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The love that dare not speak its name

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Aug 03, 2008

On this blog a few days ago, I wrote that many Muslims expect better behavior from Americans than they do from the traditional Islamic world. “That’s what you call a double-standard,” I added.

Some observers would go further, equating Muslim hypocrisy to blatant anti-Americanism. Not me. In seeking to understand, I’ve realized a dirty secret: Muslims who practice such hypocrisy actually love America.

Armed with this new comprehension, here’s my message to fellow Muslims.

Thank you for expecting so much more of the United States. Your great expectations disclose a deeper faith in America than you have in your own Muslim countries. Admit it or not, you respect the ideal of American leadership. I join you in embracing that ideal.

As I recently explained on CNN International, America is still the only country in the world with a universal constituency. Domestic politics in the U.S. have a profound impact in every corner of the globe, helping to determine immigration flows, shaping investment patterns, and even giving leaders and their presumptive heirs the excuses they need to blur the lines between God and government. “If America’s doing it,” goes the argument, “why can’t we?”

The same impact can’t be claimed about domestic politics in any other modern, multicultural state today. Not China. Not India. Not Britain. At least not yet.

In short, what happens in America doesn’t stay in America. It travels — and sets a precedent for many more nations.

My fellow Muslims, you may act resentful about this reality but it seems that the world welcomes the long reach of US culture. After all, there’s a concrete history of American innovations being voluntarily adopted elsewhere.

By “innovations,” I’m not referring simply to hip hop or fast food or iPODs or ladies’ panties that sport images of Bugs Bunny (which you can buy at any self-respecting souk in Damascus). I’m referring to something much more serious.

In a fabulous book entitled A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America, Anouar Majid writes about the Virginia act, “the first secular constitution in the world.” It became the basis of the US Constitution. But even before that, the Virginia Act was “immediately translated in French and Italian and spread throughout Europe.”

Of course, as I hinted above, American behavior can also set a negative example for the world. In another exceptional book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, philosopher Susan Neiman lets us in on how Nazi Germany justified its atrocities by exploiting US segregation:

“When criticized for his racist policies, Adolf Hitler liked to mention the number of lynchings that regularly occurred in America. In 1939, the SS Journal put out a poster quoting FDR’s reaction to Kristallnacht: ‘I couldn’t believe that this kind of thing could happen in twentieth century civilization.’ But rather than showing the bloody Jewish bodies and smashed windows of the German pogrom, the poster depicted black men hanging from Southern trees…

In the short run, Hitler’s comparison worked, as similar comparisons do today. Already, repressive measures in China, Egypt, and Malaysia have been defended by local officials who point to the Patriot Act or Guantanamo…”

To their visionary credit, America’s founding fathers saw this manipulation coming — and warned all Americans to be mindful. Thomas Paine, the 18th-century revolutionary who prepared the masses for Independence, was explicit: “He that would would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression, for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

My conclusion? The much-maligned idea of “American exceptionalism” doesn’t mean that America is excepted or excused from high standards of conduct. Exactly the opposite: America’s duty is to live up to the highest standards of all because the globe turns to the US as its role model. That’s the burden, and beauty, of American leadership.

My fellow Muslims, understand this: When you announce that American leadership has disappeared in the age of Abu Ghraib, you’re contradicting yourselves. You’re invoking Abu Ghraib instead of, say, Darfur because Abu Ghraib happened at the hands of America, and America remains the measure of our own potential.

Let me finish by returning to the philosopher Susan Neiman, an American who lives in Europe after teaching in the Middle East. She notes that the “evil of Abu Ghraib” lies in its consequences for idealism. It could make a new generation suspicious, if not cynical, about the very struggle to achieve human rights.

“When you torture and kill in the name an ideal, it’s the ideal that suffers most. Those who excuse the abuses at Abu Ghraib as better than other abuses, and necessary to win the war on terror, have forgotten an old refrain. Remember when the evils of socialism were better than the evils of capitalism, and in any case, necessary to the final struggle for liberation?

If the ideal of human rights is destroyed by the violations that were said to be needed to realize it, our children will pay the price. Many of them are already paying, for they believe in next to nothing.”

How ironic — no, tragic — that the country most ardently dedicated to a proposition might leave a legacy of nihilism. Not because of its own indifference but because all of us, everywhere, neglected to tell Americans the real reason that we’re hardest on them.

The reason is: We have more faith in Americans than we have in ourselves.