Let me ask a silly question here. Who are the opinion formers of the Muslims? As any marketing or public relations person will tell you, opinions about an idea, product, and service are formed by a limited group of people who are the opinion formers. So for example, a relatively tiny group of about a thousand people or so can be called as the opinion formers within the fashion industry. Mainly from fashion houses, magazines and celebrities. Year after year, this group of people drive the direction, thoughts and fortunes of the global fashion industry. Why am I banging on about it? Because governments around the world are trying to lance the boil of Islamist fundamentalism, and are looking for channels to achieve this. Who are they talking to?
A quote from Oscar Wilde (De Profundis, 1905) typifies this approach. He said, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Most of the western governments do believe so and they try to operate on this basis, by working through opinion formers. Different countries have adopted different ways to tackle this. US launched or helps fund Arabic and Farsi channels aimed at the youth, UK likes to work through the Muslim Council of Britain, Pakistan tries to co-opt the islamist parties into the government and actually make them part of state (read military) policy, India hands over control of Muslim affairs to Muslim bodies, many Gulf countries also have their ulema responsible for the religious development of their brethren, etc. This is both positive and negative reinforcement. Positive in the sense of encouraging Muslim bodies to take responsibility to subdue fundamentalism as in the UK or negative as in banning them, like in Egypt.
A slight diversion here and one point which needs to be emphasised. The angle which I am taking is to manage religiously motivated terrorism, and NOT secessionist motivated terrorism. A difference which may be subtle, but is important to understand! When terrorists use scriptures to justify their actions targeting civilians, then it is religiously motivated terror. If a secessionist group blows up a jeep full of policemen and is clear about the reasons being to strike against the state, so that their group can help provide independence to their statelet, then that is secessionist terrorism. Obviously, there are many campaigns where both are entwined, such as in Israel, but from a taxonomical perspective, we are concentrating on the former.
Given the vast and open internet and 24 hour TV, it is a single global world now. And I use the market word deliberately. So if the objective is to act like a multi-national company and emulate what it does, then one has to think globally and act locally. Islamists are a global phenomenon and just like anti terrorist financing initiatives, to win the battle of hearts and minds, one has to think globally. Ok, so we think globally, but the first question is, who are the people who Muslims think of as global opinion formers? Bush and Blair can bleat on as much as they want, but are Muslims hearing them and internalising their words? No, Sir. So the first thing is to identify these opinion framers/formers.
So if I act like a meerkat and peer around at this global phenomenon, I get the following. These are the pillars as I see them: Al Azhar, the Saudi religious establishment, the Madrassah’s of Pakistan and to a lesser extent India, al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian theocracy, Al Jazeera, and a fairly amorphous group of individuals such as Amr Khaled, Tariq Ramadan, Amina Wadud, (all who act independently of any structure). Each of them has a very strong influence locally. I know, I know, you will complain that I am missing out a wide swathe of the Muslims in South East Asia, Europe and USA, but frankly, I don’t think organised Muslim groups in these countries and regions really are the major drivers in the opinion forming stakes.
Al Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, is the oldest Islamic school (and may well be the oldest university) in the world, founded way back in 988 AD. While the origins lay in the Ismaili Shia doctrine, it later moved to the Sunni doctrine. This institution has played a very important role in the development and propagation of Islam throughout the world and even now, I think its pronouncements are what you would call as the closest you can get as an equivalent to a Vatican Bull. Graduates from Al Azhar are rated to be the best, top of the heap, think of it as your Harvard, IIT/IIM, Oxford, Moscow or Todai of the Muslim World.
If we move east, we see other centres of Islamic learning which are key in the propagation of theological ideas (please remember, there is no separation of Caesar and State in Islam, so the product of these universities and colleges are perfectly qualified to comment and talk about politics, family life, economics, you name it, every facet of human endeavour). Saudi Arabia’s religious infrastructure is very well resourced and entrenched in a very short period of time (compared to Al Azhar), with students from all over the world. Saudi Arabia’s immense personal wealth based charity also helps in the rapid propagation of ideas across the world by funding mosques, scholarships, charitable donations, etc. Moving a bit over the little channel, Iran and now Iraq’s Shia theological infrastructure is extremely influential across the Shia populated world, stretching from the Mediterranean to India. Within Pakistan and India, a very long history exists of Sunni and Shia seminaries and schools who have been producing a very rich theological heritage. As an aside, I frequently find people from the Arab world are quite ignorant and rather surprised when I say that India’s seminaries are almost as good and rich in terms of Islamic thought as that of Al Azhar. Perhaps the different languages used (Persian and Urdu in addition to Arabic) causes this.
