Practical prescription

A Necessary Engagement — Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World by Emile A. Nakhleh; Princeton University Press; Price: Rs.1,218; 162 pp

Relations between the ‘Muslim world’ and the ‘West’ have rapidly deteriorated in recent years, and, despite repeated calls for dialogue, they only seem to be worsening. This is bad news for everyone — not just Muslims and Westerners. This book is a passionate appeal for arresting this downslide, an effort towards promoting meaningful dialogue between Muslims and the West, especially the US.

Emile Nakhleh is eminently qualified to write on this subject. A scholar-in-residence at America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a former director of the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Programme, and a visitor-researcher to over 30 Muslim-majority countries, he persuasively argues the case for radical revision of America’s attitude towards the Muslim world. In a nutshell, he advocates that the US needs to rethink several of its current prejudices and policies vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims, and simultaneously launch a creative, sustained and multi-pronged diplomacy initiative directed towards Muslim publics.

According to Nakhleh, the American government woefully “lacks deep knowledge of the Islamic world and of the diverse ways Muslims understand their faith, their relations with each other, and their vision of, and attitudes toward, the non-Muslim world”. This, he suggests, is one of the principal reasons for not just the failure of most American initiatives in the Muslim world, but also the latter’s struggle to come to equal terms with the West and the forces of modernity. He laments the tendency of senior American officials to equate Islam with terrorism, and their refusal to acknowledge that most Islamic nations don’t support terrorism, and indeed, espouse ideas of good governance and are willing to enter into meaningful dialogue with non-Muslim countries, including America.

In the author’s considered opinion the real Islam, or even ‘political Islam’ or Islamism, doesn’t endorse terrorism. Mere exhibitions of piety and identity assertion among Muslim publics must not be perceived as signs of creeping extremism. Nevertheless Nakhleh acknowledges that “an Islamised environment might be conducive to further radicalisation and terrorism” particularly if the agencies of Islamisation are conservative, literalist Muslim groups, such as the Wahhabi sect.

Further, fringe radicals using the language of Islam must not be given the exalted status of ideologues of Islam. Rather, most often it is the drastic developments in the external environment — foreign occupation, repression by local governments, imperialist invasions or severe oppression by dominant non-Muslim communities — that push Islamic zealots into radicalism. In these eventualities radicalism shouldn’t be addressed as simple law-and-order or security-driven problems. Policy responses that don’t address root causes will not merely fail, but will prompt further radicalisation, warns the author.

Among american policies that have exacerbated Islamist tendencies, Nakhleh identifies America’s support to dictatorial and repressive client regimes in Muslim countries; its invasion and occupation of Iraq; continued US offensives in Afghanistan, and unstinted support to Israel, as key issues. He insists — and for a retired senior official of the notorious CIA, this appears strikingly bold and honest — that all this must stop if the US wants to halt the jihad factories of the Muslim world. This calls for the immediate ending of the US-led occupation of Iraq, scaling down of American military operations in Afghanistan, stoppage of the torture of Muslim terror supects, resolution of the Palestine conflict and other regional conflicts in which Muslim groups are involved, as in Kashmir. Mere sloganeering about democracy and human rights, and lip service to Islam and Muslim sentiments will not do, argues Nakhleh.

Moreover the US establishment’s tendency to relate to the Muslim world mostly or wholly through the lens of ‘terrorism’, ‘security’ and forcible regime change, is construed by Muslims as an assault on Islam. It is entirely contrary to any serious engagement with the Muslim world, and also inimical to America’s national interest, says Nakhleh.

The value of A Necessary Engagement is that it’s not a compendium of pious rhetoric but also offers a prescription for the US and Islamic societies to meet their challenges. Among the practical initiatives offered: appointment of an ambassador to the Muslim world; initiating dialogue with ‘mainstream’ Islamic parties; developing exchange programmes for Muslim and Western parliamentarians, students, teachers and professionals; encouraging American universities to establish campuses in Muslim countries; setting up a national university in the US for training imams; empowering Islamic reformers to confront radicals; expanding American cultural centres in Muslim countries, and partnering for homeland security with local Muslim communities.

Much of what Nakhleh suggests by way of American foreign policy and public diplomacy initiatives to build bridges with the Muslim world is laudable and sensible. But he fails to seriously engage with the very real practical difficulties with which some of his suggestions are likely to be confronted. Further, what about the other side of this civilisational conflict? What must Muslims do to improve relations with the non-Muslim West (and other non-Muslims)? Nakhleh refers to this only in passing, but it’s clear that an urgent task before liberal Muslim scholars and intellectuals is to reformulate new, contextually-meaningful interpretations of Islam, highlighting its acceptance of diversity, human rights, gender justice, and cordial relations with people of other faiths. This would, of course, mean directly challenging fundamentalist and radical interpretations of the Quran and Islam. Admittedly, not an easy task, but one that can no longer be avoided.

