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The Bonds Of Dissent

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By ANOUAR MAJID

Published: October 11, 2007

The escalating and acrimonious debate over the United States' presence in Iraq could mislead us into thinking that the crisis can be fixed with a single decision.

However, the 'stay the course' and 'get out' options do not capture the nuances of the tragedy because neither solution is enough to fix the enduring cultural problems in the Islamic world or reverse the decline of the United States.

Iraq, in fact, is a symbol of our dangerous orthodoxies and a warning that nations that do not snap out of their misguided ways are doomed to ruin.

My image of Iraq has been remarkably consistent since my childhood in Morocco. Iraq was, of course, the birthplace of human civilization and, for a while, Islam's foremost center of learning. It was a place of monumental grandeur and also a land of unremitting sorrows, persecution, and violence. A caliph in Baghdad even dispatched a hit man to assassinate the newly appointed leader of Morocco's first Muslim dynasty.

Over time, I came to think of Iraq as an apartheid regime, one in which the Sunni minority, empowered by a strange combination of ancient tribal loyalties and Stalin's mechanical ruthlessness, ruled despotically over a religiously and ethnically diverse population. Saddam's stranglehold certainly needed breaking, but the way it was done contributes nothing to the prospect of a freer Islamic world or a safer America.

Sunni radicals have found in the Iraqi chaos renewed zeal to persecute the minority they have long despised: the Shiites. Iraq is now the main stage on which Sunni extremists are battling for their version of the faith, as if the Islamic world were reliving the first fitna (social unrest) that followed from the prophet's death in 632 A.D.

The Shiites themselves are not eager to deviate from the supremacy of Islam, as shown in current constitutional arrangements and the rambling speeches of Iran's president.

Ironically, Islam has been declared, with the help of U.S. consuls, the law of the land. Non-Muslims would have a hard time fitting into this new regime. Social and cultural pluralism have been sacrificed for political expediency. And so the opportunity to loosen the implacable hold of monotheistic certainties on the Islamic world - by showcasing a society where people of all faiths and persuasions enjoy equal freedoms - was lost.

Meanwhile, the Islamic world is sliding further into its old monologues. Islam is simply God's final truth.

The nation that loosened Saddam's murderous grip on his people is most likely to suffer the same loss. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer money are being allocated to the war with no public referendum, yet one is hard-pressed to see the benefits to American society laboring under sky-high amounts of debt and tottering on the edge of bankruptcy.

As the gap between the wealthy few and middle-class citizens - not to mention the poor - widens, the very ideals of freedom that the U.S. military is in Iraq to enshrine may well be undermined in the liberating nation itself. Precarious conditions do not a happy nation make.

The United States already has deviated perilously far from its revolutionary principles; as the social and economic scaffolding of the republic continues to creak, America's revolutionary tradition of freedom (its main gift to human civilization) may well come undone. Anyone aware of the patterns of history cannot ignore this risk.

In the end, the war in Iraq brings into focus the failure of the Islamic world to live with difference and the failure of the United States to safeguard the principles that made it great in the first place.

Trapped in dysfunctional religious beliefs and counterproductive economic systems, both nations are engaged in lost jihads and futile crusades. That is why we need to encourage robust traditions of dissent in both cultures. We need to unshackle our visions from the tyranny of dogmas. Without a serious rethinking of our certitudes, the hope for a better world may well end up being buried in the birthplace of civilization.

Anouar Majid is founding chair and professor of English at the University of New England and the author of 'Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age.'

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