Religion and Secularism in the Muslim World, Iowa City, Iowa, February 17, 2009

- Today's program has been made possible through the cooperation of International Programs at the University of Iowa with additional support from River Products Company and BDF Investments. Our speaker today is a good friend that I've known for a good while, probably longer than both of us care to admit, Adrien Wing. Professor Wing is the Bessie Dutton Murray professor at the University of Iowa College of Law. In addition, she is the Associate Dean for Faculty Development, as well as director of the summer school program in Arcachon, France. She presently teaches international human rights in law in the Muslim world, which gives us reason for her to be able to talk about her subject today. Among her many accomplishments, Professor Wing has advised the founding fathers of three emerging governments, South Africa, Palestine, and Rwanda. An accomplished public speaker, she has lectured all over the world. Further, she has received numerous honors and held leadership positions in various organizations. She is a current vice president of the American Society of International Law, she currently serves on the board of the U.S. Association of Constitutional Law, and the board of editors at the American Journal of Comparative Law as well. Her international scholarship has emphasized two regions, both of which are important to me. Africa, especially southern Africa in her case, and the Middle East, and particularly the Palestine legal system. Now, before I'm gonna ask you to welcome her though, I want to talk more about what Adrien Wing is really like beyond this other kind of work. As a colleague, I have benefited from her tremendously. Last summer, for the first time I was able to go to Tunisia, the International Geographical Union had its quadrennial congress there. My good fortune was that after teaching in June in France, Adrien had gone to Tunisia to continue some research that she had begun there earlier, and she was gracious enough to help me understand what was going on in Tunis, to introduce me to some of her friends, and then that showed even more deeply the commitment that she has to true justice in the world. She had kind of adopted a family, and was helping that family overcome some of the economic problems that they had had, to be able to help the extended family in the compound that was there. She took me there, and we were able to participate in some activities including some wedding activities, and it really gave me a chance to see how the culture there really works, and of course it showed her commitment not only at the high level where she would know the Mandelas of the world, but her commitment to people on the lower level, everyday life. I think that for all of the high honors that Professor Wing has had, those don't at all indicate the level of her humane commitment to justice and people in terms of the way their lives have really worked. So in terms of addressing the challenges in the Muslim world, secular and religious challenges, I don't think we could have a better person to be able to come and share her thoughts with us. So join me in welcoming Professor Adrien Wing. - [Woman] If anyone deserves a standing ovation, it's this lady, stand and deliver. - Oh thank you. Stay sitting there. Good way to digest the food you're still in the middle of eating. Well thank you so much for that very gracious introduction. I'm very honored that Rex has been a friend of mine the 22 years that I have been here on faculty with him, and we're all quite fortunate that Rex has chosen to build and keep his career here at the University of Iowa, and I hope that I will continue to be here with him for many more years, doing things in Iowa City like participating in this council, council events, and also around the world. The topic that I've chosen for today is religion and secularism in the Muslim world. As we know, after 9-11, 2001, many Americans became vitally interested in the Middle East if they had not been interested before. Now we have experienced eight years of the War On Terror that got us bogged down in Iraq, tied down in Afghanistan, and brought international opinion concerning the U.S. to record historical lows. Unfortunately we became known more for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and torture than we did for freedom and justice for all. We now have a unique opportunity. We are at the beginning of the age of Obama. Up to now, our new president has had to put his primary emphasis on the dire economic picture that we face. But we know that global events are going to require a renewed and refocused emphasis on the Muslim world. We still have terrorism. We have an upsurge in violence in Afghanistan. The conflict in Iraq is not over. The recent events in Gaza point out to the continued need to focus once again on one of the most difficult areas, the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. We have a potential meltdown in Pakistan, and lots of other things we don't need, Iran, Syria, I mean name the country, we have critical problems. President Obama is well-suited to this task. Last summer I was in 10 countries all over, all parts of the world, and every single country I met people who all wanted him to win. And as we know, when he won they showed you pictures from all over the world, because across the political spectrum, across the geographic and religious spectrum, people wanted Barack Hussein Obama to win. So he is starting out with a global level of good will that is unprecedented in the world. We also know when he was a small child in his