Engaging the Muslim World

Author Juan Cole's purpose is to convince us we should talk to the Muslim world. To do that we need to understand them better. His book helps us understand the richness and diversity of the Muslim world's social and political landscape. Certainly Cole holds a pro-Muslim world bias and he presents some questionable facts, but dwelling on this would be missing the contributions he makes towards promoting dialog over conflict. Cole makes a convincing case on two points. First, he establishes that there is a real diversity of views, practices, and opinions within the Muslim world and even within major areas of the Muslim world, just as there is in the Western world. For instance there are secular Muslim societies, eg Turkey, as well as religious regimes, eg Iran. There are radical extremists, Al Qaeda of course comes to mind, but there are activist organizations, eg the Muslim Brotherhood, that promote the Islamization of society but through peaceful means only. Second, Cole argues that the West will gain more influence and benefit from holding dialog than from imposing its will through military might. For example, he decries the military aid to Pakistan and insists that the United States would build more goodwill for itself by building secular schools and thus provide an alternative to the religious schools. The book opens with as concise a presentation of the problem as I've read. The opening 26 words deserve to be quoted. "The Muslim World and the West are at a stand off. Westerners worry about terrorism, intolerance, and immigration. Muslims are anxious about neo-imperialism, ridicule, and discrimination." The book's six chapters then flesh out this position, explaining why this situation arose and proposing meaningful ways to get dialog started in order to end the stand off, or at least to bring tensions down a notch or two. In chapter one, Cole talks about the Muslim world's influence on oil and energy markets. One of the many specific situations examined explains why Iran has legitimate energy worries that motivate its nuclear research program. Cole opposes an Iranian nuclear solution but he feels the West would build more credibility by acknowledging Iran's need and contributing to alternatives. Chapter two looks at peaceful Muslim activist movements such as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Cole understands the Brotherhood was for a period a terrorist organization but that path has long since been abandoned. There's no question of engaging in talks with Al Qaeda, but the West could only benefit from talking with conservative religious movements when they in fact have significant support within the population. Chapter three looks at Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi faith and at the tensions between the Saudi regime and religious leaders. Saudi Arabia also has genuine economic problems, eg its tremendous oil revenues cannot be redistributed easily to the people unless there is a healthy economy in place. Throwing loose cash into an econo

While the title is about "engaging" the Muslim world, the book is actually an issue by issue and country by country report on the news making parts of the Muslim world. It has a concluding chapter on the importance of engagement. Ideas on how this engagement can take place are suggested throughout the book. Refreshingly, the issue of oil is discussed. If you follow the US news reports, you might reasonably conclude that oil is a side issue. Cole is up front with it and begins his book with the facts of oil availability, dependence and depletion. While I had accepted it, I was not surprised to learn that Ahmadinejad's quote (actually from Khomeini) "Israel must be wiped off the face of the map" was actually "This Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time". This quote, like so much else in relation to the Middle East, has been broadcast and rebroadcast and quoted in print such that it is accepted as fact in the US. Another area where Cole gives perspective (where the news media does not) is the actual size of the extremist Islamic population. Like extremists everywhere, these people are a noisy confrontational minority. Cole puts numbers behind this with polling and election results. He also reminds that not long ago concerns about the region focused on the communism and Soviet Union influence, not religion. Books like this one by Cole are a needed antidote to the sloppy and casual system of journalism in the US. I can only hope that this material is too elementary for policy makers who should know this as background. I highly recommend this book for the general reader and those policy makers who get their understanding of the Muslim world from the US media.

