American
Interest
Pre-Publication Copy
Summer (May/June) 2007 (Vol. II, No. 5)
The following article, in whole or in part, may not be copied, downloaded,
stored, further transmitted, transfered, distributed, altered or otherwise used,
in any form or by any means, except:
• one stored electronic and one paper copy of any article solely for your
personal, non-commercial use; or
• with prior written permission of The American Interest LLC.
To subscribe to our online version, visit www.The-American-Interest.com
To subscribe to our print version, call 1-800-767-5273 or mail the form below to:
THE AMERICAN INTEREST
PO BOX 338
MOUNT MORRIS, IL 61054-7521
o BEST OFFER! Yes, send me two years (12 issues) of
The American InteresT for only $69*.
I’ll save 23% off the cover price!
o Yes, send me one year (6 issues) for only $39*. I’ll
save $5.75 off the cover price.
Name
Address 1
Address 2
City
State
Zip
Country
E-mail
Credit Card
Exp.
Name on Card
Tel. No.
Signature
Date
*Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of first issue. Add $14 per year
for shipping & handling to addresses outside the U.S. and Canada.
o Payment enclosed
o Bill me later
A73PPC
CONTENTS
The American Interest • Volume II, Number 5, Summer (May/June) 2007
Eagle & Crescent
6
What Do Muslims Think?
by Amir Taheri
Unprecedented intellectual ferment in the Muslim world is likely to
have a happier ending than many Westerners suppose.
19
6
The Irrelevance of the Middle East
by Philip E. Auerswald
Neither our energy vulnerability nor the danger of terrorism is all it’s
cracked up to be. The Middle East just isn’t that important.
28
Adventures in State-Making
by Harvey Sicherman
The best historical analogy for understanding the U.S. predicament in
Iraq is older—and more useful—than you might think.
42
Fixing Public Diplomacy
by Michael Holtzman
The State Department needs to do “information” better, but we
should privatize the “engage and persuade” business.
Folks Like US
108
47
A Conversation with Amy Tan
Amy Tan and Dana Gioia plumb the power of storytelling within the
American immigrant experience.
52
Born in the USA
by Nicholas Eberstadt
If demography is destiny, America’s is greater than that of any
advanced nation.
60
Toolbox: A Few More Good Men
by Lawrence Korb & Peter Ogden
Bigger is not necessarily better. Here are four principles for enlarging
the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.
119
Governance & Growth
65
Survival of the Fattest
by Paul Collier
Not all aspects of democracy are created equal, especially the effects
of resource wealth on economic growth.
72
Toolbox: Making Aid Work
by Stewart Patrick
Despite reforms, the U.S. foreign aid regime is still flawed.
Summer (May/June) 2007
Potomac Tales
79
Raising Cane
by James Snyder
America’s “sugar daddies” may soon meet their match.
83
Adam Garfinkle, editor
Patricia Murphy, executive editor
Daniel Kennelly, senior managing editor
Thomas Rickers, managing editor
Executive Committee
Francis Fukuyama, chair
Charles Davidson
Josef Joffe
Walter Russell Mead
Editorial Board
Anne Applebaum, Peter Berger,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Niall Ferguson,
Bronislaw Geremek, Owen Harries,
Samuel Huntington, Bernard-Henri
Lévy, Glenn C. Loury, C. Raja Mohan,
Douglass North, Ana Palacio (on leave),
Itamar Rabinovich, Ali Salem,
Lilia Shevtsova, Takashi Shiraishi,
Mario Vargas Llosa, Wang Jisi,
Ruth Wedgwood, James Q. Wilson
A Slice of Intelligence Life
by James Rosen
Bolling Air Force Base can be a spooky place.
Reviews
88
L’Enfant’s Washington
by Francis Fukuyama
The grand, strange and illuminating story of Washington, DC,
and its eccentric genius of a designer.
102
Islam in America
by Peter Skerry
Four new books try to strike a balance between fear and
complacency over America’s three million Muslim citizens.
108
Thinking about Thinking
by William Reinhardt
Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, is
now joined by I Am a Strange Loop.
Michael McDonald, literary counsel
Simon Monroe, R. Jay Magill, Jr., illustrators
cover photo by Getty Images
112
Charles Davidson, publisher & CEO
Sara Bracceschi, advertising & syndication
Noelle Daly, subscriber services
Damir Marusic, marketing & web
Jamie Pierson, circulation & operations
119
Davos 2007
by Fred Kempe
Klaus Schwab’s most recent extravaganza was “lite” on
America. What a difference a year can make.
