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Engaging the Muslim World<\/strong><\/em><\/a> I recently finished reading Engaging the Muslim World<\/em><\/strong> by Juan Cole<\/strong>, the influential academic, well known\u00a0liberal-left blogger of Informed Comment<\/a><\/strong>, past\u00a0president of the Middle East Studies Association and occasional media\u00a0talking head. Cole has written an intriguing book on contemporary foreign policy that is of special interest to those readers concerned with public diplomacy, the Muslim world, terrorism and the domestic politics of American foreign policy, particularly the war in Iraq. I\u00a0will state\u00a0straight off that there are arguments in this book presented by Cole\u00a0that I profoundly disagree with, or,\u00a0national security related assertions\u00a0that I consider\u00a0questionable;\u00a0but in other instances, when Cole is concentrating on the nuances of the Arab-Muslim world’s\u00a0political-cultural lens, he is an illuminating and insightful analyst from whom I have learned new things.\u00a0<\/p>\n Engaging the Muslim World<\/em><\/strong> is…well….engaging. I found\u00a0Cole’s prose flowed smoothly, as if the author was talking to the reader across a table, and I had a hard time putting the book down, albeit I was frequently scribbling furiously in the margins. This is a polemical -policy book written by an academic\u00a0for a lay audience and the reader’s reaction to Engaging the Muslim World<\/em><\/strong> will depend in part on their The book\u00a0 is\u00a0divided into six chapters. The\u00a0first, “The Struggle for Islamic Oil:The Truth About Energy Independence<\/em>” which deals with energy markets, the Cold War history of the Mideast, global warming, environmental policy, alternative\u00a0fuel technologies and globalization, is a necessary\u00a0effort to concisely account for the geoeconomic importance of Muslim oil producing states and the future of fossil fuel economies.\u00a0 Cole argues – correctly, I suspect – that there will be no short or medium term substitutes for oil and gas until solar power technology is cost-efficient enough (and efficient in a physics sense) to compete with fossil fuels in the marketplace. Not being a scientist or an expert in energy market issues,\u00a0I am poorly placed by professional background\u00a0to evaluate Cole’s claims in these areas\u00a0and will leave those to others.<\/p>\n That said, chapter one\u00a0remains the odd man out. It smacks of having been\u00a0\u00a0compacted by an editor out of two or more chapters and consequently\u00a0has disparate issues jumbled together with insufficient explanation; as a whole,\u00a0chapter one\u00a0fits\u00a0uncomfortably with the\u00a0subsequent chapters which flow together naturally and thematically. On the other hand, the topic of oil can hardly be dispensed with either in a geopolitical discussion of the Mideast, so Cole was right to tackle it and the primary problem is really one of sequence, not subject matter.<\/p>\n Chapters two through six are the heart of Engaging the Muslim World<\/em><\/strong>, where Juan Cole articulates a theme of “Islam anxiety” permeating Western, particularly American, media and public opinion. Poorly informed about even the most basic information regarding the Muslim world, such as the differences between Shia and Sunnis, secular Baathist nationalists and Islamist radicals, quietists and the politically militant,\u00a0Arabs and non-Arabs, Cole asserts that Westerners tend to lump Muslims of all shades of political belief, religiousity and nationality\u00a0into a homogenous, vaguely mysterious\u00a0but ever dangerous entity. Cole cites as one example, Egypt’s Sunni\u00a0Muslim Brotherhood, which has foresworn violence and has members\u00a0who sit in Egypt’s\u00a0legislature, being lumped uncritically by American commentators\u00a0with al Qaida and Hezbollah (which is a radical Shiite group).<\/p>\n A better way to understand violent\u00a0Islamist extremists in relation to normal Muslims, in Cole’s view, would be to see them as analogous to\u00a0our homegrown,\u00a0violent, far-Right, white\u00a0racist underground\u00a0that produced Timothy McVeigh<\/strong>, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing or as cult-like movements. While smaller in size than\u00a0Islamist radicalism, the racist Right shares with violent Islamists the trappings of a fringe, ostracized,\u00a0quasi-religious, political cult with a conspiratorial worldview\u00a0that diverges sharply from the nation’s mainstream religious\u00a0life.\u00a0Violent Islamists often make themeslves as unpopular with their co-religioinists as do neo-Nazi extremists here, through actions that horrify society, such as the bloody massacre of Western\u00a0tourists and Egyptian workers\u00a0at\u00a0 Luxor, Egypt.