Simons says politics may win out over values in Mideast, elsewhere

Simons

By Linda Myers

Thomas W. Simons Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and Poland, returned to campus Feb. 21 to deliver a cautiously hopeful message on the future of Islam and the West.

Simons, a Provost's Visiting Professor, told the audience, a nearly full house in Goldwin Smith Hall's Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, that he saw the beginnings of "a major paradigm shift" -- away from politics as culture, and toward a more pragmatic form of politics that could be "good for all of us."

He began by defining politics as "a competition of interests for limited ends and bounded objectives," and its opposite number, politics as culture, as "a promotion of identities and principles that take values as their main criteria." The latter, he suggested, poses more of a threat because of the inflexibility of its proponents, for whom negotiating means betraying sacred principles.

An astute and nimble thinker, and sometimes challenging to follow, Simons stated that "in life, politics and culture are always mixed." He then went on to describe East-West conflicts from the 1950s onward in political and cultural terms, making the powerful social and economic forces at play sound almost like competing shifts in the Earth's tectonic plates.

In the 1950s in both the West and the Islamic world, politics dominated, he said. In the decades that followed, however, came the forces of technological change, new social mobility, expanding nontraditional education and their disharmonious consequences.

While the West became embroiled in the Cold War, the Islamic world, particularly in the Middle East, began its plunge into more than 30 years of civil war. The causes, said Simons, were many: discredited republican nationalism following the defeat of Arab countries by Israel in the 1967 Six Days' War; large revenues from oil in conservative monarchies such as Saudi Arabia that benefited only a wealthy few, ruined agriculture and swelled the populations in cities with inadequate infrastructure; the calling in of Islam as a weapon by those monarchies; and limping economies that could not provide enough jobs for the many university graduates produced by expanded educational programs.

"That is a recipe for radicalism, and radicalism came," starting in the mid-1970s, said Simons. A group of Muslim thinkers turned into a modern ideology the seventh-century idea of a pure, unified Muslim community, or "umma." These new Islamic fundamentalists -- Simons called them "Islamists" -- sought to overthrow sitting regimes and create "so-called Islamic states." They broadened their ranks by recruiting among the educated, unemployed youth in cities.

To maintain their political hold and defuse the insurgencies, some regimes in the Middle East covertly negotiated with the radicals, adopting Islamic practices and legislation, said Simons. Many Islamists joined the system, assuming high-ranking political posts, while others tried to subvert it peacefully by promoting Islam in schools, hospitals, mosques and charities, he said.

But in the 1990s, coinciding with the information revolution, culture became ascendant, said Simons. Many young Islamists now lived in Western cities, where they had little prospect of integrating into mainstream society. They began to see themselves as the "saving remnant of purity and sanctity" of the Muslim religion, which Simons characterized as anti-religion because, "These men reject traditional religious authority, make religious judgments themselves. ... Their religion is a hodgepodge of rules and norms and dicta, abstracted from any specific culture in order to make it pure and universal." The result: "Reduced to mere culture, it becomes merely anti-West."

This change coincided with a comparable evolution in the West, away from politics and toward culture, said Simons. With the shift in manufacturing jobs to overseas and the erosion of big labor and the middle class, "Politicians had to build support issue by issue among shifting constituences," he noted.

Enter the concept of values. Many American politicians, including President George W. Bush, proclaimed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, an attack on U.S. values. "But by positing that the enemy's purpose is to destroy U.S. values -- rather, say, than to resist U.S. policies or respond to U.S. actions -- we fall into his universe of discourse," warned Simons. Among the dangers of a cultural approach to politics, he said, was "the [misplaced] confidence that our troops in Iraq would be greeted with flowers."

Although Bush's second inaugural address last month reiterated the "V" word, some behind-the-scenes actions point to a shift back toward political pragmatism, said Simons. In addition to providing a robust security framework in Iraq and Afghanistan, "we also systematically engage in the hard, piecemeal work with locals to create plausible new national political systems."

At the United States' urging, Pashtuns have been given a stake in Afghanistan. The interim constitution in Iraq includes veto rights for Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds. And moderate Muslims like Shi'ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are negotiating an end to insurrections.

That same trend is now under way across the Islamic world, Simons said, where the discourse has shifted away from blame of the West and toward how to reconcile concepts like democracy, representation, pluralism and rights with Islam. "That, ladies and gentlemen, is politics as politics: incessant negotiation, piecemeal adjustment, constancy where possible, compromise where necessary," Simons concluded.