Asia Times Special

Asia Times:
Iraq loses its voice of reason

By Sami Moubayed
Sep 6, 2006

DAMASCUS - The saddest news coming from Iraq is the decision of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to cease all political activity and restrict himself to his religious duties in Shi'ite Islam. He said this weekend: "I will not be a political leader anymore. I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters."

If Sistani lives up to his word, this means silencing the loudest - and only - remaining voice of reason and moderation in Iraqi politics. This is the same man who used his paramount influence to silence the guns of two Shi'ite insurgencies in 2004. He then wisely ordered his supporters to vote in last years national elections, claiming that it was a "religious duty" to join the political process and jump-start democratic life in Iraq.

This same wise man, who is a democrat at heart, insisted that women, too, must have their say in politics and that they should vote in elections. If their husbands, brothers or fathers forbade them from voting, then it was their right (as authorized by Sistani) to say no and to head to the ballots without approval (something frowned on among conservative Muslims).

Never supportive of the US occupation of Iraq, he nevertheless decided to cooperate honorably with the Americans (in anticipation of their eventual withdrawal), knowing that violence would not defeat them or make them go away.

Honorable cooperation, to a Ghandian leader like Sistani, was certainly more rewarding - and less costly - than a military insurgency. His political endorsement was all that was needed for any politician to win the parliamentary elections of 2005 and 2006, and he is considered the guiding force behind the broad coalition of religious Shi'ites known as the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) that has been in power for the past two years.

Recently, however, Sistani has been both angry and disappointed at the UIA for failing to bring law, order and security to Iraq. He is appalled by the rising power of Shi'ite militias in the streets of Baghdad.

In July alone, more than 3,000 Iraqis were killed by rival militias from the Sunni and Shi'ite communities. A report released by the Pentagon on Friday showed that the real problem in Iraq is no longer an armed al-Qaeda- and Ba'athist-led insurgency fighting the Americans and the Iraqi government. It is now Iraqi Sunnis fighting against Iraqi Shi'ites - meaning, Iraq is now in civil war.

The Pentagon report noted that the attacks had risen to 792 per week and casualties were almost 150 Iraqis killed per day. Such startling facts are troubling for someone like Sistani, who hates violence and has repeatedly called for it to stop.

But his calls are falling on deaf ears. The biggest example was when fighting broke out on August 28 between Iraqi soldiers and the supporters of Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr in Diwaniyya, 160 kilometers south of Baghdad. Sistani called for calm. Nobody listened to him, and as a result 73 people were killed.

The other reason Sistani has decided to retreat from political life is that he is being greatly overshadowed by the younger, more populist Muqtada, who is 42 years his junior. Hailing from a strong dynastic family that once worked in opposition to Saddam Hussein, Muqtada rose to fame after the US invasion of 2003 as a loud anti-American leader.

He created a militia of his own, the Mehdi Army, and waged war on the Americans and the pro-US cabinet of prime minister Iyad Allawi in 2004. Under Sistani's mediation, the conflict came to an end and Muqtada was allowed to live in peace, while a warrant for his arrest was dropped.

Muqtada has since entered the political process with astounding success and holds 30 seats in parliament, as well as four portfolios held by his supporters in the cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Muqtada meets his supporters every day and distributes favors to all those around him. He operates a strong charity network, cares for the families of those who are wounded or killed in combat, and has build a name for himself as an uncorrupted leader who lives a monastic life.

He uses - with great skill - the "patron-client" system of Arab politics, offering the masses his protection in exchange for their allegiance. As a man of religion who should appeal to all Shi'ites, and not only his supporters, Sistani cannot do that.

When Iraqis come to Sistani telling them that a Sunni militant murdered one of their family, the grand cleric tells them to go to the police. Muqtada, however, promises revenge. He then sends out his own militiamen to avenge the killing, further endearing him to the masses.

Sistani is well connected to the older generation of upper-middle-class Iraqis in the Shi'ite community. He also has friends and followers among the rich urban elite. He is well connected to Iran.

Muqtada, however, is popular in the slums of Baghdad and among the unemployed youth who see salvation in Muqtada and the Mehdi Army. The reason is simple: when lawlessness prevails, the masses search for people who can protect them.

In a country like Iraq, Sistani means guidance, while Muqtada means protection. Life to the Iraqis is more important than wisdom.

