The New Nation - Internet Edition

Dr. S. Parvez Manzoor

Perhaps the best point of entry in this highly seminal field is Mohammad Hashim Kamali's original contribution to the debate over 'Freedom of _Expression in Islam' that is truly a labor of love and a work of devotion and piety. (Freedom of _Expression in Islam. By Mohammad Hashim Kamali. The Islamic Text Society, Cambridge, 1994. Pp 349. ISBN 0-946-62160-8.) It is uncompromisingly 'Islamic' in temperament, approach and method, a normative study in the 'traditional' mould that consciously strives to remain within the indigenous paradigm of fiqh. And yet, it is also quite radical and original in that it treats a thoroughly 'modern' theme and by so doing, willy-nilly, gets involved in ideological polemics with modernity. As a pioneering effort, it is both daring and imaginative, sober and scholarly and has won the 'Isma´il al-Faruqi Award for Academic Excellence'. Fulfilling a genuine need and initiating an authentic discourse, its merits have been duly recognized by the scholarly community. However, in its dialogue with modernity, in its perception and response to the polemics of secular modernism, it is far from satisfactory. In reflecting over the problem of 'freedom of _expression in Islam', the author may not have envisaged and planned entering into polemics with modernity but such is its sway over the moral and intellectual clime today that no contemporary discourse may claim authenticity if it ignores the modernist context of our world. Least justifiable is this negligence in a study that deals with a theme, freedom of _expression, which is the gift, as it were, of modernist consciousness. In dealing with an uncompromisingly modern subject, there's no escaping its polemics and criticism of 'traditional' worldviews. True enough, Kamali is not totally insensitive to the modernist context and subtext of his work and his diffidence and humility at the treading of this virgin territory are quite genuine and touching. Nevertheless, it is my conviction that a sharper intellectual vision of modernity and a more vigorous encounter with its polemics would have enhanced the already considerable worth of this work. The few following remarks, it is hoped, would put the polemical subtext of 'freedom of _expression' in sharper focus. Modernity espouses a metaphysics of immanentism within which the state, or existential body-politic, assumes certain attributes that theistic religions ascribe to the Transcendent God. And yet, paradoxically, though secular modernity (ostensibly) passes no judgment on the question of God's existence, it insists that religious and transcendent tenets be banished from politics, from the governance of the state. Or, differently expressed, questions of God's existence or non-existence, and other similar 'metaphysical' issues, it claims, belong to individual conscience with respect to which the state and its legal order must remain neutral. But, the state also insists that there are other issues, not pertaining to conscience, where it is the highest, sovereign, authority and that these constitute the crux of politics and statecraft. The individual is free with respect to religious and metaphysical 'beliefs', but not with respect to civil matters such as taxation, property, matrimony etc. Here the state has the right to use force to secure compliance. State laws are thus not laws of conscience but those of coercion. Freedom of _expression is the outward, public, side of the inward, individual, freedom of conscience. However, despite its neutrality with regard to questions of conscience, the state does get involved in the issue of their '_expression', their manifestation in the common, public, space. It is this very neutrality that stipulates, it is argued, that all individual consciences have the right to free _expression in the public sphere and that guaranteeing that right is a state obligation. The state is concerned, however, only with the legal aspect of public _expression and not with the moral content of private conscience. Freedom of _expression, in short, pertains not to truth but to the logistics of its 'self-disclosure': it is not an individual issue but an 'affair of the state'.

