E-mail a friendNoah Feldman
airdate April 10, 2008
An expert on Islamic thought, Noah Feldman is a Harvard law professor and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of several books, including After Jihad, What We Owe Iraq and, his latest, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. Following the '03 invasion of Iraq, Feldman helped write the country's new constitution. The Rhodes Scholar graduated from Harvard College and received his J.D. from Yale Law School.
Noah Feldman
Tavis: Noah Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard and a frequent contributor to "The New York Times" magazine. He also served as an advisor in the writing of the Iraqi constitution. His new book is called "The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State." He joins us tonight from Cambridge. Noah Feldman, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Noah Feldman: Thank you for having me.
Tavis: My pleasure. Let me start by asking some basics here, so make sure we're all on the same page here. When you say, "the fall and the rise of the Islamic state," I want to get the rise and the fall in just a moment. Let's start about what we're defining as, what you're defining as, the Islamic state.
Feldman: Any state where the constitution makes Islam the source of law and where the laws are supposed to fit in with Islam to qualifies for me as an Islamic state. And for many, many years, for more than a millennium, the Islamic world had constitutions that worked like that, but they weren't written constitutions, they were unwritten constitutions that made Islam the basis for the state.
Tavis: That begs the obviously question. When you say any state that has Islam as its faith, constitutionally, does that mean that we can then pack them all, group them all together as the Islamic state? I suspect there must be differences, ebbs and flows, in these various states, yes?
Feldman: Completely, and those are both across history over time - different states that you could call Islamic have been different from each other - and it's also, even at the present time, you have lots of differences across Islamic countries. So when I'm describing a common set of ideas, they are shaped and different from place to place but they still have enough in common that I think you can speak about them as a family of Islamic states without too much distorting what's really going on there.
Tavis: Give me the range, then, of the things they have in common, as juxtaposed against the things that really set them off as being uniquely different states.
Feldman: Well size, I think, is probably the biggest difference. Muslim countries, the majority of Muslim countries today, range in size from little city-states, like the ones in the Gulf - like Kuwait or Dubai, which are Islamic but are tiny, they might have a population of just a few hundred thousand citizens - to enormous states that might as many as 80 or 100 million people in them.
So you've got a lot of differences in size. The other thing is they differ with respect to how much of an official role Islam plays. Almost all of the states I'm talking about say that Islam is the official religion, and in almost all of them, the government supports the mosque and supports religious education. But in some, the version of religion that has an impact at the highest levels is a very, very conservative version, and in others it's a much more moderate version.
Tavis: So they say size matters. In this instance, does it?
Feldman: I think it does, because the way things are going to operate in a place with a lot of oil revenue and a few citizens is going to be one way. It's not going to require the government to listen very much to its citizens. By contrast, if you're a big country like Egypt with almost 100 million people in it and you don't have oil revenue and yet you have to gather taxes from your citizens, you have to be a little bit more responsive to what your citizens want from you. So I think it does make a big difference.
Tavis: So the title of the book suggests that - well, not suggests, the title is "The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State." Did the fall come before the rise?
Feldman: It sure did. There was an Islamic state for 1,000 years, from the time of the Prophet Mohammed when he organized the Muslim community in the 7th century right up until the end of the 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire, which is the last of the great Muslim empires, finally came to its collapse in World War I.
So that was the fall - long period of success before what I'm describing as the fall. Then there's a gap of 50 or 60 years in which countries in the Muslim world were mostly secular in orientation. And then beginning with the Iranian revolution in 1979 and continuing ever since, you've got more and more states in the Muslim world declaring themselves Islamic states and adopting provisions in their constitution that make them Islamic.
Tavis: Tell me what precipitated the fall.
Feldman: One thing that brought down the Ottoman Empire at the most fundamental level is that European powers were growing and the Ottoman Empire wasn't gaining the kind of technological advantages, the kind of financial advantages, the kind of military advantages that it took to remain as a world empire.
So some of that was inevitable just in the ebb and flow of great powers. But on the other hand, something that brought down the distinctively Islamic character of the Ottoman Empire were attempts to reform the empire and make it more western. So paradoxically, it was right when the Muslim world was trying to becoming more western that it was becoming essentially the beginning of its own failures.
Tavis: Tell me more about the rise, and as you talk about the rise help me define what you mean by "the rise." How are you defining that?
Feldman: The rise is slow; it's not happening all in one go. What we're seeing is that in countries in the Muslim world that allow, for example, relatively free elections as we have had in Afghanistan and as we've had in Iraq - under terrible conditions, but nevertheless relatively free elections - people have been voting for political parties who advocate the use of Sharia, Islamic law, as a key element of determining the way the state should be constructed.
And they want it to be a basis for laws in the state and they want a constitutional court or a supreme court that will supervise those laws to make sure they actually conform with Islamic law. So as more and more countries act in that way, I think we're seeing the rise of what I'm calling the new Islamic state.
Tavis: This book obviously has a dateline on it of 2008 - I mean a publication date of 2008. Does that mean - do you mean to suggest, then, by the title and the book coming out this year that what we are witnessing as we speak is the rise of the Islamic state?
Feldman: Yes. I think Islamic states are still very much on the rise, and that's even true where the U.S., for example, doesn't want them to. In both Afghanistan and Iraq the U.S. wanted secular governments, but when it came time to actually ask the people of those countries what kind of governments they wanted, they voted overwhelmingly for states that gave a very important and prominent role to Islam. So I think you're definitely seeing a trend that's growing, and the more free elections there are in the majority of Muslim countries, the more such developments you're likely to see.