formative years he lived in a Muslim country, Indonesia, he went to a Muslim school, he had a Muslim stepfather. He has Muslim members of his family. His father, who he barely knew, only met him once, was a Muslim who then left his faith and became an atheist. President Obama has close Muslim friends including University of Chicago Professor Rashid Khalidi, and as some of you may remember there was an attempt to smear Professor Khalidi and refer to him as some sort of terrorist and use that to bring down Senator Obama. As many of you know, he is, Senator Obama now President Obama, is a member of the United Church of Christ, and some of the things that his former minister said from the Trinity United Church of Christ got a lot of prominence. You may or may not know, Trinity United Church of Christ is the largest church in the denomination, 8,000 members. I myself am a member of the United Church of Christ from birth, and when I go up to Chicago I go to that church. I bring that up because those who are in UCC know it's very open to a wide variety of perspectives. People who are members are not based only in that my way is the right way and the rest of you all are infidels who don't understand anything about God. UCC is very open and President Obama brings that perspective to his understanding of what's going on in the Middle East as well as the rest of the world. At his inauguration, he said we are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. He opened and offered his hand in friendship to the Middle East and to the broader Muslim world. He favors diplomacy over war, including maybe even talking to Iran. His first television interview in the Muslim world was to Al Arabiya, very prominent. His first phone call as head of state was to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. He has said he will go to a Muslim country early in his administration. These all bode us well and they are unique in terms of any prior American president. One of the themes that has become salient in the last eight years is the incredible tension, the dichotomy that exists between a suitable role for the secular world and a suitable role for the religious world. While there's a global tension in this regard, the Muslim world is a prime place to look at where this tension is. President Obama is going to develop, and his staff, are going to develop a much more nuanced understanding of this aspect of the region than his predecessor did, and it will be important to creating reformed policies that will enhance American interests and hopefully restore global respect for our country, not just for our president but for our whole country. I'm going to discuss this topic of secularism in the Muslim world from a particular perspective. I'm a member of a group of scholars in the law who are called critical race theorists, and we focus, we emphasize the role of race and ethnicity, nationality, as being important in what happens to people in the world. So I'm first gonna mention a little bit about the perspective that I bring, and them I'm going to focus on fundamentalism and its role in the world, and then talk about several examples where the religious and secular tension exists. I'm gonna talk about one example in the western world which is France, and them I'm gonna talk about within predominantly Muslim countries, taking a look at Tunisia, Turkey, and Palestine. Then I'm gonna close with what we call praxis, theory and practice together, what can we do? What can we, here, in the United States, in the still super power, we may be wobbling but we're still the global super power, what can we do with respect to this issue? Okay first, the perspective I bring from critical race theory, as I said we focus on identity. For instance race and ethnicity. But we're also interested in other identities in that you can't ignore these identities. So for instance, one identity is your religious identity. In the Muslim world, you can't deal in Iraq if you don't understand the difference between Shiites and Sunnis. And as we know in the electoral cycle, some of our candidates had a problem with that basic idea, and then some maybe in the prior administration had problems with understanding what that meant. And we know in Iraq if you didn't understand that they were led by a Sunni minority, that Saddam Hussein was a Sunni from a minority and he was dictating over a Shiite majority, and that that was an important factor and it's still an important factor, and it's linked in to Iran being a Shiite country, and Hezbollah in Lebanon being Shiites. You cannot ignore this. If you just try to just look at the people as well, they're some kind of Arabs, it will result in the kind of idiocy in policies that we've had in the past. Another identity that we focus on in critical race theory is political ideology. It's not enough what's your religion, but what is your ideology within your religion, within your ethnicity, et cetera? Former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated, and her ideology and some of the things that she stood for were involved in that, and now her husband is the current leader and then supposedly then their son will be the leader after that. We also look at the role of gender, and in the Muslim world the role of women has been one of the first things that people look at, in particular the role of clothing in terms of the burka in Afghanistan or just the headscarf. Those are often the only things people think about when they think of Islam, they think of women, oppression, and what do they wear, where of course it's more complicated. We also look at identity such as