The post-1970 crisis in the Islamic world and Pakistan's role

It is possible to trace today's crisis in the Islamic world back to the time of the Prophet (pbuh) and the four Righteous Caliphs. Many Salafists among Muslims and many so-called Orientalists among Westerners do just that. Opposed in every other way, they both believe in an Islamic "essence" unchanged since then. Others go back to the 19th century CE, to the onset of Western domination over much of the Muslim 'umma. Yet it seems to me that to understand today's crisis adequately we need go no further back than the years around 1970 in Islam's old Arab and Iranian heartlands. Admittedly a number of factors had to come together to produce the dilemmas we still live with.

The 20th century struggle against colonialism raised high hopes that the departure of the colonisers would usher in a new era of dignity and prosperity for Muslims. The main ideology of these hopes was the kind of republican nationalism associated with Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser in Egypt and Muhammad Mossadeq in Iran. By about 1970 these hopes had collapsed.

Not only had Israel persisted as a reminder that decolonisation did not mean an end to subordination, but the 1967 Six Days' War was such a catastrophe that its casualties were not just military: it discredited the republican nationalist ideology as well. The Arab world was rent by rivalries between republicans and monarchists, with the Cold War protagonists egging them on and paying them rents for friendship. Worst of all, the postcolonial regimes turned out to be authoritarian and corrupt.

Nor was that the whole story. There had also been much economic and social development, yet it was of very special kinds. State-led industrialisation had been based mainly on oil and gas, and oil and gas are special commodities. The iron and steel that drove earlier Western growth had created new middle and working classes; oil and gas do not, and their profits are easily captured by sitting elites. To pay for industry, moreover, states ran down agriculture. Within decades this drove millions from farms and small towns into cities that then exploded their infrastructures. The states offered education, particularly at higher levels - at one point Egypt was producing 75,000 graduates a year - but beginning about 1970 states were withdrawing from the economy and turning responsibility for growth over to captive and anaemic private sectors. So more and more first-generation graduates were entering increasingly slack economies with no real prospects for jobs or dignity.

All this was a recipe for political radicalism, and the ideological vacuum left behind by discredited republican nationalism was filled by the dream of recreating the unity and purity of the original 'umma in the 7th century CE. That dream had been part of Islamic discourse almost from the beginning, but it had mainly appealed to the 'umma's fringes, the Bedouin soldiers of the Khariji movement, the small townsmen of Islam's middle years who had then become Shi'a or Sufis. Now, around 1970, the dream had been modernised by thinkers like Sayyid Qutb in the Arab lands, 'Ali Shariati in Iran, and Maulana Abu-l-'Ala Maududi in this country, and in that form it entered the Islamic mainstream. It became the chief ideology of opposition to the authoritarian and corrupt postcolonial regimes.

The result has been thirty years of savage and bloody civil war among Muslims. It has struck Westerners and Israelis too, but most of the victims have been Muslim, because the regimes were now headed by Muslims. When Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad retook the city of Hama from Sunni insurrectionists in 1982, he killed at least 10,000 people, three times the casualties of September 11.

What would it take for Muslims to transcend this crisis? Time after time in their history they have overcome huge challenges by creating marvellous new syntheses of thought and feeling and practice. I have no doubt that they have the spiritual and intellectual and physical resources to do so once again. But what would be the elements of renewal at this new stage?

Some elements have already been moving into place.

As the civil war has proceeded, there has been covert movement on both sides toward a new centre. Regimes have been Islamising themselves. They have been introducing some Islamic law and some Islamic practice into their governance. Conversely, Islamists have been entering the political system. They now run for election; they enter cabinets; they serve in parliaments; they function as (more or less) loyal oppositions.

The process has been drenched in bad faith on both sides, but movement has been real.

Concurrently, more and more Muslims who might have become Islamist political revolutionaries two decades ago are now forsaking politics for community action in the 'umma. Rather than bombs and guns, the name of the game is now schools, clinics, charities, and the Islamic piety of individual Muslims and their families.

