Islam. But the international media should also report on the more rational and humane Islamic perspectives.

Miller states: ‘While I have tried to keep an open mind about traditions and cultures that differ from my own, I make no apology for the fact that as a Western woman and an American, I believe firmly in the inherent dignity of the individual and the value of human rights and legal equality for all. In this commitment, I, too, am unapologetically militant.’ One has confidence in Miller’s professional ability to minimize her perspective’s influence on her reporting, but who one is and what one believes in necessarily affect how one perceives the other, even in the most successful efforts at cross-cultural understanding.

While Miller exposes the profound human rights problems in the theory and practice of militant Islamists, she is ambivalent about violations of human rights by ‘moderate’ regimes. She ‘can hardly endorse the [Algerian] government’s refusal to abide by the [1991] election results, [but] was relieved that it had done so.’ What does that tell both sides in Algeria? She supports ‘Egypt’s suppression of violent militant Islamists’ but does not condone ‘torture, emergency military trials, and other illegal means that have become routine features of the government’s anti-Islamist campaign.’ How else does she think the policy she backs will be achieved, if not through means she abhors?

The book vividly depicts the suffering of Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel, delivers the occasional reproach for Israeli ‘excesses’ such as the torture of prisoners, and discusses Israel’s misguided promotion of Hamas in the 1980s as a counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organization. But Miller’s tone makes all this sound like regrettable but understandable political reality. I looked in vain for scrutiny, from the standpoint of human rights, of the inherently discriminatory nature of an officially Jewish state and the consequences for the region. Considering how the Israeli dimension of their predicament obsesses Muslims of all stripes, Miller could have helped frustrate manipulation of the issue by governments as well as Islamist groups by engaging the implications of her analysis.

Each of the three examples above points up the difficulty of reconciling competing claims to self-determination, whether by the proponents and opponents of sharia (Islamic law) in countries like Egypt and Algeria or by Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the (formerly?) occupied territories. Each set of ‘internal’ difficulties, moreover, tends to be viewed in light of other factors, such as real or perceived bias for or against Islam or Israel. An appreciation of the other side’s fears can contribute to the reconciliation of competing claims.

ISLAM RUNS DEEP

Miller is right to call on Muslim intellectuals to ask, ‘What did we do wrong?’ rather than ‘Who did this to us?’ and to encourage them to seek solutions for tyranny and economic failure in their countries. But I sense in her analysis a negative view of Islam, even apart from her focus on Islamic militancy. Miller’s accounts of individual Muslims’ lives, while sympathetic, paint them as trapped in a difficult and painful situation rather than as being there by choice or drawing strength from their faith. In the only part of the book to present a clear view of Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad -- six pages in the chapter on Saudi Arabia -- Miller serves up a cruel, opportunistic figure, shorn of context, that, ironically, Islamic militants past and present have evoked to legitimate the use of violence and the worst kind of intolerance.