Arab Spring, A Clash of Civilizational Paradigms:  Arabism, Capitalism, and an Islamic Just Third Way

                                                    by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane

I.  Challenge and Response

      The future of what optimistically has been dubbed “The Arab Spring” becomes increasingly problematic as the populist originators fail to address, much less agree upon, their ultimate goals.  The framework or paradigm of “Freedom from” requires a corresponding paradigm of “freedom for”.  A focus on secular power as an ultimate goal can start a revolution, but it inevitably will result in a replication of itself, perhaps even worse than what originally triggered it, unless the highest goal of transcendent justice provides both a rationale and motivation for revolutionary transformation both within persons and within societal institutions.

    The response of the establishment Muslim organizations in America to the Arab Spring is just as disconcerting as are the apparently impending failures of the Arab Spring in the Muslim world.  In an email of August 16, 2011, Sheila Musaji, founding editor of the ezine, www.theamericanmuslim.org, pointed to the catastrophy highlighted by a recent Gallop poll of Muslims in America.  This poll, she writes, “showed two HUGE problems that we also need to address:

1)  Muslims are least likely of religious groups in America to be registered to vote, and

2)  None of our existing national organizations are seen by American Muslims as representing them (12% was the highest approval rating any of them received”.

    For more than thirty years, I have been addressing the underlying problems among Muslims that have led to the Islamophobic political campaign now reaching a crescendo after two decades of professional preparation.  The response is increasingly receptive, though still rare, to my critique that most professional Muslim organizers have always focused on gaining power for Muslims as an independent force in America, rather than on understanding and developing the fundamental identity of classical Islam and classical American thought.  Although they insist that almost all Muslims in America are loyal Americans, which clearly is true, their understanding of what it means to be an American is superficial. 

    Perhaps this is understandable because both the heritage of classical Islam in the transcendent justice embodied in the maqasid al shari’ah and the profoundly spiritual American heritage in the Scottish Enlightenment, which gave rise to the American Revolution, have been lost in the black hole of shirk al khafi or hidden polytheism. This consists in worship of the four false gods of contemporary civilization, namely, power, prestige, plutocracy, and wanton pleasure as ultimate goals of both personal and social life. 

    The key to bringing the common wisdom of classical American thought and classical Islamic thought to bear in addressing otherwise insoluable problems, both domestic and global, is the common paradigm of normative law, known as the maqasid al shari’ah in Islamic jurisprudence, pioneered by the head of the minority party in England, Edmund Burke, who was the principal mentor to almost all of America’s founders, not the so-called contract theorists who insisted that man, not God, creates truth and therefore is the source of all authority.  The Great American Experiment as a milestone in global civilization actually was not a revolution but a profoundly spiritual reformation designed to bring out the best of the past in the present to build a better future. 

    The same can be said of classical Islamic thought of the third through eighty Islamic centuries, which gave rise to the code of human responsibilities and human rights, known as the maqasid al shari’ah.  Unfortunately, at least until recently, this unique development in interfaith jurisprudence has been dead or at least moribund, especially in the Sunni world, for six hundred years. Muslim attempts to revive the Islamic civilization of centuries ago focus unfortunately on the externals, without recognition of the dynamics that led to the twin peaks of civilization in the Muslim world and in America.  Such attempts also suffer from the delusion that one can revive civilization without revolutionary innovation to build a new civilization for the future.  This was the key to Ibn Khaldun’s and Arnold Toynbee’s theories of civilizational challenge and response.  American Muslim leaders need to reread these basic texts.

    Unfortunately, the inertia of the “old guard mentality” that dominates all national Muslim organizations, still leaves the books and hundreds of professional articles on what it means to be an American as barely more than a quaint voice in the wilderness, including a dozen articles on the Arab Spring in my de facto blog, www.theamericanmuslim.org, this year.

    As a lifelong professional long-range global forecaster, my conclusion based on simple trend analysis, which fortunately usually turns out to be wrong by excluding exogenous variables, is that the day is coming when in America the surviving Muslims will envy the dead.  The most powerful variable is the common jurisprudence inherent in the Islamic shari’ah and in the natural law theories, known as the Sunnat Allah in Islamic thought, that motivated America’s founders.  The greatest catastrophy in the modern world is that the common heritage shared by the three sources of Western civilization, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, has been lost in a black hole of historical revisionism propagated by secularistic relativism in modern education.  The task of the academy is to develop the art of paradigm management in order to shape the agenda of think tanks, which, in turn, influence or even control policy.