Moreover, with the end of the Cold War sitting regimes can no longer collect rents from the USSR, and they find it harder to collect rents from the US now that competition with the USSR is over. Even the new rents the US is paying since September 11 will never match Cold War largesse. There will never again be enough official assistance to keep regimes in power by sustaining their growth rates.

Now they must rely instead on private foreign direct investment (PFDI). This is because all over the world production of knowledge is replacing production of things as the engine of economic growth. PFDI flows mainly on economic grounds. It is not attracted by the archaic, state-dominated, information-shy economies of the Arab Middle East and Iran. Their share of world PFDI has fallen from 12 percent in 1990 to 3-4 percent today. To attract it, they need reforms that will make them less rigid, less state-dominated, and less information-shy. Such economic reforms typically lead to demands for political reforms too. That is their quandary.

Such pressures will not end Islamist radicalism. The conditions that give it birth are often still there. But such pressures do tend to force radicalism to the margins of the 'umma once again. Osama is a perfect example: through the 1990s he was forced step by step back to the only place in the world where he now had a double layer of protection and hence the space and time needed to mount an operation like September 11.

Nor will such pressures automatically generate the new Islamic synthesis the planet needs. But they do create a new opportunity for Muslims to fashion an authentically Islamic modernity that is adequate to their history and their hopes.

I would argue that September 11 did not change this basic picture. It came as a shock to most Muslims, and even Islamists asked themselves whether Osama's methods were the best path to the common goal. Iraq, of course, has been much more problematic. There military defeat was so rapid and complete that it rekindled the usual Arab feelings of helplessness and rage, and the botched aftermath has given these feelings time to swell and take political form. Radicalism is reconstituting itself, but - it should be noted - on a new basis.

For Osama, for Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, Islam may still be the banner of revolutionary overthrow. For younger Muslims, Islam is increasingly the badge of membership in national communities. It is no longer just an ideology for outsiders. More and more it is the ideology of outsiders and deprived or threatened ruling ethnic elites: Sunni Tikritis in Iraq, Pushtuns in Afghanistan. Driven toward the margins by repression, cooptation or military defeat, Islamism is re-entering the body politic through the service entrance of Islamo-nationalism.

The consequences can be unhealthy. If only Muslims should be citizens, Christians and Jews are excluded in ways quite novel in Islamic experience, and quite dangerous. But there may also be a new and exciting opening for an Islamic legitimation of the modern nation-state that is valid for Sunnis.

So far, the only place in the Islamic heartlands to produce such a legitimation has been Iran. Not long before he died in 1989, Imam Khomeini ruled on religious grounds that in emergencies national interests can take precedence over the shari'a. It helps explain how Iran has emerged from the charismatic phase of Islamic rule without widespread violence. But Iran's special Shi'i traditions make it hard to transpose to Sunni-majority societies. Taliban rule in Afghanistan was perhaps an effort to create a version for Sunnis, but it ended before it succeeded. In both cases, moreover, the effort took place within a theocratic framework, direct rule by 'ulema.

Theocracy is not a mainstream Islamic tradition and will not appeal in most Muslim countries. A broader version of religious legitimation of the nation-state could be taking shape now in Iraq. It may be that the Americans are needed both as a parameter and as a target. But the outcome is very uncertain, the circumstances very special. And Iraq too has a majority of Shi'a.

Where does Pakistan fit in this picture? I see some similarities and more differences.

Like some Arab states, Pakistan inherited a postcolonial security threat that has absorbed disproportionate resources and has thereby reinforced older socio-political structures and a traditional sense of political irresponsibility: someone else is always to blame.

Although Pakistan was founded as an Islamic nation-state by modern means and modern people, here too modernity is so associated with the West that it must be denied as un-Islamic.

And Pakistan too has been stranded by the end of the Cold War and the onset of the IT era in economics. New rents from the war on terrorism will not restore the levels of official assistance Pakistan attracted before 1990, and private foreign direct investment has not rushed in to fill the gap.

