The reaction within the Kingdom was remarkable for its simultaneous restraint and schadenfreude fascination.  The Saudi Times, the Kingdom’s English language daily and a publication best known for its heavily state-influenced reporting, could not avoid featuring Egypt as its front page, column 1, above the fold news, day after day.  They struggled to find sufficiently noncommittal statements from His Highness King Abdullah, who appropriately spoke strongly in support of the Egyptian people, but stopped short of supporting an overt removal of Mubarak.

The next day, I met with a business partner for lunch and found myself in a candid conversation with a scrupulously gracious and recent Egyptian expat, roughly my contemporary, who in his candid thoughts found himself profoundly worried about events back home. At first I thought his duty to provide Arab hospitality to his visitor perhaps extended to accommodating what he knew to be the view of the US Government: namely that Mubarak, virtual dictator though he was, was relatively preferable to a destabilized and potentially radicalized Egypt. But even Arab hospitality has its philosophical limits, and my colleague showed all the signs of real conviction:  the specter of a state run by the Muslim Brotherhood, overtly hostile to the West, to the minority Egyptian Christian population, and leaning towards extremist isolationism was enough to make my friend lose his appetite.  He began smoking constantly, until his mother called.  From Egypt.  To tell him she was alright.  And then he calmed down a bit–at least for a while.  But he kept smoking.

Now that I’ve left the Kingdom, I can say that the reports on Western news media that “Saudi might be next” or that the unrest in Jordan is but a harbinger of a complete democratization of the region are at once both hopelessly optimistic (speaking of the region as a whole) and naively ignorant of the facts (speaking of the Kingdom in particular).  The Saudi monarchy bears little resemblance to the Mubarak regime: it has developed a broad-based and effective system of wealth distribution that keeps it firmly both in power and on the friendly side of what otherwise become the restless middle class bourgeousie.  It has also struck a 30-year deal with its Wahabbi extremist constituency which keeps it both in power and cloaked in the vestments of religious authority.¹  They have effectively managed diverse constituencies and, even if we know that the average Saudi is restive and possibly susceptible to persuasion by extremists to become terrorists, at the same time the monarchy has paid attention to constituencies and dynamics which Mubarek et al. chose to ignore.  For that reason alone they may receive some flak for infrastructure failures (the virtually annual Jeddah flooding and the virtually annual street protests come to mind), but they remain firmly in power and respected.  And US media theorizing notwithstanding, they show every sign of staying that way for the foreseeable future.

At the same time, Americans and others who see the recent Egypt developments as “a miracle” ought to bear in mind that this triumph of democracy has brought with it an 80 million person power vacuum.  If the Muslim Brotherhood has its way, peace treaties with Israel disappear, the Christian minority becomes a persecuted apostatic underclass, and Egypt flirts with the fate of Afghanistan after the Soviets.  We can–and should–celebrate the removal of a brutal autocrat.  But we should also brace ourselves for a messy destabilization.  If my Egyptian friend is right, most of his 80 million fellow countrymen want I peaceful, nonradical state.  On behalf of one peripatetic and worried American, I profoundly hope he and they get what they want.

1. The relationship between the House of Saud and the Wahabbis in fact stretches back nearly 300 years, but it was the Kingdom’s need for a fatwah “authorizing” their counter-attack on the dissidents who took over the Grand Mosque in 1979 which rolled back the modicum of liberalization seen in the Kingdom during the ’70s and cemented their symbiosis for decades to come.

Last year, I traveled Pakistan to speak at a counter-terrorism conference.  I met numerous devout, serious Muslims who decried the senseless violence extremists have brought to their country.  Little did I think that, just a year later, I would be comparing those well-meaning, peaceful Pakistanis with the peaceful, shocked residents of Arizona.  But here we are, a modern first world democracy, confronting the fact that our own internal extremists brook no more dissent than do Pakistan’s and feel no more compunction at shedding the blood of leaders with whom they disagree than do the likes of Mumtaz Qadri (Taseer’s murderer and bodyguard).  In Pakistan, extremists murdered Benazir Bhutto for her  non-extremist beliefs;  in the United States, extremists murdered  Dr. George Tiller for practicing abortion.  Pakistani extremists defy the Koran when they take the lives of other Muslims whose beliefs they do not agree;  American extremists defy their (mostly Christian) beliefs when they take the lives of those whose beliefs they don’t like.

