PRESS RELEASE FROM PROJECT MOSAIC
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2009
Al Qaeda has lost widespread support in recent years as Islamist activists have rejected violence and opted for peaceful change, according to a former CIA officer specialising in radical Muslim movements.
Dr Emile Nakhleh, who headed the CIA’s office on “Political Islam” until he retired in 2006, said in a speech on Monday that Al Qaeda and other extremist groups continued to pose a serious threat to Western countries, but that these radicals were becoming increasingly marginalised.
“More and more Muslims are denouncing the killing of innocent civilians – Muslims and non-Muslims – and are beginning to question the logic of violence openly and publicly,” he said.
Nakhleh, a Palestinian-born Christian American, said U.S. President Barack Obama had improved the image of the United States in the Muslim world. He said U.S.-Muslim relations earlier reached a low point when George W Bush’s “war on terror” was seen by many Muslims as a war on Islam. Obama has helped turn around this perception, including with a speech in Cairo in June during which he praised peaceful values of Islam and urged a new partnership between America and the world’s 1.5 million Muslims, he said.
The former CIA officer describes in his recently-published book, “A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World”, rising aspirations amongst Muslims in the Middle East and other Muslim countries for economic, educational, political and social justice. He said on Monday that Islamism – a set of ideologies that Islam is not only a religion, but also a political system – had emerged as an opposition voice to many governments considered corrupt and anti-democratic. A growing number of these Islamic political movements were now willing to participate in political elections, he said.
“The U.S. government should engage with these Islamist parties and should not equate Islamism with extremist violence,” he said.
Nakhleh was delivering the inaugural lecture for Project Mosaic, a charity that uses education to promote interfaith tolerance, multiethnic good citizenship and integration of immigrant communities, and that works to counter group hatred and extremism. Project Mosaic, which encourages dialogue between faith and ethnic communities, was created in 2008 in memory of David Fontana, one of the 343 firefighters that died on September 11, 2001 while helping to rescue people from the World Trade Center.
Having spent the last three decades travelling throughout the Arab and Muslim world, Nakhleh, an Arabic- speaker, described a raging debate in many Muslim communities on women’s rights, whether Islam can co-exist with secular society and the future vision of Islam. “If one doesn’t read Arabic or the languages of the majority-Muslim countries, one is not hearing this heated debate. But it is happening,” he said.
He cited a “waning of the radical paradigm”, as growing numbers of Muslims rejected Al Qaeda for its violence against innocent civilians and because of the extremist group’s opposition to ideas of tolerance, inclusion and the participation in politics now actively sought by mainstream Islamic groups.
Nakhleh urged Washington to engage a wide variety of Muslim communities, not just governments, on issues such as corruption, economic deprivation, women’s rights, religious freedom and political marginalisation, in order to win hearts and minds in the Middle East and globally. “There is no such thing as one Muslim world, one Muslim ‘street’ or one Muslim public opinion,” he said.
For a copy of the November 16, 2009 lecture given by Dr Emile Nakhleh,
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