But Pakistan is also different from the Arab world and Iran in relevant ways. Some are counterintuitive; most are to Pakistan's advantage.

First, Pakistan is not dependent on oil and gas, and can be better off for it. Pakistan is dependent on cotton, and compared to oil and gas, cotton and cotton textile production makes for larger middle and working classes, better attuned to modern political and economic needs than Middle Eastern elites.

Second, Pakistan is less developed than the old Islamic heartlands - more agricultural, less urbanised, less educated - and that too can help. It has not destroyed its agriculture. Except for Karachi, rural outmigration has not exploded its cities, and even there civil war has been on an ethnic and not a religious basis. And the graduating cohorts entering the limp economy have been relatively small. In other words Pakistan has not yet produced the conditions that brought Islamist radicalism to the centre of Middle East politics. It therefore has a window of opportunity to create better structures less conducive to civil war.

Third, Pakistanis have been struggling for over half a century to bring religion and politics together in a functioning system of governance. The need to experiment came with Pakistan's original mandate; it has led through the Ahmedi riots, the Objectives Resolution, the MRD in 1977 (sic: PNA is meant), and various Islamisation steps thereafter. Certainly, however, experimentation has been particularly intense since 2002. Its outcome is also quite uncertain.

What this means, though, is that Pakistanis have a wealth of lived experience wrestling with issues that are newer and more destructive in other Muslim societies, and of doing so mainly without violence. They should therefore be better able to integrate the religious impulse into a basically democratic political system without first establishing theocracy. If they can, it will be a first version of religious legitimation for the modern nation-state in a society with a recognisably Sunni majority. Where Pakistan fits in todayís Islamic world is as a major test case. Not for Americans: for Pakistanis. And for all the other members of the 'umma.

*Footnote: This essay draws on themes from the writer's book on Islam and a talk he gave at the Administrative Staff College in Lahore on May 24, 2004.

I begin with a proposition. There are a great many pressing problems in the world. There is population growth and economic development, with attending pressures on resources - including food and that other essential, water. There is a continuing global security crisis, augmented by the rise in terrorism. There is the chronically inequitable distribution in resources between the rich nations of the North and the poor nations of the South. And there is the steadily growing body of evidence for a major reorganization of the global climate regime.

My proposition is that the last of these is the most serious threat - not only because it will profoundly affect the lives of our children and our grandchildren in a direct way, but also because it will interact powerfully with every single one of the other problems I have listed.

Let me begin with the science underlying climate change. Last week I helped organize a symposium and briefing session on climate science for press, policy-makers, and the public, supported by the Hewlett Foundation and with co-sponsorship from the Conference Board. We had ten of the most distinguished climate scientists in the United States, led off by Sherry Rowland, the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. The purpose was to make a careful assessment of the science - what we know for sure, what we think likely, and what are interesting but unproven possibilities.

So here is a short summary of what we know. General Circulation Models - climate models that take into account variations in the sun's energy, volcanic activity, and other natural phenomena - explained fluctuations in average global temperature very well over most of the past thousand years. But for the past hundred years, these same models faithfully reproduce global temperature history ONLY if they include the greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons - that are by-products of human economic activity. That is why the average temperature of the globe has risen by about one degree F, and the sea level has risen by between 10 and 20 cm., in the last century. The primary causative agent is carbon dioxide, which in preindustrial times was about 280 ppm/v and has now reached 380ppm/v. It is rising continually as the activities that produce it are proceeding on a business as usual basis. That is because the failure of the Kyoto protocol - a failure both because its targets were inadequate, and also because they were unattainable by many of the participating nations - has left us without any basis for meeting the goals of the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. Just to remind us, the US is a signatory and a party to that agreement, under which we are committed to limit atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to avoid "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."

