4:52 p.m., Feb. 25, 2010----Shibley Telhami said he believes that for America to better understand the nature of political Islam, it needs to shift to viewing the countries where Islam is the religion of the majority as Muslim communities, rather than the “Muslim World.”

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Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, made his remarks during his presentation, “Rethinking the Islamic World Paradigm,” as the opening lecture of the 2010 Global Agenda Speaker Series on Wednesday, Feb. 24, in Mitchell Hall.

In welcoming Telhami, program moderator Ralph Begleiter, director of UD's Center for Political Communication, received a hearty round of applause from the audience of more than 300 persons when he noted the series was beginning its 10th year at UD.

The idea that America is dealing with a “Muslim World” is as unrepresentative as suggesting that there might be other entities and groups of counties grouped together and identified primarily by their religious majorities, Telhami said.

“I want to challenge you about the concept of a 'Muslim World.' It distorts and biases the way we look at the Middle East,” Telhami said. “We don't lump Venezuela, Austria, Russia and the United States together as the Christian World, even though the majority of citizens in those countries are Christians.”

The view of a Muslim World, he said, emerged in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, against the United States, an event that causes Americans to view the world, and especially Islam through a prism of pain.

A similar prism of pain, Telhami noted, has affected the way countries with Islamic majorities view America after the Iraq War that began in 2003 under then-U.S. President George W. Bush. This perception initially changed when America elected Barack Obama president in 2008.

“When President Barack Obama delivered his speech on June 4, 2009, in Cairo, Egypt, it was well received,” Telhami said. “If you compare the sentiment in countries where Islam is the majority at that time to the present, you will find increasing anger and disillusionment.”

Talhami said that polls conducted in Muslim community countries revealed three reasons for the existence of this initial positive perception of America among Arab peoples.

“First, the fact that he said he was going to follow through with his campaign promise to pull out of Iraq and that he had a plan to withdraw,” Telhami said. “Second, the president declared plans to end torture and close the Guantanamo detention facility. Third was the appointment of George Mitchell to mediate the Arab-Israeli issue.”

Since then, Telhami noted, a skepticism has developed among Arab publics about whether or not the United States is moving in the right direction.

In viewing the often turbulent relationship between countries with Muslim majorities and the United States and its allies, Telhami said it is important to examine the results of a public opinion poll he conducted with Zogby International in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

“One of the regular questions is, 'whom among world leaders outside of your own country do you admire most,'” Telhami said. “In 2006, it was Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, who emerged as a most popular leader. Today it is Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.”

Chavez's popularity among Arab peoples lies mainly in the fact that he was the one world leader during the 2008-08 war in Gaza who opposed the conflict and cut off diplomatic relations with Israel, while Arab states at peace with Israel did not, Telhami said.

“The Arab public rewarded him for it,” Telhami said. “That is the prism through which the Arabs are looking at the world, not the Sunni-Shi'a prism or the Middle East-West prism.'”

While Telhami noted that there is a serious issue of sectarianism between Sunnis and Shias in countries such as Lebanon and Iraq, he doesn't believe this issue is the central cause of the Middle East conflict.

Telhami also addressed the issue of the democracy in Arab countries and also in Muslim-majority countries after 9/11.

“By important measures, there is a pervasive authoritarianism in the Middle East, and there isn't much democracy as we know it in the West. And there has been a debate about how to spread democracy and the barriers to it,” Telhami said. “It is an important debate, but what has been fascinating is how much the discourse has moved toward 'Is Islam compatible with democracy?'”

Most respondents, Telhami said, indicated that outside of their own countries, they would prefer to live in Western countries and that Arabs' notions of democracy and freedom are very much in harmony with Western countries. The issue here, Telhami said, is that most Arabs don't trust that the United States is trying to help them obtain democracy, especially as evidenced by U.S. policy in the Middle East.

With the United States involved in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism, our political and military leaders tend of necessity to have the closest relations with the militaries and intelligence forces, and not the general population in those areas, Telhami said.

“This is because our military and intelligence relations are central to the war efforts and to protecting American troops. That's where most expenditures go,” Telhami said. “But, the military and intelligence institutions in these countries are the very institutions of repression, the anchors of the authoritarianism that we say we are seeking to change.”

Telhami concluded his talk with a discussion of women's rights in Muslim-majority countries, where he noted there is indeed a visible problem.

“There is no question that when we look at the culture and the religion which is often very conservative, there is no denying that these can be important factors at some levels of society, including issues of women's rights,” Telhami said. “I don't want to dismiss religion as a sociological factor, but by focusing on religion and culture, which are almost always constant, we diverted attention away from possibly more powerful explanations.”

Telhami cited an analysis by Michael Ross, a professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles, who looked at the increase or lack of increase in women's rights in countries around the world.

“His conclusion was unconventional. The oil economies in these regions, not religion and culture, have resulted in fewer women involved in politics and the workplace,” Telhami said. “The reason why oil economies were distorted, he argued, was that when one looks at how women acquired rights across the globe, one finds that typically, it was work incentives where economic need would draw them in by creating certain jobs that were suitable for women early on, before they started acquiring more political and economic power in the system. Oil economies do not allow this to happen. They don't create the structural incentives to draw women in.”

Telhami concluded by saying that the United States needs to move away from a discourse that treats Muslims as “others,” and to work toward understanding what the real problems are that separate it from countries in the Muslim community.

“All of my polls show that the Arab-Israeli issue remains the prism of pain through which the Arabs see the world,” Telhami said. “When I ask them why they are angry, they say the main reason is our Israeli-Arab policy. That is their prism of pain.”

The 2010 Global Agenda Speaker Series is presented by the World Affairs Council of Wilmington, the UD Institute for Global Studies, the Department of Communication and the Department of Political Science and International Relations.

The next Global Agenda Speaker Series program, “Living with Political Islam,” with Nicholas Schmiddle, who lived and reported among the Taliban in Pakistan from 2006-08, will be held at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 10, in Mitchell Hall.

Article by Jerry Rhodes
Photo by Duane Perry