The Independent quoted one of his aids when asked whether Sistani could prevent civil war in Iraq: "Honestly, I think not. He is very angry, very disappointed." He was further quoted saying: "He [Sistani] asked the politicians to ask the Americans to make a timetable for leaving [Iraq] but they disappointed him." He added: "After the war, the politicians were visiting him every month. If they wanted to do something, they visited him. But no one has visited him for two or three months. He is very angry that this is happening now. He sees this as very bad."

Saddam dreaded Sistani because the cleric had backed a Shi'ite rebellion against him in 1991. Inasmuch as he would have loved to assassinate Sistani, Saddam could not do that because this would have created certain civil war in Ba'athist Iraq. This was something Saddam could not afford, coming out of eight years of the Iran-Iraq War and the fiasco of invading Kuwait and then being defeated by the Americans in 1991.

Nor could Saddam make Sistani disappear in the way Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi did to Imam Musa al-Sadr, another Shi'ite cleric, in 1978. Instead, Saddam put Sistani under house arrest, shut down his mosque and forbade him from preaching.

The Shi'ite leader remained in seclusion until Saddam was toppled in March 2003. He has since reinforced his authority over Shi'ites throughout the region, sending emissaries to Iran to meet with the clergy, and relying on state-of-the-art technology to market his leadership through the Internet.

This is mainly done through a multi-language website called Sistani.org, which attracts more than 3 million people from Iran alone every month. Sistani receives hundreds of visitors at his home in Najaf every day, but does not go out, rarely gives interviews and rarely poses for the cameras. His office is Internet-wired and his aides are often on Google, surfing the 'Net to brief him on the latest updates taking place around the world.

Still, however, the difference between Muqtada and Sistani is great. Although Sistani's "honorable cooperation" is no longer popular among grassroot Shi'ites, he is still looked up to as an ultimate authority on religious affairs, even by Muqtada.

Muqtada does not match him in religious legitimacy, although some of his supporters have recently started to call him "Sayyed Muqtada" to give him an honorary religious title. He remains, however, a nobody in religious affairs, while Sistani is the supreme master, not only in Iraq but throughout the Muslim World.

Sistani is one of the brains of Shi'ite Islam, matched only by the Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the other grand ayatollah of Iranian politics who had been the chosen successor to the Islamic Republic's founder Ruhollah Khomeini.

Sistani, who is an Iranian living in Iraq, was seen by Iraqis as a foreigner because he speaks Arabic with a Persian accent, and does not even hold an Iraqi passport. When people say, however, that Sistani is a follower of Iran, this is not very correct. The truth is that Iran follows Sistani, because of his paramount standing as a religious authority on Shi'ite Islam.

Sistani and Muqtada stand on different ground when it comes to Iran and the status of the Shi'ite community in Iraq.

Muqtada is greatly opposed to creating an autonomous Shi'ite district in southern Iraq, something that has been lobbied for by Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Hakim is a creation of Iran and an ally of Sistani. His family is also the historical contender to Shi'ite leadership in Iraq against the family of Muqtada.

The young Muqtada believes in a united and Arabist Iraq. He pays little more than lip service to the mullahs of Tehran, arguing that they should not interfere in domestic politics. Both men have an ultimate goal of creating an Iran-style theocracy in Iraq. Sistani wants it influenced and controlled by Iran, while Muqtada wants it to be independent from Tehran. This brings the two men further apart when added to how they view the US occupation of Iraq. While both may be equally opposed to it, each deals with this occupation in a very different manner.

Historically, one must remember that it was Sistani who saved Muqtada from the hangman's noose in 2004. Muqtada went to war in April 2004 and Sistani ordered a ceasefire that went into effect in May. That August, however, Sistani went to London for surgery and before reaching Heathrow Airport, fighting had resumed between the Americans and the Sadrists.

Some speculated that Sistani's journey to London at such a time was deliberate: a green light to the Americans to launch a full assault on Muqtada. If the Americans won, then Sistani would have rid himself of a noisy challenger in Shi'ite politics. If they lost (which was impossible) then he would get rid of the Americans.

What happened was a different story. During Sistani's absence, more fighting broke out. On his return, when Muqtada and his men were stranded in combat, Sistani stepped in at the last moment to end the crisis. He secured another ceasefire, a pardon for Muqtada, and his continuation in the political life of Iraq.

