Zakaria on “Radical Islamists”

     I am currently in Professor Patel’s Middle Eastern Politics class, so this piece by Newsweek’s head international affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria was particularly engaging. Zakaria is basically arguing that while the United States might find many values of “radical Islamists” disagreeable or even completely immoral, not all Islamic fundamentalists should be treated as potential terrorists. There is much progress to be made by working with these groups.

We have an instant, violent reaction to anyone who sounds like an Islamic bigot. This is understandable. Many Islamists are bigots, reactionaries and extremists (others are charlatans and opportunists). But this can sometimes blind us to the ways they might prove useful in the broader struggle against Islamic terror. The Bush administration spent its first term engaged in a largely abstract, theoretical conversation about radical Islam and its evils—and conservative intellectuals still spout this kind of unyielding rhetoric. By its second term, though, the administration was grappling with the complexities of Islam on the ground. It is instructive that Bush ended up pursuing a most sophisticated and nuanced policy toward political Islam in the one country where reality was unavoidable—Iraq.

He argues that in the set of fundamentalist groups, many do not advocate terrorist policies and could be potentially useful for American interests. Now, I cannot claim to have as much knowledge of IR as Zakaria, but I think he largely misses the point here. There are many moderate Islamist organizations pursuing moderate political platforms in the Middle East. Perhaps the focus of U.S. policy should be engaging with those Islamist parties/organizations that are committed to democratic processes?