language, class, age, disability, marriage status, sexual orientation, and how all of these intersect. And just talking a minute about sexual orientation, you all may remember when the Iranian President Ahmadinejad came to Columbia University, somebody asked him about gay issues, he said, "We don't have any of those people here. "There are no gays in Iran." And you know, people here may laugh but there are many countries in the world where people in those countries will say there are no gay people here, that that's a disease, that's some western disease and we don't have that here. So that identity, sexual orientation, in those countries can lead you not only to not be recognized but to face horrific discrimination and maybe execution for just having that identity. So the Middle East will not be a place where the issue of same-sex marriage will be at the top of the agenda any time in the foreseeable future. So in critical race theory we're also concerned about critical race praxis, which is why at the end of this talk I will also be giving you some practical ideas that we can use to move forward. Now I want to go and talk a little bit about the first issue, fundamentalism. We like to think here in the U.S. that fundamentalism is just something that exists over in those Islamic countries. We have to look at the fact that there is a global trend in fundamentalism. What do I mean by fundamentalism? In all of the religions that exist, there are trends where the most literal interpretation of whatever is the holy book is more and more appealing to more and more people. And there's nothing wrong with that. People can have interpretations of the book that they want. However, within each of these fundamentalisms, in each of the religions, there can be some people who feel that in interpreting their book it means that they need to take action against some other types of people, and that they might take that action in a violent way. So for instance we say Islamic fundamentalist as if Islamic fundamentalist was synonymous with terrorist, whereas most people who we would call Islamic fundamentalist have nothing to do with terrorism whatsoever. But it may happen that some people who are Islamic fundamentalist are terrorists. But as we know, we had a bombing here in the U.S., in the Murrah Federal Building, when an American, Tim McVeigh and others were involved in blowing up one of our federal buildings, but we don't just call that the Christian Fundamentalist terrorist, even though that's what he was, we don't choose to use that label. Instead we have ended up smooshing together the religious identity of being a Muslim with an ideology with that being a Muslim of being a so-called fundamentalist, and then linking that to some activity, terrorist, and smooshing it all together as it if was one thing, which does a disservice. Now it doesn't apply only in the Muslim world. In our own election that we just had, it was very interesting that part of the reason that Senator McCain picked Governor Palin, aside from her gender, was because she was supposed to appeal to the Christian religious right. And apparently she did, even though a number of the values exhibited in her own family did not jibe with values that are supposed to be part of Christian right wing fundamentalism. Now what was interesting to me in that, in our own country when you pick a person and they're supposed to represent this particular religious perspective is that when she was asked by Katie Couric tell us some source that guides you, that has influenced you, remember? And she couldn't like name anything, she said, "Oh, everything." What should she have mentioned? - [Audience] The Bible. - The Bible. I was astounded that someone who says they are a Christian did not even mention the Bible. I couldn't relate to that at all, which to me says then this is not a Christian. A Christian would have mentioned the Bible, and then that would have got a question, and tell me what verses in the Bible inspire you? And I assume that that would have then led to other problems. But she wouldn't have been able to name some verses if she didn't even name the book that's supposed to guide her, that's part of the reason why she's the vice presidential candidate. So I bring all that up to just show that here you have a role of religion that was in our last election, and it's still there, and if she runs again in 2012 and runs for president I'm sure it will come back up. So the U.S. is not immune from any of these influences. So the global trend in fundamentalism, I predict, is going to become even greater because the global financial crisis that we are now in is going to cause many people, those who already we would have called fundamentalists but many other people who would not have considered themselves fundamentalists, to say only God is gonna get us out of this, and I'm gonna go away from secularism and materialism and I'm going to find my strength deep within my faith. And I bet we're gonna see that, right? And a lot of people are gonna want to do that because I've lost my job, I'm losing my house, I'm losing this, I'm losing that, what's going on? And so often religion of any type is that's what we're going to go to. So I bet you will see that an even bigger rise in some people who, when they're pulling into religion in these difficult economic times, will then become what some other people will call fundamentalist. I should say for Islam we use the term Islamist. So if you see that term Islamist with a T at the end, that's referring to people that some of us would say are Islamic fundamentalists, okay? So Muslim is not necessarily, the