Former U.S. ambassador offers strong views on Islam and globalization

Thomas W. Simons Jr., former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and Poland and the first Provost's Visiting Professor at Cornell, speaks in Statler Auditorium Feb. 24. Robert Barker/University Photography

By Franklin Crawford

America's unilateral war on Iraq threatens to reverse many positive trends in the Islamic world that predated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and continued despite the United States invasion of Afghanistan, said Thomas W. Simons Jr., former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and Poland. But overall, he said, "the winds of change are blowing harder than ever."

Simons believes that those positive "winds" are pushing many Islamic countries into the 21st century's globalized world, with the United States serving as both "a partner and a target" to many Arab nations as they forge states that co-join the sacred with the secular.

During a Feb. 24 talk in Cornell's Statler Auditorium titled "Islam, 9/11 and Iraq," Simons, the first Provost's Visiting Professor at Cornell, drew on his extensive foreign service experience and his scholarly training as a historian to discuss trends in modern Islam, even as he avoided discussions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Provost Biddy Martin introduced Simons, and his subsequent lecture served in part to bring his latest book, Islam in a Globalizing World (Stanford University Press, 2003) current with the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

While many Arabs are "making Islam the primary badge of national identity rather than a belief system," Simons said, he told an audience of about 70 people that he sees this leading to a new nationalism. That may seem threatening to Americans but, in fact, it is a good thing, he argued.

"I think Afghanistan is grinding slowly toward a kind of constitutionalism and a degree of power sharing that is going to undercut the Taliban's appeal. ... In Iran you see the struggle of aging clerics and young reformers go on within the framework of national law. In Iraq we're learning, painfully, that we have to deal with the power of the Shiia, especially when they espouse elections ... they may even force us back to where we should be with the international community."

But Simons maintained that "by going into Iraq with inadequate political rationale and inadequate international [support] and by winning so big so fast, [the United States] gave the Arabs and other Muslims the perfect excuse to continue to wallow in political irresponsibility."

The Middle East is the least populated region of a diverse and widespread Islamic world composed of about 1.2 billion people. But the Arab states, home to less than one-fifth of all Muslims worldwide, are the Islamic heartland and source of the main political tensions and trends in modern Islam, Simons said. He spoke with an admiration and respect for Islamic culture as he described its origins, significant features and "hard history." Yet he showed little sympathy for Arab nations that use history as an excuse for what he termed continued "political irresponsibility."

"It comes so natural, from their history, to blame anyone but themselves for their ills and weaknesses and to refuse responsibility for the hard work and thinking" that go into building and sustaining a modern state, Simons argued.

He covered that history early in his talk by describing Islam's near annihilation by nomadic invaders from Central Asia and even Arabia in the Middle Ages; the later domination by the Ottoman Empire and, then, the European colonialists, especially during the period from the early 19th century to the mid-20th century. In the latter half of the 20th century, he said, post-colonial Islamic states in the Middle East savored freedom for only a short time before plunging back into a period of renewed humiliation, economic hardship, bloody civil unrest, religious infighting and, Simons alleged, political irresponsibility.

While Islam's history of repeated subjugation has led to a tendency toward victimization, Simons maintained, the current crisis in Islam, especially in the Arab states, arose from developments in the 1970s, the period in which post-colonial Arab nations rapidly fell out of sync with the industrialized West.

The decades following decolonization did not give way to the freedom and prosperity the Arab nations had longed for, Simons said. The shattering and humiliating military defeat of the Six Day War in 1967 sent Arab nations reeling. A culture with a historical proclivity toward blaming others for its problems, Simon argued, once again felt politically powerless. The United States had inherited "the imperial mantle" from the European powers and it played Cold War games with religious and secular, oil rich and oil poor Arab states alike. The United States supported Israel, and Israel remains a sore reminder of past occupations, he said.

Simons reminded his audience that while the West remembers terrorist actions against Israel at the 1972 Olympics in Munich and other front-page tragedies, the main victims of Arab terrorism in the Middle East throughout this period were Arabs.

Despite current evidence to the contrary, he said, prevailing trends indicate Islamic fundamentalist terrorists have and will become increasingly marginalized as Arab states move haltingly toward the economic benefits of globalization. This trend was true before 9/11, he argued, and continued even after the United States invasion of Afghanistan, which was carried out with U.N. support and the sympathies of many Islamic moderates.

Across the Islamic world, he concluded, trends toward innovation and modernization are very strong. As socioeconomic trends continue to pressure Islamic countries with globalization, "Muslims are going to want to benefit from [globalization] rather than just suffer from it," he said. "The question is whether the blow-back from our mishandled Iraq adventure will reverse these positive trends."