Top College News Subscribe to the Newsletter

LAKHANPAL: A Discontinued Dialogue

Cutter, Kuh-Tawr, Qatar

Published: Monday, February 6, 2012

Updated: Tuesday, February 7, 2012 11:02

If the population of the Arab world were offered ballots for the 2012 U.S. presidential election, I'm pretty sure they would choose not to vote.

In such a situation, the losers would be the Arab nations themselves.

The problem with U.S. policy in regards to Middle Eastern affairs is its stagnancy. It hasn't changed, it isn't changing and it won't change for a while. In recent electoral history, only one man seemed to provide a flicker of hope for progress: Barack Obama.

This posed another problem, however: Not long after his inauguration, the United States and the rest of the world, including Arab nations like Qatar, chose to focus on the "man" who is Barack Obama, not the president. The man was going to deliver on vast promises, emancipate the world from worry and maybe even go so far as to reach out and write my philosophy paper. Okay, maybe not that far, but people had high hopes for what he could accomplish.

Now, however, the view is different. We see him as the president who talked the talk but didn't walk the walk. Some might make the argument that President Obama has done his best to boost the economy, attempt healthcare reform and unite political parties.

Unfortunately, trying doesn't mean much, especially in the Arab world. Results are what matter. The man is still solid, but the president is a disappointment. Here, Arab citizens expected the same change that Americans anticipated. And it has not been delivered to either of us.

I understand the Arab frustration. In 2009, Obama was in Cairo when he said the following: "The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own."

Obama said he would oppose the expansion of Israeli settlements at the beginning of his presidency, but the United States voted against a United Nations Security Council resolution in February 2011 that would have condemned any such Israeli action. The transformation from inspiring man to disappointing president took place over the two-year period following his inauguration.

Even though the president has other priorities, he never capitalized on any of his promises to the Arab and Islamic world in his first term. Before his Cairo speech, Obama was said to be outlining an extensive and detailed plan that would revolutionize policy in the Middle East. After the speech, politicians from the region, including both Palestinian and Israeli leaders, had extraordinarily optimistic reactions. Many called it a new beginning for America's relations with the Arab world.

Nothing really changed, though, even in the months following his speech. Relations improved, but only briefly. The maintenance of a positive relationship with the Arab world became a governmental priority. Despite relatively postive governmental interactions, friction still existed between Americans and Arabs. It was because they didn't like the U.S. government, and when analyzing the situation from their perspective, it would seem rightfully so.

Election 2012 is coming up, and as an American voting in his first election, I will be extremely excited to cast my ballot. Issues will be debated, the political brush will be aflame and we'll try to give change, hope and promise another go. It's just a shame that no matter which candidate comes out on top, stagnancy is still going to keep Middle East policy from changing.

Now, the Arab Spring is in full swing. This is the time for sweeping transformations to occur in the region. So why can't it happen in ours? Maybe in Obama's second term, he'll decide that he wants to do what he promised for our Arab friends. Maybe Romney or Gingrich will realize that we need to establish better relations with the peoples of the Middle East.

Optimism in the region, however, is low.

I asked an Arab friend what Obama's greatest achievement has been so far. He paused and sighed, "At least he isn't George W. Bush."

Nikhil Lakhanpal is a freshman at the School of Foreign Service-Qatar campus. CUTTER, KUH-TAWR, QATAR appears every other Tuesday.

Recommended: Articles that may interest you

4 comments

Anonymous
Tue Feb 7 2012 14:30
I appreciate your attempts to find a way that Islam can come into the modern world but I think all such attempts will fail. Islam, unlike any other major faith is, as Bertrand Russell observed almost a century ago, the only religion which is totalitarian in structure and ideology. And there's no reforming a totalitarian ideology.

You can't have a kinder, nicer Nazism or a reformed Marxism. Totalitarian ideologies must be discarded. They can never be squared with such things as liberty, true democracy and equality under the law. I don't doubt that many Muslims now and in the future will be pretty much passive about all the pathological instructions that their religion demands of them, but that is not germane.