Muslim faith, not everybody in the Muslim faith is an Islamist, okay? So I just want to make that clear. So we're now in an era I think, in the age of Obama, where we will see much more fundamentalism and I think it will affect President Obama as well because he is perceived incorrectly as a Muslim, right? As someone who has links to the Muslim world which he clearly does. There will be the need for him to offset that by appearing not to be leaning pro-Muslim, particularly in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where there's the fear that is he gonna be supportive enough of our ally Israel? He will have to bend over backwards to not appear to lean too far to the Muslims. So even if he makes a phone call to Abbas or he appointed Senator Mitchell to go and be a special envoy, that's not gonna offset other things he will need to do to make sure that our historic relationship with Israel is as strong as possible. And right now, you know, he doesn't even have a church because he had to distance himself from his prior minister and not go to his Trinity Church of 20 years, he now is in D.C. so he's now himself any church he chooses is gonna be looked at. Everyone in there is gonna be looked at, every speech they ever made, and try to link him to some kind of radicalism within that church. So he may be going to become a member of no church in his whole four or eight years. All of this is gonna affect how his administration, and how he personally, is gonna be able to interact in terms of Islamic fundamentalism or in terms of the religion of Islam, and how some of our policies may become affected. Now interestingly, in the Arab world there was a failure of policies of socialism and nationalism, you know, after the 60s and 70s and all of that failed and then the Soviet Union failed, so that was supposed to be socialism was in the dust bin of history, but now socialism is reviving, right? The United States of America is gonna be the biggest socialist country, except for China, right? I mean we're literally buying up our banks, doing all these things to our economy. So interestingly, where it appeared that socialism was dead it may be that we're all socialists now. But at the same time that that will be going on, there'll still be this trend of the fundamentalist religion. Now socialism is supposed to be godless, that's not supposed to be what's going on, but I think we will see this trend, a trend that was in the Muslim world in terms of the socialist nationalism from the 60s and so forth, and we will see this more globally where defacto we will have socialism going on but we will also have a lot more religious fundamentalism in all of the areas. And the U.S. is going to be identified, right? Or the values that we historically have had which were the free market capitalism, or semi-free market capitalism, are gonna be among those qualities that are gonna be thrown away. They're gonna be saying look, the U.S. is an example of the supreme failure of free market capitalism, so we can't go there, so we need to be looking at other options, and if the U.S. is gonna stand for anything it's going to stand for more socialistic values and also, since professor, I keep calling him Professor Obama because he was also a Constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. It's also though perhaps gonna stand for a bigger role for religion in our society as well because that's been a big role in President Obama's life and in his political career. So we may see, even as he has to be afraid of whether he's leaning over backwards or not too far to the Muslim side, he may feel free to say, "Okay, in these difficult times I'm calling on "all of you as Americans to tighten your belts up "to call for an even bigger role in terms of faith." And he has a person on his staff, a young 26-year-old, who is in charge of faith-based initiatives and linking in to the religious sector. So I think these will be trends that we are going to see in the near future. Okay, so now let's see how the secular religious tension has played itself out in some particular places in the world, and I have written a number of articles on all of these areas, and if you Google and go to my web page at the University of Iowa, you can find my bibliography and it'll list all of the articles, and if any of you all want copies of any of those articles just email me and I'll be happy to give them to you. So all of the things I'm going to be saying are based in part on research I've been doing over a number of years. So the first example I want to give is a western example, and that is France. You may have heard a few years ago France passed a law that banned headscarves in the public schools, K through 12, and they did that because they were afraid that the French Muslim schoolgirls would be pressured to wear a headscarf. A girl can start wearing a headscarf when she reaches puberty. So from junior high or high school up, the French government was afraid girls would be forced to wear these headscarves. You have to understand, France is based on a principle of secularism, the state is supposed to be secular. They also have the idea of assimilation or melting pot. They don't accept the U.S. idea of diversity being like the salad bowl where we have African-Americans and Irish-Americans and Asian-Americans, everybody's supposed to be just French. So when you combine that idea of the melting bowl with the idea of pure secularism, what that means in France is you can't come into school and wear your headscarf. Now it also affected if you wear a Sikh turban, a Jewish yarmulke, or they said a ostentatious