Reagan’s Brandenburg Concerto
by John C. Kornblum
Marking the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s “Tear
Down This Wall” speech.
ADVERTISING SALES
Sara Bracceschi
sara.bracceschi@the-american-interest.com
(202) 223-4408
Perry Janoski
publishing representative
Allston-Cherry Ltd.
(212) 665-9885
Imran Ahmad
Adspace Sales Corporation LLC
(92-21) 587-4214
Notes & Letters
128
132
website
www.the-american-interest.com
The American Interest
Letters to the Editor
Thomas Parker, Eliot A. Cohen
133
Summer Note: The First Duty of Honest Men
by Adam Garfinkle
Critics of recent Administration tactics on Korea and Iran
protest too much—sometimes way too much.
SYNDICATION
Sara Bracceschi
sara.bracceschi@the-american-interest.com
(202) 223-4408
The Pollbearer: A Letter from Rabat
by A.M. Spiegel
Notes on the pratfalls of democracy promotion.
140
Yankee Doodle
Subscriptions: Call (800) 767-5273 or visit www.the-american-interest.com. Two years (12 issues): $69 print
or online; $129 for both. One year (6 issues): $39 print or online: $69 for both. Please add $14 per year for printsubscription delivery outside the U.S. and Canada. Postmaster and subscribers, send subscription orders and changes
of address to: The American Interest, P.O. Box 338, Mount Morris, IL 61054-7521. The American Interest (ISSN 15565777) is published six times a year by The American Interest LLC. Printed by Fry Communications, Inc. Postage paid
in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. ©2007, The American Interest LLC. Editorial offices: 1730 Rhode Island Ave. NW,
Suite 617, Washington, DC 20036. Tel.: (202) 223-4408. Fax: (202) 223-4489. Email: ai@the-american-interest.com.
Geneive Abdo, Mecca and Main Street: Muslim
Life in America After 9/11 (Oxford University Press,
2006), 224 pp., $26.
Paul M. Barrett, American Islam: The Struggle for
the Soul of a Religion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2006), 320 pp., $25.
Ilyas Ba-Yunus and Kassim Kone, Muslims in the
United States (Greenwood Press, 2006), 192 pp.,
$55.
Steven Emerson, Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to
Militant Islam in the U.S. (Prometheus Books,
2006), 535 pp., $28.
Islam in America
Peter Skerry
J
udging by talk radio chatter, Americans
these days are more alarmed by Mexican
day laborers hanging out on street corners
than by the prospect that Islamist terrorists
will blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Yet large
numbers of Americans are anxious and do feel
threatened by Muslims around the globe, including the roughly three million Muslims living today in the United States. But is there any
good reason for Americans to fear the Muslim
communities in their midst? That is the focus of the four books reviewed here. Each in
its own way illustrates the enormous gaps in
knowledge about American Muslims that we
as a nation have barely begun to address. For
its insights or for what it unwittingly reveals
about Muslim attitudes, each also adds to our
understanding.
Geneive Abdo worked for more than a decade as a foreign correspondent in Egypt and
Iran. Undoubtedly, that experience, as well as
growing up in San Antonio, Texas, in a Maronite Catholic Lebanese immigrant family,
help explain the freshness of her approach. In
Mecca and Main Street, Abdo has no axes to
grind, and her perspective is remarkably uncluttered by the blinders and preoccupations
102
The American Interest
that many journalists bring to this topic. Yet
her very openness leaves her without a steady
compass by which to navigate the crosscurrents
of the contemporary Muslim American scene.
Abdo does avoid the bromides of naive liberals, who typically insist on treating Muslims
as not so different from earlier immigrants to
America. She is convinced that there are looming challenges among Muslim Americans, but
she is not very clear as to what those challenges
are. She is also careful to emphasize that there is
“no evidence of militancy” among Muslims here,
by which she presumably means no signs of terrorist activity. Still, she highlights an emergent
“rejectionist movement” among young Muslim
Americans who, in her words, “are trying to create their own world where they can find comfort in their faith and their communities” and
“are placing their Islamic identity first.” Their
religious orientation, she relates, is much more
intellectual than the innocent and unreflective
faith of their parents. They are “not interested
in blindly following the teachings of an imam
simply because he is a religious figure.” At the
same time, she notes, these young people “are
often more observant of Islamic practice than
their parents. Many young women are wearing
headscarves, even if their mothers didn’t cover.”
