“You can’t have an honest debate even behind closed doors in America” concerning Islam, stated the Iranian-American, native Farsi-speaking former intelligence analyst MJ Javani to this author in a recent interview. A patriotic 14-year veteran of America’s intelligence services following Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks, Javani engagingly explained how his Unit 81 espionage thrillers help to illuminate politically hard truths about jihadist threats.
Javani’s professional experience was ironic given that he fled in the 1980s as a child with his family the theocratic tyranny of Iran’s Islamic Republic. He marveled at the workplace inhibitions concerning Islam at organizations such as the Defense Department. Political correctness has subtly created an environment of self-censorship where “everyone understands which ideas can be openly expressed and which ones cannot.”
Many of America’s current intelligence analysts began their careers after 9/11 straight out of college, Javani noted, where the prevailing academic view was that “Islam is a religion of peace.” These same academics have in turn advised government agencies on the basis of a “new Left, post-modernist perspective” on Islam and a “conciliatory, apologist view towards Islamic extremism.” The result is “almost like an indoctrination of the US Government’s analysts.”
The Islamic Republic that emerged after the 1979 Iranian revolution under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini inoculated Javani against any such delusions. He noted Khomeini’s axiom that “Islam is politics, politics is Islam” and “anyone who says that Islam and politics can be separated does not understand Islam at all.” Accordingly, Khomeini denigrated Islamic reformist ideas such as separating religion from state as “American Islam.”
Farsi-language sources constantly demonstrated to Javani that the Islamic Republic is “purely based on Shia Islamic ideology,” with no connection to any nationalist Iranian or “classic Westphalian nation-state” interests. This ideology’s foundation is Twelver Shia Islam, which claims that Islam’s last, Twelfth Imam entered occultation in 878 at the age of five and will return during the apocalypse. “The regime in Tehran is a messianic regime geared towards setting the stage for the apocalypse where the 12th imam can make a re-appearance,” Javani stated.
Until then the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader exercises “power of attorney for the 12th hidden Imam,” in a global Manichean struggle, noted Javani, as exemplified by the grandson of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, Imam Hussain. The death of the third Shia Imam during the sectarian conflict that broke apart the Islamic community following Muhammad’s death in 632 climaxed the fissures between Sunnis and Shiites. Hussain led 72 of his followers against 10,000 Sunnis of the caliph Yazid to martyrdom at the 680 Battle of Karbala in what is now Iraq.
While the Islamic Republic has claimed Hussain’s mantle, Javani observed, for officials in Tehran, the Karbala analogy casts America and Israel in the role of Yazid, despised by Shiite tradition. Washington and Jerusalem are thus the “personification of evil in the world.” The Islamic Republic’s “end goal is the destruction of the United States and Israel as the modern-day Yazid.”
In this context, Javani sees little point in America trying to achieve an accommodation with the Islamic Republic, which perceives itself as an “expeditionary” global jihad base. For the Islamic Republic, “concessions to the United States mean basically surrendering to evil,” he noted, while a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic will not respond to deterrence as would the Soviet Union or China. Given that an “apocalyptic nuclear war with the United States” would only precipitate the Twelfth Imam’s return as the Mahdi, the Islamic Republic is much more willing to take confrontational risks.
On the other hand, Javani distrusts possibilities for regime change in Iran. He estimates that perhaps three-quarters of working class Iranians are devout Muslims, unlike the more secular, educated Iranians who often interact with Westerners. Many of the faithful will continue to support the Islamic Republic, or perhaps at least a “more moderate Islamic republic-like” regime, where “Islam plays a central role in people’s lives.”
Javani even worried that in case of Iranian regime change, “something even more extreme” is “actually more likely than something more moderate in the short to medium term.” In Iran, the “people with the most power are the ones with the guns,” including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), representing the “more extremist elements of Iranian society.” “If it came to street battles, obviously it’s not going to be the academics or bourgeois, who are going to be cracking skulls. It’s going to be the ones who are devout and think that they are going to see Allah…getting in front of bullets,” he added.
President Donald Trump presented for Javani a balanced Iran policy between “hawks” such as interventionist neoconservatives and appeasement “doves” such as former President Barack Obama. Trump “is doing a fantastic job of containing the regime without starting a war.” As his unprecedented January 2020 drone strike killing of IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Solemeini showed, Trump “draws clear red lines, but is not a warmonger.”