Sistani was sending Muqtada a message: "I saved you in a minute, and if I wish, I can also destroy you in a minute. Do not get too strong or overambitious. I am No 1 in the Shi'ite community of Iraq."

This message reached Muqtada loud and clear in 2004. Fate - and US mishandling of Iraq - which leaves no room for "honorable cooperation" anymore, played directly into the hands of Muqtada, making him "No 1" in the Shi'ite community of Iraq.

Postscript: This author submitted a question by e-mail to Sistani.org, asking the ayatollah whether, if history repeats itself, he would step in to save Muqtada again, the way he did in 2004. In other words, did he regret his "wisdom" in 2004? To date, there has been no answer.

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Bush's Hezbollah hangover

By Ashraf Fahim

CAIRO - It is now the long morning after for President George W Bush and his merry band of misguided Middle East grand strategists, who gambled big by letting the Israeli army run wild in Lebanon and came up empty.

As in Iraq, circa March 2003, the Arab world was supposed to have been shocked and awed by an almighty display of US-made firepower, with the uppity Islamists rather than the uppity Arab nationalists on the receiving end this time around.

Hezbollah would wilt beneath the firestorm and Lebanese democracy would flourish anew through the cracks of the newly made rubble. Seeing their proxy brought low, Syria and Iran, Hezbollah's backers, would cower in frightened obeisance.

But it was not to be. Hezbollah faced down the Israelis, with its small guerrilla force outmaneuvering Israeli units at every step. For example, the elite Sayaret Maglan unit, wrote Uzi Manihami in The Times of London, "were astonished by the firepower and perseverance of Hezbollah". Said one Maglan soldier: "Evidently they had never heard that an Arab soldier is supposed to run away after a short engagement with the Israelis."

The United States, having held Israel's hat while it killed more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians (but still failed to achieve its objectives), now faces an even greater crisis of credibility than it already did, if such a thing is imaginable.

And ironically, the war has given even greater momentum to the Islamist movements already bolstered by America's ham-fisted policies in Iraq, Palestine, Iran and elsewhere.

Egypt is a perfect example. Here Hezbollah's success against Israel and the Hosni Mubarak government's failure to support the Shi'ite militia (initially it joined Jordan and the Saudis in blaming Hezbollah for the conflict) have emboldened the opposition. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest opposition group, has been a particular beneficiary. Responding to the public mood somewhat better, the group's leader, Mahdi Akef, offered to dispatch "10,000 mujahideen" to Lebanon.

It takes a great deal to shake the Arab world's sleeping giant - Egypt's world-weary masses are less depoliticized than they are political cynics preoccupied with making ends meet. The government is likewise preoccupied with keeping its people sated with their daily bread, while filling the streets with security forces just in case a loaf is not enough to stifle any rumblings of discontent, no matter how small.

These factors combined to ensure that no more than 1,000 Egyptians (in a country of more than 70 million) managed to reach any one street protest during the war. But this should not obscure the fact that the opposition, of all trends, were boosted by the Mubarak government's equivocal response to the war and Hezbollah's success, and unified in vociferous opposition to US support for Israel.

Egypt may not be the regional force it once was, but most analysts would still agree that where Egypt goes, so may the Arab world - and in that sense, the war doesn't augur well for the US.

Some analysis had imagined the Sunni-Shi'ite divide widening over this war. Former US ambassador to Israel and pro-Israel lobbyist Martin Indyk sees in the Saudi, Jordanian and Egyptian positions the possibility for Israel of "a tacit alliance with the Sunni Arab world against Iran". But the Arab public has shown none of officialdom's squeamishness about throwing its lot in with Shi'ite Hezbollah, and state rhetoric has shifted to take public sentiment into account.

Egypt is the largest Sunni-majority Arab state, and its authorities at al-Azhar, the most important seat of Sunni learning, have not begrudged tiny, Shi'ite Hezbollah its success against mighty Israel.

Beyond the pulpit, more important, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has become a folk hero. His namesakes populate the maternity wards, including the twins Hassan and Nasrallah of Alexandria. His portrait adorns taxis, bookstores, cafes and, for some reason, the stalls of an inordinate number of fruit sellers (fakahany) in the Egyptian capital. And he came in first in a poll of those leaders most admired by Egyptians that was carried out by government opponent Saadedine Ibrahim's Ibn Khaldun Center.