Any discussion of 'freedom of expression', it ought to be underlined, is contingent upon the dialectics of individual and state, conscience and society, public and private, religion and politics that are all peculiar to secular modernity. (However, not only is the definition of what constitutes a private act of conscience, in contradistinction to a public act of politics, always historically conditioned and dependent upon the prevailing societal consensus, even the distinction itself, namely between private conscience and public politics, is a contested claim of secular modernity and not a given fact of human existence.) Without taking full cognizance of these dialectics, or rejecting these dichotomies on normative grounds, in other words, there cannot be any meaningful probing of the theme of 'Freedom of _expression in Islam.' Without any delineation of the Islamic vision of the state, albeit in modern times, the project of discovering (the dialectic of?) 'Freedom of _Expression in Islam' cannot even be launched: it does not even lift off the ground, to use a modern metaphor. One may, of course, regard Islam as an autonomous, self-referential, system that is in no need of corroboration or correction from other worldviews and philosophies. Modernity and adherents of secularism may, in such a case, enter into dialogue with Islam, but only on Islamic terms, only on the pre-condition of acknowledging the possibility of transcendence in human affair. Such a stance, had it been adopted in this study, would have entailed the task of deconstructing modernity, exposing its metaphysical foundations and charting the moral parameters of its secular project. It would have certainly not required the borrowing of a patently and self-consciously polemical topos of modernity and transplanting it in the Islamic intellectual and moral landscape as has been done here. For to launch a project of delineating the parameters of 'Freedom of _expression in Islam' is tantamount to acquiescing in to the moral validity of the modernist claims, if not accepting them as the yardstick of Islamic theopolity. Then there are the notorious conundrums of the concept of freedom that are logically and metaphysically intractable. Again, for the purpose of managing them within a pragmatic discourse, modern theory reduces their scope to certain civil and political 'liberties', i.e. absence of legal and practical constraints from the authority and power of the state. To define freedom as 'the ability of the individual to do or say what he or she wishes, or to avoid doing so, without violating the rights of others, or the limits set by the law' (p 7) is to turn it into an empty tautology. For, if freedom is simply identical with the licit, the legally valid, one may dispense with the concept of freedom altogether, retain only that of law and not a whit need be modified of the moral discourse! Little wonder that prior to the advent of modernity, rights and liberties did not form the stock motives of the politico-religious discourse and, as Kamali himself realizes, the introduction of the _expression 'Freedom of _Expression' into the political vocabulary of Arabic is of recent origin. Kamali, who has been forced to approach this subject without the benefit of any precedent or prior model of reflection, declares in the beginning that the principal question that he addresses in the study is 'whether or not the Shari´ah subscribes to freedom of conscience.' If so, the title of the book fails to pay tribute to his intellectual labour, for it announces that the work is about 'Freedom of _Expression', and the two are by no means identical. Sure enough, an inquiry into this subject is worth a sizeable volume and may demand a close examination of the traditional sources of fiqh, something that Kamali does quite judiciously before saying 'yes'; nevertheless, to ordinary believers like this writer, the question admits of only one, affirmative, answer - with or without the ransacking of the brains of our illustrious fuqaha! The modern query leads to a single, foregone conclusion as the very concept of submission (Islam), as found in the Qur'an, denotes an act of voluntary assent, a receiving of God in the soul as it were. Islam and fettered conscience are contradictions in terms. Only a jurisitic intellect, which identifies Islamic reason with raison d'état, could be so befuddled as to regard 'freedom of conscience' an original fact of modernist consciousness that needs authentication from indigenous legal sources!

Though Kamali remains firmly anchored in the fiqhi tradition, his perception and conceptual schemes show unmistakable signs of having acquired modernist influences, nay prejudices. A clear, and for this critic quite distressing, sign of this is Kamali's indiscriminate use of the prejudicial term, 'religion', which modernity regards as synonymous with private conscience. (The concept of a universal and essential 'religion', it has been cogently demonstrated, is part of the polemical repertoire of modernity and a historical construct of secular forces (Cf. Talal Asad, 'The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category', (Genealogies of Religion, Baltimore, 1993). Another, far more grievous, sign of juristic positivism comes from the reified perception of the pivotal concept Shar´iah: it is used such that it can be totally identified with the extant corpus of fiqh. Needless to say that from the Islamic point of view, there are very convincing arguments for keeping the transcendent vision of the Shari´a distinct from its fallible appropriation in the juridic tradition, for keeping the text of the law separate from its interpretations. Nor is Kamali's disregard of the modern distinction between the legal and the moral going to cut much ice with the critics of the tradition for whom it merely represents the obsolete and the archaic. He is least likely to convince modernists like Habermas with his contentions that actions like slander, insult and blasphemy are part of the modern political discourse. "This work is a an attempt to explore some of the Islamic responses to issues of contemporary concern', says Kamali, and 'to develop further the existing positions in the light of prevailing conditions, or failing that, to take a direct approach to the source materials of Shari´ah in the quest for an alternative solution.' (p 5; Italics added). This reviewer couldn't agree more but would also like to add that in this search the philosophical and conceptual analysis of the key Qur'anic terms be given priority over the atomistic and literal approach of fiqh. Needless to say that in this regard, regardless of Kamali's commendable effort, the task is yet to begin. Let me recapitulate the main insights of this review:

1. 'Freedom of _Expression' is a problem bestowed to us by modernist consciousness which makes a pragmatic distinction between public and private. Islam, a doctrine of truth, which transcends the Public-Private divide, does not confront the problem of the freedom of _expression in a purely pragmatic spirit. For it, the content and ethic of freedom are more paramount than its form and logistics.