Abdo argues that these developments
“largely defy decades of history in a nation of
immigrants, and they challenge the American
ideal of diverse cultures linked by a shared attachment to common goals and dreams.” But
are these trends, if true, really so different from
those of other immigrant groups—Greeks,
Jews, Irish, Italian and many others—whose
children or grand-children self-consciously reclaimed some aspect of their heritage to define
their particular American identity? If what she
identifies among Muslims here today is fundamentally different from other groups, Abdo
does not make the case very cogently.
An admittedly dramatic episode involving
changes at a prominent mosque in Dearborn,
Michigan, does suggest a degree of difference.
The Dix mosque was founded in an old pool
hall in 1937, when it was used mostly by Lebanese-Syrian immigrants. There were also a few
Yemenis, whose numbers remained low until
the permissive changes in U.S. immigration
law in 1965. “Soon, the Yemenis controlled Dix
Reviews
completely, and life was turned upside down”,
writes Abdo. Eventually, the Lebanese retreated
and established a new mosque.
The Yemeni men of the Dix mosque typically dress in traditional garb, white gallabiyyas;
their wives and daughters in jilbabs, anklelength dresses. They are not well educated and
are economically marginal. The mosque’s allmale, mostly immigrant board has been very
traditional and over the years has forced out
several less conservative imams. As described by
Abdo, the Dix mosque and those who attend it
are hardly typical of their more numerous educated and affluent Muslim American brothers
and sisters. Abdo nevertheless points to this
group of Yemenis as somehow representative
of the broader phenomenon of Muslims turning inward in America, especially since 9/11.
This example, however, highlights little more
than the traditionalist views of this one group
of Muslim immigrants from a particularly underdeveloped society.
Abdo herself devotes a good deal of attention
to how many young Muslims born or raised here
gravitate away from traditionalism, even toward
Islamic rock and rap. If her careful chronicling of
these Muslim youth currents suggests anything,
it suggests how absorptive American society is
and how adaptive Islamic faith and values can be.
In the same vein, Abdo highlights how Muslim
women in America are attaining greater visibility and authority in mosques and other settings.
The prime example she features is Ingrid Mattson, the recently elected president of the Islamic
Society of North America, the largest and most
traditionalist national Muslim organization.
Mattson, by the way, is a Canadian who was
raised as a Catholic, converted to Islam, eventually got a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and now teaches at the Hartford Seminary.
Unfortunately, Abdo never adequately helps the
reader make sense of these disparate images. As a
result, Mecca and Main Street ends up reflecting
the anxiety and confusion of Americans about
the Muslims in their midst rather than helping
clarify or resolve them.
A
more successful effort to address the complexity of Muslim America is American
Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion by
former Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Barrett.
To an even greater degree than Abdo, Barrett
lays out the many facets of Islam in America,
including the troubling undercurrents of antiSemitism and anti-Americanism, as well as the
possibilities for change and adaptation. More
to the point, he does this in such a way that
the reader gets a clear picture of a diverse and
complicated phenomenon without being overwhelmed by detail. Without a doubt, this is the
most incisive and balanced analysis of Muslims
in America yet written.
Barrett presents chapter-length vignettes of
seven different individuals: Osama Siblani, the
Lebanese-born publisher of the Arab American
News, based in Dearborn; Khaled Abou El Fadl,
an outspoken UCLA law professor educated at
Yale but raised by Egyptian parents in Kuwait;
Siraj Wahhaj, a Brooklyn-born African-Ameri-
Is there any good
reason to fear the Muslim
communities in our midst?
can convert, named by Federal prosecutors as
an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot by Islamist terrorists to blow up the United Nations
and other New York City landmarks; Asra Nomani, a Muslim feminist born in Mumbai and
raised by Pakistani parents in Morgantown,
West Virginia; Sheik Muhammad Kabbani, a
Lebanese Sufi who has a loyal following in the
United States and who famously told a State
Department audience in January 1999 that 80
percent of Muslims in America were under the
influence of “extremism”; Sami Omar al-Hussayen, a doctoral candidate in computer science
at the University of Idaho, who was unsuccessfully tried in Federal court for material support
of terrorism but was ultimately deported back
to his native Saudi Arabia; and finally, Mustafa
Saied, a relatively obscure Indian-born Muslim
who joined a secretive Muslim Brotherhood cell
here in the United States but has subsequently
renounced his extremist involvements.