Now we find out that the alleged perpetrator in Arizona is mentally ill.  Does that exonerate him?  Make him any less an extremist?  The vast majority of schizophrenics lead non-violent, if unenviable lives.  Few of them create YouTube channels devoted to anti-government rantings.  So I brand him extreme.  When will we—Americans and Pakistanis alike—act collectively against the overt hostility of our public debate, before it roils itself into outright murder?  We live today in a democracy transmogrified into a killing field, in which those with whom we disagree politically are not only not worthy of our respect, but not worthy of their own lives.  It is already too late to save the first victims.  Will Americans wait until political killing is reaches the heights it has reached in Venezuela, or Pakistan, or Myanmar?

I have spent much of my professional career fighting to end one type of violence: gun violence.  Every day, my work at ShotSpotter helps save lives, solve gun-related crimes, and take criminals off the street who would otherwise keep using guns to destroy lives and communities.  A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be asked to join the Board of Directors of PAX, our country’s leading non-profit dedicated to reducing youth gun violence.  I thought I was making a difference.  And then I wake up on a day like today, and I read the news from Islamabad, and the news from Tucson, and I realize just how much more difference there is to be made, and how much work we all have before us.

The headline on yesterday’s Wall Street Journal read “Iran Arms Syria with Radar [sic]“.  My orthographic quibbles about the proper spelling of RADAR notwithstanding, the article quotes officials who say the new RADAR could pose a security threat to Israel.  No doubt it could.  The point of the article is that this level of military and technology “cooperation” constitutes a serious security threat.  No doubt it does.

Wall Street Journal, from Getty Images

One fact missing from the story was that the Syrians had already spent huge amounts on their air defenses—billions, by some estimates¹.  And as the former US top cybersecurity official, Richard Clarke, points out in his new book, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It, those investments had failed spectacularly.  Clarke those reiterated last night at the Aspen Institute Security Forum that the challenge of cybersecurity lies in the manner in which it levels the playing field in such unexpected ways.  In the case of the briefly infamous 2008 Israeli air raid on the North Korean-designed (and operated?) Syrian nuclear facility, the Syrian RADAR systems appear to have been shut down before a single Israeli shot was fired:  someone (the Israelis, we presume) hacked the Syrian RADAR networks caused them either not to detect the F-15s and F-16s overhead, or not to display them.  (Neither of those aircraft is stealthy;  there is no question the RADARs could have detected them.)  Perhaps the first public acknowledgment of cyberwar in a modern military action followed, as first publicly reported by David A. Fulghum, Robert Wall and Amy Butler (“Israel Shows Electronic Prowess,” in Aviation Week).

So one wonders about this WSJ story:  why are the Syrians buying new RADAR equipment instead of new firewalls and routers?  Well, perhaps they are….

1. Clarke, Richard A. and Robert K. Knake, Cyber War, Harper Collins, 2010

The conference is abuzz with the words of Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke yesterday and twice raised the topic of terrorist synergies: the joining of forces between previously unrelated and even mutually distrusting terrorist organizations. Having spent the week fighting the fire that was Gen McChrystal’s dismissal and just himself back from a trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel, it is clear that Adm. Mullen was a man on a mission to identify and address this new phenomenon of terrorist cooperation.

The term and concept are relatively new: there has previously been talk of criminal-terrorist synergies, but in general those reflected local alliances made, if not as a matter of expedience, certainly not with a view towards a global strategy. The trend has existed for a while: as the Hon. Fran Townsend (former Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism) pointed out today, the trend began early in the Bush Administration: Indonesia’s Jamaat Islamia overtly supporting Al Quaeda; Sudan’s GSPC aligning similarly, etc. But US officials, at least, have taken some comfort in the rifts within Islam and the assumption that, for example, primarly Sunni organizations like Al Quaeda would not join forces with Shiite regimes such as Iran.

Take comfort no longer. There is a palpable sense among officials here that we are now fighting a globally decentralized, cooperating terrorist network which is willing to forego internal idealistic disagreements in favor of the ultimate goal: damaging the West and, specifically, the United States. We have graduated from a multitude of fights against separate entities to a unified fight against global terrorism.

