From Freedom to Justice
The idea that the United States is fighting for “freedom” in Iraq, and in the greater Middle East, is the last reed the Bush administration seems to be clinging to as the turbulent waters of sectarian civil war rise higher. Unfortunately, it is a weakly rooted reed, and clinging to it has about as much promise as adhering to a strategy of clear-hold-and-build, or clinging to the fragile, suspect Iraqi regime.
The desire to advance human liberty is certainly laudable, but the problem is that the administration has emphasized freedom as a policy goal at the expense of clearly articulating another social value, justice, which is much more deeply rooted in Arab culture. The result has been to cloud our understanding of the conflict, to limit our options for dealing with it, and to distort badly our entire foreign policy in the Middle East.
There are layers of history to this problem. At an immediate level, the war aim of “liberating” Iraq came to the fore as the original justification for the war (WMD) fell by the wayside. More broadly, ever since 9/11, the administration has framed American foreign policy in terms of some kind of apocalyptic battle between freedom and evil – arguing, not without reason, that the spread of freedom and democracy will combat the spread of terrorism by giving people meaningful ways of participating in their societies and by creating governments more friendly to us and to each other. This framing, in turn, reflects the fact that the American right has chosen “freedom” as its essential theme and its banner, insisting, typically, that freedom is not simply a natural right, but a God-given right. (The various ways in which conservative policies actually make Americans less free is rather beside the point, which has to do with the articulation of foreign policy and its relation to cultural realities other than our own. Also beside the point is that fact that progressives, who are usually more comfortable talking about “equality” than about freedom, would do well to begin framing their ideals more in terms of genuine human freedom).
In any event, what must remain clear in our heads is that the concept of “freedom” does not have quite the same resonance, power, or historical weight in Arab Muslim cultures as it does in our own. Higher in the scale of social values is the principle of justice, and American policy-makers drift into error when they fail to recognize that many of our Arab friends would rather live in a just society than a free society (if ever they had to choose). This cultural misunderstanding lies at the root of the disastrous situation in which we find ourselves today in the Middle East.
The Arab emphasis on justice as a cardinal virtue has its own particular history, which helps to explain why, when we open the newspaper or turn on the television, commentators and regular citizens in the Middle East recur so frequently to the theme of having been wronged. Most visibly, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is not hated primarily because it has made the Palestinians less free, but because it is seen as unjust. More broadly, the sense of grievance and resentment of Western policies over the last 100 years is rooted less in a feeling of oppression than in one of injustice.
As early as 1949, the radical Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb put his finger on an issue that continues to haunt Arab societies, and that in large measure accounts for the rise of fundamentalist Islamic doctrine. “We have only to look,” Qutb wrote in his work Social Justice in Islam, “to see that our social situation is as bad as it can be; it is apparent that our social conditions have no possible relation to justice; and so we turn our eyes to Europe, America, or Russia, and we expect to import from there solutions to our problems…. [And] when it is a matter of importing principles and customs and laws … we cast aside our own fundamental principles and doctrines, and we bring in those of democracy, or socialism, or communism.”
Qutb maintained that justice, among other “fundamental principles and doctrines,” had to be grounded in the Koran, and this insistence should give us pause, for it does seem to invite all the evils of religious intolerance and theocratic oppression. Yet as Majid Khadduri has more recently suggested, in The Islamic Conception of Justice (Johns Hopkins, 2001), the invocation of divine authority to legitimate civil governance is a more complicated matter in Arab cultures than we might expect. The principle of justice is not just about applying sharia, or Koranic law, heavy-handedly, and it has a centuries-long history that involves the whole fabric of human relationships.
Lawrence Rosen, in The Justice of Islam: Comparative Perspectives on Islamic Law and Society (Oxford, 2000), gives a sense of how broad the philosophical underpinning of the Islamic concept of justice is: “Whether it is in the relations among total strangers looking for a basis of mutual comprehension and engagement,” he writes, “or in the heart of the family itself, the sense of the negotiable relatedness of all persons runs as a constant theme in Arab cultural life” (70). Therefore, it “follows that what matters most in evaluating actions is not their connection to a series of abstract propositions that lie behind them but to the consequences that actions have in the world, their impact on those networks of relationships, those webs of obligation, that are constitutive of reality itself” (72).
Similarly, Mahmoud Ayoub, in “The Islamic Conception of Justice,” in Islamic Identity and the Struggle for Justice (University of Florida, 1996), emphasizes the relational and practical dimensions of justice in the Arab World. He suggests that “justice in Islam is a way of relating to one another without having anyone come up short,” and that at its heart lies the belief that “whatever we develop ought to be developed with a sense of fair, middle ground” (20). The opposite of this social/divine justice, or Qist, he writes, is Zulm, which is “often interpreted as oppression, but it means far more. It goes back to the Islamic notion of justice that implies sharing. Zulm is to get a bigger share than your fellow human being, which creates opacity, darkness, and confusion” (22).
The Uncommon Denominator does not purport to have the last word on Arab ideas of justice, but these cited books are the sort of thing that people in the State Department and the White House need to be reading when formulating American foreign policy, or at least when fashioning our rhetoric. For there remains a serious and debilitating disconnect between our words and actions, on the one hand, and on the other, the actual needs, desires, beliefs, and feelings of the part of the world we are supposedly trying to help.
If we’re serious about prevailing in “the decisive ideological struggle of our time,” as President Bush phrased it in his January 10 address, we can’t simply try to export our own values without a good understanding of the values of our would-be partners. The United States and even our moderate Arab friends have been talking past each other, speaking different languages, and that miscommunication makes it incredibly difficult for us to gain traction in the war of ideas.
It is probably
too late for the current administration to understand any of this or
to take any of it to heart, but in the years ahead the policy analysts
and planners in the American government need start understanding and
talking the language of the region they are dealing with. Few changes
would have a more salutary effect on our relations with the Muslim and
Arab worlds than explaining how our involvement in the region promotes
justice there as much as freedom – assuming, of course, we don’t
just talk the talk, but walk the walk. That means, above all, pushing
hard for a just settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and, if it’s not too late, achieving a just allocation of resources
and reconstruction monies in Iraq. Then we’ll see improvement
in our relations with ordinary Arabs, increasing room for our ideas
to take root, and some recovery of our squandered international prestige.
© Commonweal Institute, Inc., 2007
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