Barrett’s analysis is subtle and fair. For example, he clearly delineates the notorious Siraj
Wahhaj’s ties to the Saudis, but resists simply
characterizing him as a Wahhabi or a funda-
Summer (May/June) 2007
103
His God tells him to bomb the World Trade
mentalist. He points, for example, to Wahhaj’s
friendly relations with public officials and black
Center. Your God tells you, bomb Baghdad.
Christians, emphasizing that a “full-fledged
No difference. You’re the same.”
Wahhabi would refrain from such ties.” As BarObviously a loose cannon, Siblani neverrett observes of Wahhaj, “Some of his sermons,
theless continues to be courted assiduously by
opinions, and past personal affiliations betray
Democrats and Republicans alike. His outraan affinity for fundamentalism. But the roots
geousness and inconsistencies should be familiar
of his anger at American society trace more dito anyone who has spent time at the grassroots
rectly to the condition of American blacks than
of American politics. One of Barrett’s strengths
here is presenting such views straightforwardly
to grievances grounded in the Middle East.”
Similarly, Barrett traces how Wahhaj’s disand allowing them to speak for themselves.
turbing ties to the notorious “blind sheikh”,
Barrett is perhaps at his best when dissecting
the story around the reputed terrorist webmasOmar Abdel-Rahman, mastermind of the 1993
ter, Sami Omar al-Hussayen. Again, we have
World Trade Center bombing, led to his being
named an unindicted co-conspirator by Federal
a model of clear-eyed, even-handed analysis
authorities. But he also points out that on one
that will disappoint anyone looking for a slamoccasion Wahhaj actually assisted Federal prosdunk case. Barrett persuasively manages to lay
ecutors by testifying in the trial of four Muslim
out this Idaho-based Saudi’s troubling ties to
extremists with ties to al-Qaeda, individuals
Islamist terrorists without declaring him guilty.
who were then convicted for their involvement
At the same time, he dissects the many flaws
in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in
in the government’s unsuccessful case against
him. Indeed, he offers a useful and balanced acKenya and Tanzania.
Barrett’s portrait of Lebanese-American
counting of the Federal government’s less than
publisher Osama Siblani is similarly nuanced. Siblani is a Shi‘a who, even after
9/11, has been heard loudly supporting
Hizballah. As he declared to the Detroit
News, “How could you not support a
group that has driven an occupier from
your country?” Barrett goes on to point
out how this prominent Muslim American, who supported George W. Bush
in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, once
said to him: “I support the resistance
to an occupation, not only in Lebanon,
but anywhere in the world. . . . In fact
I support right now the Iraqi resistance
against American forces there.”
Barrett recounts the scene at an October 2004 banquet celebrating Siblani’s
political action committee’s endorsement of John Kerry. With members
of Congress and Michigan Governor
Jennifer Granholm present, Siblani declared, “George Bush betrayed us! Take
our country back from those Taliban in
Washington!” On another occasion Siblani tells Barrett a joke about a fictiAssociated Press
tious meeting with Bush in which the
publisher says, “What’s the difference Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society
between you and Osama bin Laden? of North America
104
The American Interest
Reviews
impressive prosecutorial record against Islamist
terrorists since 9/11.
At the end of American Islam, Barrett presents an overview of the challenges facing Muslims in America, arguing persuasively that
“moderate Muslims must speak up and act
forcefully to protect America—and American
Islam—from a tiny minority capable of doing
harm.” But he also argues that non-Muslims
need to acknowledge the pressure that Muslims
here have been under since 9/11. As he puts it,
“Publicly acknowledging this psychic burden
and showing some empathy would improve relationships with Muslims of all stripes and begin to counter accusations that Americans seek
to persecute followers of Islam.”
In this regard, Barrett praises President Bush
for having made “a decent effort to distinguish
Islam and Muslims generally from the targets of
the antiterrorism campaign.” But he also urges
Bush and other national figures to “speak out
against Islam-hating Christian fundamentalists”
such as Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham.
Their silence in this regard, I can report from my
own discussions around the country, has had a
powerfully negative impact on Muslim Americans. Finally, Barrett calls for the Justice Department to upgrade its performance in the prosecution of terrorists, and for an end to abusive and
discriminatory treatment of Muslim inmates
and detainees. Hard to argue with that.