The religion itself, in all its totalitarian make-up, will remain and, guaranteed here, will always function as a death cult for at least a certain percentage of Muslims when they don't get their way. Ultimately, it's the relgion itself which is rotten and, though personally not religious, I don't see rottenness in any other major faith. The Islamic theological blueprint is flawed to its very core. No other religion's theological blueprint is. This is the essence of the problem.

Anonymous
Tue Feb 7 2012 14:29
From the essay "Communism and Islam" in International Affairs, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan., 1954), pp. 1-12, here is Bernard Lewis on Islam's inherent authoritarianism:
I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition...Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and democracy are identical -- attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam or democracy or both...In point of fact, except for the early caliphate, when the anarchic individualism of tribal Arabia was still effective, the political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy...[I]t was authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law. In the great days of classical Islam this duty was only owed to the lawfully appointed caliph, as God's vicegerent on earth and head of the theocratic community, and then only for as long as he upheld the law; but with the decline of the caliphate and the growth of military dictatorship, Muslim jurists and theologians accommodated their teachings to the changed situation and extended the religious duty of obedience to any effective authority, however impious, however barbarous. For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as "tyranny is better than anarchy" and "whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent."
...Quite obviously, the Ulama of Islam are very different from the Communist Party. Nevertheless, on closer examination, we find certain uncomfortable resemblances. Both groups profess a totalitarian doctrine, with complete and final answers to all questions on heaven and earth; the answers are different in every respect, alike only in their finality and completeness, and in the contrast they offer with the eternal questioning of Western man. Both groups offer to their members and followers the agreeable sensation of belonging to a community of believers, who are always right, as against an outer world of unbelievers, who are always wrong. Both offer an exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory of the true faith over the infidel evil-doers. The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, two necessarily opposed groups, of which- the first has the collective obligation of perpetual struggle against the second, also has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. There again, the content of belief is utterly different, but the aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same. The humorist who summed up the Communist creed as "There is no God and Karl Marx is his Prophet!" was laying his finger on a real affinity. The call to a Communist Jihad, a Holy War for the faith -- a new faith, but against the self-same Western Christian enemy -- might well strike a responsive note.
Anonymous
Tue Feb 7 2012 14:28
The source of Muslim repression, or why Muslims are drawn to repressive leaders like moths to flames:

Islam's prophet was a theocratic, megalomaniac. Unlike Christ, Buddha or other religious leaders, Mohammed demanded that he ruled over everything.

Christ said, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's." Mohammed said and practiced the opposite.

Sharia law is all about repression of the individual, whereas democracy is about empowering the individual.

Free speech, freedom to choose a religion (or not to choose any religion), freedom of conscience are all alien to Islam.

It's "hip" among the mainstream media to write about The Arab Spring as if it connoted a sort of rebirth, but anyone who has studied Islam realizes that this misleading misnomer is the ultimate lie and says more about the ignorance of media organizations like the NYT, CNN, BBC, etc... than it has to say about the real world. But, then again, that's what intelligent people have come to expect from our media and the pundits they pay big bucks to help them sell advertising space.

Anonymous
Tue Feb 7 2012 14:27
Unreal.

So this is our fault. Or, am I mistaken and it's colonialism's fault or imperialism's fault or Israel's fault instead. It goes without saying it is not Islam's fault and the repressive, violent, threatening doctrine that underlies that religion.

Problem is this does not explain why Islam is creating havoc and violence in Sudan, Nigeria, Kashmir, southern Thailand where 5,000 Buddhists have been violently killed by Muslims, or Lebanon where the Christian demographic has plummeted from 60% down to 30% in the last several decades and all their leaders have been assassinated, or Bangladesh and Pakistan where the Hindu demographic has also plummeted while the Muslim demographic in India has soared.

We all know this is not Islam's fault for Islam is perfect. We all know instead it is those nasty Buddhists in southern Thailand who are causing the unrest, and the poor starving black Sudanese who are responsible for 2.6 million dead, and the Coptic Christians of Alexandria for their slow but steady extermination from a place they have called home for millennia.

It could never be Islam's fault because we're all liberal college punks and professors who are always going to blame the west for all the world's problems. That's the way it is and that's who we are.





log out