Asif Hassan/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images

Insidious forces of extremism continue to erode core Pakistani political and governmental functions.  Indeed, this particular suicide attack focused on Karachi, which lies at the southwestern-most end of Pakistan and, along with the rest of Sindh Province, has enjoyed relative peace and tranquility since the high profile attacks against Western targets it saw in 2002.  These attacks thus portend a serious escalation of the destabilization–and all of this despite (or perhaps because of–keep reading!) a continued US commitment to the region in the form of a time-limited commitment to Afghanistan.  Indeed, today’s Associated Press notes the recent increase in Haqqani network attacks on Pakistani intelligence and security operatives in North Waziristan is further straining US-Pakistani relations.  (The Haqqani network is an Al-Quaeda linked Afghani Taliban faction operating on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border.  Its increased activity may or may not be a result of an increased US activity in Afghanistan, but its recent impact on Pakistani ISI is nonetheless serious and potentially the source of some Pakistani concern over US activity.)

As well-known Washington Post correspondent David Ignatius pointed during a fascinating session at the recent Leading Thinkers Washington Forum on US-Pakistan relations, Pakistan both welcomes increased US commitment to Afghan stability (and thus to avoiding Afghanistan’s return to the status of a failed state), but also has cause for concern because of the possibility that more US troop pressure in southeastern Afghanistan will result in more insurgent activity both in the Swat valley (to the northeast) and in Pakistan’s Waziri provinces (to the northwest)–via a kind of chaotic osmosis destined to bring only increased threats to Pakistani stability.

One way or another, the conclusion is clear and worrisome:  Pakistan is heating up, and the US’s “Afghan Surge” has not quelled the hostility or the unrest.  If anything, the unintended short-term consequence of the US efforts in Afghanistan may be increased internal tension and terrorist activity in Pakistan.  Let’s hope we can complete the task in Afghanistan sufficiently quickly to avoid permanent destabilization of its neighbor to the south.

There was something surreal about watching President Obama take the oath of office from a hotel room in Karachi, Pakistan. Several times, I wondered whether there were more suicide bomb barriers surrounding his dais or my hotel. Suicide bombers had nearly destroyed the hotel a year or two earlier, and the predictable reaction—to erect sufficient vehicle barriers to stop more than one simultaneous attack—had of course been implemented. And so I watched, from 13,000 miles away, as America took what I profoundly hope will be the first of many steps towards reestablishing its international reputation as a symbol of freedom, all the while knowing that I was under strict orders from our hosts not to leave the building.

All around me were little security instruction sheets, thoughtfully Xeroxed by the hotel staff and placed in every room. From the typical (“this water is unsafe for drinking; kindly enjoy the complimentary bottle of mineral water provided”) to the stern (“do not stand on balcony; snipers may be active”), the warnings combined to deliver the message that, thanks to the efforts of less than 1% of the population, Westerners are simply not welcome in Pakistan. 99% of Pakistanis we met were hopeful, interesting people, happy to talk to an American (and to ask us about our new president—more about that in a different post). But all I had to do was look out my hotel room window to realize that it is the 1% who rule the country.

View from my Karachi Hotelroom

As they so often do, this picture tells the story better than I can. The balcony is enclosed in a net, lest grenades be thrown up onto the landing. The wires above the pool are for god-knows-what security technique. (My guess: since they are either grounded or energized, probably an anti-eavesdropping measure which doubles as a mechanism for defeating radio frequency bomb triggers, although my mobile phone worked just fine underneath them, so perhaps not.) There were magnetometers, x-ray machines in the lobby, and nearly every entrance to every building was peopled by thoroughly un-reasuring armed guards. There were small trucks parked in the parking lots of both “Western” hotels, each filled with four chain-smoking Pakistani infantrymen, on top of which was mounted what looked like an M60 (.50 caliber machine gun). Two bomb-sniffing Labrador retrievers worked the parking lot. ID checks were performed endlessly.

I doubt that any experience since 9/11 has reminded me that this really is a war. Not a war which gives our government the right to abrogate our Constitution, but a war nonetheless. And until it ends, Americans traveling abroad had better remember that the actions of our own government (and in particular the recently-departed administration) catalyze reactions abroad which pose as grave a threat to our well-being as any other. (Until 2002, there had been no attacks against Western targets in Karachi. That all started after we reacted to 9/11.) In the end, no matter how hopeful I am that the inauguration of President Obama will set us off to righting our standing worldwide, we will remain “the enemy” for a long time to come.