Why, a dozen years later, is there some doubt about the dangers of this interference? The C02 we add to the atmosphere will stay there; its average residence time is a century. There is no disagreement about whether average global temperature will rise; it will. The scientific debate is about how much. For the future we depend again on the General Circulation Models. It's reassuring that when applied to past climates in "back-casting" efforts, like the example I gave a moment ago, these actually predict climate history so accurately. Perhaps more interesting, they regularly somewhat underestimate the magnitude of the real climate changes - that is, Nature regularly turns out to be harsher than the models suggest. Projecting the models into the future, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and an evaluation by the National Academies prepared at President Bush's request, estimate that by the end of this century, the increase in average global temperature will be between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Centigrade.

Why such a range? These models, like most, contain some uncertainties. Some of these are scientific: how increased cloud cover might affect the outcome, since clouds can either cool the climate by reflecting sunlight from above, or warm it by trapping heat that is leaving from below; how changes in the earth's albedo due to melting ice might accelerate heating, and so on. Aerosols produced by volcanic eruptions have a cooling effect, as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo did in giving us two unusually cool years in the early 90's. Other uncertainties are economic and social: we don't know how national policies and international agreements will serve to restrain the amount of greenhouse gases we are adding.

These uncertainties - about half due to the models themselves, and the rest to social and economic unknowns -- have provided arguments for those who prefer to postpone economically difficult approaches for controlling greenhouse gas emissions. But it is important that even at the very lowest estimates, there will be substantial changes in the nature of human life on the only planet we currently occupy. The rather modest impacts of the past century have already produced profound changes in regional climate dynamics. Substantial ice-sheet melting and retreat is taking place both in the Arctic and in the West Antarctic ice sheet. In the Arctic, where climate warming has been extreme, sea ice is sharply diminished and rivers become ice-free much earlier. Low latitude mountain glaciers are shrinking; the famous snow-capped summit of Kilimanjaro will be bare within fifteen years, converting hundreds of old African safari shots into historic treasures.

Biological cycles are experiencing the effects of warming, with upward extensions of the range of Alpine flora and advances in the time of flowering or breeding by an average of 5 days per decade. The models have all also predicted more frequent and severe weather events, and we have had heat waves in the upper Midwest and Paris, accelerated beach erosion on coasts all over the world, and disastrous floods and landslides in Central America.

That is now, but of course we are more interested in the future. What the models tell us unambiguously is that the climate system is headed for further disruption. The standard scenario foresees a steady, ramp-like increase in average global temperature, with a concomitant rise in sea level, but records of past climate tell us that it is riddled with abrupt changes - something that the models fail to predict well. A possible alternative involves a change in major ocean circulation patterns - especially in the North Atlantic, where a clockwise gyre brings warm equatorial water up via the Gulf Stream. As it flows Northward and then crosses Eastward, it is cooled by the atmosphere, becomes more saline through evaporation, and then sinks to return as a cold deep current. If large discharges of fresh meltwater or rain made this water less dense, it could fail to sink and thus disrupt the entire cycle.

A fictionalized version of such a scenario appears in the disaster film "The Day After Tomorrow," which you should see only for amusement. Beyond that silliness lies a real prospect that a gradual change in average global temperature could intercept the threshold for some non-linear, dynamic process, triggering abrupt changes in either direction. Of course there is uncertainty: we are engaged in a large-scale, uncontrolled experiment on the only planet we have.

Let's consider some collateral impacts. A group of us at Stanford was asked by the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict to look - among other things -- at ways in which environmental change might alter the circumstances under which human populations might be placed. Climate change was an important variable. One example we looked at was the impact of sea level rise, along with storm surges from extreme weather events, on the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta. Flood disasters already occur there regularly. 15 million people live within 2 meter above sea level, and are vulnerable to abrupt displacement. We know they will have to go somewhere; in the past they have fled in much smaller numbers to Bengal. The security problems arising from a massive influx of a traditionally hostile population, combined with an almost certain high level of cholera infection, are not difficult to imagine.

Water is a desperately important resource in most parts of the world, and drought is often followed by famine or emigration. Here in the US, warmer winters threaten mountain snowpacks and will soon demand the revision of interstate and international water allocation agreements. Maritime rivers are already undertaking management steps to deal with saline intrusions due to sea level rise or storm surges. In Great Britain, the barrier that protects London from occasional flooding of the Thames estuary is now being used six times a year compared to less than once a year in the 1980's.

