A Quiet Revolution (30 page)

Ayman al-Zawahiri also was in the United States in
1993
, raising

funds in Silicon Valley for the jihad against America. The FBI knew about his activities but did not arrest him. It must have been obvious to the U.S. officials, commented Kepel, that “radical Islamism was breed- ing international terrorism.” However, well into the mid-
1990
s they clearly “did little to act on that knowledge. Whether through negligence, ignorance, the work of obscure forces, or an excessively complex game of manipulation that turned against its authors, the United States man- aged to let two leaders of the most extreme forms of Egyptian Islamism obtain visas to enter the United States without encountering a single obstacle.”
16

Kepel’s forceful views on this subject are echoed by others knowl- edgeable in such matters. A CIA agent who had worked in the Afghan- istan operation was reported by the
Boston Herald
to have said: “By giving these people the funding we did, a situation was created in which it could be safely argued that we bombed the World Trade Center.”
17
Similarly, the historian Chalmers Johnson wrote in his book
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire:
“The term ‘blowback,’ which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own use . . . refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal

arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.”
18

In Egypt, the spate of terrorist attacks of the early
1990
s generated panic and anger and gave rise to strident criticism of the growing numbers of mosques as well as grim warnings from the media and government against Islamists—warnings that failed to distinguish between the vast moderate majority and the radical extremists.
19
The responses in the

U.S. that the
1993
bombing of the World Trade Center triggered were on

the whole not dissimilar, with the difference perhaps that while these at- tacks elicited from the Egyptian media and authorities sweepingly neg- ative views of all Islamists, here in America the tendency was toward a negative perception of all Muslims. American responses would be further complicated and exacerbated by the complexities of U.S. relations with the Middle East—over its critical oil reserves, and with Israel, and also, by the
1990
s, regarding American military intervention in the first Gulf War in Iraq.

There were other factors in the early nineties, beyond the first erup- tions of Islamic terrorism on American soil, that would begin to tilt the ground toward an exacerbation of negative perceptions of Muslims in America. For of course a vein of prejudice toward Muslims has been an element—at times muted and at times more intense—of American as well as European society in the past, as such works as Edward Said’s
Ori- entalism
and Jack Shaheen’s
Reel Bad Arabs
explore in some detail. This negativity palpably began to increase in the
1990
s. With the fall of the Soviet Union, as Zachary Lockman writes, observers began “to seek new ways of understanding the fault lines and potential sources of conflict in the post–Cold War world, and one of these involved a reversion to the old but still powerful notion that the world was divided into fundamen- tally different and clashing civilizations.”
20

Bernard Lewis, the influential public intellectual and longtime op- ponent of Edward Said (whose works Said had fiercely criticized for their anti-Muslim bias), published an article in
1990
entitled “Roots of Mus- lim Rage” in which he rearticulated the notion of a fundamental fault line and “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West. Lewis’s thesis was taken up and developed in an article (and sub-

sequently a book) by Samuel Huntington. The article, “Clash of Civi- lizations?” appeared in
1993
in
Foreign Affairs,
the politically influential journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations. Mingling schol- arship and policymaking was well-trod ground for Huntington, a Har- vard professor who had been (as Lockman notes) a “leading advocate” in the
1960
s of the U.S. war in Vietnam and of the “massive bombard- ment of the Vietnamese countryside.”
21
Taking his title from a phrase in Lewis’s article, Huntington wrote that the “fault lines of civilizations will

be the battle lines of the future.” One such major fault line, Huntington maintained, was that between Islam and the West. Another was that be- tween “Confucian civilization”—by which Huntington meant China— and the West.
22

Huntington’s thesis was rebutted by many, among them Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Harvard’s Roy Mottahedeh, a professor who was also a scholar of Islam.
23
Nevertheless, in the world of politics and in the broader political culture in the United States, Huntington’s ideas proved tremendously influential. As GhaneaBassiri noted, they would come to have a “significant influence on the way in which U.S. relations with the Muslim-majority world” would be framed in the political arena and in the media and public conversation on Islam and the Muslim world.
24

The “clash of civilizations” thesis was particularly popular, as GhaneaBassiri also notes, among people who were primarily concerned about U.S.-Israeli relations and the risks that “constructive relations” be- tween the U.S. and Islamist organizations might pose to these. In addi- tion, he continues, “militant pro-Israelis like Daniel Pipes and Steve

Emerson . . . launched an anti-Islamism propaganda campaign of their own in the
1990
s.”

Pipes is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum, a small think tank whose goals he described as those of promoting American in- terests in the Middle East, specifically “strong ties with Israel, Turkey, and other democracies as they emerge,” and “a stable supply and a low price of oil.” According to Lockman, whose book
Contending Visions of the Middle East
provides a detailed account of the struggle over knowl- edge and politics in relation to the Middle East, a struggle that has been under way in America for some decades and that has resurfaced with particular intensity in recent years, Pipes has “carved out a small but

moderately successful niche for himself in the world of right-wing pun- ditry.”
25

A supporter of the Israeli Right who favors the use of military force over negotiation, Pipes published an article in
1990
called “The Muslims Are Coming! The Muslims Are Coming!”—an article that he developed into the book
Militant Islam Reaches America
(
2002
). Both article and book make clear, as GhaneaBassiri pointed out, that Pipes considers all Islamists to be militant Islamists. Thus Pipes evidently considered the MSA and ISNA to be “proponents of militant Islam,” even though, as

GhaneaBassiri observes, “they have never carried out or advocated any militant actions.”
26

