Overcoming ‘Fitna’
Mar 2nd, 2008 by MESH
From J. Scott Carpenter
As early as this weekend, Geert Wilders, controversial Dutch politician and vocal critic of Islam, will release his new film, Fitna, on the internet. Fitna, which in Arabic means “dissension,” promises to be even more inflammatory in Muslim-majority countries than the Danish cartoons that sparked riots in many capitals in 2006. According to Wilders, the 15-minute film will show that the Quran is “a fascist book” that “incites people to murder,” and he promises something special at the end of the film: “Something will happen to [a picture of Muhammad] but I won’t say what.”
MESH Updater: See the MESH posting on the film and its reception by Josef Joffe, Fitna and the ‘Euroweenies’. The film may be viewed here. And scroll down for J. Scott Carpenter’s post-release assessment: “There is little newly controversial—or even wrong—here.” |
The State Department has been in routine discussion with the Dutch government about the film and was hoping that Wilders would be persuaded not to release it. He has resisted such entreaties and has said he is housing the server from which the film will be released “in North America” to prevent the Dutch government from shutting it down.
Even before its release, the film has caused a backlash, particularly in Egypt, where a government spokesman has already chastised “European lawmakers and politicians” for using “gratuitous methods to gain electoral votes by attacking” Islam. Shortly after that statement, the organizers of the International Film Festival for Children in Cairo boycotted the Dutch entry, Where is Winky’s Horse? For good measure, they boycotted the Danish entries as well. In universities around Egypt, thousands of students have already joined protests—all in response to a yet-to-be-released film that no one has seen.
Whatever Wilders’ ultimate motivation for releasing the film, he aims to tap into a deep ambivalence about the cultural drift taking place within Dutch and broader European society, and the fact that too few people are reflecting on what it means. Whether it’s the Dutch foreign minister stating explicitly that Islamic culture will become part of Dutch culture, or the Archbishop of Canterbury stating that Sharia should be made part of British common law, there is the sense that European leaders are simply surrendering to political correctness without asking basic questions about what it is to be Dutch, British, European or—for that matter—Muslim.
At times, radicals on both sides of a question are needed to propel those in the center forward—to shake them from their lethargy and lift their heads from the sand. But almost all of the radicals, Wilders notwithstanding, have been on the Islamic side. Ever since 9/11, Western societies have responded to rising radicalism by doing all of the soul-searching, adjusting and accommodating. As a result, Western governments have sought ways to connect with the Muslim communities within our own societies and sought partnerships with them to solve shared problems in a shared way. On the whole, this has been a good thing.
Unfortunately, Muslim-majority governments, especially in the Arab world, have not responded in kind. Rather than become self-critical and recognize how they have helped radicalize their populations, governments have made the situation worse by steadily accentuating the role of Islam in politics while pretending in their narratives to be secular. The reason is simple: insecure in both their ideas and their legitimacy, they have sought to borrow both from Islam, hoping in this way to secure their flank against populist Islamists. It is not working.
Egypt is a case in point. Not until 1971 did the Egyptian constitution make the principles of Sharia a source of legislation for the legislature and government to consider. In all previous constitutions, amended or otherwise, going back to 1923, this phrase was absent. Later, under pressure that likely accompanied the signing of the Camp David Accords, President Sadat in 1980 went further making Sharia the source of all legislation (Article 2). Even this was not enough to save him from a hail of bullets, however, and since then increasingly conservative Egyptian courts have had to do back-flips to justify huge swathes of secular law.
Recently, in an unprecedented ruling by Egypt’s highest administrative court, the court determined that a group of Coptic Christians who had converted to Islam could have their re-conversion officially recognized. This was proclaimed by the New York Times as something of a triumph to be celebrated: “Egyptian Court Allows Return to Christianity,” it trumpeted.
Although a fairly radical step for Egypt, it was not a blossoming of religious freedom. Agreeing with the lower court that Islam does not envision conversion from Islam to “a less complete religion,” the court required an asterisk of sorts be placed on the returning Christians’ national ID cards. The cards will have added to them the brief phrase: “adopted Islam for a brief period”—marking their bearers as apostates and possibly for death.
