Shibley Telhami (GTU M.A. ‘78) is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland-College Park, and is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has taught at several universities, including Cornell, Princeton, Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in political science.

Telhami has served as advisor to the United States Mission to the United Nations, and has published extensively on foreign policy and Middle Eastern affairs. His book, The Stakes: America in the Middle East, was rated as one of the five best books on the Middle East by Foreign Affairs in 2003. In it, he examines Arab and Muslim perceptions of the United States as they relate to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Iraq, and the War on Terrorism. He is a contributor to a recent volume entitled Liberty and Power: A Dialogue on Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy in an Unjust World.

Dr. Telhami spoke at the GTU on Nov. 15, 2004; following are excerpts from his talk.

After finishing my studies for the master’s degree at the GTU, I wanted to see if I could understand the conflict in the Middle East through the lens of religious movements. In 1976 and 1977, I spent time in the Middle East, looking at Islam and Judaism in Egypt and Israel. I concluded that the real key to understanding the conflict was not religion, which is why I went on to get my doctorate in political science at the University of California at Berkeley. While religion played a role and was certainly being used as an instrument, it wasn't the driving force of the conflict in the region.

I want to propose that we always underestimate the extent to which what we see as a religious phenomenon is really an organized political phenomenon—the power of religion as an organized social and political force, rather than religion as a set of convictions. And that applies here in America as well. In the Middle East the rise of religious power, including Islamic organizations, whether it be in Iran or in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, is most often a function of their organizational capacity in the absence of alternatives.

Religion is a force in society, to be sure, and that explains why the organizations are important to begin with. Organizations play a role in society, particularly in authoritarian societies where there is very little alternative way to organize opposition. Religious institutions, by virtue of their being outside the realm of what the government can fully control, become the natural path of opposition. And so political entrepreneurs use them to mobilize, and most of the time people don't tell the difference between convictions and political intent.

If one examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which I think is at the core of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict, the reason there was hope in the 1990s was a function of a secular interpretation of the conflict: that this was a nationalist conflict of self-determination over land, and it could be therefore satisfied through political compromise. And that was the notion that made it possible to negotiate. That nationalist paradigm of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which evolved over time, was the key reason for creating a possible solution.

What we have seen since the collapse of negotiations since 2000 is that the whole package of secular nationalism is increasingly on the defensive, and is being replaced by a new definition of the conflict set largely in religious and ethnic terms, most often as Jewish-Muslim conflict. If that is allowed to take place, I think it is going to be extremely troubling because it has implications for the type of political coalitions that are going to face each other, and it has a troubling consequence for the possibility of compromise.

Beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict, I suggest that what we are seeing in Arab and Muslim countries today is not the rise in Islamic fundamentalism as such. Certainly there is religiousity in the region that may have its own causes. But the broader phenomenon we are seeing is the rise of what I call “Islamic nationalism”—Islam as an organizing principle for political movement that is highly nationalistic. At the core, this is a response to a perceived imperial intervention from the outside, and a symptom of the failure of the states to meet the aspirations of their citizens.

If I am right, this has very important consequences because we are confusing two types of distinctly different groups in our policy. On the one hand, there is the vast majority of people who are organizing themselves and rallying behind the name of Islam as a political force and nationalistic force, but not for puritanical religious reasons. Their aims may be more local, more nationalistic, more a yearning for independence. Bin Ladenism, on the other hand, is a puritanical force that is trying to bring about an Islamic order that would destroy the existing political order in the region, and sees the United States as the anchor of that order. The latter are a minority. But by virtue of not making that separation, we are helping them come together. Similarly, most of the opposition in Iraq is clearly nationalistic, with only a marginal, small part linked to bin Ladenism. But because our policies do not make that clear distinction, we are beginning to force these two groups together, at least among Sunnis. My fear is that this paves the way for an unnecessary, costly, and avoidable “civilizational” clash between Islamic countries and the U.S.

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