Then we come to the two groups, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Both these groups have their own ideologies based upon individuals. The brotherhood’s basis can be traced directly to Hassan al-Banna, its founder, and is now spread over a significant proportion of the Middle East, from Syria to Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq and also has international chapters. On the other hand, Al Qaeda or more formally, “International Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders” as Osama Bin Laden calls it. This group’s philosophical basis is drawn strongly from Sayyid Qutb’s essays. Qutb was a member of the aforementioned Muslim Brotherhood. Their pronouncements backed up by their actions make them into very strong opinion framers within the Muslim World.
Then we have Al Jazeera, the TV channel which burst into view with the closest thing one can think of a nuclear explosion, in the global media environment. I have previously spoken about this channel (http://piquancy.blogspot.com/2003/04/agree-to-disagree.html or http://tinyurl.com/nmwed). But with its free speech, passionate panel discussions and open debates, independent views, wide ranging topics (frequently touching very taboo subjects such as religion, politics, terrorism, education, etc.), giving air time to dissidents, Israeli’s, and other people and groups who are normally censored out etc. In particular, it offers a voice for Al-Qaeda’s messages to the wider world in its non-censored full glory. For an Arab world starved of such open discussion, this channel and its participants are one of the most important opinion framers in this part of the world. In particular, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the regular presenters on this Qatar based channel, a graduate of Al Azhar, involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, is a very potent voice through this channel.
The final grouping is of an even more amorphous group of more or less independent scholars, broadcasters, intellectuals, small groups whose impact is far more diffuse but can be considered as Muslim opinion framers. These people are varied but their messages are heard across the globe (in many cases it is not their messages per se’ but rather the negative reaction to them). People like Tariq Ramadan, Amina Wadud, Amr Khaled, Shirin Abadi, Asma Jehangir, Wafa Sultan, Fatema Mernissi, Musdah Mulia, Amel Grami, Fethullah Gülen, Louis Farrakhan, as well as Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji and Tarek Fatah and his group, and so on and so forth.
I have to address a couple of points which my sister pointed out and those are valid points, worthy of further explanation. Thinking about the entire Muslim nation as one homogenous block is dangerous and Huntingtonian in nature. That is true. On the other hand, when one hears from the aforementioned pillars, the feeling or at least the claim that all Muslims form a block or one single nation is very strong and very frequent. The associated point is that this block is actually more heterogeneous with sects galore. I agree, about the only point that seems to be common is that they call themselves as Muslims and (mostly) believe in the Qur'an. Other than that, almost every other aspect is disputed by somebody or other. So assuming that identifying them as block or an Ummah may be a very vague aspect, but my counter to that is to point to the cartoon issue. This issue did exercise almost all Muslims, even if the reasons were varied and based on different reasons. So we could say that there are common identifying factors which give somewhat credence to this concept of a single Muslim Nation.
The second point she mentioned is that a single message to all of them would neither work nor get received nor transmitted. Agreed. Again in marketing parlance, this is the target opinion formers but a single message is wrong. It has to be calibrated as for example, a ruling from Sunni Al Azhar will have absolutely no impact on Shia Iran, or a mixed gender prayer led by a woman in the US will not affect Muslim women in Afghanistan, excepting perhaps in a negative sense. In future essays, we will explore message characterisation or calibration, in other words, just what kind of a message would the wider world like to see emanate from these pillars, what are the chances of the desired message being accepted, what will be the resistance to these messages, and I guess the most contentious of all, the actual logistics of (who, where, when and how) taking this message to them.
How many are we talking about? And I realise these numbers are extremely debatable, although I do have some assumptions behind each of these estimates. Al Azhar has about 500 odd senior professors, the Saudi religious establishment has about 800-1000 senior members, the Shia have about 500 very senior members, and there are about 1000 senior theologists across India/Pakistan, Al Jazeera has about 50 odd key people, the other independent members would be about 500 or so). So about 3.500 people in total. Mind you, you can easily move this figure up and down by 1000 without losing the key conceptual thrust behind this essay. Interesting number, eh? On totting this up, I was beset by two conflicting thoughts. The first was: a few thousand people, that are it? Surely with the battalions of marketing and sales people around the marketing and advertising obsessed world, we can have a targeted marketing campaign to influence these people, no? Then reality came crashing in as I thought further into the calibration of the messages, the very long time frames which will be required, the theological challenges, the difficulty in the crafting of the single message, or at least a few different approaches leading to the same final message, the sheer amount of coordination required. Still, we seem to have identified the major opinion formers and as one of my old bosses once said, know inside out who you have to speak to, rest is logistics, administration, hard work and pain.
All this to be taken with a grain of salt!
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