Christian cross. Now I don't know how big a cross they'd be talking about it's supposed to affect that, but everybody knows that the thrust of the law is for Muslims, for Muslim girls not to wear these headscarves. So Muslims were not in the legislature when this was passed and some of them protested about it, but they basically had been excluded from the system, so they passed this law. It's interesting from an American perspective because France believes in freedom of religion like we do and freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but they interpret that the opposite. They mean that that means that there should be no religion in a public place, whereas we would say well the girl could wear hear headscarf in a high school here. So we interpret the same principles, freedom of speech, religion, et cetera, the opposite from the French, right? And they're an ally and they're pretty close to us in a lot of philosophical ways. Now to me it's similar to where now at the University of Iowa we can't put a Christmas tree up inside the school. We now say that no, you're not supposed to do that. So in that same way they would say you shouldn't wear the hijab, the headscarf. But the tension remains there, and the Muslim population is 10%, the largest in Europe, and there have been riots and things that remind us very much of the U.S. civil rights movement. President Sarkozy was not known for being pro-Muslim. He called some of the rioting Muslims scum. On the other hand, his new minister of justice is a Muslim woman, the first Muslim in the cabinet, and he has made a number of appointments to show that he recognizes that France is not just only French, that there are people who are French but have other aspects to them. So here's France that is struggling with this tension and the issues are gonna come up I'm sure, with the economic crisis hitting France, there'll be more upheaval inside of all of the French ghettos where the Muslim people disproportionately live. So there's one example of a tension, banned religious expression in the schools. Now going to the Muslim world itself, majority-Muslim countries, I'll just briefly mention a few examples. Turkey is a country that is 99% Muslim but its founding president was a guy named Ataturk, and from the early part of the 20th century he said, "I'm having a secular state." He banned all religious expression. He abolished all the religious courts and he took over religious education. So in Turkey the state teaches religion in the schools in a certain way to make sure that there's not gonna be any other type of religion taught, i.e. no fundamentalism is gonna be taught in terms of religion. So it's the opposite of the U.S., let religion be taught outside in the church. Yeah, we'll have that, but it's going to be taught in one way and that one way is gonna be the government's way. So in Turkey they banned the headscarves, you can't wear them in public places. You can wear them in private places but not in the state institutions including, in Turkey, the universities. France allows the headscarf in a university but Turkey does not. But recently though the Turkish government has become Islamist-leaning, and so they tried to insert some amendments into their constitution that would permit women to wear headscarves and also there to be religious expression in the public sphere, and the supreme court which has been secular in orientation, overturned the amendments. So it remains to be seen what will happen. And in Turkey there have been four military coups, and each military coup was because the Turkish military supports secularism. So they are quite capable of toppling the government for being too Islamic. So we'll have to see what happens with that. Now Tunisia is a country that after it became independent in the 50s, its leader, a man named Bourgiba, Habib Bourguiba, he decided the country should be secular even though 100% of the country is Muslim. He did something really radical, he banned polygamy back in the 50s. All the other Muslim countries, except for Turkey, have polygamy where a man can have four wives. And I went there and did research and I asked, is polygamy really banned? Come on now, you know, men have got to have more than one wife, and they said, "Well we have the same problem as other places "where men have mistresses," "but they can't call them a wife, "and if they do they get a prison term," and that prison term has reduced the amount of polygamy quite a bit. But it hasn't solve the mistress problem. And they said, "And your president Clinton," and we just didn't go any further there. Okay, the last country I want to talk about is Palestine because you can't understand a lot of the things going on in Palestine right now if you don't understand that in '06 the Hamas fundamentalist Muslim group won a democratic election against the Fatah secularist political party. So then you had problems there and then in '07 there was a little mini civil war and Hamas has control over the Gaza Strip and the Fatah group has control over the West Bank, and the Fatah group is an ally of the U.S. and the Hamas group has been reviled. So then we have the whole situation with Israel bombing Hamas, and Hamas firing rockets into Israel, et cetera. This situation will not be resolved without us acknowledging that Hamas was a elected group by the majority of Palestinians. We say we're for democracy except if it doesn't come out how we want. Well, they democratically voted for Hamas, not because the Palestinians are fundamentalists but because Fatah they viewed as corrupt for 10 years and it didn't do anything for them. And I'll