The fact that Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad came second in that poll is symptomatic of US failures in the region. Iran's willingness to risk a confrontation with the US over its nuclear program has won it many admirers and, rather than fearing an abstract Persian or Shi'ite threat, many Arabs wish their governments were similarly forthright.

Hezbollah's public relations bonanza in the Arab world encapsulates secularism's long, slow defeat in its effort to convince the public that it has the answers to their myriad afflictions. Try as they might, the liberal opposition in Egypt fail to capture the popular imagination. Their anti-authoritarian message is reasonable enough, but falls flat in a region that feels itself under siege.

But even were liberals' fortunes to turn, it would be cold comfort for the Bush administration. Whatever faith liberals held in the United States as a force for good has long since vanished. The Kefaya movement, for example, which campaigns for Mubarak's ouster, is the ideological opposite of the more powerful Brotherhood. They were, nevertheless, of one mind when it came to Lebanon, with Kefaya matching the Brotherhood's bluster with its own petition to procure a million signatures to abrogate Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.

The normally pro-US liberal sociologist Saadedine Ibrahim, a thorn in the regime's side who was jailed for his troubles, recently wrote scathingly of the bitter harvest for US policy.

"Their policies in support of the actions of their closest regional ally, Israel, have helped midwife the newborn," he wrote, mocking US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's stone-hearted comment during the bloodletting that these were but the "birth pangs of a new Middle East". "But it will not be exactly the baby they have longed for. For one thing, it will be neither secular nor friendly to the United States," Ibrahim said.

Even the most jaded cynics in the region have been taken aback at the way Bush has talked up the need for democracy, only to leave victorious Islamists in what few elections there are (bar Iraq, where the US has little choice but to hedge) twisting in the wind.

From the Bush administration's indifference to human-rights violations when they victimize Islamists, to its failure to condemn Israel's jailing of Hamas ministers, to its palpable fear of the Brotherhood's gains in Egypt, to its support for the attack on Lebanon in part in the hopes of turning the Lebanese against Hezbollah, the trend is clear: "Instead of welcoming these particular elected officials into the newly emerging democratic fold, Washington began a cold war on Muslim democrats ... Now the cold war on Islamists has escalated into a shooting war," wrote Ibrahim.

There is no great mystery as to the reasons the Islamists win elections; they run against failed political systems; in a region strangled by corruption they are considered incorruptible; they provide social services where governments fail; they don't compromise when it comes to standing up to the US and Israel; and especially after Hezbollah's victory, they are seen as capable on the battlefield - the royalists and republicans hold summits, the Islamists blow up Merkava tanks.

Another key to their success has been the moderation of their goals and willingness to work within the system and with their ideological opponents. In some cases, that includes adopting their opponents' rhetoric. Nasrallah has done himself no harm by peppering his speeches with appeals to Arab nationalism. Nasrallah has dropped references to an Islamic Lebanon to win allies of all denominations.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in Palestine have also softened their messages. This can be seen through the actions of the Brotherhood's 88 members of the Egyptian parliament, as Joshua Stracher and Samir Shehata note in Middle East Research and Information Project.

"The Brotherhood parliamentary bloc is being noticed in Egypt for its work across ideological lines to serve constituents and increase its collective knowledge of local, national and international affairs," they write. "Moreover, the delegation has not pursued an agenda focused on banning books and legislating the length of skirts. It has pursued an agenda of political reform."

A river in Egypt
For all the obviousness of its self-inflicted wounds, the Bush administration is in a public state of denial. Speaking on August 29, Rice seemed as if she had, Van Winkle-like, slept through the past three years or so.

"Five years ago, who could have imagined that a vibrant debate about democratic reform and economic reform and social reform would be raging in every country of the broader Middle East?" she said. "Who could have imagined the positive changes we have already witnessed in places as different as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait and Morocco, and Jordan?"

Rice clearly realizes that when it comes to US foreign policy in the Middle East, it is possible to fool a lot of Americans a lot of the time. It is harder, however, to fool anybody in the Arab world any of the time, rendering stillborn US efforts at public diplomacy.

In the Arab world, US actions across the Middle East are seen as part of an integrated strategy to promote US interests regardless of Arab ambitions - much the same way they're seen by policymakers in Washington. So when Israel went into Lebanon, and the Bush administration made no secret of its desire to forestall an immediate ceasefire, the US was understandably blamed for Israel's war.

