The Obama Speech and the "Muslim Perspective"
I am often asked precisely how I feel that President Obama's speech in Cairo has affected the Muslim world, and I hardly know how to respond. I usually say unlike broad trends in the Muslim world, or huge events that seem to convulse so much of it, one speech can barely be examined well on some sort of pan Islamic plane. I don't think there is a broadly similar reaction, I think it might well depend on where you go. As for me, well the Muslims I know best, living as I do right now in the Muslim world, are Iraqis, and really an elite set of Iraqi decision makers, and I can only say how they have reacted. Very, very well. Their main concern is that they have grown so accustomed to being suspicious of the US that they figure Obama cannot possibly speak as positively as he did about Islam, and survive for very long. Some posit a coup, others an assassination, others think this is all crazy talk, what will really happen is the Jews will seize the election apparatus and give the Congress and then the presidency back to the Republicans, but generally speaking the Muslims I know were quite impressed with the speech. But again, I emphasize, it's Iraqi legislators I know, and they know Americans quite well, by and large don't care much about Gaza (it's hard to know which is more extreme--their contempt for Palestinians or their paranoia about Jews) and by and large are living pretty well post Iraq invasion. This is but a slice, and probably not a representative one, of the Muslim world.
The response I get, not always (not from my students in particular, who are far sharper) is some sort of relief, Obama has won over the Muslim world, something about Pakistani allies, or Indonesian politics, or Turkish secularism, or Iranian revolution, or something, that always leaves me puzzled. I just said I know about Iraqi elites on this question, I wonder, why in the world are people asking me what people think about it in the Swat Valley? Where is the Swat Valley exactly anyway? Why is it that Americans don't see a vast and varied Muslim world, a mosaic of peoples and nations, bound by any number of commitments (political, cultural, economic) in addition to Islam?
But then again, while I often have this issue when speaking with Americans, when living in the Muslim world, I tend to see the opposite problem. (As the adage goes for those of us bound to two cultures, never more American than in Iraq, never more Iraqi than in America.) That is to say, some of the reaction to Obama's speech was entirely puzzling to me among people who I thought would know better. They somehow found it a sea change that the president was willing to condemn those who would prevent a woman from wearing a headscarf out of religious conviction. It wasn't long ago that girls couldn't wear such dress in American schools they said.
No, French schools, I told them. They didn't understand precisely what the difference was. I don't mean they are idiots who don't know that France and America are different countries, only that they couldn't process the notion that somehow their attitudes to religion would be that different. Two Western secular states with Christianity the predominant religion, it seemed to them it was the same. So Obama was making a real gesture towards Islam, they only wondered if he could carry it through before somebody brought him down.
I tried to explain long standing American principles of law and religion--that it is categorically prohibited and entirely uncontroversial that a law, any law, that prohibits a religious practice as a religious practice is per se unconstitutional and void. The real division in America is over whether a neutral law that incidentally impacts religion (say, a law that police officers must be clean shaven, derived long before Muslim men with beards wanted to join and having nothing to do with Islam) should have to have exemptions for religious practice depending on how burdensome the law is to the faithful, and how hard an exemption would be to apply. Some think the neutral law is fine, no exemptions constitutionally required. That's the Supreme court's view. Quite obviously it is not the opinion of Congress and Congress has spent some time in vain trying to find a way around it. They can do it case by case--just grant legislative exemptions--but a universal one based on a different theory of religious freedom doesn't work, since the constitution sets those parameters and the Court decides what the constitution says.
When I explain this, they listen patiently and well, but it doesn't entirely register. Again, they are lawyers, and somehow unlike so many Americans who don't seem to understand that Iraq has law schools, they do graduate some pretty good people (and like us, some morons) and they can understand judicial supremacy over interpretation, and the difference between a religiously neutral law and one targetting religion. Somehow the US conventional wisdom on the Iraq legal community holds it in such low regard that the US public, and even the American legal elite, can somehow be convinced an American law professor with no real knowledge of the country or its law could be flown in by the US and write the Iraqi constitution. I can't imagine what you would have to think of Iraqi lawyers not to listen to such a story and burst into hysterical laughter, though I should say the folks who were on the Constitutional Committee, and their legal drafters, are nearly all my friends by this point, and they aint doing much laughing. More on this at a future date and time.
So they are smart, they are lawyers, they get what I am saying, but they don't get how it can be true. The West hates Islam, and here I am telling them consistent US policy has been to protect religion. It doesn't mesh. Part of this has to do with various aspects of US foreign policy that resonate pretty poorly in the Muslim world, but part also is a massive ignorance in the Muslim world that the West is composed of many pieces and that not all of these pieces fit together as one might think. It's not "France bans headscarves in schools, America sends foreign aid to Israel, therefore America bans headscarves in schools." It's not pro-Islam and anti-Islam. what leads to foreign policy decisions, and religious freedom decisions, and immigration decisions, are tied up in any number of factors in both the US and France that lead to entirely different conclusions on these questions that cannot possibly understood on the single spectrum of pro-Islam and anti-Islam. And that's obvious to a Westerner, but not to a Muslim in the Muslim world.