After
9
/
11
Pipes would launch a website called Campus Watch,

which listed professors at American institutions who did not share Pipes’s views on Islam, Israel, and the Palestinians, defining their views as unacceptable, and describing at least one among them—John Es- posito of Georgetown University—as an “apologist for Islamic and Palestinian terrorism.” Campus Watch also invited students to monitor their professors and to report statements “which they deemed anti- Israel or anti-American.” These actions provoked widespread anger among academics, and more than a hundred professors wrote in to crit- icize Campus Watch “for its crude attempt to silence debate about the Middle East.”
27

Pipes was nominated by President Bush in
2003
to the board of di-

rectors of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a federally funded institution “ded- icated to preventing, managing and peacefully resolving international conflicts.” The nomination astonished many, given Pipes’s position in favor of “resolving conflict through superior military force.” Muslim- American groups in particular were appalled, as they considered Pipes to be an Islamophobe whose writings and pronouncements “deliberately sought to spread fear and suspicion” of Muslims and Islam. Others too, notes Lockman, were outraged, including “moderate scholars who re- garded Pipes as extreme in his views as well as in how he expressed them,” and thus as not suitable for such a position. The
Washington Post,
reports Lockman, described the nomination as “salt in the wound” and a “cruel joke” for U.S. Muslims. When Democratic senators expressed their opposition and held up the nomination in Congress, the following

month President Bush “bypassed Congress” and appointed Pipes to the position.

Another prominent voice on Islam in the
1990
s and subsequently

is Steven Emerson, a journalist with whom Pipes sometimes collabo- rated. Following the attack on the World Trade Center in
1993
, Emer- son produced a documentary called
Jihad in America
which aired on PBS stations nationwide in December
1994
. The documentary in part follows the trail of U.S. involvement in and support for jihadism in Afghanistan, as well as the spread of jihadism to the United States. It also claimed that Islamist organizations, including organizations involved in violence in Is- rael, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, were also now operating in the United States.

Emerson’s documentary both won awards and drew fierce criti- cism.
28
Some critics maintained that Emerson had made unsubstanti- ated accusations and also that the film contained a “fundamental deceit”

—as an investigative reporter put it in
The Nation
—in that it showed clips of speakers calling for jihad without clarifying that they were “not referring to America but to Afghanistan and Israel.”
29

Following the bombings in Oklahoma in
1995
, Emerson—accord-

ing to this same reporter, Robert I. Friedman—“was a fixture on radio and TV, waging jihad on Islam,” his assertions playing a role in “creating mass hysteria against American Arabs.” Emerson, for example, appeared on
CBS News
on the evening of the Oklahoma bombings, reported Fried- man, saying, “This was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait.” The bombers were likely Hamas, Emerson had also said, as Friedman’s account continues: “They hate democracy. They hate America.”

And, indeed, following the Oklahoma bombing (a bombing for which Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators were convicted; McVeigh was executed in
2001
) there was a backlash and a distinct rise in incidents of harassment against Muslims, as Nihad Awad, cofounder

of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), today the most prominent Muslim civil rights advocacy group in America, would later note. CAIR had been a fledgling organization (formed in
1994
) when, Awad said, he received a call from the president of the Islamic Society of

Greater Oklahoma City, urging him to come to Oklahoma. Before the bombing and the “anti-Muslim backlash that followed,” Awad would later explain, CAIR had been “asked to review a few incidents” relating to Muslim-American civil rights issues, but after the bombing “harass- ment and harmful acts increased.” In Oklahoma in particular, Muslims, “particularly those of Arab descent[,] were viewed with suspicion.” In fact, recounted Awad, “a Muslim family’s home had been attacked, pre- sumably by vigilantes who believed the rumors swirling about the bomb- ing being the handiwork of Middle Eastern terrorists.” Awad recalled speaking with the man whose home had been attacked, and also with his wife, “who miscarried her first child soon after the attack.”
30
‌

In September
1995
, CAIR would publish its first report on the sta-

tus of Muslim civil rights in America, chronicling “more than
200
doc- umented incidents of harassment of Muslims.” Henceforth CAIR would publish such a report annually, giving the figures for and documenting the number of anti-Muslim incidents occurring in that year.

In the
1990
s strong criticism and even fierce attacks on Islamist

American organizations were voiced also by Muslims—Muslims who did not belong to the Islamist organizations that had risen to dominance in America and who disliked the kind of Islam preached and embraced by Islamists, their comments indicating that they evidently also resented the way in which the dominant Muslim American organizations were laying claim to be speaking for all Muslims when in fact they were not.

Khaled Abou El Fadl, professor of Islamic studies at UCLA at the time, had been a longtime critic of the “science-trained new spokespeo- ple” who were essentially ignorant of the Islamic scholarly legacy of de- bate, discussion, and interpretation.
31
In the nineties El Fadl had written a book strongly critiquing the “Wahhabi puritan” strain that he saw as exerting a dominant influence in Muslim American organizations. He

would follow this in
2005
with a book whose title,
The Great Theft:

Wrestling Islam from the Extremists,
made clear his position. He fiercely denounced Wahhabi Islam and asserted that there was a deep schism in contemporary Islam between Muslim moderates—the camp in which he placed himself—and, as he puts it, “what I will call the Muslim puri- tans.” Both groups, he wrote,

claim to represent the true authentic Islam. Both believe that they represent the Divine message as God intended it to be, and both believe that their convictions are thoroughly rooted in the Holy Book.... Puritans, however, accuse the moder- ates of having changed and reformed Islam to the point of di- luting and corrupting it. And moderates accuse the puritans of miscomprehending and misapplying Islam to the point of undermining and even defiling the religion.
32