tell you, if there's another election tomorrow in the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas will win again because interestingly, after being bombed by Israel but still being able to fire these little rockets, they are gonna be viewed by Palestinians as steadfast, as strong, as, "Hey, we defeated Israel, "like Hezbollah did with Lebanon." They bombed Lebanon, but Hezbollah could still fire. So we might say my God, but look at all the people killed and how could this be viewed as a victory? Instead it will be viewed as they were so strong. As a result of that there will be no peace unless George Mitchell and the U.S. government are able to say, "Hey, we gotta talk with our enemies. "In Northern Ireland we had to talk to the IRA "even though they were called terrorists." But you're gonna have to deal with Hamas, you're gonna have to deal with Fatah, you've got to get them together but meanwhile the Israelis have just had an election, too, where fundamentalist Jewish forces are in the ascendancy and it might be that that government becomes fundamentalist-dominated, as the Palestinian government is fundamentalist-dominated, and now we have a new government in the U.S. who may not be able to do anything with the two major groups because of the role of fundamentalism within the political structures that are going on there. So there's a lot of work. I've got to conclude now, but I want to conclude by talking about well, what can we do about all of this? Well you all are doing the best thing right now, learning more yourselves, and then talking to your relatives and your friends and your students and your colleagues about what's going on. Talk to them at Thanksgiving, July 4th picnic, okay? When you can talk to your auntie or your friend and you're politically like over here, but this is when you have to start bringing these things up. Travel, we've got to get more of our students abroad. The U.S. government wants to do that. We also need to have our professional people and our senior citizens getting abroad more. I get all these things now, I'm a senior citizen now, I have seven grandchildren, and there are luxury cruises and five-star hotels to Dubai. That's not what you need to be doing. If you want to go over there and you're a senior citizen and you want to not sleep in very difficult conditions as you might when you're 20 years old, there's still something in between five-star luxury cruiser and maybe being in a tent in the desert, although I recommend tents in the desert if you can. So we've got to do more traveling. We've got to encourage our government to let more Arab students and Muslim people into the country. I'm really excited if the U.S. will let in those Iraqi students. Let's see if they let them in. They better be letting them in and not just talking. We've got to have many more of our people being able to go to the Arab world. We've got to be talking about dealing with each other in conditions of peace and equality, as friends rather than as we're the big bad U.S. and you better do what we say or we're gonna take away your goodies. That's not gonna work. In conclusion, I try to remain hopeful, and it's very, very hard to do and in part it takes my faith, right? It takes my faith to try to remain hopeful and the person who inspires me spiritually the most within my own group of African-Americans is Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King, as some of you will remember and as some of you have read, made a speech about I have a dream, and he had a dream that there were gonna be these little children in Georgia, black and white, and they would be able to play together and it would be great. Well, even after the election of the first African-American president, there are many places in the United States where little black and white children are not able to live together, play together, interact together, we are still not in that world. Well I have a bigger dream, and my even bigger dream than that is that my little grandchildren, my Christian grandchildren will one day be able to go over to Jerusalem and that they will be able to play together with Jewish Israeli children and Palestinian Muslim children all together in Jerusalem, and we will be celebrating the birth of the independent state of Palestine that's gonna live next door in peace and prosperity to Israel, and I hope you will all work with me to make that day happen, thank you. - The questions are coming in, but I think this one is a good one to be able to get at some of the underlying issues that are involved, and it is, "Is race important within the Muslim world? "Is the U.S. and the west more concerned with race "as such because of our heritage of "slavery and segregation?" How important, in the modern project, is race in the Middle East? - Yes. In the Muslim world itself, they don't so much look at things in a racial way. Like I'll see somebody and to me I'll say, "Oh, that's a black Palestinian," and that has no meaning for them to say somebody's a black Palestinian, they're just a Palestinian. But the race matters from the U.S. perspective because our country is so drenched in race, in who's black and who's white and who's yellow and who's brown, that we use those constructs when we look at other people. So in our heads it's kind of like who are the white people in this, the civilized people, the developed people? And we have socially constructed that those are the Israelis, they represent the western interests. And who are the blacks? There's like the cowboys and the Indians, well who are the Indians here, who are the blacks, who are the? And those are the