2. Freedom of _Expression is a problem that demands attention and resolution within the public realm, but especially within a public realm that does not claim to 'incarnate' any 'transcendental truth', that makes no effort toward the 'salvation' of its citizens. Little wonder that the problem is intimately related to the constitution of the (modern) state (political and existential community) and 'the ultimate ends' toward which it does, or does not, strive.

3. For the secular modern state, the most paramount freedom is the freedom of 'religion', or of 'conscience' - which does not entail, however, freedom from taxes or laws! That such a scale of values establishes the sovereignty of the political over the religious is beyond doubt. Nevertheless, the historical fact that the modern, non-confessional, state arose as a consequence of the internecine sectarian wars of pre-modern Europe, should make us sensitive to the sustaining ethos and moral pathos of the modern longing for freedom. Despite this, however, modernism cannot claim to possess any ultimate truth, and, hence, the secularity of its constitution is not the only guarantee for the freedom of conscience and expression.

4. Freedom of Expression, like everything else in modernity, is an instrumental value, since the modern state pretends to be neutral towards - cares nothing about - the final goal of the human existence. (All this is of course disingenuous and misleading, for the modern state does have its agenda, its commitment to the, secular, wellbeing of its citizen; it is not merely a formal and instrumental entity but does have a substantive commitment to the values of this worldly- meliorism, just as it espouses a metaphysics of immanentism.

5. To pose the problem of the freedom of _expression in its ultimate, metaphysical and moral, context (and then transpose it to the contrasting metaphysics of Islamic transcendentalism) also renders it intractable and beyond the kin of any pragmatic solution. Such a 'fundamentalist' epistemology, though indispensable for a correct understanding of the problem, is counter-productive in a world of competing civilizations and contending moralities. However, if we confine our attention to the purely functional and logistic aspects of Freedom of _Expression, then the theme that would merit further exploration and reflection would not be 'Freedom vs. Islam', but the nature and scope of that freedom in a concrete historical polity, say Turkey, or Iran, or Kuwait, or Pakistan, etc.

6. A logical corollary of the above argument is that Freedom of _Expression is essentially a matter of the presence or absence of 'civil and political liberties' and that it should be problematized as such. Nevertheless, even within the provision of such a concrete objective, the debate in modern Western societies, which are assumed to provide yardsticks for such liberties, is seldom enlightening or capable of unambiguous guidance. That there is a logical, and moral, tension between the ultimate value of 'freedom' and that of 'equality' (or 'justice') has been the cause of much philosophical and moral distress. That any actualization of 'freedom' enjoins a counter-balancing of its effects by the equally obligatory quest for justice, or equality, renders the issue of 'Freedom of _Expression' far more problematical than a glib slogan of civilizational polemics! Nor must we forget the uncomfortable fact that in a hierarchical and hegemonic world, the beneficiaries of freedom are not always the week and the oppressed, but also, and indeed pre-eminently so, the rich and the dominant!

7. Despite all these reservations, and the genuine intellectual, philosophical and moral quandaries that, the theme of Freedom of _Expression gives rise to in a cross-civilizational context, let's not, as Islamically committed thinkers, shirk our responsibility of exposing all the hurdles - socio-political and local but also neo-imperialist and global - that prevent the emergence of a humane regime of civil and political liberties in the lands of the Muslims. Let us not produce any apology for the corrupt and oppressive order of the Muslim regimes that seeks legitimacy by exploiting the name of Islam. And let us not transform Islam, the religious faith which for the recognition of its truth accepts no constraints on the conscience of man, into a political ideology that for the glories of this world would establish a regime of coercion and force.

(Source: IslamOnline)

John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt

We wrote 'The Israel Lobby' in order to begin a discussion of a subject that had become difficult to address openly in the United States . We knew it was likely to generate a strong reaction, and we are not surprised that some of our critics have chosen to attack our characters or misrepresent our arguments. We have also been gratified by the many positive responses we have received, and by the thoughtful commentary that has begun to emerge in the media and the blogosphere. It is clear that many people - including Jews and Israelis - believe that it is time to have a candid discussion of the US relationship with Israel. It is in that spirit that we engage with the letters responding to our article. We confine ourselves here to the most salient points of dispute.

