Q: You highlight the pluralistic and tolerant nature of Islam but leading trends we see today in Islam seem to be intolerant and sectarian. We can see that here in Pakistan through what is called “Talibanisation” taking root. What makes a Muslim society change in this way?

A: It’s not just Muslim societies that are changing in this way. You have exactly the same trends in the Christian world too, with a growing fundamentalism in the United States. And certainly also growing orthodoxy and militancy in the Jewish world, with a strong, even radical flavour. This is a worldwide trend, I think. This is a particular problem here in Pakistan because, when people feel threatened or feel under attack or feel humiliated, they tend to cling to readily accessible truth. I think religious people throughout the world have this tendency at the moment. We highlight Islam because it suits our ideology and our preconceptions. Islam seems now to be fulfilling the stereotype we’ve had about it for a long time in the Western world. I think really we should look at our own behaviour.

To come back to your earlier question about the attack… The history of so-called fundamentalist religious movements in Judaism, Christianity and Islam shows that when you attack these groups — this includes military force, or even the media — they become more extreme. Most of these extreme movements are rooted in profound fear, a fear of annihilation. In small-town America, there are Christians who believe they are going to be wiped out by the so-called liberal establishment. When one comes after them either with a media attack or guns, this fulfils their worst fears that we really are out to get them, and they go to an extreme. That’s not the way to deal with these religious movements.

Q: Sitting here in Islamabad, we could well be within a couple of hundred miles from where Osama bin Laden is hiding. Do you think it would make any difference to the spread of radical Islam if he was caught tomorrow?

A: No. I don’t think it would make much difference at all. What he has exported is, as it were, a franchise. He doesn’t have to be there telling people what to do. This thing has spread. But it is still important to note that this is a minority movement among Muslims. Gallup has recently done a poll in at least 10 Muslim countries — including Iraq, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia — in which they asked how many of them sympathised with the Sept. 11 attacks. Only eight percent approved. The overwhelming majority — 82 percent — said there was no justification for such attacks. They may not have liked American foreign policy but they did not say that this was justifiable. And interestingly, when followed up, the people who approved of the atrocities highlighted purely secular political reasons; interference, the oppression of Muslim people throughout the world etc.

Those who have opposed these atrocities have almost always cited religious reasons, citing for example the Koranic verse that “to take one life is to destroy a whole world”. As lethal as the al Qaeda product is, it is still a minority pursuit in the Muslim world. The trick in the West is to keep it that way, and to stop a steady bleed away of young disaffected men who feel that the West is against them whether they’re right or wrong.

Q: How do you see Bin Laden in a historical context, in comparison with figures like him who have come before and what they lead to? What can we possibly expect after this?

A: He is a second or perhaps third generation fundamentalist feeding on the ideology of Sayed Qutb, who I don’t think would have approved of these measures. He was a much more thoughtful man. I would see him as a criminal basically, rather than a thinker or ideologue. But it is part of a trend. When I finished my book on fundamentalism in the year 2000, I noted the tendency in fundamentalist movements in all three religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — as moving into a new and more extreme phase, a far more lawless phase. Then, lo and behold, Sept. 11 happened.

There are similar, utterly radical movements tending towards criminality and amorality and immorality that have happened in the Christian world, where fundamentalism is going into a post-fundamentalism phase very different from Jerry Falwell’s 1970s style of fundamentalism.

Q: Where are the regions that you are particularly worried about that trend?

A: Well I think that is a problem throughout the Middle East and in certain states of the United States. These movements tend to become lethal when they rise up in a
region where violence has become endemic or chronic, like Afghanistan, like the Middle East, which as been subjected to war for years, or like the Gaza Strip. When violence becomes endemic in a region, this affects everything people do. Religion tends to get sucked into the escalating violence and becomes part of the problem.

It’s less a religious movement in the case of Osama, or people like Hamas or Hezbollah, though these are different movements and I don’t put them in the same bracket as al Qaeda. They’re a form of religiously articulated nationalism, religiously articulated identity politics rather than the more strictly religious inspiration of earlier fundamentalists.

Most fundamentalists — I don’t like this term but we’ll use it for now — are not violent. The vast majority of fundamentalists, whether they be Jewish, Christian or Muslim, do not take part in acts of terror. Only a tiny minority do that. Most of them are simply concerned to live what they regard as a good religious life in a world that seems
increasingly hostile to religion.

Q: After Sept 11, many people in the West rushed out to buy a copy of Koran….

A: No. In America, not in the UK and not in Europe.

Q: Does it make much sense on a day-to-day basis to analyse the acts of radical Islamists through the Koran?