II.  The Black Hole of Arabism

    The clash of civilizations has never been among civilizations but within each of them.  Fortunately, the Arab Spring is setting the stage to consider three competing paradigms, Arabism, Capitalism, and an Islamic Just Third Way.  The second law of thermodynamics, according to which all energy dissipates without external renewal, guarantees that continuation of Arabism will destroy all hope of civilizational renewal.  Capitalism, as developed in violation of classical Islamic thought, concentrates ownership of productive capital and produces a growing wealth gap within and among nations that inevitably, without basic reform, will engender revolution, terrorism, and terroristic counter-terrorism.  The question is whether interfaith understanding and cooperation can develop institutional reform adequate to promote peace, prosperity, and freedom through compassionate justice, and whether reviving the best of the Islamic and American heritage can be the vehicle for success.
 

    The praxis of Arabism is nowhere better spelled out than in Guy Sorman’s article, “Is Islam Compatible with Capitalism:  The Middle East’s Future Depends on the Answer”.  His analysis of what he calls “Arabism” actually describes what is generally known as “The Third World Mentality”, but is good because he describes it so well.  His analysis of the drags on civilizational renewal are well stated.  His conclusion, however, that the only alternative is “capitalism” perfectly reflects the secular advice that produced Arabism to begin with and would merely guarantee that the Arab Spring would degenerate into the Arab Winter.

    His punch line is that the Arab world became a failed civilization because it was not sufficiently capitalistic and that the shari’ah caused this collapse.  His proof is contained in his bizarre statement that, “Joint-stock companies, which sharia prohibited, had much greater reach and risk-hedging power”.  One could legitimately argue that the degraded state of shari’ah praxis found in the fiqh once restricted the use of joint-stock companies.  Nevertheless, such an aberration was never an essential part of traditional shari’ah jurisprudence, because it would violate all its essential principles.

    The essence of so-called Arabism was brought home to me in 1976, when I had to get a photo ID as an employee of the Bahraini government, where for one year I was the Principal Economic and Budget Adviser to the Finance Minister and an informal adviser to Yusuf Sharawi, the Minister of Industry, charged with developing a five-year-plan and a GNP.  This was published as a spin-off from the book that I published later as Deputy Director in the U.S. Treasury Department of the U.S. - Saudi Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation, Planning the Future of Saudi Arabia: A Model for Achieving National Priorities, Praeger Special Studies, a Division of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, CBS, Inc, 1978, 241 pages.  I could have been processed as a VIP in ten minutes, but I chose to see how the system operated.  The system consisted of five different steps, all of which could have been performed most effectively by a single person and a photographer in “one stop” processing.  Instead I and a hundred other people had to wait interminably in five different lines, because this was easier and more profitable for the petty bureaucrats. 

    Later on contract with the U.S. State Department to brief prospective American businessmen on how to adapt to the “Arab culture” I warned a man who was to establish a gasoline station in a Gulf country on how to avoid going stark raving mad in frustration.  My advice was to calculate how long it would take to accomplish his mission, which should be one month, and then multiply two.  If still nothing had happened, multiple again.  Only then should he question whether there was a problem, such as a need for bakshish.  Another lesson was that Arabs respect honesty and sometimes will reward it lavishly and give an exclusive to an American who will point out that a job can be done for a fraction of the going rate.

    Guy Sorman comments that such cultural uniqueness “is an annoying and disturbing welcome to a chaotic land, one that has grown only more chaotic since the January revolution.  It’s also instructive, effectively demonstrating why it’s hard to do business in this country or in other Arab Muslim lands, where personal status so often trumps fair, universally applied rules. Such personalization of the law is incompatible with a truly free-market or modern society and helps explain why the Arab world’s per-capita income is one-tenth America’s or Europe’s”.

    Sorman now cuts to the quick with the point of his persuasive but superficial article.  He writes, “Egypt is, of course, a Muslim nation. Should Islam be indicted for what was in Rifaa’s time, and remains today, a dysfunctional economy?  The question becomes all the more important if you extend it to the rest of the Arab Middle East as it is swept by popular revolts against authoritarian rule.  Will the nations that emerge from the Arab Spring embrace the rule of law and other crucial institutions that have allowed capitalism to flourish in the West?  Or are Islam and economic progress fundamentally at odds?”    He adds with historical perspective that such experiences, had he been able to undergo them, would have been drearily familiar to Rifaa al Tahtawi, a brilliant young imam sent to France in 1829 by the pasha of Egypt.  His mission: figure out how Napoleon’s military had so easily crushed Egypt three decades earlier, a defeat that revealed to a shocked Arab world that it was now an economic, military, and scientific laggard.  At the outset of the book that he wrote about his journey, The Gold of Paris, Rifaa describes a Marseille café:  ‘How astonished I was that in Marseille, a waiter came to me and asked for my order without my looking for him’.  Then the coffee arrives without delay.  Finally—most amazing of all—Rifaa gets the bill for it, and the price is the same as the one listed on the menu: ‘No haggling’ he enthuses.  Rifaa concludes: ‘I look for the day when the Cairo cafés will follow the same predictable rules as the Marseille cafés’.  But nearly two centuries later, the only Egyptian cafés that live up to Rifaa’s hopes are the imported Starbucks”.

