Transnational Dialogue in an Age of Terror

Abstract

11 September led many people to dismiss the prospects for a meaningful dialogue between Islam and the West. This article argues that the terrorist attacks against the United States also created the potential for a new kind of dialogue by initiating a virtually unprecedented issue-specific global public sphere focused on the question of the relations between Islam and the West. It draws on Habermas to consider the potential for dialogue under contemporary conditions. By examining the constructivist foundations of both Islamist and neoconservative approaches to international politics, this article posits both a demand for and an important potential supply for a meaningful dialogue. In particular, it discusses the intense and important public arguments within the Islamic world about the concept of dialogue and its political possibilities. It focuses upon the internal arguments between moderates and extremists on both sides, and considers how dialogue (or its absence) can change the terms of the interaction by breaking the monopoly over representation claimed by – and too often granted to – radicals.

Notes

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I would like to thank Hayward Alkar, Craig Calhoun, Dale Eickelman and the participants in workshops at the University of Southern California's Center for International Studies and the Williams College International Studies Colloquium for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Sohaib Saeed, “If Qaradawi is an extremist, who is left?”, Guardian (9 July 2004).

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Amr Musa, “The Road to Enhanced International Dialogue: An Arab Perspective”, unpublished lecture delivered to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, 9 November 2001.

Quoted by Antony Sullivan, “Western and Islamist Leaders Consider ‘Dialogues of Cultures and Civilizations’”, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (August 1996).

Pew Research Center for People and the Press, Views of a Changing World (3 June 2003), p. 2. See Marc Lynch, “Taking Arabs Seriously”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 5 (September 2003), pp. 81–94.

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Giovanni Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 35.

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Jean Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 45.

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For details, see Marc Lynch, Sympathy for the Devil: Iraq and the New Arab Public Sphere (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2005).

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The most well-known and dramatic examples come from Egypt – the prosecution of Nasir Abu Zayd, the assassination of Faraq Fuda and attempt on the life of Naguib Mahfouz, al-Azhar's decrees banning various works of fiction.

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See Lee Smith, “The myth of Islamist democracy”, Slate (16 July 2004), available: ⟨http://slate.msn.com/id/2103980/⟩; or Daniel Pipes, “Stealth Islamist”, Middle East Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2004), available: ⟨http://www.meforum.org/article/602⟩. For a Muslim observation to this effect, see Yasir al-Za'atra, “The attack on Qaradawi”, al Watan (22 July 2004).

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