T
he conflicting and confusing images of
Muslims that Barrett sorts through so
carefully are exemplified by Muslims in the
United States, a book by two immigrant Muslim social scientists, Ilyas Ba-Yunus and Kassim
Kone, both affiliated with the State University
of New York at Cortland. Theirs is a flawed
but frequently insightful and invariably honest
study that is perhaps most useful as a document
illustrating the multifarious views among Muslims in America today.
Non-Muslim Americans will be gratified
to hear Ba-Yunus and Kone echo what I have
heard many Muslim immigrants recount about
the United States:
Why do Muslims want to migrate to the
West, especially to the United States? Perhaps their motivation to migrate is the same
as that of other people from the developing countries—plenty of good jobs, higher
wages, higher standard of living, quality of
life including a democratic system of government, equality before the law and freedom of
speech, which are rare commodities in the
Third World in general and in the Muslim
World in particular.
Like most Muslims I have encountered, the authors emphasize America’s tradition of religious
liberty: “Like the followers of all other faiths in
this secular society, Muslims have been able to
practice their faith more freely than it is possible
to do so in many Muslim countries.”
Moreover, Without ignoring anti-Muslim
incidents before and after 9/11, Ba-Yunus and
Kone nevertheless offer this rather startling observation—startling, that is, coming from the
halls of contemporary academia:
Americans are generally nice people. To say
“thank you” or “sorry” to someone, to hold
the door for someone, for instance, are American cultural traits. . . . Most Americans, irrespective of race or religion, are neighborly,
friendly, and charitable. Despite a great deal
of opposition to immigration, most ordinary
Americans go out of their way to accommodate new arrivals in their midst. Newcomers
are often invited to churches, into homes,
and are befriended.
Such observations come with some real insights about Muslim life in America. For example, contrary to popular understanding, Ba-Yunas and Kone point out that the typical imam is
typically just an employee of the mosque board
and therefore typically in a precarious position.
By contrast, African-American imams—not
unlike many black Protestant preachers—are
often powerful figures.
Ba-Yunus and Kone also present some interesting findings about Muslim women in the
United States, highlighting for example the
high divorce rate, especially among less-educated, foreign-born Muslim women in their forties
and fifties. Similarly helpful is the authors’ emphasis on the many sources of disunity among
Muslims here, including the highly contentious
matter of hilal, which refers literally to the new
Summer (May/June) 2007
105
or crescent moon. Because the Islamic calendar
is lunar, the sighting of the new moon is critical to the timing of key religious observances.
But how this is to be done—where in the sky,
at what time of day, with the naked eye or scientific instruments or with astronomical calculations—is a surprisingly divisive issue among
American Muslims, hailing from varied climates and traditions across the globe.
Despite its virtues, Muslims in the United
States has some real problems. There are disturbing factual errors. Malcolm X was assassinated
in New York City, not in New Jersey. Immigration restriction began with an act of Congress in
1921, not 1920. The liberal immigration policy
legislated in 1965 was not “hastily withdrawn in
1970 under the Nixon administration.” There
are other such mistakes, too numerous to list.
Much more troubling is Ba-Yunus’ and
Kone’s treatment of the Palestinian issue. To
their credit, in their straightforward manner
they put the matter front and center, emphasizing its critical importance to Muslims in the
United States and indeed around the globe.
But Ba-Yunus and Kone themselves demonstrate the evasiveness and moral obtuseness
about this topic that Barrett highlights. At one
point, they bizarrely equate Saddam Hussein
with the Israelis:
Saddam Hussein was a bad man, we were
told, because, among other things, he broke
at least a dozen U.N. resolutions. How many
U.N. resolutions did Israel choose to ignore
during the same period that the media did
not care to discuss?
They go on to defend Hamas as “a Palestinian organization that has nothing to do with
Osama Bin Laden. It is never known to have
hurt any Americans and is never known to
have engaged in any anti-American policies.”
Acknowledging Hamas’ reliance on suicide
bombers inside Israel, Ba-Yunus and Kone
highlight the organization’s social service programs and conclude: “It is beyond most Arab
and Muslim Americans as to what is wrong in
helping a people who never tried to harm the
United States.” However questionable these
various claims may be, on this last point about
the sympathies of Arab and Muslim Ameri106
The American Interest
cans, Ba-Yunus and Kone are surely, albeit disturbingly, correct.