In May of last year, Habib al-Adly, Egypt’s Minister of Interior, wrote a memo urging the blanket rejection of all re-conversions to Christianity. Al-Adly insisted that Islam is the state religion, meaning that any Muslim man who abandons his faith should be killed. Happily this was not the case for women. A Muslim woman, he wrote, “should only be imprisoned and beaten every three days until she returns to Islam.” What is ironic about this is that al-Adly is also charged with protecting the Egyptian state from the purported scourge of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Last year’s constitutional amendments reflect the continuing confusion over the role of religion in Egyptian society. Articles 5 and 46 as amended sought to separate religion from politics by banning the formation of religious parties and by guaranteeing the freedom of religion. Both of these moves were rightly applauded in the West. Nothing was done, however, to make them compatible with Article 2—and how could they be? The Muslim Brotherhood argues that not only is a ban on its organization unconstitutional, but that Article 2 in fact mandates its existence and the use of its campaign slogan “Islam is the Solution.” Most Egyptians probably agree. The courts, too, have refused to allow Muslims who convert to Christianity to have their ID cards record the fact. Only one Egyptian has been courageous enough to test the courts on the question.
If yesterday, governments in the region, including Egypt’s, sought to co-opt the symbols of Islam to legitimize their rule, today the genie they’ve released is out of their control. The governments have argued for years in Washington that they were the only bulwark against radical Islam. Today they say they really mean it. And yet the main strategy for dealing with political Islam seems to be repressing it with one hand while stimulating it with the other.
When Wilders’ film is released, many Muslims (not all) in many countries (not all) will riot; cries will go up far and wide for the West to come to terms with Islam, and the radicals will again try to shift the ground toward them. Predictably, such violence will take place mostly in countries that are not free or only partly free by Freedom House’s standards.
When this happens, it should be more than another occasion for the West to apologize for its irresponsible politicians. Western governments, particularly the United States, should challenge Arab “allies” to adopt policies that begin to reverse the long trend. Unless and until these governments become convinced that tolerance is something to be resolutely cultivated—not for the West but for the health of their own societies—it is they who will bear much of the responsibility for the violence unleashed as a result of a (yet unseen) 15-minute film.
Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.
6 Responses to “Overcoming ‘Fitna’”
I agree with Scott Carpenter that this film will be used instrumentally and opportunistically by Islamists and Arab/Muslim governments to push their agendas and bolster their legitimacy, respectively. I don’t see this film as encouraging voices of religious skepticism and tolerance in the Islamic world. Rather, it will be used to inflame sentiments and push for greater measures of intolerance as well as to reify the divide between the West and Islam.
The director, however, has every right to produce this film and to push the limits in Europe as to what being European means and what values undergird its societies. It is in Europe, not in the Islamic world, that I would be watching for meaningful political discussion and change. This will no doubt center on the place and role of Muslims in Europe.
Bernard Heykal is a member of MESH.
In his post forecasting the imminent uproar over Geert Wilders’ film about Islam, Scott Carpenter makes an elegant case for why our Muslim, especially Arab, allies should share our interest in not radicalizing the societies they rule. Instead, as he writes, “insecure in both their ideas and their legitimacy, [Arab regimes] have sought to borrow both from Islam, hoping in this way to secure their flank against populist Islamists. It is not working.”
It’s true, as Carpenter writes, that there was nothing in Egypt’s 1923 constitution about Sharia, and that it only started to creep into the document during Sadat’s presidency. But it’s worth remembering that constitutions are a relatively recent development in the Muslim Middle East, while Islam is not. Egypt has been Muslim since the 7th century, and the country’s “liberal” era—roughly 1923-52—is but a sigh in Middle Eastern time.
Islam really is an authentic source of political legitimacy and the regimes are right to try to outflank the Islamists on this count because it almost always works, especially in tandem with a ruthless application of force. Sure, the Muslim Brotherhood only dates back to 1928, but Muslim rulers have been fighting off pretenders since the earliest days of the umma, and both the incumbent and the challenger (e.g., Sunni, Shia, among others) invariably ground their claims to legitimacy in Islam.
Many of us may wish it were otherwise, including the Bush administration, whose democratization program sought to import a form of political legitimacy derived not from Islam (or violence) but popular sovereignty. It seems that Carpenter locates the problems with Arab governance in the same place the White House did: with the regimes, for it is they, in this reading, who are responsible for radicalizing their own populations.