Tavis: I suspect when we get a new president in the White House come next January the answer to this question might change, and so maybe we'll have you back on then. But as the Bush administration goes, as they are concerned, what is the best thing about the rise and what's the most challenging thing about the rise for this particular administration?
Feldman: The best thing about it is that it does actually reflect a democratic impulse in the region, and the one thing that the Bush administration has been able to cling to through all of our failures and difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan has been that we enabled the peoples of those countries actually to make some choices for themselves.
And in this one case I think it's fair to say that that's true. It's actually true that the folks in those countries were picking what they wanted, which was more Islam, and not what we wanted them to pick, which was a secular form of government. The downside, though, from the Bush administration standpoint is that the governments that are elected that are pro-Islam are not always pro-U.S.
They might actually be somewhat skeptical of the U.S. and of our policies, and the more democracy we have in the region the more we have to accept that lots of ordinary people actually don't like us or don't like the things that we do, at least.
Tavis: And so as Americans, how are we going about, you think, from your perspective, how are we doing with accepting that reality? That if we push democracy on people and they choose it, by whatever form they want to choose it, under whatever definition they want to have democracy under, that it means, to your point, that they're not necessarily going to like us. How are we doing in accepting that reality?
Feldman: I would say not real well. Recently in Pakistan we found ourselves supporting President Musharraf because we thought it was good for our national interest as he was getting less and less and less popular with each passing day. And then when there were elections, of course his party was strongly repudiated by a public that thought that he was too closely allied with the United States.
So it's slow process. The bright side of it, though, the one good thing I would say about our acceptance is that we are working closely with governments in Iraq and Afghanistan that are full of people who actually don't care for us very much, that are full of people who prefer an Islamic form of government, and we are working with them, actually very closely.
So that suggests that if we really have no choice, if our backs are against the wall, we the United States actually are able to accept and deal with governments whose values are very different from our own.
Tavis: And in those places where there's a list of countries that we're not dealing so well with because they've elected people that we don't like, what is at the center of why we don't like them? I know this question can be answered - there's a different answer for every state, but if there is a general principle for why it is that we're not getting along so well with those countries that have elected people that profess this faith that we don't like, why is that?
Feldman: It really varies, I think, as you suggested, Tavis. I mean, I think the most important reason is that people who are responsible, elected officials who are responsible to a public that sees our policies in Iraq, for example, as wrong - publics that don't want to see the United States involved in Iraq, the government of those folks, if it's democratically elected, is going to say so.
They're going to say that they're unhappy with our presence there. And frankly, even in Iraq, where we support the government, when those guys go off and run for office, they make it really clear to their constituents how think really feel about us and that believe me, that's not too positive. So I think that's probably the most significant feature of it.
More broadly, though, people perceive the United States all over the world, not just in the Muslim world, as throwing our weight around, maybe more than we should. And of course people want us to throw our weight around when it's convenient, less so when it's not convenient for them. But the sense that the United States is a great and powerful superpower that tries to do whatever it wants I think has cost us a lot. I think we could often accomplish almost exactly the same things that we want to accomplish if we frame them a little differently.
Tavis: Let me ask, since you raised Iraq, what your role was back some time ago in helping to write the Iraqi constitution, and if my facts are straight here, what brought that role to, shall I say, an abrupt end?
Feldman: well, when I first went out to Iraq I was actually going out to work with Jay Garner, the U.S. general who was briefly in charge of reconstruction in Iraq. And shortly after I arrived he was replaced by Ambassador Bremer to work as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. And I was supposed to be a constitutional advisor to help give advice on how the U.S. should be thinking about what the Iraqi constitutional process was going to look like.
And I did that in four months in 2003, right after Saddam's statue fell, until it became really clear, I think both to me and to the people that I was working for, that I would be able to make a better contribution if I wasn't seen as the U.S. guy working on the Iraqi constitution but just as an independent citizen working in concert with independent Iraqis, who were working on their constitutional process.
So I left the government role and I shifted over to working on an individual and pro bono basis for the Iraqis, who actually ended up being involved in the drafting first of the interim constitution and then eventually of the final constitution there.
Tavis: Let me offer, then, a two-part exit question, Noah. One, what the trajectory is, as you see it, for the rise that we are witnessing now of the Islamic state, and along with that what is the one thing that the U.S. had better understand better than we do at the moment about whatever that first answer is?
Feldman: The key point about the trajectory of the rise is that wherever you have free elections in the Muslim world you're going to see lots of people voting for parties that say they want Islamic law, that they want the Sharia in place. What we need to keep in mind about that, in answer to your second question, what we need to keep in mind about that is that when they do so they are looking for the rule of law.
They are looking for the things people everywhere are looking for: a government that's responsible to the law, that isn't above the law, in which there's a balance of powers and which people feel they can go to court and get treated fairly. We are better off as a country when we support people in that effort, and we have to keep our eyes on the prize and realize that if we support people who want the rule of law we're going to have allies in the region, and if we don't, we're going to have people who don't like us very much.
Tavis: His name, of course, is Noah Feldman. The new book by Mr. Feldman, "The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State." Noah Feldman, thank you for the text and thanks for your insight.
Feldman: Thank you very much.
Back to April 10, 2008