A: No, I don’t think it does. Of course, you can look into Scriptures and fish out any verse here or there to justify anything. But you can’t really sit down and read the Koran at home. The Koran means recitation, it means it should be recited, it should be listened to. The chant is important. You don’t sit down and start at page one and flog through it until your reach page 320. The Koran deliberately repeats itself and you listen to a little bit at a time. And over the years of a lifetime, the message of the whole seeps into your soul. And that is the way people read the Bible too, before the invention of printing made it possible for everyone to own his or her own Bible, and before universal literacy enabled everyone to read it for themselves.

Hitherto, people listened to their Scriptures. They didn’t just pick out their favourite bits or flip through to find everything they could on jihad. They had to listen to the whole thing in context. The Koran actually directs Muslims not to grasp immediately at a superficial understanding of a verse, but to see how each verse fitted into the whole. They should not pick at random and out of context, denying the far greater number of verses that speak of compassion and respect and the importance of laying down your arms the moment the enemy sues for peace, and the importance of forgiveness and talking things out. War is always, in the Koran, an awesome evil.

So, I can see people would want to rush out and seek, but they would come back from the Koran baffled, because it’s not the kind of book that is meant to be perused just by reading it.

Q: You mentioned Sayyid Qutb earlier, in terms of what bin Laden and Zawahri now stand for. Do you think it would be useful to look through his texts to understand what radical Islamists are doing?

A: Yes, I think we should look at Qutb’s text, because he is one of the people who helped to craft Sunni fundamentalist Islam. But remember that this was not born in a rich man’s house, as people say of bin Laden, this was born in prison. Sayyid Qutb was imprisoned by Nasser and finally executed by Nasser. He was subjected to physical and mental torture. At one point, he was hung upside down. He suffered from various horrible prison diseases for about 15 years. He went into the camp as a moderate, and within the camp he became a radical, a fundamentalist.

That’s what I mean — to attack these groups, round up people in an indiscriminate way and throw them into jail, as Nasser did, is to court the danger of making things worse.

As I say, Qutb went into the camp as a moderate and developed his fundamentalist ideology largely as a result of his prison experiences. When he looked around this really unpleasant prison and heard at the same time Nasser vowing to secularise Egypt on the Western model and push Islam into the private sphere, secularism didn’t seem the benign ideology that it has been to people like me. It seemed literally lethal. One of the problems in the Middle East is that the secularism that we adopted very slowly, bit by bit, piece by piece — our secular institutions emerged over a period two or three centuries — it has been done too quickly. It has often felt like, and been experienced by people, as an assault upon religion.

Q: Last autumn, a group of 138 Muslim scholars wrote to Christian leaders urging a serious theological dialogue with them so the two faiths could get to understand each other. Some Christians accepted the invitation unconditionally, while the Vatican accepted with reservations because some there seemed to think that a real theological dialogue with Islam isn’t possible. Do you think the Muslim and Christian scholars can have real theological dialogue now?

A: I hope so, otherwise we’re really up a gum tree, and it would mean that those religious traditions had failed. One must always be prepared to listen and to realise that nobody has the last word on truth. When we’re talking about God, we’re talking about the transcendent. As the Muslims say “Allahu akbar.” God is always greater than anything we can conceive.

The only hope we have is to talk, but talking also means listening. Very often a dialogue becomes a diatribe when people just want to get across their point of view without listening fully. In a true dialogue, as in an ordinary relationship, if there is a (disagreement), the only way of patching it up is to really listen to what your partner may be saying and be prepared to accept the fact that you may be wrong, too. If they are not prepared to do this they are failing their tradition. Jesus said “love your enemies, if you like only people who like you, there is no merit in that”.

Very often you can imagine a Muslim and a Christian sitting around and the Christian says” we believe Jesus is the son of God” and the Muslim says “we don’t” and that’s the end of the matter. Whereas if you’re both working together on a local project for peace, for Middle Eastern peace and your eyes are on a common goal, then you begin to discover commonalities that go beyond mere beliefs and hard line positions.

Religious traditions can very easily become a kind of idolatry, standing in the way of the transcendence of God. We often prefer a man-made system to the transcendent demand for universal compassion, which is what all the faiths teach.

Q: Since 9/11, has there been anything on the upside in terms of greater awareness between the faiths?

A: Yes, I do think so. For example, when I go to the United States, which I’ve been going to several times a year since Sept. 11, there is in about 50 percent of the population a real desire to understand and to learn. Americans are religiously sensitive, in a way that Europeans often aren’t. There is, therefore, an understanding there that you can build upon.