In fact, this is a fairly common conceit in U.S. policy circles, that even our Arab allies incite anti-American, and anti-Israeli, feeling through the media, mosques and educational system. And thus the thesis posits an Arabic-speaking Muslim citizenry that would be moderate—and naturally predisposed toward the United States and Israel—if only it weren’t for cynical Arab leaders who rile them up for their own political ends, largely to scare the United States into thinking that only the regime stands between Washington and chaos.
I also used to believe that the regimes were the issue, but three events changed my mind.
First there was the Iraq war. As Hazem Saghieh has been saying since 2003, the Arabs believed the problem with the region was the Americans, and the Americans believed the problem was the regimes. As the decapitation of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the subsequent bloodshed showed, the fundamental problem was not the Americans or the regime. It was the pathologies of Arab society.
Next was the July 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. I was in Damascus during the second week of fighting. Yes, there was martial music blaring on the radio all day long, but the regime had to push very few buttons to convince Syrians across the sectarian spectrum to fly the yellow Hezbollah flag from radio antennae and store fronts. What the Syrians really want is Arab reform, we are told by those who are trying gloss over the obvious fact that what the Syrians really love is Arab resistance. And no one is shoving it down their throats.
Finally there was this, a brief discussion I had with the head of a small Arab state with excellent and longstanding ties to the United States. We were talking about the pace of reform in the region. “It’s a process,” he said. “Every country’s got to set its own pace. You know you can’t say, alright everybody by such and such a date has to have free media—I wish we had a free media.”
That last comment caught me off guard. What did he mean that he “wished” his country could have a free press? Why, if the ruler wishes it, can’t he make it so? Because even in a relatively moderate Arab state, large sectors of the populace hold radical views—views that are not encouraged by the regime, but, as the ruler intimated, censored by it.
The regimes may be overselling their case a bit when they claim they are a bulwark against radical Islam—sometimes they merely ignore the issue or even deflect it—but they’re not the problem. Arab regimes are merely a part of the Arab societies from which they issue.
Lee Smith is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Scott Carpenter’s post on Wilders’ film Fitna was truly edifying, and shows inter alia what a loss to the U.S. Government Scott’s having left the State Department really is. But more to the point, Scott’s comment begs some reflections.
First, I have always thought it interesting that while Islamic societies have historically been reasonably tolerant (because they have been irremediably heterogeneous from the get-go for the most part), mainstream Islamic theology (i.e., not Sufi, not Ahmadi) has not. As the “seal” of the Abrahamic faiths, it has been downright chauvinist. On the other hand, Christian societies have historically been more intolerant, but Christian theology arguably has been more disposed to toleration. One sees this in the “turn the other cheek” and “render under Caesar” tropes, but also in the more recent kind of structural theological humility characteristic of much of Protestantism, especially Anglo-American Protestantism.
If the Arab public sphere is becoming less tolerant, this suggests that what we are seeing, very broadly drawn, is a theologicalization of Islamic societies, defined as the process whereby the status of religion as a legitimate carrier of the public weal grows and the status of politics of a legitimate carrier of the public weal declines. (Just the opposite has been going on in Europe for about two or three centuries.) The reason for this, I think, is clear: The pressures of modernization, greatly increased over the past few decades, are accentuating the internal divisions within most Muslim societies between secularists and nativists/fundamentalists, with traditionalists and the neo-orthodox (Gellner’s definition meant here) squeezed in between, and the vocabulary of dispute becoming increasingly moralist, in this case Islamic.
Which leads to a second reflection. One understands Wilders’ motive to put a charge into his “I’m-OK, you’re OK” oblivious, supine European neighbors. But this kind of provocation plays right into these Islamic societal divisions, and does so in a negative way. It helps the nativist radicals to mobilize fence-sitters in their direction. In my view, the West is mainly a prop for the playing out of these internal divisions and the violence characteristic of them, not the main target. That goes for the Danish cartoons episode and for 9/11 itself. The problem for sentient Europeans is how to rouse the spirit of the Continent from its wildly asymmetrical tolerance for the intolerant without aiding precisely those Muslims who are most dangerous to it. I wish I knew the solution.
