Fitzgerald: Emile Nakhleh: One worries, and one wonders

Unless we know what Emile Nakhleh, "the CIA program's former director," means by that strange phrase "political Islam," we cannot really examine that "two to three percent figure" he also provides. But we have reason to think all he is doing is engaging in an effort at ludicrously minimizing the problem posed by the theologico-politico-geopolitical system of Islam, and that can only be in order to allay fears, to keep the Infidels unalarmed, as unconcerned, even as somnolent, as possible.

In Western Europe for decades, those who ruled, and whose duty it was to both instruct and protect others from threats as early as possible in their detection, failed to instruct and protect enough early on about Nazism, and about Communism, and about energy policies and problems, and about AIDS, and Mad Cow Disease, and possibly irreversible environmental changes. They also failed to learn themselves, and then to instruct others, in what Islam is all about, and what Muslim migrants would necessarily be carrying with them in their mental baggage, and why what they carried would mean, necessarily, disaster for the countries of the Bilad al-kufr to which those Muslim migrants came. For who can deny at this point, even if there are disagreements over what is now to be done, that the large-scale presence of Muslims in the countries of Western Europe has lead to a situation, for the indigenous Infidels and even for other, non-Muslim, migrants to those same lands (Hindus, Buddhists, Caribbean and African Christians, Chinese), of greater unpleasantness, expense, and physical insecurity than would otherwise be the case?

Finally, Nakhleh asserts, in a tone of remarkable self-assurance, that "[p]olitical Islam is not a threat. The threat is if the people become disenchanted with the political process and democracy, and opt for violence.'"

By "people" he means "Muslim" people. And he is telling us that not only is the teeniest tiniest possible percentage -- "two to three percent" -- of the world's Muslims (who, by the way, are now up to "1.4 billion") -- "politically active" but that also there is trouble only when "people" (that is, Muslims) become "disenchanted with the political process and democracy, and opt for violence."

Now I'm confused. Now I need Emile Nakhleh to help me out. Are the "two to three percent" of the world's Muslims who are "politically active" the ones who are not "disenchanted with the political process and democracy"? Are they the ones we don't have to worry about because they are engaged in political activities, and therefore must not yet be "disenchanted with the political process and democracy" and are not opting "for violence," as Emile Nakhleh demurely describes terrorist groups and suicide-bombers? Or are they the ones who, being the only “politically active” ones out of those "1.4 billion Muslims," therefore the very ones who soon become "disenchanted with the political process and democracy, and opt for violence"?

If it is the latter case, then one must ask why 97-98% of the world's "1.4 billion Muslims" manage to avoid being "politically active," and instead are politically passive or inert? One wonders what would be the reasons for that. One wonders if we Infidels should indeed wish that those 97-98 percent of the Muslims who are now, according to Emile Nakhleh, not “politically active” to become active. For can this lead to anything other than many more of them then becoming “disenchanted with the political process and democracy” and then opting “for violence”? (How demure that choice of verb, incidentally -- “opt for violence.” I “opt for violence,” you “opt for violence,” we all “opt for violence.”)

Societies suffused with Islam are suffused with a belief-system that encourages despotism, not least because Islam locates the source of political legitimacy not in the will of those ruled -- the political theory that undergirds the advanced Western democracies -- but rather in the degree to which any government and any rulers adhere to the expressed will of Allah and of his messenger, as located by clerics and interpreters long ago in Qur’an and hadith, a will to be found in the Holy Law of Islam, or Shari’a. And since, further, the belief-system of Islam is a collectivist system, ignores the rights of the individual, and sees the individual Muslim as owing his entire allegiance to that belief-system and to the collective of fellow Believers, the Umma al-Islamiyya, it is difficult for Muslims to conceive of recognizing, much less making the center of their polities, the rights of individuals -- rights such as freedom of speech and free exercise of religion, including the right to abandon a religion. That is why no Muslim country adheres to the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (though the Shah of Iran signed the document), and why instead a “Muslim version” that completely vitiates the entire meaning and sense of the original was created and presented to the world as an acceptable alternative, when it at every point undermined the letter and spirit of that original.

And if what Emile Nakhleh, who retired from the C.I.A. last June as head of its “program” dealing with “political Islam,” means (oh, what a tangled web we weave, Mr. Nakhleh, and Miss Reuters, when ‘ere we practice to deceive) is that the 97-98 percent of Muslims who are not “politically active” should become so, and we Infidels have a duty to somehow prevent them from becoming “disenchanted” and thus becoming “politically active” in another bombs-and-explosives sort of way, he is therefore essentially saying that it is up to us, the Infidels, to bend our efforts to encouraging democracy in Muslim societies. And he wants us to do this despite the fact that everything necessary to democracy beyond mere head-counting at the purple-thumbed polls, including the legitimacy of governments arising from a social contract theory and the necessity of post-electoral compromise between political rivals (a spirit of compromise completely unknown in Islam, and the results of which we see in Iraq today), as well as the enshrinement of individual rights, is not part of Islam, is inimical to Islam. Yet we are not permitted to discuss this, to worry about it, to wonder how Islamic societies can be brought a kind of democracy that means anything at all. We are not permitted to wonder how they can make democracy into more than what it has meant in the farcical elections in Egypt (where the Ikhwan gained seats), in the “Palestinian” “Authority” (where Hamas won power), in Jordan and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and anywhere that the tiniest, phoniest, and for-western-consumption-only steps are taken to supposedly begin that process of “democratization.” Everywhere that process has led to an increase in the power of the less corrupt, but much more threatening, true Believers -- less tainted by corruption than the more worldly thieving-ruling families, for they would be Believers purs et durs.

Emile Nakhleh’s two paragraphs of nonsense deserve to have some sense imposed on them. We’ve tried above. We’ve really tried.

And Emile Nakhleh himself deserves attention. Is he one more of those C.I.A retirees who, like Raymond Close, “retired” early in order to go into business – perhaps something in the public-relations line – with some of those he was supposed to worry about? Is he now a “lecturer” by any chance, on “political Islam,” a writer of Op-Ed pronouncements, someone who might be supplementing his government pension with the kind of remarks that are reuterized above? Or is he simply one more example of the unintelligent “experts” in the Central Intelligence Agency, of whom we have had a troubling sampling – including schoolboyish Scheuer – over the past few years, each one more naïve and confused than the next?

One worries: these are the ones we find out about, these are the ones whose intelligence and understanding we can judge because they have retired from the C.I.A., and are now speaking publicly. But what about those who haven’t retired, but whose capacity for comprehension, or whose loyalties, are similar to those of Emile Nakhleh, or Raymond Close, or others?

One worries, and one wonders.