    “Muslim economies”, he notes,

“haven’t always been low achievers.  In his seminal work The World Economy, economist Angus Maddison showed that until the twelfth century, per-capita income was much higher in the Muslim Middle East than in Europe.  Beginning in the twelfth century, though, what Duke University economist Timur Kuran calls the Long Divergence began, upending this economic hierarchy, so that by Rifaa’s time, Europe had grown far more powerful and prosperous than the Arab Muslim world.

    “A key factor in the divergence was Italian city-states’ invention of capitalism—a development that rested on certain cultural prerequisites, Stanford University’s Avner Greif observes. In the early twelfth century, two groups of merchants dominated Mediterranean sea trade: the European Genoans and the Cairo-based Maghrebis, who were Jewish but, coming originally from Baghdad, shared the cultural norms of the Arab Middle East. The Genoans outpaced the Maghrebis and eventually won the competition, Greif argues, because they invented various corporate institutions that formed the core of capitalism, including banks, bills of exchange, and joint-stock companies, which allowed them to accumulate enough capital to launch riskier but more profitable ventures.  These institutions, in Greif’s account, were an outgrowth of the Genoans’ Western culture, in which people were bound not just by blood but also by contracts, including the fundamental contract of marriage.  The Maghrebis’ Arab values, by contrast, meant undertaking nothing outside the family and tribe, which limited commercial expeditions’ resources and hence their reach. The bonds of blood couldn’t compete with fair, reliable institutions (see “Economics Does Not Lie,” Summer 2008).

    “Greif’s theory suggests that cultural differences explain economic development better than religious beliefs do.  Indeed, from a strictly religious perspective, one could view Muslims as having an advantage at creating wealth.  After all, Islam is the only religion founded by a trader—one who also, by the way, married a wealthy merchant.  The Koran has only good words for successful businessmen. Entrepreneurs must pay a 2.5 percent tax, the zakat, to the community to support the general welfare, but otherwise can make money guilt-free.  Private property is sacred, according to the Koran.  All this, needless to say, contrasts with the traditional Christian attitude toward wealth, which puts the poor on the fast track to heaven and looks down in particular on merchants (recall Jesus’s driving them from the Temple).

    “But Duke’s Kuran believes that Islam did play a role in the Long Divergence.  It wasn’t the Koran, which the Muslim faithful see as written by God and unalterable, that impeded Muslims economically, he argues, but instead sharia, the religious law developed by scholars after Mohammed’s time.  Not that sharia was overtly hostile to economic progress; it established commerce-friendly legal rules that, for instance, allowed for bazaars and for the arbitration of economic disputes.  Rather, Kuran maintains, sharia became economically counterproductive because it was less efficient than the Western legal framework.

    “The most significant of the sharia-rooted economic liabilities was the Islamic partnership, which proved no match for the Western world’s joint-stock company.  Partnerships were short-lived, dissolving with the death of any of the partners, and they tended to be small, often formed among family members.  Joint-stock companies, which sharia prohibited, had much greater reach and risk-hedging power. Sharia inheritance rules were a second drag on economic development, Kuran explains.  Since the Koran sanctions polygamy, sharia required a husband’s wealth, upon his death, to go in equal portions to his widows and children, which worked against capital accumulation.  In the Roman law that held sway in Europe until the nineteenth century, by contrast, the eldest son inherited his deceased father’s wealth, creating vast fortunes that could be put to economic work.  Some economists point to sharia’s prohibition of interest as another hamper on development, but this is much less significant than it appears.  From at least the twelfth century on, sharia lawyers authorized ‘fees’ that could accompany money-lending, getting around the ban.

    “Muslim welfare foundations to aid the poor, called waqf, also undermined economic competitiveness over time, says Kuran.  According to sharia, all money given to these charities was exempt from taxation.  But Muslim merchants began to establish waqf as fronts for commercial enterprises, depriving the government of sufficient funds to function properly.  This tax evasion contributed to the failure of the Arab kingdoms and the Ottoman Empire to build a competent minimal state, which is essential to the effective rule of law.