Title: Engaging the Muslim World Author: Juan Cole Rating: ****1/2 Tags: islam, middle east, iran, pakistan, energy, oil, non-fiction, afghanistan, egypt, saudi arabia Juan Cole is an expert on the Middle East and Islam. He first encountered Islam as a boy when his Army father was sent to the Horn of Africa. Later he spent 10 years living in Muslim countries and learned several of the languages used in this part of the world, and he has continued to travel extensively in the region. The book is his attempt to show how Islam anxiety in the U.S. and American anxiety in the Middle East fuel misunderstandings. The book is a corrective to Islam anxiety in the U.S., which is dangerously under-informed about Islam. Cole seeks to remedy this ignorance. The first chapter of the book is an excessively grim, albeit realistic, view of the world's energy situation. The world currently produces 15 terrawtats of energy. Estimates are that by 2050 the demand will double. Alternative energies aren't yet able to suppy a large part of the need. The U.S is more dependent than ever on foreign oil, and the chances are small it will be able to reduce that anytime in the forseeable future. And that's why Cole believes that Dick Cheney became convinced that a war with Iraq was necessary to secure the rights of U.S. oil companies to a supply of Middle Eastern oil. Cole then goes into the histories of various Islamic groups and countries. For the most part, Muslims are more moderate than Americans give them credit for, and that is the lesson that comes across over and over as Cole shows the potent mix of religion, ethnicity, nationality, economics, colonialism, post-colonialism, and other factors that have created the current situation. If you know someone who blithely tosses off the term Islamofascism, please give them this book to read. Cole's book was reviewed in the New York Times by David Sanger, author of The Inheritance, a book I read a few months ago and which scared me silly. He and Cole seem to have very different views of the Middle East, especially the dangers posed by Pakistan and Iran. I suspect, as is often the case, the truth lies somewhere in between. Read both, and decide for yourself. Publication Palgrave Macmillan (2009), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 288 pages Publication date 2009 ISBN 0230607543 / 9780230607545

As a regular reader of Juan Cole's blog, I found much of this book to be a summary of those daily comments which urge a rational, not belligerent, approach to the Muslim world. He takes apart the notion that we are in some inevitable struggle for world supremacy with muslims. His previous book described Napolean's foolhardy invasion of Egypt, a lesson unheeded by George Bush with his equally foolhardy invasion of Iraq. President Obama seems to be heeding the advice summarized in this book's title.

According to Dr. Cole's book, US interest in Middle East oil has been motivated by a desire to ensure a stable supply of it to Western Europe and Japan. On the other hand, it is widely believed in the Middle East that American and British oil companies have made huge profits out of Middle Eastern oil while the people of the region, at best, obtain small benefit from it. . When puppet dictators that ensure the flow of oil and petrodollars to western corporations are overthrown, the Americans get very worried. Cole discusses the US overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 and the Kennedy administration's "blowtorch Bob" Komer's worries about the threat to American oil companies posed by the Kassem regime in Iraq. Cole notes that Komer was very happy when the Ba'ath party launched its successful coup against Kassem in 1963; the Ba'ath minister of interior later said that the coup was backed by the CIA. The best part of the book is Cole's attack on American military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Take his analysis of US Iraq policy. What mainstream debate about the "surge" has ignored but which Cole discusses in this book, is that large scale ethnic cleansing is largely responsible for the alleged "success" of the surge. For example, Shiite death squads allied with the Iraqi government cleansed Sunnis out of Baghdad during the surge. Cole writes that Baghdad, in 2003 was 50 percent Sunni; at the end of the surge in 2008, it was 75 percent Shiite. Obviously the elimination of rival ethnic groups from Iraqi neighborhoods has reduced the justification for violence by ethnic militias. The surge dramatically increased the number of internally displaced refugees in Iraq, most of whom live in squalor: the total went from about 1.8 million in January 2007 to 2.7 million in the summer of 2008. Meanwhile about 200,000 Iraqi refugees live in misery in Jordan and another million live in Syria. Cole describes how he discovered, from his own visit to refugee camps and other sources in the region, that many Sunni refugees are afraid to go back to Iraq because they have been threatened with violent retribution from Shiite militias if they try to return to their old homes. Cole's analysis makes clear that the "surge" has not offered any long-term solutions to Iraq's most serious problems. Cole is also great when he argues against the Islamophobic currents in western societies. He argues that the principles of mainstream Islamic thought going back to the medieval ages are anathema to the ideas of Sayd Qatb, the Egyptian fundamentalist executed by the Nasser regime in 1966 and a leading inspiration for Al Qaeda type ideologies. He argues that it is inaccurate to describe the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a fascist movement. He cites a number of polls to show that all but a very small number of Muslims in the Middle East have any sympathy with Al Qaeda. He warns that the extremely brutal "search and destroy" operations by US troops in Iraq and Afgh