Despite its advocacy-style fervour and repetitiousness, A Necessary Engagement is mandatory reading for those interested in contemporary global politics and the travails of Muslims and Islam.

Yoginder Sikand

Revivalist crime fiction

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson; Maclehose Press; Price: Rs.299; 554 pp; Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland

Except within the ranks of it professionals, young executives and suburban housewives with a penchant for ‘English Literature’, the popular 20th century crime fiction genre of novels have been having a rough time. In recent history there’s been a sharp decline in the number of people anxious to learn Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, and about murders in genteel suburbs and vicarages.

Yet a latter day crime fiction revolution originating in the unlikely habitat of Scandinavia seems to signal a crime novel revival. And Nordic crime writer, Stieg Larsson leads this trend. Although Larsson’s crime fiction hasn’t received much recognition in India yet, internationally he is being acclaimed as a crime fiction master with his compelling, fast-paced books outsold only by the Harry Potter series worldwide. Given all this, it’s hard not to approach Larsson’s latest novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with awe and excitement.

The book opens with two narratives running parallely, one involving a missing girl and another, a fraud in a Swedish company. Journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, Mikael Blomkvist has hit rock bottom after losing a criminal defamation case filed against him by a Swedish tycoon, the head of the influential Wennerstrom Group, and the prospect of a three-month prison sentence looms large.

At a time when his credibility is low and the future of his magazine is in peril, Blomkvist is summoned by a lawyer of a rival industrialist, Henrik Vanger who hires him to investigate the disappearance of his great-niece, Harriet, 40 years earlier. Harriet had vanished from Hedeby Island owned by the Vanger family. Vanger is still tormented by the loss and is convinced that a member of his family has committed murder, the identity of whom he wants to know at any cost. Perhaps because every year on his birthday, he is reminded of her disappearance through a strange white flower posted to him anonymously.

The circumstances in which the 16-year-old Harriet went missing were well recorded. Hedeby Island is linked to the town of Hedestad by a solitary suspension bridge and the day Harriet went missing, a car had collided with an oil tanker on the bridge, cutting off all access to Hedeby Island for several hours. Harriet was seen last on the scene of the accident and much after the bedlam following the car-tanker accident on the bridge had settled, her family noticed her absence. A frenzied search followed but her body was never found.

Despite serious misgivings and hesitation, Blomkvist agrees to investigate Harriet’s case mainly for the 2.4 million kroner (Rs.18 lakh) that Vanger offers him to solve the mystery. Blomkvist moves from Stockholm and settles in the sparsely populated and secluded island run by the Vanger family.

Under the pretense of writing Vanger’s biography, Blomkvist starts digging into the Vanger family history and discovers that three of Vanger’s brothers are Nazis, supporting Sweden’s nascent fascist movement. The remaining members of the family despise each other and maintain minimal contact, even though most of them live on Hedeby Island. The story starts unfolding majorly from this point, as prior to this Larsson devotes three fourths of the book to developing his characters. In the process he details widespread violence against women, which is the dark underbelly of Scandinavia’s prosperous and efficient welfare state.

The most fascinating character in the book is Lisbeth Salander (24), a fragile and heavily tattooed anorexic, slightly autistic but a brilliant computer hacker. Blomkvist seeks Salander’s help to unravel the mystery of the missing Harriet. Together they develop a weird sexual chemistry. She is a complex and disturbed character with a troubled past and hazy future, and is driven by a desire to avenge the abuse she has suffered. Once the mystery of the case is solved, the novel ends with a shocking and perhaps disappointing denouement. But the brilliant characterisation of Lisbeth Salander redeems the book.

Originally published in Swedish as Men Who Hate Women, this novel was widely acclaimed for  depicting the nuances of sexual politics in contemporary Sweden. It’s doubtful if the author’s brilliant analysis of gender politics in Scandinavia is captured in the English translation re-titled Dragon Tattoo, presented as a raw and hard- hitting crime novel written in a disturbing matter-of-fact style.

Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first volume of a three part Millennium Trilogy. Unfortunately, the author — an active campaigner for the rights of women and Sweden’s racial minorities — didn’t live to enjoy the success of this book and died, at the young age of 50, before his first novel in the trilogy was published.

Neha Ghosh