One needn’t spend much time browsing in The Bazaar before you realize: the proverbial cat is out of the bag. He is not the first to report that the knowledge of how to construct a nuclear weapon is no longer particularly hard to come by. (You may not quite be able to download the plans off the Internet, but the basic “gun” model used in the Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb is fairly easy to construct from the right amount of Uranium 235.) Thus for a long time, the world has relied for its nonproliferative intentions on the difficulty of obtaining sufficient quantities of weapons-grade U235 (loosely defined as uranium whose 235 isotope is present at >90% by mass). Building centrifuges requires far more engineering and machining expertise than does building the actual bomb, and Western nonproliferation efforts (and the IAEA‘s efforts) have thus focused on nipping the process in the materials production bud.

Blame it on the leaky Russians (Langewiesche convinces us that they had little, if anything to do with nuclear proliferation) or the incredibly trusting Dutch, who initially hired A. Q. Kahn and later let him waltz out of the country with the plans for what are still considered state-of-the-art uranium centrifuges (state-of-the-non-classified-art, I should say), or the Pakistan government, which first propped up Kahn and which later bowed to US pressure to arrest him—and then promptly locked him away under house arrest so that no Western intelligence services could ask any further awkward questions relating to the involvement of the Pakistani government itself—but no matter how you slice it, not only has nuclear knowledge proliferated, but therefore so has nuclear technology. The North Koreans, the Iranians and the Libyans now also have the know-how (if not the machines, in the case of newly-reformed Libya) to produce significant quantities of weapons-grade uranium, and of course so do the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Israelis (not officially , the Germans, the French, the British, the Chinese, the Russians and the US. That’s roughly half the world’s population (50.6%, to be precise) whose governments are known have access to nuclear weapons technology. A majority.

Thus I conclude that the nonproliferation agenda is bankrupt. So far as we know, we have kept these weapons out of the hands of non-state actors. But such was not the aim of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty! In order to create effective controls which might curb the transfer of nuclear technologies to non-state actors, we’ll have to start by identifying what didn’t work in the NPT—for starters, the overt inequity between the nations permitted to maintain such weapons (namely the permanent members of the UN Security Council) and those not permitted to do so. The NPT created second-class citizens of half the world. Any surprise the world didn’t abide by the treaty? It’s Versaille all over again: a Phyrric victory of an asymmetric treaty over geopolitical reality.

So much for sleeping tonight.

She and her colleagues have formed Project Ijtihad, which seeks to encourage discussion, debate, and independent thinking about what Islam should and should not mean to its believers. Ijtihad (Arabic اجتهاد IPA: [ iʤti'hæːd]) is originally a word of technical legal origin for the process of reaching a legal conclusion by direct interpretation (i.e. independent analysis) of legal sources, as opposed to blindly following the decisions of others (its opposite is, tellingly, Taqlid (Arabic تَقْليد IPA: [ taqlīd ]) which means “immitation”). Interestingly, the word ijtihad shares is etymologically related to jihad (Arabic: جهاد IPA: [ ʤi'hæːd]), which means struggle. The mission of Project Ijtihad? Incite debate. (“Struggle!”)

Irshad (lower right) with Craig Kielburger, President, FreeTheChildren and StudentsEffectingChange	Irshad (right) with Bono

No sooner does Irshad’s piece run on line than the bigots and pedants come out in droves to comment. We’ll start with the pedants, who mindlessly quote mid-millennial Muslim conservative thinkers (mostly writing after the twelfth century, a.d.). Nobody actually pays attention to arguments Irshad is making that it was pre-twelfth century Islam that was the seat of open and honest debate and intellectual curiosity. They (her critics) just blindly post quotations from all of these reactionary, conservative voices as if she never made her argument in the first place. It’s almost amusingly pathetic.

And of course there were several crackpot posts from people attacking Irshad for being a woman. Or for being a lesbian. Or for having a brain. Or an opinion. There was, in short, the usual display of small-binded bigotry for which the whole of Islam is occasionally mistaken. They (the bigots) give Islam a bad name and a bad reputation, and every time they attack as they have on the Washington Post’s website in response to Irshad’s column, they further prove the point that debate and introspection is what is most desperately needed in Islam today. (“Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” said Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.)

Since the Washington Post’s commenting system is running several hours behind, I’ll copy the comment I made here–especially because of the irony of the tagline of Islamica Magazine (which supposedly is “Opening Minds Everywhere”), where a scathing review of Irshad’s book recently ran.