One of the most prominent charges against us is that we see the lobby as a well-organised Jewish conspiracy. Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, for example, begin by noting that 'accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-semitism'. It is a tradition we deplore and that we explicitly rejected in our article. Instead, we described the lobby as a loose coalition of individuals and organisations without a central headquarters. It includes gentiles as well as Jews, and many Jewish-Americans do not endorse its positions on some or all issues. Most important, the Israel lobby is not a secret, clandestine cabal; on the contrary, it is openly engaged in interest-group politics and there is nothing conspiratorial or illicit about its behaviour. Thus, we can easily believe that Daniel Pipes has never 'taken orders' from the lobby, because the Leninist caricature of the lobby depicted in his letter is one that we clearly dismissed. Readers will also note that Pipes does not deny that his organisation, Campus Watch, was created in order to monitor what academics say, write and teach, so as to discourage them from engaging in open discourse about the Middle East.

Several writers chide us for making mono-causal arguments, accusing us of saying that Israel alone is responsible for anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world (as one letter puts it, anti-Americanism 'would exist if Israel was not there') or suggesting that the lobby bears sole responsibility for the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. But that is not what we said. We emphasised that US support for Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories is a powerful source of anti-Americanism, the conclusion reached in several scholarly studies and US government commissions (including the 9/11 Commission). But we also pointed out that support for Israel is hardly the only reason America's standing in the Middle East is so low. Similarly, we clearly stated that Osama bin Laden had other grievances against the United States besides the Palestinian issue, but as the 9/11 Commission documents, this matter was a major concern for him. We also explicitly stated that the lobby, by itself, could not convince either the Clinton or the Bush administration to invade Iraq. Nevertheless, there is abundant evidence that the neo-conservatives and other groups within the lobby played a central role in making the case for war.

At least two of the letters complain that we 'catalogue Israel's moral flaws', while paying little attention to the shortcomings of other states. We focused on Israeli behaviour, not because we have any animus towards Israel, but because the United States gives it such high levels of material and diplomatic support. Our aim was to determine whether Israel merits this special treatment either because it is a unique strategic asset or because it behaves better than other countries do. We argued that neither argument is convincing: Israel's strategic value has declined since the end of the Cold War and Israel does not behave significantly better than most other states.

Herf and Markovits interpret us to be saying that Israel's 'continued survival' should be of little concern to the United States. We made no such argument. In fact, we emphasised that there is a powerful moral case for Israel's existence, and we firmly believe that the United States should take action to ensure its survival if it were in danger. Our criticism was directed at Israeli policy and America's special relationship with Israel, not Israel's existence.

Another recurring theme in the letters is that the lobby ultimately matters little because Israel's 'values command genuine support among the American public'. Thus, Herf and Markovits maintain that there is substantial support for Israel in military and diplomatic circles within the United States. We agree that there is strong public support for Israel in America, in part because it is seen as compatible with America's Judaeo-Christian culture. But we believe this popularity is substantially due to the lobby's success at portraying Israel in a favourable light and effectively limiting public awareness and discussion of Israel's less savoury actions. Diplomats and military officers are also affected by this distorted public discourse, but many of them can see through the rhetoric. They keep silent, however, because they fear that groups like AIPAC will damage their careers if they speak out. The fact is that if there were no AIPAC, Americans would have a more critical view of Israel and US policy in the Middle East would look different.

On a related point, Michael Szanto contrasts the US-Israeli relationship with the American military commitments to Western Europe, Japan and South Korea, to show that the United States has given substantial support to other states besides Israel (6 April). He does not mention, however, that these other relationships did not depend on strong domestic lobbies. The reason is simple: these countries did not need a lobby because close ties with each of them were in America's strategic interest. By contrast, as Israel has become a strategic burden for the US, its American backers have had to work even harder to preserve the 'special relationship'.

Other critics contend that we overstate the lobby's power because we overlook countervailing forces, such as 'paleo-conservatives, Arab and Islamic advocacy groups . . . and the diplomatic establishment'. Such countervailing forces do exist, but they are no match - either alone or in combination - for the lobby. There are Arab-American political groups, for example, but they are weak, divided, and wield far less influence than AIPAC and other organisations that present a strong, consistent message from the lobby.

Probably the most popular argument made about a countervailing force is Herf and Markovits's claim that the centrepiece of US Middle East policy is oil, not Israel. There is no question that access to that region's oil is a vital US strategic interest. Washington is also deeply committed to supporting Israel. Thus, the relevant question is, how does each of those interests affect US policy? We maintain that US policy in the Middle East is driven primarily by the commitment to Israel, not oil interests. If the oil companies or the oil-producing countries were driving policy, Washington would be tempted to favour the Palestinians instead of Israel. Moreover, the United States would almost certainly not have gone to war against Iraq in March 2003, and the Bush administration would not be threatening to use military force against Iran. Although many claim that the Iraq war was all about oil, there is hardly any evidence to support that supposition, and much evidence of the lobby's influence. Oil is clearly an important concern for US policymakers, but with the exception of episodes like the 1973 Opec oil embargo, the US commitment to Israel has yet to threaten access to oil. It does, however, contribute to America's terrorism problem, complicates its efforts to halt nuclear proliferation, and helped get the United States involved in wars like Iraq.