Most troubling, however, is how these two
otherwise discerning Muslims readily exculpate terrorists of moral responsibility for their
actions:
Today the United States is only one of the few
unconditional supporters of the state of Israel
despite all the atrocities that it continues to
commit against rock-throwing Palestinians
who are now forced to become suicide bombers—terrorists in the jargon of the American
government and the media. [emphasis added]
W
ould any of this surprise Steven Emerson, the indefatigable investigative
journalist who has spent more than a decade
documenting the activities of Islamist terrorists
and their supporters in the United States? His
latest book, Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the U.S., makes the case that militant Islam is a pervasive force in contemporary
America. Emerson is an anti-jihadist muckraker who piles fact on fact on fact to produce this
535-page encyclopedic tome with an attitude.
Rather artlessly, by accretion if nothing else,
Emerson earns the attention of his readers, even
skeptics to the possibility that there is cause for
concern—that there are Islamist terrorist organizations operating in the United States either
relying on our liberties and generosity to raise
money for criminal activities overseas, or for
operations against us here.
Emerson’s most impressive brief is against
former University of South Florida engineering
professor Sami al-Arian, whom Federal authorities charged with raising funds for the terrorist
group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Al-Arian
was eventually acquitted of several of the counts
against him. Yet on the basis of the remaining
deadlocked charges, he did accept a plea agreement providing for his deportation in exchange
for acknowledging his involvement with this
terrorist organization—a relationship he had
strenuously denied for more than a decade.
So no, Emerson would not be surprised by
the sympathy expressed for Palestinian terrorists by Ba-Yunus and Kone. Indeed, he claims
to have evidence of active support for such activities across a variety of Muslim-American
Reviews
individuals and organizations. For example, he
identifies the aforementioned Islamic Society of
North America (ISNA), an umbrella organization of over 300 mosques whose annual meeting brings together at least 30,000 Muslims,
as a “radical Islamist organization.” Emerson
similarly identifies another national Muslim organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Council
(MPAC). Indeed, he accuses MPAC’s guiding
spirit, Maher Hathout, with using “Wahabbi
tactics” to redefine moderate, mainstream Islam. Emerson makes similar charges against
the Council on American Islamic Relations
(CAIR), which is now the largest MuslimAmerican advocacy group.
Yet the organizations Emerson paints with
the same radical Islamist brush differ in important ways. CAIR is most obviously rooted
in radical Islamism. Its key leaders are of Palestinian origin and come out of an organization called the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), with clear ties to Hamas. CAIR is
fundamentalist in its interpretation of Islam,
but it is moderating under the influence of
American-born Muslims. The organization
also receives funding from the Saudis and
other Gulf sources. Yet, as Emerson rightfully
emphasizes, such critical details are routinely
ignored by academics and journalists, who
often refer to CAIR as simply a Muslim civil
rights organization.
ISNA also has ties to the Saudis—not surprising, since the organization emerged out of
the Muslim Student Association (MSA). The
Saudi government supported the MSA in the
1960s as a means to reinforce Muslim identity
and combat socialist tendencies among Muslim students studying in the United States.
Today, those ties are attenuated. With Mattson, its newly elected female president, ISNA’s
religious orientation is hardly fundamentalist.
I have heard its leadership publicly denounce
the intolerance and bigotry of Saudi religious
authorities. No such developments get any attention from Emerson.
Finally, MPAC legitimately claims to be the
most progressive Muslim-American organization. It is certainly the most self-consciously
oriented toward assimilation into the American
mainstream. The organization’s former spokesperson was an American-born Muslim woman
who did not wear the hijab, or headscarf. Strongest in Southern California, MPAC maintains a
network of full-time Muslim elementary schools
there that include in their curriculum art and
music, unlike more traditional Muslim schools.
As a matter of explicit policy, MPAC has always
rejected funding from foreign sources. None
of this fits with the Wahhabist label Emerson
pastes onto it.
To be sure, these differences fade quickly
when it comes to controversies over individuals
like Sami al-Arian, who has been supported by
both CAIR and MPAC. But is this because they
share his radical Islamist ideology? Or because
they sympathize with the Palestinian cause?