Arabs. And words have been used like these are sand monkeys, and sand the N word, and so this sort of mentality of thinking in the binary white-black way that in the U.S. we've had for hundreds of years often affects, in the view of critical race theory, affects how we view the rest of the world. - There are a couple of questions that have to do with the timing of engagement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by U.S. administrations, and the fact that the last couple of administrations waited really until they were lame ducks to get involved, both Bush and Clinton. There's some concern, especially with these as well as we've heard elsewhere, that it's important that Obama become engaged immediately, and tied to that there's a question of given what's happened in the politics of these two places are you seeing his engagement as not having any effect because the two sides are gonna become more solidified in their opposition? On the other hand, does that make it possible that something could be done, the same way that Nixon could go to China the way that a Democrat couldn't have gone, is it more likely even that with a hard line Israeli government or hard line Palestinian government they would be able to do things that more centrist governments would not, so that indeed Obama should get engaged now and take advantage of this opportunity? - Yeah, I think he's off to a good start by the fact that he designated several envoys, special envoys immediately to this region, for Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, and for where else, Pakistan? Yes, Pakistan as well. So he's hitting the ground running, and the person he picked for the Israeli-Palestinian issue was critical, George Mitchell. Many Americans don't understand, George Mitchell is an Arab. He is a Lebanese-American. Everybody in the Muslim world knows that, but he has been socially constructed within the U.S. context as a white person. So we're looking at him as oh, George Mitchell, he's going over there. He knows who he is, it's in his biography, everybody over there knows who he is. So he picked a person who would be acceptable to the Arab side of the problem. For instance, if he had picked, the fear was that Rahm Emanuel controls the president in some way and that he would pick a Jewish fundamentalist to be his representative, that would not work for dealing with the Arab world. So he picked someone who would be acceptable. Now how acceptable Senator Mitchell will be to the Israeli side, I am not sure. Now this issue about Nixon went to China, and Reagan dealt with the Soviets, that so far hasn't really been the case. All of the progress in the Israeli-Palestinian situation has come about when Labor Party was in effect and that's not that much progress. But when Benjamin Netanyahu was the prime minister before all the peace process was dead in the water. Nevertheless, I think you've got to move forward and the Israeli-Palestine question is critical, but we have also other areas too in terms of Iraq and in terms of Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Syria situation, Iran, et cetera. So if you look at the holistic picture, I think what the president is doing is good and it'll be great for symbolism if he does go, as he promised, early in his term into a Arab or a Muslim country. I don't know what the plans are for that, if anybody's heard that, and which one he will pick. How do you pick, you know? You go to Saudi Arabia you look like there you are catering to the fundamentalist Saudis and their oil wealth. If you go to Turkey or Tunisia, they're so secular they won't be regarded well by others. Do you go to Indonesia who's the biggest, or do you you do? So we'll have to see how that gets played out. - [Man] Go to Morocco. The first country to recognize the United States. - [Adrien] That would be something, but Morocco's got a kingdom, going to monarchies, we'll see. - Netanyahu and Clinton didn't get along. Would the administration be able to bring Bill Clinton back in, in terms of negotiations with Israel, in a way that may get them to deal with things that they should have dealt with nine years ago? - Uh, no, I don't think Bill Clinton will be brought in for a number of reasons. I think in general it doesn't make sense to bring in Bill Clinton, particularly when his wife is the secretary of state and she needs to have her power as secretary of state. And because his initiative, his efforts to push through a peace process died at the end, I don't think that will work very well. So I think it's better to keep out people who are so well known by what they stood for. Same thing with Carter, he actually did a successful peace treaty, but once again on the Israeli side they really hate Jimmy Carter because he had one of his books is Peace Not Apartheid in Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid in Palestine. So the Israelis like Netanyahu certainly are not gonna want that former president as well. So I think it's better having somebody like George Mitchell who is affiliated with a great deal of success in terms of the Northern Ireland, something that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Middle East, than to bring in Bill Clinton. So we'll all be watching with bated breath. Where will Bill Clinton be, and what will he be up to? And we will all pray that whatever he's up to will be wonderful and he has a wonderful foundation and it's still doing work, even though it's being looked at quite closely now. So we'll all hope that, you know, it's hard to be an ex-president, right? They were calling him, maybe he needs to be a house husband. - Well