Engaging with Islam
The State of the Muslim World
In speaking about the origins of his current research, Husain Haqqani recalls a Newsweek cover from October 2001. Across a photo of a Pakistani child brandishing an automatic weapon were inscribed four troubling words: “Why They Hate Us.”
His research sparked by years of wondering “why the Muslim world is in the eye of virtually every storm,” Husain Haqqani, a former journalist and diplomat in Pakistan, is trying to change attitudes and rhetoric in both the Middle East and the West.
The director of BU's Center for International Relations, Haqqani came to the United States after a career as a Pakistani journalist and statesman. He is a former ambassador and advisor to Pakistani prime ministers Benazir Bhutto, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, and Nawaz Sharif. He is also a practicing Muslim who studied in a madrassa, or traditional Islamic school, in Pakistan.
But throughout his distinguished career, one question has haunted him. “I have always wondered why the Muslim world is in the eye of virtually every storm, in my lifetime at least,” he says. “The Middle East is a cauldron. The India/Pakistan conflict has a Muslim dimension. In Russia, there's Chechnya, another Muslim dimension.” Why is the Muslim world plagued by instability, undemocratic governments, and sectarian violence? As Bernard Lewis asked in the title of his 2001 book about the seemingly unending conflict between Islam and the West, What Went Wrong?
Haqqani has set out to seek answers to these questions. He calls the project a “State of the Muslim World,” and his research draws broadly from such fields as anthropology, sociology, history, economics, and demography. Despite the diversity of the Islam-influenced world, he says, Muslims everywhere share membership in the Ummah, or community of believers. “There are many differences among Muslims, but there are also common streaks running from Egypt to Indonesia, and there is a sense of belonging together,” he says. “And yet, in the last few centuries, it has been a belonging-together in decline. The Kuwaitis may be rich, but they know it is coming from oil in the ground, not from something they've accomplished. There is a lack of a general sense of accomplishment in modern times.”
He reels off a series of surprising statistics in support of this argument: The GDP of the world's 57 Muslim-majority countries combined is less than that of France. Those 57 countries contain about 500 universities, compared to more than 5,000 in the United States and 8,000 in India. There are only 230 scientists per million Muslims. Fewer new book titles are published each year in Arabic, the language of 300 million people, than in Greek, spoken by only 15 million. More books are translated into Spanish each year than have been translated into Arabic in the last century.
From these hard facts, Haqqani draws a startling conclusion. He argues that a lack of economic, intellectual, cultural, and technological productivity in the Muslim world has left a vacuum that has been filled by paranoia and inflammatory rhetoric, fueling “a culture of political anger, rather than political solutions.” This rhetoric, he maintains, keeps Muslims in a constant state of fear that Islam and Islamic culture are in danger of being snuffed out by the West—and, in turn, a cycle of violence persists as Muslims respond to the perceived threat posed by both external and sectarian enemies. At the same time, this culture of outward-directed anger prevents Muslims from examining the internal problems that plague the Islamic world, such as repressive governments, sectarian conflict, and a lack of democratic representation. “Muslims must rise and peacefully mobilize against sectarianism and the violence and destruction in, say, Iraq,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Gulf Times, a popular English-language newspaper in Qatar. “But before that can happen, Muslim discourse would have to shift away from the focus on Muslim victimhood and towards taking responsibility, as a community, for our own situation.”
Though Haqqani hopes his message will reach Muslim listeners, he believes that his research has something to teach Western policy makers as well. “Basically, I am saying that this is an entire section of the world that is reeling from the trauma of its decline,” he says. “How can the United States and other Western powers build relationships with the Muslim world without understanding what happens in the Muslim mind?”
For more information, see www.bu.edu/ir/faculty/haqqani.html.
