Posted on 05/19/2003 10:03:03 AM PDT by BaghdadBarney
Monday, May 19, 2003. Jihad is Over! (If Noah Feldman Wants It.) The newest face thrust upon us by America's insatiable appetite for novelty belongs to one Noah Feldman. He's a 32-year-old assistant professor of law at New York University and author of a new (his first) entitled After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy. He's also been anointed chief U.S. adviser to Iraq for the writing of its new constitution. This announcement has been greeted by laudatory pieces, in places as varied as the New York Times, the Christian Science Monito, and the Israeli daily Ma'ariv. The novelty? It's the combination. Feldman is Jewish (raised in an Orthodox home); summa cum laude at Harvard (Near Eastern studies); conversant in Arabic; a Rhodes scholar with an Oxford D.Phil. in Islamic studies; and a law graduate from Yale. "The East is a career," wrote Disraeli. What he really meant was that the East is a great place to launch a career. It's now done that for young Professor Feldman, who will never again know obscurity.
The understanding of the Middle East can always use a new face. After all, America's most credible interpreter of the Middle East and Islam is about to turn 87 (happy birthday to Bernard Lewis, May 31!), so you know there is a generation gap. But you expect new ideas from new faces. The problem with Noah Feldman is that his idea isn't new. In fact, it's the same idea first advanced about a decade ago by John L. Esposito, a professor at Georgetown University and America's foremost apologist for Islamism. If you purchase Feldman's After Jihad, you should shelve it between Esposito's 1992 book, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, and his co-authored 1996 book, Islam and Democracy. They're all essentially the same book. (You can get the gist of Feldman's book from a short piece in the Boston Review (http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR28.2/feldman.html). . .
The Esposito/Feldman idea goes like this: Islamists are really no worry at all. In fact, they are actually the best hope for democracy in the Middle East. Leading Islamist thinkers want democracy, and if Islamist parties were allowed to take power—which they certainly would do in free elections—it would be an improvement over the situation today. Even if Islamists declared "Islamic" states on assuming power, these regimes would probably be more or less democratic, provided you don't insist on a narrow, culture-bound definition of democracy. The United States is making a big mistake by allying itself with autocratic rulers in the region, and it's betraying its values too. It should encourage inevitable change in the Islamists' favor, which is really in the U.S. interest.
To make this argument stick, you need to claim that "jihad is over." Why? While it's still on, too many so-called "moderates" apologize for it or even cheer it on.
(Excerpt) Read more at martinkramer.org ...
The trouble is, if we want democracy in Iraq, we'll get an Islamist government immediately upon calling the first election: the Shi'ites will elect their own leaders, and all their prominent leaders (thanks to Saddam killing all competitors) are mullahs.
What we need to give the Iraqis is a constitutional government, and in doing so, we need to recognize the facts on the ground: a lot of Iraqi Muslims want to live under their mullahs' version of sharia law. Elsewhere I have suggested adopting the wisdom of the old Ottoman "millet" system: everyone was subject to the sultan's laws, but each nationality or millet had its own laws. In place of the sultan's autocracy, the common laws could be tolerant, pro-business, liberal (in the classical sense, not the corrupt sense of American socialist) laws, while communities which wish to bind themselves under sharia (or other laws: the Chaldean-rite uniates could forbid contraception, for instance) could do so, with some sort of limited enforcement powers.
The only other possibility would be to adopt John C. Calhoun's "concurrent majority" proposal into the Iraqi constititution, with 'states' small enough that Christian, Kurdish Sunni, secularist-dominated, devout Arab Sunni-dominated, and Shi'ite-dominated areas could be gerrymandered. Then when the central government imposed sharia, the secularist and Christian areas could demure by not providing concurrent majorities, and the laws would not apply in their region.
Bwahahaha and then your alarm went off
Silence says more than this statement does, ugh.
This really doesn't look good. Bremer shouldn't let this kid get off the plane in Baghdad.
LOL I think I'm just gonna wait a while and see what evolves, no-one knows how is going to end up but the one thing I am sure of is we aren't hearing the GOOD NEWS in Iraq. It doesn't fit the "quagmire" mold.
I suppose I should be more direct, other than e-mail to the White House, I'm not sure what the direct route would be.
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