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By Root 936 0

’s CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy, a feeble replica of the multi-layered and polyvalent strategies the US has adopted to combat global terrorism. It seeks to instrumentalise Islamic Studies in higher education—with the aid of £1 million of hypothecated funding—as a means of deradicalising young British Muslims, many of whom, like Ed Husain, author of The Islamist, were indoctrinated in further-education colleges through the presence of Hizb ut-Tahrir.10 This also means blithely ignoring the intent behind the £200 million-plus donated to British universities from the Arab Middle East, as well as disregarding the ostentatious refusal by British academics to acknowledge that they have any public responsibilities in terms of notifying the authorities about Islamist extremism among their students. An Islamist underworld exists within these universities in prayer rooms and societies, all passively tolerated by vice-chancellors. British dons take Saudi money—£8 million was given to Cambridge in 2008—while their trades union seeks to exclude military recruiters or to boycott Israel, which they view as an apartheid state like South Africa. Oxford’s notorious St Antony’s College employs the sinuous Tariq Ramadan despite his being banned from France and the US as an undesirable influence.11

During the Cold War the CIA despatched the Boston Symphony Orchestra into the cultural lists and covertly funded both abstract expressionism and serial music as alternatives to social realism. It is debatable whether the West needs to do this nowadays, although it is surely right to suggest that the sums it expends on public diplomacy are derisory. Does the US really need to burnish Brand America when the world’s enterprising classes line up for entry, or when the functioning of democracy was so manifest in the 2008 presidential primaries, notwithstanding Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo Bay? Where else elects district attorneys, judges and sheriffs? Where else so subtly separates Church and state, without prejudicing the rights of the religious, or differentiates between sin and crime—a failure to effect such a separation being one of the main conceptual failings of the Muslim world? Surely, if the problems are primarily in the Muslim world, then the West should be supporting the shoots of pluralism that already exist, through such enterprises as the Arabic Booker Prize and other manifestations of a liberal artistic, journalistic and visual culture. Are there no liberals and socialists in the entire Middle East? Do Muslims really savour dictation by mullahs? They would be extraordinarily unlike most Christians if they did. There are many Muslims around the world who no more wish to live in theocracies than Westerners do, being all too aware of the ignorance and megalomania of clerics.

Several unsavoury regimes based on corruption and violence have used the war on terror to suppress voices that have nothing to do with radical Islamism. Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s arrests of lawyers and judges provide one conspicuous example of this process, acts which automatically subtracted forces hunting down murderous Islamists who assassinated prime ministerial candidate Benazir Bhutto in late December 2007. This problem is also evident in the Middle East and North Africa. Some 300,000 people demonstrated in Algiers in 1992 on the eve of elections that the Islamic Salvation Front won, marching under the slogan ‘neither a police state, nor an Islamic state, but a democratic state’. Similar constituencies of the cosmopolitan intellectual or mercantile bourgeoisie exist in Cairo: the West’s task is discreetly to help organise them, perhaps along the lines of Freedom House’s role in the ‘colours’ revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, for they could be one of the building blocks from which a more pluralistic Middle East and North Africa may emerge. After all, democracy is not inherently alien to that region, whatever differences societies based on clans and tribes may impose on its local elaborations. Since 1961 Kuwait has had a parliament, replete with committees