Threat containment, and not democratic transformation, is the only practical Middle East policy for the foreseeable future in Javani’s view, meaning that in many cases policymakers should “leave things alone.” “Classical liberalism, Enlightenment thought, really haven’t had a space to develop in the Muslim world,” but are a “product of hundreds of years of philosophical debate and development in the West.” People in Muslim societies “are still predominantly religious. Why would they vote for classical liberal style leaders and governments? They have not had those debates and experiences; it’s not something they’ve been taught to value yet.” As America’s Iraqi regime change experience and Hamas’ 2006 Palestinian Authority electoral victory have shown, for Washington, DC, policymakers to think that modern Muslims “are going to vote for someone like James Madison or John Locke, is a joke.”
Middle East liberalization will demand long-term commitments such as the “cultural pushback against Communism” during the Cold War by the United States and its allies, Javani argued. He noted famous examples of covert American support for intellectuals such as the American artist Jackson Pollock and the Russian writer Boris Pasternak in anticommunist cultural offensives. Javani suggested similar support for Islamic reformers such as Mohammad Tawhidi (the Imam of Peace). Given the devout nature of contemporary Muslim societies, “you can’t really have political reform unless there is religious reform.”
In the meantime, Javani has used his novel writing as a continuation of politics by other means. He worries that the “seepage of political correctness into defense and intelligence circles” unduly limits United States freedom of action. In response, his alternative reality involves Unit 81, a privately financed, Mission Impossible-like clandestine group that American leaders can use for unorthodox measures outside of established channels.
“To fight a dirty war against a dirty enemy…you want to have the full toolbox,” Javani commented. Therefore Unit 81 battles the Islamic Republic “no holds barred” with its main character, Janusz Soltani, an Iranian-American like Javani. As in Javani’s most recent action story, Operation Devil’s Vengeance, this special agent replies to brutal, nefarious Islamic Republic rogues in kind with sexual honey-traps and targeted assassinations.
“In the Middle East, the only thing that really holds sway is strength and power,” Javani correspondingly assessed. He noted that often in Iranian “writings, there is a deferential fear of Israel, that is not apparent vis-à-vis the United States.” Arabs and Iranians understand that there are “certain things you don’t do to Israel, because the Israelis don’t f*ck around and are not Politically Correct.”
Yet Javani concedes that his characters raise concerns about how a free society should exercise oversight over intelligence agencies. Reported FBI targeting of the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential campaign particularly highlighted this issue for Javani. Thus his characters, formerly “disenchanted people in the intelligence community,” are “true patriots. They wouldn’t go too far, they have moral boundaries” and are “not off the reservation…not like maniacs.”
Thus Javani’s plots offer more than just the sex and violence so familiar to James Bond and numerous other cloak and dagger tales. Deadly earnest international security issues underlie Javani’s entertainment. The question of how much of his fantasy does and should reflect real life offers interesting food for thought.
Cicero says
A very intriguing glimpse into a new genre of war fiction which intersperses and elaborates facts and thinking. The reader may enjoy whilst being informed
mortimer says
Congratulations to MJ Javani for raising the concern about self-censorship in the US. One of the most important things to discuss today is jihad-terrorism, perhaps the greatest threat to world peace. However, Iran and other countries that export jihad don’t want jihad in their own borders. ‘Jihad for thee, but not for me,’ they say.
mortimer says
Americans are so concerned about racism, that they have ignored that jihad is an ideology in the realm of ideas … the discussion of jihad is political science.
Ray Jarman says
+1 Mortimer,
Having a Master’s in International Relations and BS in Government Administration, I totally agree separation is impossible.
James Lincoln says
mortimer says,
“the discussion of jihad is political science.”
Exactly!
Bill Warner, PhD, calls it “political islam”.
wpm says
Jihad is the highest form of racism there is ,killing and enslaving anyone who though to be non-Muslim or not Muslim enough .The hatred of other people based on them being Christian ,Jewish,Hindu,or Atheist ,the slave and master ideology .You are either a master of other people or your a slave in Islam.It is on the same level as Nazism,instead of genetic supremacist ,you have religious supremacist entering the rule of law in the land to rule all as either slaves(-Non Muslims )or masters(Muslims).Anyone bucking the system must be killed ,anyone trying to leave the system must be killed.The treatment of women even if they are in the”right sect” of Islam of the country that they are living in ,the silence of the west in not condemning this system of racism that has gone on for 1400 years speaks how cowardly our leaders are.
gravenimage says
MJ Javani’s Fiction Raises Troubling Middle East Facts
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Sounds like a good book.