part of the difficulty there is Hillary has to be able to muzzle Bill, and Obama has to be able to muzzle Biden. And that's part of what their difficulty is with this. There are a series of questions that have to do with a completely different problem. Nothing is completely different in this part of the world but at the other end of the Middle East. Looking at your theme of religion and secularism, and looking at changes in the Pakistani government, and looking at the situation in Afghanistan which of course had the most religious, in a narrow sense, government under the Taliban in terms of their imposition of rules that limited people's lives, particularly limited women's lives. Now, how would you see our options in dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan, and this overarching commitment that we have to women's rights globally? - Yeah, I'm particularly worried about Afghanistan because the secular government is known as being globally corrupt and it's failing, and it never really did govern more than part of Kabul, and the president's guards are American. The Taliban has resurged, and the Taliban is funded by the poppy crop, so it's not a poor group. It's got access to billions of dollars through that poppy crop, and then their ability to go over into Pakistan, I think that could be an area that fails or becomes a failed state, some would say Afghanistan has always been a failed state, it's defeated every attempt by any empire to put it into some sort of shape. The president recognizes this, which is why he in the campaign had been talking about we need more troops there. But people have counseled him about this because there's no level of troops we can put in there that's gonna be more than a drop in the bucket. So I don't know what the nature of those troops will be. And then we've been bombing into Pakistan. I have a particular interest in this because my youngest of my five sons is a cadet at West Point, he's a sophomore cadet at West Point, and so he is committed to serving the United States of America and to be sent wherever he will be sent. It was first looking like Iraq but by the time he gets out it could very well be Afghanistan or somewhere else. So I have a personal interest in the policy working out better than it has worked out. So I think actually that could blow up even more than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A lot of things could be going on but the country's so big we just don't see them. - Given that if the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan gets completely out of hand, that world peace more generally is gonna be threatened, what do you see the leverage of the administration can bring on the neighbors in the region to get them to engage in ways in which they haven't? That would include Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states in terms of trying to keep that flash point from leading to a much broader conflagration that would be totally out of control. - Yeah, actually at the end of the Bush administration when it was in a total lame duck status, doing nothing, there were a lot of other countries such as Turkey, such as France, and others who were engaged in diplomacy in the region to attempt to work out some situations. If what happens is what I've recommended, that we actually deal with countries viewing them as equals or viewing them as important players rather than viewing them to do what they're told, then it would be possible I think for some of these other countries to say, "Hey, you America, you can't be on the front line of this, "but we can," you know? The Syrian government can deal with Iran better than the U.S. government if we don't demonize Syria and push it over here. So I think we can't succeed at getting a peaceful situation globally in any of the regions including this one unless we interact with all the players based on respect and not under the former Bush doctrine, or not under even more ancient doctrines of just kind of U.S. gunboat diplomacy in some eras, and the modern era, so we cannot operate like that. So I'm hoping because Obama has this good will and he's seen as somebody that reaches out and his administration will be guided by more diplomacy than big stick, that perhaps he will be able to get those countries that have better relationships with some of the parties than the U.S. does to become engaged in it. In the Pakistani situation it is quite critical because they are a nuclear power. We're talking about what Iran might do. Pakistan and India have nukes, have plenty of them, and we don't want that situation to end up exploding. - Okay, well thank you. We really have reached the time to conclude today's program. On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council I want to thank Adrien Wing for sharing with us and our radio and cable TV audiences a presentation on religion and secularism in the Muslim world. I also wish to thank our sponsors, International Programs at the University of Iowa, Iowa River Products Company, and BDF Investments. As a modest token of our appreciation, we wish to present you with the coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug, suitable for either coffee or tea, or other beverage of your choice. - Thank you. - If you have any questions about joining ICFRC, please call the office, 335-0351, or if you enjoy listening to the program on the radio or via cable TV, please consider supporting the council's work by sending a contribution to ICFRC, 1111 University Capitol Centre, Iowa City. Please return your name tags. Thank you, we are adjourned. - Thank you very much. - You're welcome.