udith Miller is a
New York Times reporter much in evidence on
talk shows and seminars on the Middle East. She trades in "the Islamic
threat" -- her particular mission has been to advance the millennial
thesis that militant Islam is a danger to the West. The search for a
post-Soviet foreign devil has come to rest, as it did beginning in the
eighth century for European Christendom, on Islam, a religion whose
physical proximity and unstilled challenge to the West seem as
diabolical and violent now as they did then. Never mind that most
Islamic countries today are too poverty-stricken, tyrannical and
hopelessly inept militarily as well as scientifically to be much of a
threat to anyone except their own citizens; and never mind that the most
powerful of them -- like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Pa kistan --
are totally within the U.S. orbit. What matters to "experts" like
Miller, Samuel Huntington, Martin Kramer, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes,
Steven Emerson and Barry Rubin, plus a whole battery of Israeli
academics, is to make sure that the "threat" is kept before our eyes,
the better to excoriate Islam for terror, despotism and violence, while
assuring themselves profitable consultancies, frequent TV appearances
and book contracts. The Islamic threat is made to seem
disproportionately fearsome, lending support to the thesis (which is an
interesting parallel to anti-Semitic paranoia) that there is a worldwide
conspiracy behind every explosion.
Political Islam has generally been a failure wherever it has tried to
take state power. Iran is a possible exception, but neither Sudan,
already an Islamic state, nor Algeria, riven by the contest between
Islamic groups and a brutal soldiery, has done anything but make itself
poorer and more marginal on the world stage. Lurking beneath the
discourse of Islamic peril in the West is, however, some measure of
truth, which is that appeals to Islam among Muslims have fueled
resistance (in the style of what Eric Hobsbawm has called primitive,
pre-industrial rebellion) to the Pax Americana-Israelica throughout the
Middle East. Yet neither Hezbollah nor Hamas has presented a serious
obstacle to the ongoing steamroller of the anything-but-peace process.
Most Arab Muslims today are too discouraged and humiliated, and also too
anesthetized by uncertainty and their incompetent and crude
dictatorships, to support anything like a vast Islamic campaign against
the West. Besides, the elites are for the most part in cahoots with the
regimes, supporting martial law and other extralegal measures against
"extremists." So why, then, the accents of alarm and fear in most
discussions of Islam? Of course there have been suicide bombings and
outrageous acts of terrorism, but have they accomplished anything except
to strengthen the hand of Israel and the United States and their client
regimes in the Muslim world?
The answer, I think, is that books like Miller's are symptomatic because
they are weapons in the contest to subordinate, beat down, compel and
defeat any Arab or Muslim resistance to U.S.-Israeli dominance.
Moreover, by surreptitiously justifying a policy of single-minded
obduracy that links Islamism to a strategically important, oil-rich part
of the world, the anti-Islam campaign virtually eliminates the
possibility of equal dialogue between Islam and the Arabs, and the West
or Israel. To demonize and dehumanize a whole culture on the ground that
it is (in Lewis's sneering phrase) enraged at modernity is to turn
Muslims into the objects of a therapeutic, punitive attention. I do not
want to be misunderstood here: The manipulation of Islam, or for that
matter Christianity or Judaism, for retrograde political purposes is
catastrophically bad and must be opposed, not just in Saudi Arabia, the
West Bank and Gaza, Pakistan, Sudan, Algeria and Tunisia but also in
Israel, among the right-wing Christians in Lebanon (for whom Miller
shows an unseemly sympathy) and wherever theocratic tendencies appear.
And I do not at all believe that all the ills of Muslim countries are
due to Zionism and imperialism. But this is very far from saying that
Israel and the United States, and their intellectual flacks, have not
played a combative, even incendiary role in stigmatizing and heaping
invidious abuse on an abstraction called "Islam," deliberately in order
to stir up feelings of anger and fear about Islam among Americans and
Europeans, who are also enjoined to see in Israel a secular, liberal
alternative. Miller says unctuously at the beginning of her book that
right-wing Judaism in Israel is "the subject of another book." It is
actually very much part of the book that she has written, except that
she has willfully suppressed it in order to go after "Islam."
Writing about any other part of the world, Miller would be considered
woefully unqualified. She tells us that she has been involved with the
Middle East for twenty-five years, yet she has little knowledge of
either Arabic or Persian. It would be impossible to be taken seriously
as a reporter or expert on Russia, France, Germany or Latin America,
perhaps even China or Japan, without knowing the requisite languages,
but for "Islam," linguistic knowledge is unnecessary since what one is
dealing with is considered to be a psychological deformation, not a
"real" culture or religion.
What of her political and historical information? Each of the ten
country chapters (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan) begins with an anecdote
and moves immediately to a potted history that reflects not much more
than the work of a name-dropping college sophomore. Cobbled up out of
various, not always reliable authorities (her pages of footnotes are
tainted by her ignorance, whether because she can only cite the sources
she already knows she wants in English, or because she quotes only
authorities whose views correspond to hers, thereby closing out an
entire library by Muslims, Arabs and non-Orientalist scholars), these
histories are meant principally to display her command of the material,
but actually expose her lamentable prejudices and failures of
comprehension. In the Saudi Arabia chapter, for instance, she informs us
in a note that her "favorite" source on the Prophet Mohammed is the
French Orientalist Maxime Rodinson, a redoubtable Marxist scholar whose
biography of the Prophet is written with a bracing combination of
anti-clerical irony and enormous erudition. What Miller gets from this
in her short summary of Mohammed's life and ideas is that there is
something inherently risible, if not contemptible, about the man whom
Rodinson says was a combination of Charlemagne and Jesus Christ; for
whereas Rodinson understands what that means, Miller tells us
(irrelevantly) that she is not convinced. For her, Mohammed is the
begetter of an anti-Jewish religion, one laced with violence and
paranoia. She does not directly quote one Muslim source on Mohammed;
just imagine a book published in the United States on Jesus or Moses
that makes no use of a single Christian or Judaic authority.
Most of Miller's book is made up not of argument and ideas but of
endless interviews with what seems to be a slew of pathetic,
unconvincing, self-serving scoundrels and their occasional critics. Once
past her little histories we are adrift in boring, unstructured
meanderings. Here's a typical sentence of insubstantial generalization:
"And Syrians, mindful of their country's chaotic history" (of what
country on earth is this not also true?) "found the prospect of a return
to anarchy or yet another prolonged, bloody power struggle -- " (is this
uniquely true of Syria as a postcolonial state, or is it true of a
hundred others in Asia, Africa, Latin America?) "and perhaps even the
triumph of militant Islam in the most secular" (with what thermometer
did she get that reading?) "of all Arab states -- alarming." Leave aside
the abominable diction and jaw-shattering jargon of the writing. What
you have is not an idea at all but a series of clichés mixed with
unverifiable assertions that reflect the "thought" of "Syrians" much
less than they do Miller's.
Miller gilds her paper-thin descriptions with the phrase "my friend,"
which she uses to convince her reader that she really knows the people
and consequently what she is talking about. I counted 247 uses of the
phrase before I stopped about halfway through the book. This technique
produces extraordinary distortions in the form of long digressions that
testify to an Islamic mindset, even as they obscure or ignore more or at
least equally relevant material like local politics, the functioning of
secular institutions and the active intellectual contest taking place
between Islamists and nationalist opponents. She seems never to have
heard of Arkoun, or Jabri, or Tarabishi, or Adonis, or Hanafi or Djeit,
whose theses are hotly debated all over the Islamic world.