Regrettably, some of our critics have tried to smear us by linking us with overt racists, thereby suggesting that we are racists or anti-semites ourselves. Michael Taylor, for example, notes that our article has been 'hailed' by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke (6 April). Alan Dershowitz implies that some of our material was taken from neo-Nazi websites and other hate literature (20 April). We have no control over who likes or dislikes our article, but we regret that Duke used it to promote his racist agenda, which we utterly reject. Furthermore, nothing in our piece is drawn from racist sources of any kind, and Dershowitz offers no evidence to support this false claim. We provided a fully documented version of the paper so that readers could see for themselves that we used reputable sources.

Finally, a few critics claim that some of our facts, references or quotations are mistaken. For example, Dershowitz challenges our claim that Israel was 'explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship'.

Israel was founded as a Jewish state (a fact Dershowitz does not challenge), and our reference to citizenship was obviously to Israel's Jewish citizens, whose identity is ordinarily based on ancestry. We stated that Israel has a sizeable number of non-Jewish citizens (primarily Arabs), and our main point was that many of them are relegated to a second-class status in a predominantly Jewish society.

We also referred to Golda Meir's famous statement that 'there is no such thing as a Palestinian,' and Jeremy Schreiber reads us as saying that Meir was denying the existence of those people rather than simply denying Palestinian nationhood (20 April). There is no disagreement here; we agree with Schreiber's interpretation and we quoted Meir in a discussion of Israel's prolonged effort 'to deny the Palestinians' national ambitions'.

Dershowitz challenges our claim that the Israelis did not offer the Palestinians a contiguous state at Camp David in July 2000. As support, he cites a statement by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and the memoirs of former US negotiator Dennis Ross. There are a number of competing accounts of what happened at Camp David, however, and many of them agree with our claim. Moreover, Barak himself acknowledges that 'the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor-thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem . . . to the Jordan River.' This wedge, which would bisect the West Bank, was essential to Israel's plan to retain control of the Jordan River Valley for another six to twenty years. Finally, and contrary to Dershowitz's claim, there was no 'second map' or map of a 'final proposal at Camp David'. Indeed, it is explicitly stated in a note beside the map published in Ross's memoirs that 'no map was presented during the final rounds at Camp David.' Given all this, it is not surprising that Barak's foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was a key participant at Camp David, later admitted: 'If I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David as well.'

Dershowitz also claims that we quote David Ben-Gurion 'out of context' and thus misrepresented his views on the need to use force to build a Jewish state in all of Palestine. Dershowitz is wrong. As a number of Israeli historians have shown, Ben-Gurion made numerous statements about the need to use force (or the threat of overwhelming force) to create a Jewish state in all of Palestine. In October 1937, for example, he wrote to his son Amos that the future Jewish state would have an 'outstanding army . . . so I am certain that we won't be constrained from settling in the rest of the country, either by mutual agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbours, or by some other way' (emphasis added). Furthermore, common sense says that there was no other way to achieve that goal, because the Palestinians were hardly likely to give up their homeland voluntarily. Ben-Gurion was a consummate strategist and he understood that it would be unwise for the Zionists to talk openly about the need for 'brutal compulsion'. We quote a memorandum Ben-Gurion wrote prior to the Extraordinary Zionist Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942. He wrote that 'it is impossible to imagine general evacuation' of the Arab population of Palestine 'without compulsion, and brutal compulsion'. Dershowitz claims that Ben-Gurion's subsequent statement - 'we should in no way make it part of our programme' - shows that he opposed the transfer of the Arab population and the 'brutal compulsion' it would entail. But Ben-Gurion was not rejecting this policy: he was simply noting that the Zionists should not openly proclaim it. Indeed, he said that they should not 'discourage other people, British or American, who favour transfer from advocating this course, but we should in no way make it part of our programme'.

We close with a final comment about the controversy surrounding our article. Although we are not surprised by the hostility directed at us, we are still disappointed that more attention has not been paid to the substance of the piece. The fact remains that the United States is in deep trouble in the Middle East, and it will not be able to develop effective policies if it is impossible to have a civilised discussion about the role of Israel in American foreign policy.

(John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt, University of Chicago & Harvard University)