When the word Pakistan is mentioned in the U.K., the word usually conjures up trouble of some sort. Extremism is there, suicide bombing, etc. This afternoon, in the middle of this horrible period with tragedies just unresolved behind us, there was a whole room full of people filled with utter goodwill, yearning to hear a friendly Western voice, longing for something different. The politicians may be stirring things up, but I think on the ground, as one of the questioners asked me this afternoon, there are grounds for optimism.

More Americans know about Islam than they did six years ago. Admittedly, when something happens like the Danish cartoons, or this Dutch film which is about to break upon us, then both sides will show themselves at their worst. But that will only be the
extreme tip. There’s always a majority in the middle ground.

This afternoon, I spoke of the Gallup poll conducted during the Danish cartoon crisis in which the vast majority of Danes who were questioned were passionately concerned that speech should be free and there should be freedom of expression without censorship. But at the same time they were distressed that so much offence had been given. And similarly, 97 percent of the Muslim youth who were questioned by Gallup said that while they were offended by the cartoons, they deplored the violence of some of the protesters. Now that’s the voice we need to hear. At the moment, what’s happening on all sides is that extremists are tending to set the agenda, leaving out this middle ground which is the majority, and which is where peace will come. But when you travel around, you encounter this majority.

It would be a very different matter if I went up to tribal territories, the north, I’m quite aware of that. But on the other hand, who would have thought that people would allow a Western woman to come and tell them about their Prophet 10 years ago? There is a readiness for peace if only politicians would harvest that instead of pursuing their own short term goals.

Q: With the extremists setting the agenda, do you think we’re still at a point when divisions are widening instead of coming together?

A: It’s hard to say. There is a basic imbalance in the world that is political rather than religious or ideological. There’s an imbalance of power. There are ongoing unresolved political conflicts, like the Arab-Israeli conflict, which feed into a growing disaffection or malaise or hopelessness and become symbolic. If those conflicts could be sorted out equitably, then I think we’d see a change. We have to realise, whether we like it or not, that we’re in the same boat. We’re all sharing one world.

This is a new feeling for us in the West to feel vulnerable. Hitherto, the disasters and the violence, apart from our world wars, tended to happen quite a way away. Now we know that what happens today in Afghanistan or Iraq will very likely have repercussions in London, or Washington or New York tomorrow. We are interconnected. Our markets are interconnected. One market has a wobble and there’s a ripple throughout the world.

We are both polarised and divided as never before. And the sense is to realise this, to understand that unless we mend our ways we are not going to have viable world to hand on to our children.

Q: You mentioned politicians not listening to people. Do you think that the world needs to move on from those politicians associated with events of the last 6 1/2 years?

A: Yes I do, because all of them have become a bit tainted. The secret of it all, of course, lies in the United States, with it being the superpower. And there is, I think, ignorance about certain issues, Middle Eastern questions etc, because Americans are not very curious about the outside world. Many of them are waking up to the fact that, for their own survival, they’ve got to know more. To really make a difference you’ve got to have someone come into the presidency prepared to do one term, courting massive popularity, perhaps even get assassinated — that being the way that Americans sometime deal with politicians of a liberal cast — but make himself a sacrifice for the world to get some things changed in a radical way.

I think one of the things we’ve seen is the barrenness of nationalism. We’ve seen that in Europe for some time. In Europe, nationalism was one of the really bad ideas of the 19th century. National feeling, patriotism and jingoism caused two major world wars. Now many of us are retreating and trying to form a European Union. That’s a ray of hope. Just think (back) a hundred years ago, when we Europeans were getting ready to slaughter each other in unprecedented numbers — to think that one day we’d be sitting together, wrangling about currency problems and living together!

If Europeans can do it, it can happen in the Middle East too. But unfortunately, just as we were retreating from the nationalist dream, we planted it in places like the Middle East and said, now form a nation state. And America now has still very much got the nationalistic bug.

A lot of the religious fundamentalists movements are really a form of religiously articulated patriotism. The Christian fundamentalists have a very different view of the United States than the Washington administration. They don’t like democracy. The Jewish Zionists have a very different view of how they see Israel and want a particularly religious Israel, and similarly here (in Pakistan). It is not only the Islamic world that is falling prey to this idea that the secular ideology of 19th century nationalism that has failed us in Europe.

It wasn’t a great idea. It was never a great idea in the Muslim world. It had no roots. It was an alien import. Now people are trying to find other ways of saying: why are we Pakistanis? Why are we Iraqis? Why are we Israelis?