That anger was well founded. Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, for one, has written of the Bush administration's deep involvement in the planning of Israel's bombing campaign in Lebanon. One reason it did so was in the hopes of testing how effective US weaponry would be against Iranian nuclear installations, as Iran was assumed to have helped Hezbollah build its bunkers. Reports since the end of the war have hinted at the administration's deep despondency at the outcome, of course.

The support Hezbollah receives from Iran and Syria was part of the justification used for the war, and is now being used to explain away Hezbollah's success. This explanation may wash in the US, but it doesn't in the Arab world.

As a recent study by the World Policy Council (WPC) stated, "Much has been made in the US media of the Syrian and Iranian-origin weaponry used by Hezbollah ... There has been no parallel discussion of the origin of Israel's weaponry, the vast bulk of which is from the United States."

Americans may not be informed about this omission, but Arabs certainly are. Particular outrage was caused by reports during the war that the US, with British assistance, had replenished Israeli stocks of precision-guided bombs. The initial report, on July 22, came just as reports of massive Lebanese civilian casualties circulated.

According to the WPC report, during the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2005 "Israel received $10.5 billion in foreign military financing ... and $6.3 billion in US arms deliveries".

It is difficult to overstate the degree to which Arab military defeats to the US Army in the two Gulf wars, and to the US-backed Israeli army, particularly in the Six Day War of 1967, have fed a sense of humiliation and resentment at the US.

But with the US now bogged down in Iraq and Israel stunned in southern Lebanon, there is a feeling that something beyond compliance with US dictate may be possible. Even Bashar al-Assad of Syria now talks of liberating the Golan by guerrilla war, something his father never dared do. The US and Israel are not Zeus, raining lightning bolts on helpless mortals below, it seems to many, but earthbound Achilles, fearsome but vulnerable.

These events do not presage an Islamic revolution, the coming of a new caliphate, or a war of civilizations. But they will and are creating the kind of upheaval that is unlikely to be in America's favor.

What remains now of the Bush administration's plans for the "broader Middle East" is not clear. A managed transition to pro-Western democracy has now become much more difficult. Sonar would be needed to plot the depths of anti-US and Israeli sentiment across the political spectrum.

And even the most self-possessed neo-conservative must now realize that the problem is not pro-Western dictators mystifying their publics Oz-like from behind the curtain with tales of the dastardly Zionists - it is well-informed, anti-Western publics, newly inspired, clamoring at the gates for their leaders to show the same resourcefulness as the guerrillas of south Lebanon.

Let Bush fear the fakahany of Cairo.

Ashraf Fahim is a freelance writer on Middle Eastern affairs based in New York and London. His writing can be found at www.storminateacup.org.uk

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Spreading the word in the US

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami's speaking tour in the United States, which granted him a visa as a gesture of goodwill toward Iran, has, as expected, occasioned renewed interest in Khatami's theme of dialogue among civilizations.

Initiated in 2000 as a discursive response to the siren voices of clashing civilizations, Khatami's "counter-paradigm" attracted global attention after the United Nations' embrace of his suggestion to make 2001 the Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations. The UN and its Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) organized a plethora of events around this, sponsored under the leadership of veteran UN diplomat Giandomenico Picco, Kofi Annan's personal representative on "Dialogue Among Civilizations".

For more than two years, this author worked closely with Picco and others to promote the message of tolerance, understanding and reciprocity behind this UN-focused program. [1] In addition to countless conferences, seminars and inter-faith meetings, this involved organizing a world youth festival on "Dialogue Among Civilizations", which took place in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the summer of 2000, bringing hundreds of young people from some 60 countries for a week of learning and inter-cultural activities.

In an article I inked in 2001 titled "Khatami and the emancipatory project of dialogue among civilizations", I highlighted the more than one dozen motivational factors that operated behind Khatami's initiative, including a quest for identity, autonomy, interdependence, peace and non-violence. [2]

In retrospect, I would put non-violence on top, particularly since there is so much rather pathetic misunderstanding of Islam in general and Shi'ism in specific in the West, irrespective of all the media commentaries. Case in point, respected Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis opined an article titled "August 22" in the Wall Street Journal last month in which he lambasted Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic Mahdism as a violent discourse premised on the end of the world.