<\/p>\n Cole’s\u00a0analogy with cults and racial extremists\u00a0I think is a useful one. Radical Islamists are difficult to classify on a traditional political spectrum as their political behavior has definite similarities with those of the fascist and communist totalitarians of the 20th century, but\u00a0will\u00a0not fit smoothly with either, given\u00a0Islamist religious extremism and the fanatical atheism or at least radically secular nature of the Bolsheviks and Nazis. The psychological overlap however is certain, something akin to the 19th century Anarchist-terrorists or what Eric Hoffer<\/strong> captured in his classic work, The True Believer<\/em><\/strong><\/a> On Israel and Iran, Cole bends over backwards, like a circus sideshow contortionist,\u00a0to try and\u00a0explain the lunacy (and Cole admits it is,\u00a0at\u00a0best, a\u00a0crackpot worldview) of Ahmadinejad’s<\/strong>\u00a0violently antisemitic statements\u00a0about the Holocaust and Iran’s generally defiant behavior\u00a0toward the international community while giving Israel no similar benefit of the doubt.\u00a0 Cole argues that Ahmadinejad’s oft-stated “wipe Israel off of the map” is a deliberate mistranslation by the Western media. Ok, possibly so. I do not speak Farsi, so I’ll take Cole’s word here.\u00a0If it is the case though, Ahmadinejad is well aware of how\u00a0his repeated statement is being mistranslated by Reuters and AP, yet he keeps using it. Again and again. That\u00a0is an ominous\u00a0statement in itself.<\/p>\n This\u00a0uneveness regarding Iran and Israel will no doubt enrage conservatives and delight progressives, but in fairness\u00a0to Juan, I must say that despite his partiality toward Iran in his book, as a blogger he was very\u00a0quick to denounce the obvious stealing of the recent election by Khameini-Ahmadinejad-IRGC and my perception is that\u00a0Cole views the apocalyptic\u00a0Mahdist tendency in Twelver Shiism that Ahmadinejad embraces as a kooky deviation from mainstream Shiism. That not just Ahmadinejad holds this belief dear, but also many influential figures in the Iranian security apparatus as well, is in my view,\u00a0a cause for alarm.<\/p>\n Despite his politics, Cole concludes Engaging the Muslim World<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0with a very pragmatic prescription for American\u00a0public diplomacy for engaging Arabs and Muslims in a more effective manner than in the past eight or eighteen or eighty years. If I do not agree with every aspect, it is a good deal better than what\u00a0the State Department and the rest of the USG is\u00a0doing now:<\/p>\n Once I saw an Iraqi tribal leader interviewed on al-Jazeera. He said. “There is good and bad in America”. I was struck by how pragmatic and realistic his response was, and how different it was from so much of the fundamentalist vigilantee propaganda about the United States posted on radical internet bulletin boards. If Washington could reach out to all Muslims and bring them around to a more nuanced -and clear-view, in which America was not simply demonized, it would be a major accomplishment. The point is not that they should see the West through rose colored glasses, but that they should be willing to see the good and bad.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That would represent a step up by an order of magnitude.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Engaging the Muslim World\u00a0by Juan Cole I recently finished reading Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole, the influential academic, well known\u00a0liberal-left blogger of Informed Comment, past\u00a0president of the Middle East Studies Association and occasional media\u00a0talking head. Cole has written an intriguing book on contemporary foreign policy that is of special interest to those readers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,361,498,420,321,2,102,483,87,178,425,165,78,336,499,210,270,372,187,472,533,131,558,10,486,211,312,1,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-america","category-arab-world","category-authors","category-blogosphere","category-blogroll","category-diplomacy","category-extremists","category-foreign-policy","category-geopolitics","category-government","category-historians","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-islamic-world","category-islamist","category-national-security","category-non-state-actors","category-politics","category-public-diplomacy","category-religion","category-security","category-social-science","category-state-failure","category-state-terrorism","category-terrorism","category-tribes","category-uncategorized","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=zenpundit-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0230607543\")
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own worldview. Liberals will cheer more than they disagree with Cole, while\u00a0conservatives and supporters of Israel\u00a0are likely to reject many of the book’s normative assumptions long before they read the conclusions –\u00a0but Cole also offers some prescriptive advice that\u00a0center-right COIN and public diplomacy advocates will warmly embrace.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=zenpundit-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0060505915\")