Why is it that anyone who bravely raises her voice to seek reason, discussion, or tolerance within Islam immediately becomes the target of such vitriol? I suppose I don’t object to the reasoned (if intensely verbose) review of her book by Haroon Moghul, which someone was “clever” enough to cut and paste above (thus flagrantly violating US copyright law . Twice. (Incidentally, the review was originally published in Islamica Magazine, whose tag line reads “Opening Minds Everywhere.” Irony.) But the intense desire of the others who speak out above and insist on flinging mud at Ms. Manji for her person

Update: my colleague Pascal Levensohn, whom I’ve blogged about before (No Reason to be Board) has just posted his own response to Irshad’s column and the attendant reader response. (Full disclosure: although we knew each other long before, and indeed participated in an Aspen Institute seminar on Islam with Irshad long before, Pascal now sits on the Board of Directors of ShotSpotter.)

Irshad’s new project reminds us that perhaps Islam’s greatest hope lies within itself. All of Islam may not agree with everything Irshad says (I don’t agree with everything Irshad says!), but debate is a necessary starting point. (Click the image to see an interesting interview Irshad gave to Bob Simon on a recent CBS 60 Minutes episode.)

I’m looking forward to this PBS piece. It’s a measure of Irshad’s growing reputation and impact that PBS will air the piece as part of its new “America at a Crossroads” series (a series of documentaries focusing on the challenges facing the US in a post September 11th world) I, for one, couldn’t think of any more critical crossroads than this. Congratulations, Catalyst. You’ve done it again!

Irshad is perhaps best known for writing the controversial
The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith, a work which has brought her accolades, criticism, and a fatwa. Irshad is no shrinking violet: despite her faith and profound Muslim identity, she has been the target of more criticism than I care to recount, and the fatwa certainly doesn’t make her life any easier. But no amount of criticism and no number of threats will cause her to soften her message: that Islam has forgotten its egalitarian and tolerant roots, and that Modern Islam has a lot to learn from the more open and inclusive societies.

Just under a year ago, Irshad taught a seminar as part of the Socrates Society of the Aspen Institute entitled “Reforming Islam?” and I found myself both refreshed by her willingness to confront those who disagree with her and troubled by the resistance so much of the Muslim world appears to harbor towards her and those who, like Irshad, are willing to question both their own assumptions and those of their fellow Muslims. [Note to the orthographically scrutinous: there is a QUESTION MARK--an interrogation point, an eroteme--in the title of this seminar! Irshad is asking a question (should we reform? who is we? what is reform?), not stating a position.]

The seminar centered on Irshad’s core thesis: that the concept of ijtihad must return to Islamic discourse. Ijtihad, originally a narrow Islamic legal term for making legal decisions based on interpretation of independent legal texts, has a broader meaning relating to independent and interpretation. Irshad has adopted the term and created Project Ijtihad of which she is the Chief Catalyst. Fortunately, she’s not the only one calling for independent thought and interpretation: Muqtedar Kahn’s excellent website has superb material.

This afternoon, as I drove about running errands trying to recover from the weekend’s onslaught of tryptophan, I heard Irshad’s voice on the radio. BBC World Service’s excellent Heart and Soul ran a program called “The Future Of Islam – Or Just ‘Islam Lite’?” As usual, Irshad did her cause proud. More interesting were the other Muslim thought leaders, who agreed with Irshad to one degree or another: Prof. Tariq Ramadan is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University and was the subject of a number of news stories when his US Visa was revoked in 2004 when he was teaching at Notre Dame. And even Saira Khan, runner-up in the UK’s version of The Apprentice.

Irshad has her critics, and many of them could be heard throughout this thoughtful and well-balanced BBC program. One of them makes the excellent point that, even if Irshad is too far “out there” for mainstream Muslims to accept, the very nature of her “extremism” will cause others with more moderate but nevertheless reformist voices to appear less strident and less extreme in comparison. That’s something of a back-handed complement if ever I’ve heard one, but they all miss the point: what Irshad wants, what she strives for, is the very dialogue in which all of her critics are engaging.

So Irshad is Catalyzing precisely the ijtihad and the discourse she so correctly proclaims Islam needs. And, despite their dissent, even her critics have succumbed: they are engaging in intelligent debate and consideration of her ideas. And the ideas of others. And that’s precisely what ijtihad is all about. Mission accomplished.