Lewis's diatribe, easily debunkable by showing the remarkable non-violent ethos of Mahdism, in essence as a doctrine of hope in close affinity with the Christian belief in resurrection, clearly shows that the malady of pseudo-understanding of Islam is not a monopoly of so-called yellow journalism and unfortunately runs deeper, infecting a significant aspect of the academic community in the United States. [3]

Thus the timely antidote of Khatami's trip and his message of Islamic humanism beamed at the US and global audience sets straight a sad spectacle of academic and scholarly miscognition on Islam.

In a speech in Chicago, Khatami responded to his Jewish and other critics by pointing out that he was the first Muslim leader to condemn the "barbaric" atrocities of September 11, 2001, and that he condemned the terrorists committing mass slaughter in New York in the strongest language possible in his speech before the UN General Assembly that year.

Khatami may be out of office and even out of favor in Tehran, yet his message of peace and dialogue is as important as ever, seeing how the nuclear row between Iran and the US has the potential of going down the slippery road to military confrontation.

A relatively neglected facet of Khatami's discourse deals with security. Until now, Khatami has not fully incorporated the security dialogue as an organic facet of his vision of dialogue among civilizations. Yet in light of the post-September 11 US intervention in the Middle East and the heightened insecurity of the Muslim Middle East regarding a "new crusade" led by an evangelical US president, it is essential that the discourse move on from mostly philosophical and theological levels or dimensions to the more concrete level of security dialogue.

Dialogue is, after all, a quest for understanding the "hostile other", and short of understanding the root causes of insecurity breeding paranoia in the West and Muslim East about each other, it is impossible to see a genuine way forward beyond the seemingly impregnable walls of clashing civilizations.

Of course, even then there is no guarantee that we could witness a qualitative breakthrough in the hot furnace of Islam versus West in the current milieu. As Samuel Huntington has aptly pointed out in his book on clashing civilizations, a great deal of this animosity is power-generated, by the vast accumulation of economic and political capital in the West headed by the United States, which, according to Huntington, manipulates the UN almost at will.

Huntington has been rightly criticized, including by this author, for his not-so-apt analysis of the countervailing forces at the UN, etc, and his theoretically simplistic advocacy of "distinct" civilizations leaves a lot to be desired. Yet for one reason or another, which goes to the heart of the decline of intellectual power in the West, this thoroughly suspect "paradigm" has come to grand prominence, lighting the fire of the raw sentiments of many a religious zealot in the West and the East.

To his credit, Khatami has taken a lead in criticizing this "dangerous idea" and has made the singular contribution of seeking to turn its poison around by putting its premise on the head by the counter-discourse of dialogue among civilizations, the theoretical status of which still remains somewhat murky six years later.

In an essay published in the UN Chronicle in 2000, this author made the following observation: "Much as some of us, particularly in the West, may prefer an economically neutral 'dialogue among civilizations' tailored to cross-cultural exchange on a world scale, for this dialogue to have an impact, its terrain must extend to political economy, taking into consideration the lessons of the North-South dialogue, such as that globalization has marred the lines of demarcation between the poles even though the present world hierarchization and inequities warrant churning the engines of this dialogue - on perennial issues of just trade, foreign aid, reform of global finance, AIDS and so on - notwithstanding Nelson Mandela's call for 'globalization without marginalization'."

Six years later, in view of the UN's inability to make meaningful progress on its much-publicized Millennium Development Goals, the global fight against poverty is more and more appearing as a losing battle. Poverty breeds hatred and conflict, and with so much of the Muslim world living in poverty, there has to be a dialogue on economic security that addresses the economic root causes of terrorism, the fact that the Muslim underclass is easy prey to terrorist networks, partly for economic reasons in addition to purely religious grounds.

A genuine ethic of tolerance blinded to the economic causes of intolerance is like a one-eyed horse that limps only in one direction, ie, cultural reciprocity. Yet while this is highly important, the economic determinations, leading us back to some of the basic insights of Karl Marx, are equally important.

Notes
1. Listening. Inclusiveness. Tolerance. Reciprocity. Perspective: Dialogue among civilizations
, United Nations Chronicle online edition, November 2001.
2. See Khatami and the emancipatory project of dialogue of civilization: A motivational analysis.
3. "Shi'ism as Mahdism: Reflections on a Doctrine of Hope", a speech given by Kaveh L Afrasiabi at the London Institute for Islamic Studies on the occasion of the Birthday of the Twelfth Imam Mahdi, November 20, 2003.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.

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