And third, finally, of course we all wish that authoritarian Arab regimes would stop feeding intolerance as a way to protect themselves from their own societies. They won’t stop, however, because religious and social tolerance bear far too much of a resemblance to the toleration of political dissent. Someone might get some “ideas.” Arab state elites will only relax and allow, if not promote, tolerance if and when their states become stronger, by which I do not mean more efficient mukhabarat states but precisely the reverse. I mean states that, as noted above, are socially authentic carriers of the values of the public weal, states whose legitimacy will then rise as the need to exercise random coercion will fall. Arab states will only achieve that blessed ideal when they can do two things: contain radical nativist violence without apologizing for it, and at the same time genuinely reflect social mores. That’s a delicate operation, and untutored Westerners viewing it are liable to misread what is going on. It is possible for Arab state elites to venerate Islam without giving in to radicals pretending to speak for tradition. The Jordanians seem to have the balance about right, for example.
Conclusion? If Fitna produces riots, it’ll be bad news if state authorities are complicit in fomenting them; it’ll be good news if state authorities bust some heads in the name of protecting genuine Islamic values. But open appeals to social toleration? We’ll not hear them. Scott, that’s the best we can hope for right now.
Adam Garfinkle is a member of MESH.
From a Dutch reader: Small correction: “Whether it’s the Dutch foreign minister stating explicitly that Islamic culture will become part of Dutch culture…” It was not our foreign minister, Mr. Verhagen (Christian Democrats), but minister for integration Ms. Vogelaar (Labour party) who made this remark. Verhagen is a strong defender of Dutch Leitkultur, and was one of the first to propose a ban on wearing a burqa in public space.
Wilders is a self-proclaimed provocateur, and Fitna provokes. That said, the film raises, as intended, more questions for the Dutch and, by extension, the Europeans, than for Muslims. Perhaps Adam Garfinkle’s worries that it may encourage radicals are correct, although it is hard to see what additional encouragement they need. The problem is that Europe and its tolerance have transformed it, during the past decades, from a refuge of Islamists like Abu Qatada, Abu Hamza, and the like, into an exporter of jihadism—to the United States, Kashmir, Israel, Yemen, etc.—and, since 2004, into a target.
Throughout, the “moderate” Muslims in Europe have been either quiet or, more often, in denial, giving the impression that solidarity with fellow Muslims, criminal as they may be, trumps any serious self-examination, and that alleged victimhood is a more important topic than common security and active defense of a version of Islam which is compatible with the 21st century. As for the Europeans, their attempts to muzzle Wilders suggest that they have learned the wrong lessons from the Rushdie and Danish cartoons affairs—and that, perhaps, Wilders has a point.
Michael Radu is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and Co-Chairman of FPRI’s Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security.
It’s taken me a while to get to it but I’ve just finished watching Fitna and have to say that I was thoroughly underwhelmed.
What was all the threatened violence about? Except for the multiple use of the infamous Muhammad cartoon—now with an animated fuse—and the off-screen sound of a torn page of what the filmmakers make explicit is not the Quran being torn, there is little newly controversial—or even wrong—here. In fact, the juxtaposed images and text, even when graphic, are tame when compared to the extremists’ own cutting-edge use of the same words and worse images to detail their barbarity and its excuse. In contrast to their highly emotive recruitment videos, Wilders’ film seems sophomoric, even boring, in comparison. His rather prosaic though reasonable point, made at the end of the film, is that it is up to moderate Muslims to excise the violent and intolerant from their midst. Hardly the product of a well-known agent of intolerance the Dutch government (and to a lesser extent our own) was preparing for.
For whatever reasons, Wilders clearly pulled his punches, and yet the whole of official Europe is bending over backwards to distance itself from this mildly provocative film. Foreign ministries (and our own State Department) are urging calm in Arab capitals across the region. And yet on the same day Fitna was released, a puppet show aimed at kids aired on Hamas TV in which a small boy kills President Bush with a knife and turns the White House into a mosque. As far as I can tell no outrage has been expressed to our Arab allies and they certainly have not publicly condemned the puppet show.
All of this serves to reinforce the essential thrust of my original post: all of the hand-wringing over the impact of a short, rather inconsequential film in Europe and the West cannot eclipse the need for “moderate” Arab governments to be compelled to do more to reverse decades of misusing Islam to prop up their own faltering regimes. That they will not does not mean that Western governments, including our own, shouldn’t call them on it.
J. Scott Carpenter is a member of MESH.