Q: When you spoke to a Pakistani audience today, was their any particular points you wanted to make to them?

A: I suppose what I’d like to say ultimately was in the Gandhi quote that I finished with: “You must yourself be the change that you want to see in the world.”

If you want to see a more pluralistic tolerant world, you yourself have to become peaceful and pluralistic in your outlook.

Islam has a tradition of looking very critically at current events and using that creatively and always in the past it has been able to come back from the brink, to come back from
disasters, even after the Mongol disaster in the 13th Century.

Against the West, it has been butting itself in vain. The late Wilfred Cantwell Smith — who was a Canadian theologian and historian of religion, head of comparative religion at Harvard and a great mentor of mine — already sensed this growing malaise in a very prescient book written before the Suez crisis. He finished his book by saying if the Arabs in particular, and the Islamic world in general, do not somehow come to terms better with the fact of the West, they will fail the test of the 20th century. But equally, if the Christian world and the West do not realise that they share the planet not with inferiors but with equals, they too will have failed the test of the 20th Century.

I think that the events of Sept. 11 showed that we all failed that test.

Now we cannot keep on hanging on to those old colonial ideas that we in the West are superior or that somehow the West is infidel. That means divesting ourselves of a little bit of our pride, nationalistic pride, religious pride. But that’s what religion is about.

Q: I know you are not an expert on Pakistan and have only visited a couple of times, but you met with President Musharraf today, during those discussions did you get a sense of the crisis that Pakistan is undergoing and what the possible answers to it might be it.

A: No. We had half an hour and he was mostly concerned with speaking about religion and he was mostly concerned, as am I, with the Western carelessness in their speech about religion, because this is endangering all our security. This feeds the sense that the West is inimically against us.

Again, there is a failure to recognise the position of Pakistan, a lack of historical perspective. We often look at the suicide bombings, the (Bhutto) assassination and think, what barbarous people. But you fail to look at the fact that for a long time Pakistan was facing a threat from India, a threat from the Soviet Union, was cooperating on a frontier basis and is a new state founded out of immense disruption and tragedy, in which we are a bit implicated, we British.

Out of that, it’s not a long time, it’s a very bad beginning for a state. It takes time to develop stable institutions, just as it took us a very long time in Europe to develop our secular democratic institutions. We didn’t have that kind of displacement.

Q: You lectured about tolerance in Islam in a historical perspective. Have you found a consistent pattern of non-religious factors — political, economic, social or otherwise — that seem to bring out the intolerant side of a religion?

A: When people are attacked, they tend to retreat into denominations. It’s insecurity, I think. Also egos. Long long ago, the Taoist sages of China, in the 3rd century BCE, said that we really interject ourselves far too strongly with our opinions. This is egotism and it is ego that stands in the way of enlightenment.

There is a huge temptation for religious people to prefer to be right rather than compassionate, compassion being the main demand made on them by all their great traditions. Often people go for the easier option of feeling right and when they feel imperilled then they can become aggressive about it.

Q: Could you please expand on your description of Israel as a secular state?

A: Israel is a secular state, and they are very proud of that. It was set up by Ben Gurion very definitely as a secular state. Ben Gurion definitely thought that religion would wither away once Jews got into their own land. The first Zionists were very, very anti-religious. Zionism was considered deeply unorthodox, so that real ultra-orthodox saw Hitlerism as a punishment for Zionism. Ben Gurion gave subsidies to the orthodox, (thinking) “let them have their little yeshivas and it will die out”.

Not at all! After the 1967 war, there was a major religious revival. There is a massive divide now between secular Israelis and religious Israelis. Secular Israelis have said to me they feel more in common with the Palestinians than with the orthodox — and vice versa. (This is happening) because people are saying: what does it mean to have a Jewish state?

And what does it mean to have a Muslim state is perhaps the great question Muslims are asking themselves. How you create a good Muslim state in the modern world is a major religious question. Ultimately, as (Ayatollah) Khomeini found, you have to secularise to a degree to run a modern state. There’s a dynamic to it. That means that ulema can’t keep popping in. Khomeini just before his death, at the same time that he was fulminating that dreadful anti-Rushdie fatwa, he was also telling the clerics to keep their noses out defence and economics. Stick to what you know, he said.

He was learning that there had to be a degree of secularisation. That’s the way the modern state works. And that’s a major change, because the separation of religion is a modern analytic thing that wouldn’t have occurred to people before where religion was just a way of life. People are just being religious and it imbues all their way of life.

Now we say: “No, compartmentalise it.” We’re so used to it in our rather secular countries, but that’s a big change for religious people.

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