Reality check from Tehran

Get it right: entire Muslim world hasn’t ganged up on us

IN the Reagan era, bookshops on liberal campuses in the US used to sell a map of the world as it was supposedly viewed by their intellectually challenged president. It was really quite simple. A few swathes of pastels told you who were friends or foes. South Asia was, quite predictably, dismissed as Injuns. The only complexity was the Islamic world, because it had to be painted in two distinct hues: our Muslims, their Muslims. ‘‘Our’’ Muslims obviously were the Saudis, Kuwaitis and the other pro-Western Gulf states. ‘‘Their’’ Muslims were Iran and Iraq.

Very funny, isn’t it? But how would it work if we were to ask an Indian schoolchild to paint a similarly simplistic map of the world? Which colour will he paint the Islamic world in? Friendly or hostile? And if he does call it hostile, will he make any distinction between ‘‘their’’ Muslims and ‘‘ours’’, friends, foes or neutrals?

Why just schoolchildren, ask any adult Indian that question and the answer would underline a most dangerous national consensus, that somehow all Muslim nations the world over are hostile to India. That the OIC is one tightly knit body leading this pan-Islamic charge against India and that it is this combined might of a hundred crore Muslims the world over that we are up against. Also, that because Pakistan officially treats us as its enemy and swears by the ummah, somehow every other Muslim in the world inevitably thinks so.

As Vajpayee’s visit to Iran reaffirmed this week, nothing could be farther from truth. Listen, first, to what the Iranians said. Not only did they go out of their way to make subtle yet critical references to Pakistan, they even distanced themselves firmly from the Taliban-type fundamentalism. President Khatami, in fact, made an entirely unsolicited reference to growing ‘‘terrorism, violence, rebellion and narcotics trafficking’’ in Afghanistan and added that he was ‘‘deeply regretful that such crimes are committed in the name of Islam’’. He condemned the destruction at Bamiyan a little bit later, but the most significant nuance is that he regretted the use of Islam, not merely in connection with the destruction of the Buddha statues but in the overall context of talibanisation. The Pakistanis, certainly, won’t have liked it. But the lesson for us is that all Muslim countries and, by implication, all Muslims around the world do not think alike. Their respective worldviews are governed by their own national interests, ideologies and historical and cultural linkages.

Throughout the history of mankind, religious monotheism has never implied monolithic politics. Christian states have fought more wars against fellow Christian states than with others. The same is even truer for Islam. The notion of the cast-iron unity of the Islamic world is a reality only in the minds of the lunatics in Nagpur and others of the tribe. It is a hopeless myth and its perpetuation in our national mindset is extremely dangerous.

You do not have to be a scholar to see how divided the Islamic world is. First of all, Islamic societies of the east (Indonesia, Malaysia) think very differently from the rest. The African Islamic countries, particularly the Francophone ones, have their own peculiar concerns, so much so that some of them have taken the lead in establishing flourishing relations even with Israel. Finally, the Middle East is so violently divided, any thought of it standing by any faraway ‘‘Islamic’’ cause unitedly is utterly ludicrous. The more practical GCC nations are driven by their commercial interests. The Saudis are fighting for ideological supremacy in the world of the faithful with Iran. Both Iraq and Iran, militarily the strongest Islamic states, are still officially at war and, in some way or the other, have been so for 13 centuries now. Where does this leave Pakistan’s fantasies of a pan-Islamic encirclement of India and our masochistic notion of the ummah targeting us as the common enemy? In fact, if you look closely at the Islamic world, the only country — such as it is — that may be fully in sync with the Pakistanis is talibanised Afghanistan. This is where the popular Pakistani fantasy of defence-in-depth or what is derided, even by their own liberal intellectuals, as the PIA Pakistan-Iran-Afgha- nistan) alliance, today stands.

Vajpayee is conscious of this and mark, therefore, the manner in which he has kept his message out of the religious, Islamic world paradigm, latching instead on to Khatami’s call (to the western world) for a dialogue among civilisations. It would have been dangerous to hark on the Persian-Indian links that precede Islam. While dealing with Iran you cannot sidestep Islam. But the civilisational framework is a clever one. It would not only fox the Pakistanis but also help us look at a leading Islamic nation in historical terms, as a distinct, old nation-state rather than merely a fortress of fundamentalist Shia Islam.

Once you move beyond the religious straitjacket you look at the convergence or clash of interests in more realistic terms. That has been our emerging equation with Iran for the past six years or so, ever since Narasimha Rao and his then special envoy, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, sought Iran out as an ally at the UN Human Rights Convention in Geneva. It was also no surprise that with his nation still nursing the wounds of Babri, Rao got Rafsanjani to visit India and declare at Lucknow’s Imambara that he had full faith in India’s secularism and the ability of its constitutional system to safeguard its Muslims.

THE real danger in dividing up the world in blocks is that it closes your mind to any creative new solutions or approaches. If the Islamic world is united as the ummah, and hates you, what is the point of going out to engage with its constituents? Funnily, it is the one area of our worldview where public opinion is years behind even the policy making establishment. In the socialist past we had a problem. We thought the louder we shouted in support of the Palestinian cause, the more the Islamic bloc would love us. We failed to see that even then so many Arab countries, including, and notably, Jordan, were cutting deals with the West and burying the hatchet with Israel — in the Palestinians’ back. In any case, our allegedly formidable leverage on the Palestinian cause was a mere delusion in our own minds and nobody took us seriously. It is only since Rao that we began moving away from this, shook hands with Israel and attempted to relate to some Islamic states as if they were nations in their own individual right with their own respective vested interests and insecurities. The distance we have travelled vis-a-vis Iran today is a reward for that.

Forget Reagan for a moment and see how the US, and the West, have sorted out the pan-Islamic threat. They have won over the GCC states with relentless engagement and by using democracy as an unstated blackmail with the ruling royals. Play ball with us or, who knows, when somebody would unleash democracy movements in your sheikhdoms, is the message. Iran and Iraq, on the other hand, are being openly attacked with ‘‘democracy’’ and told to democratise, or else. Democratisation, ironically, is the weapon with which they hope to attack these more egalitarian dictatorships. For Egypt, there is a different formula altogether. Mubarak is a stooge and a dictator who is fully underwritten by Uncle Sam for his support to the cause of an Arab-Israeli rapprochement. What threats does that leave in the Muslim world for the West and its interests, including Israel? A declining Saddam, a weakening Iran and a minor thug called Osama bin Laden.

Would they have been able to come so far if they too, like so many of us, had viewed and feared the Islamic world as a monolith that feels, thinks and acts as one? And, if this was so, would Khatami then have stood beside Vajpayee, condemning the Taliban for misusing Islam to justify their fundamentalist terror, drug-running and violence?

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