Much like a Muslim scratches her head and can't understand why it is that Americans think they can understand why Islam can't be understood on the one dimensional spectrum of proAmerica and antiAmerica. It's hard to know what to make of the inanity of the American media on these questions, just in the context of Iraq. First, it's the Shi'a hate Saddam, and the Sunnis are in insurgency, so the Shi'a are pro-America. What a relief. But then wait, Sadr hates America and some Sunni elites want to work with the Ambassador, reverse that, make it Sunnis pro-America. but then Qaeda is Sunni, hold off then, Shi'a pro-America again? No wonder it's confusing to people, entire sects with their multivariable interests and spectra of ideas are being thrown into a single dimension on a single question that most of their adherents probably don't spend ten minutes thinking about.
As I said, happens both directions. Just the way things are, I suppose, depressing as that is to say.
HAH
The response I get, not always (not from my students in particular, who are far sharper) is some sort of relief, Obama has won over the Muslim world, something about Pakistani allies, or Indonesian politics, or Turkish secularism, or Iranian revolution, or something, that always leaves me puzzled. I just said I know about Iraqi elites on this question, I wonder, why in the world are people asking me what people think about it in the Swat Valley? Where is the Swat Valley exactly anyway? Why is it that Americans don't see a vast and varied Muslim world, a mosaic of peoples and nations, bound by any number of commitments (political, cultural, economic) in addition to Islam?
But then again, while I often have this issue when speaking with Americans, when living in the Muslim world, I tend to see the opposite problem. (As the adage goes for those of us bound to two cultures, never more American than in Iraq, never more Iraqi than in America.) That is to say, some of the reaction to Obama's speech was entirely puzzling to me among people who I thought would know better. They somehow found it a sea change that the president was willing to condemn those who would prevent a woman from wearing a headscarf out of religious conviction. It wasn't long ago that girls couldn't wear such dress in American schools they said.
No, French schools, I told them. They didn't understand precisely what the difference was. I don't mean they are idiots who don't know that France and America are different countries, only that they couldn't process the notion that somehow their attitudes to religion would be that different. Two Western secular states with Christianity the predominant religion, it seemed to them it was the same. So Obama was making a real gesture towards Islam, they only wondered if he could carry it through before somebody brought him down.
I tried to explain long standing American principles of law and religion--that it is categorically prohibited and entirely uncontroversial that a law, any law, that prohibits a religious practice as a religious practice is per se unconstitutional and void. The real division in America is over whether a neutral law that incidentally impacts religion (say, a law that police officers must be clean shaven, derived long before Muslim men with beards wanted to join and having nothing to do with Islam) should have to have exemptions for religious practice depending on how burdensome the law is to the faithful, and how hard an exemption would be to apply. Some think the neutral law is fine, no exemptions constitutionally required. That's the Supreme court's view. Quite obviously it is not the opinion of Congress and Congress has spent some time in vain trying to find a way around it. They can do it case by case--just grant legislative exemptions--but a universal one based on a different theory of religious freedom doesn't work, since the constitution sets those parameters and the Court decides what the constitution says.
When I explain this, they listen patiently and well, but it doesn't entirely register. Again, they are lawyers, and somehow unlike so many Americans who don't seem to understand that Iraq has law schools, they do graduate some pretty good people (and like us, some morons) and they can understand judicial supremacy over interpretation, and the difference between a religiously neutral law and one targetting religion. Somehow the US conventional wisdom on the Iraq legal community holds it in such low regard that the US public, and even the American legal elite, can somehow be convinced an American law professor with no real knowledge of the country or its law could be flown in by the US and write the Iraqi constitution. I can't imagine what you would have to think of Iraqi lawyers not to listen to such a story and burst into hysterical laughter, though I should say the folks who were on the Constitutional Committee, and their legal drafters, are nearly all my friends by this point, and they aint doing much laughing. More on this at a future date and time.
So they are smart, they are lawyers, they get what I am saying, but they don't get how it can be true. The West hates Islam, and here I am telling them consistent US policy has been to protect religion. It doesn't mesh. Part of this has to do with various aspects of US foreign policy that resonate pretty poorly in the Muslim world, but part also is a massive ignorance in the Muslim world that the West is composed of many pieces and that not all of these pieces fit together as one might think. It's not "France bans headscarves in schools, America sends foreign aid to Israel, therefore America bans headscarves in schools." It's not pro-Islam and anti-Islam. what leads to foreign policy decisions, and religious freedom decisions, and immigration decisions, are tied up in any number of factors in both the US and France that lead to entirely different conclusions on these questions that cannot possibly understood on the single spectrum of pro-Islam and anti-Islam. And that's obvious to a Westerner, but not to a Muslim in the Muslim world.
Much like a Muslim scratches her head and can't understand why it is that Americans think they can understand why Islam can't be understood on the one dimensional spectrum of proAmerica and antiAmerica. It's hard to know what to make of the inanity of the American media on these questions, just in the context of Iraq. First, it's the Shi'a hate Saddam, and the Sunnis are in insurgency, so the Shi'a are pro-America. What a relief. But then wait, Sadr hates America and some Sunni elites want to work with the Ambassador, reverse that, make it Sunnis pro-America. but then Qaeda is Sunni, hold off then, Shi'a pro-America again? No wonder it's confusing to people, entire sects with their multivariable interests and spectra of ideas are being thrown into a single dimension on a single question that most of their adherents probably don't spend ten minutes thinking about.
As I said, happens both directions. Just the way things are, I suppose, depressing as that is to say.
HAH
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