Or because, as Muslims in America, they feel
a bond with another Muslim who has felt the
prosecutorial force of the Federal government—
Emerson is an anti-jihadist
muckracker who piles
fact on fact on fact.
at a time when others among them have also felt
that force, not always appropriately?
These are difficult questions, to which insufficient attention has been paid. Yet Emerson has a ready-made response: “These groups
have acted as the self-appointed spokespersons
of ‘mainstream’ Islam and were established in
the United States with a very specific political
Islamist agenda that is not mainstream.” In
other words, these organizations are misrepresenting and distorting the views and interests
of Muslim Americans. And if we delegitimize
their leaders, then the more benign mainstream will emerge.
If this scenario sounds familiar, it is. It
parallels what Americans were told before
we invaded Iraq: Just get rid of Saddam and
his Ba‘athi thugs and the natural democratic
moderation of the Iraqi people will emerge.
Yet as the works of Barrett and Ba-Yunus
and Kone suggest, the Muslim mainstream
in America, while hardly radical, is more
sympathetic to defenders of the Palestinians—including Islamist terrorists—than we
typically acknowledge. As dire as Emerson’s
Summer (May/June) 2007
107
scenario of hundreds of terrorists operating
in the shadows is, the more mundane reality
of some three million American Muslims is
in some respects even more troubling—and
certainly more complicated.
Peter Skerry is professor of political science at
Boston College.
Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (Basic
Books, 2007), 384 pp., $26.95.
Thinking about
Thinking
William Reinhardt
I
n 1979, Douglas Hofstadter, a 27-year-old
mathematician-turned-computer scientist, and an expositor of sublime originality, produced an extraordinary, Pulitzer Prizewinning bestseller entitled Gödel, Escher,
Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Written as
a series of word games, dialogues and skeins
of symbolic logic (with actual mathematical
symbols!), it was a tour de force presentation
of “thinking about thinking”, or what, in the
style of Hofstadter, I will call TAT for short.
He exemplified TAT through the mathematical implications of the work of three unique
geniuses: the 20th-century logician Kurt
Gödel, the artist M.C. Escher, and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
The relevance of Bach and Escher to Hofstadter’s TAT project was not intuitively obvious, but Hofstadter’s unique gift was to bring
it all into easy focus. At the height of the Baroque period, Bach managed to produce music
of complexity and beauty within the confines
of rules so constraining that others less brilliant
could not make a fugue proceed past the fourth
voice; Bach succeeded with six. Bach’s genius
was to loop his music’s voices around and past
each other, creating an evolving recursive pat108
The American Interest
tern that sounded as magnificent as it was
mathematically elegant, and could even end up
making musical reference to itself. This possibility of self-reference is key.
Escher was the pre-eminent artist of visual
paradox. His drawings and etchings are profound and realistic depictions of “realities” that
cannot exist in three-dimensional space. Looking at any small piece of Escher’s worlds causes
no trouble, but the pieces don’t coalesce properly
when taken as a whole. They can even contain
themselves within themselves. This visual and
paradoxical “looping” provides a visualization
of the complexities and contradictions of TAT.
What did the logician Kurt Gödel have to
do with TAT? Plenty, as it turns out. To start at
the end, so to speak, Gödel ended the dream of
early 20th-century mathematics that “everything
could be axiomatized”—that all of mathematics,
and then all of everything, could come spilling
out of an all-powerful computer once “fed” the
right (and assumed to be simple) axioms. Some
of these axioms were from number theory, these
being necessary to understand and “prove” things
from 1+1=2 up to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Beginning with these mathematical first principles,
it was hoped, we could deduce the full natures
of chemistry, biology or any of the natural sciences—including psychology. Indeed, perhaps
only a few more such axioms would allow us to
fathom the mind and consciousness itself. One
could then really think about thinking, systematically and scientifically, too.
This expectation presumed a certain philosophy of mathematics, and a certain wider
cosmology. Before Gödel, mathematics was
taken to be both the descriptive and predictive
language of physics, astronomy and cosmology.
And why not, since mathematics and the physical sciences use the same machinery: the human
brain, with its extraordinary abilities to conceptualize, formulate and generalize? It was further
supposed that mathematics was the unambiguous language through which to communicate
about the natural sciences. It was less prone to
the ambiguities and misunderstandings of everyday human languages. Logically speaking,
mathematics had a place for everything and put
everything in its place.
If mathematics gives us a precise and exhaustive means of describing the natural world,