Agriculture, of course, is the most essential of human activities. The regional distribution of global warming impacts may be at least temporarily kind to temperate-zone food production. But the models all predict an increased incidence of mid-continent droughts as climate change progresses, and we know that the American Midwest has in the past experienced droughts both deeper and longer than the one in the 30's that led to the Dust Bowl migrations. Irrigation is an answer to drought, but in the six High Plains states, dryland wheat production depends upon the Ogallala Aquifer, a buried ice-age storage well that is being so rapidly depleted that it is already unusable in its southern portion. And in the tropics, where people are poorest and capacity to adapt is minimal, the consequences of even modest warming will be far more serious.

Infectious diseases are spread by vectors, like the Anopheles malaria mosquito, that have their own patterns of reproduction, movement, and climate sensitivity. In parts of Africa where vertical topography dominates, warmer and rainier seasons cause malaria incidence to rise in higher-altitude locations. In a warmer and wetter world, more of the same can be expected.

So climate change is not an isolated problem. Instead, it is likely to interact with most of the other problems humans face all over the world. Thus I hope that this meeting will help encourage us to prepare a sound portfolio of risk-reducing measures. These will not, I must tell you, bring us out of the woods. Our destiny is partly built in -- to the heat that is already locked into our oceans, to the greenhouse gases that are already in our atmosphere and will increase by another 50% or more no matter what we do, and to the justified economic appetites of the developing world. What we will be talking about, it should be clear, are ways of limiting the damage to manageable levels, NOT preserving the status quo. We lost that years ago.

So the contemporary policy challenge amounts to a bet about risk: are the consequences of business as usual likely to entail costs greater than those of beginning to mitigate those consequences now? Other nations - the UK, several EU countries, and Japan - are making substantial commitments. Some industries - British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, and Swiss Re, for example - have undertaken steps of their own. The insurance burden from the exploding rates of coastal erosion and storm damage has pushed the insurance industry to lead. If companies fail to participate in emissions reduction and join with others to resist such measures, questions are already being raised. If you believe so strongly that climate change is a myth, Swiss Re might say, then surely you won't mind a climate-related events exclusion from your Directors and Officers insurance policy.

But we can't count on voluntary actions, and the United States so far has only announced a long-range research program that, although it looks reasonable, makes NO current commitments to mitigate our contribution, about a quarter of the world's, to the global warming problem. We must have a more aggressive national policy to purchase insurance against this risk.

It will not be cheap. We have old, coal-fired power plants in this country; it may take subsidies to replace them with modern, less carbon-intensive facilities that run on natural gas. States like mine are already driving the transportation sector to ultra-low emission, and that may move the domestic industry in a positive direction. Some of us will have to give up our reflex opposition to nuclear power and begin comparing its risks realistically against those of global climate change. Although the room for alternative energy sources (photovoltaic, wind, geothermal) is limited, these options need encouragement. Energy conservation measures have, at several times in the past, turned economic predictions on their head by their success, and the right incentives could yield real benefits there.

The portfolio I have just described is needed, but will not be enough. We know that market-based mechanisms for emissions control can work, because they did in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments that limited SO2 emissions. The bill proposed by Senators McCain and Lieberman would mandate a cap-and-trade program for controlling carbon dioxide emissions. Similar systems are being considered by regional assemblages of states in the Northwest and the Northeast, and that may encourage the development of a national system - which could then build trading relationships with other nations that are moving toward similar regimes. A case for this approach is elegantly made in the Council on Foreign Relations Policy Initiative on Climate Change, by my colleague David Victor.

The United States is in a position of natural leadership here. It is the most powerful nation - and the world's leading producer of greenhouse gases. Plainly it is in its own national interest, in multiple ways, to reduce its consumption of fossil fuels. To see it failing in this most vital, globally sensitive matter is a national embarrassment.