    “For evidence that sharia had negative economic effects, consider the Egyptian city of Alexandria.  Beginning in the fifteenth century, non-Muslim merchants in the city could opt out of sharia’s business rules.  Those who did and embraced Western capitalist norms quickly grew richer than those who continued to follow sharia, historians have shown.

    “Over time, however, sharia adapted to capitalism.  In the nineteenth century, it finally allowed Muslims to form joint-stock companies and to borrow other key capitalist institutions from the West.  Today, Islamic banks follow the same practices that non-Islamic banks do (including the use of derivatives) but describe them differently, so that they conform with sharia.  Yet despite this transformation in Islamic law, Muslim economies still lag behind Western ones.  Greif and Kuran may help explain the Long Divergence, but what accounts for the fact that there is no ‘Arab Tiger’ comparable with Asia’s remarkable success stories?

    “Part of the answer may, in fact, be religious: Islam’s apostasy law.  Sharia holds that a Muslim who breaks with Islam becomes an apostate, an offense punishable by death.  And since, at least for Sunni Muslims, there is no central theological authority—the theocratic regime in Iran establishes such authority for Shiite Muslims—any Sunni imam can define what constitutes breaking with Islam.  This power may deter potential innovators, including the entrepreneurial kind, from doing anything that could conceivably get them into trouble.

    “But a bigger reason for the Arab world’s stagnation is political.  In nearly every Arab Muslim country, the prime enemy of entrepreneurship and the free market is an abusive government—and the strong, unaccountable, and usually despotic regimes that have dominated Arab Muslim populations for decades owe neither their origins nor their legitimacy, such as it is, to Islam.  All emerged from the decolonization struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, which, since the primary colonizers were Europeans, provoked angry anti-Western and anticapitalist attitudes in Muslim societies.  The decolonization of the Arabs did not go well.  Violent confrontations were the norm, even when full-blown war didn’t break out, as happened in Algeria.  The upheavals brought military regimes to power in most of the decolonized Arab states; even when the military wasn’t officially in charge, it controlled puppet governments, as in Morocco.  All these regimes espoused nationalism and resisted any rule of law that might limit state power—or give entrepreneurs a freer hand.

    “Worse, independence took place at a time when the Soviet Union was influential and many believed that centrally planned socialism was a shortcut to power and prosperity.  Arab governments thus found it tempting to confiscate private property, eradicate the existing bourgeoisie, and create massive state monopolies in resources like copper, oil, and phosphate.  In the name of national independence and economic modernization, all the wealth could be concentrated in the hands of the ruling militaries and bureaucracies.

    “After the fall of the Soviet Union showed socialism to be far less efficient than the free market, Arab Muslim governments began to free up markets somewhat, but without surrendering their tyrannical authority.  This resulted in an Arab crony capitalism, which is now the dominant economic arrangement in the Muslim Middle East.  In today’s pseudo-market Arab economies, it makes little sense to be an independent entrepreneur.  If you want to open a business, you’ll need a license, and the only surefire way to obtain it is to belong to (or be close to) someone in the ruling elite; even then, you’ll share your profits with the bureaucrats.  It’s far easier to seek a rent—a benefit based on your position in society.  Rent-seeking is particularly prevalent in countries overflowing with natural resources like oil and gas, which bring in massive revenues that reduce the incentive to diversify the economy.

    “Egypt exemplifies the crony-capitalist model.  During the 1990s, corrupt privatizations transferred state monopolies in energy, steel, cement, and other industries to private ‘entrepreneurs’, most of whom were members of President Hosni Mubarak’s family, top military officers, and other well-connected people.  Meanwhile, economist Hernando de Soto has calculated, opening a modest bakery in Cairo required two years of slogging through the bureaucracy, at each stage of which the would-be owner would need to grease official palms—and if his bakery finally opened, he would then have to pay ongoing protection money to the local police.  Small wonder Egypt suffers from slow growth, massive unemployment, and a large black market.

    “The authoritarian nature of today’s Muslim governments also generates social norms that harm entrepreneurship.  For example, a survey conducted by the Casablanca-based business magazine L’Economiste compared the organizational structures of Moroccan firms with those of Western companies operating in Morocco.  It found that the boss of a Moroccan firm tends to have a larger office and more assistants, secretaries, and chauffeurs than his Western counterpart does and that his behavior is more autocratic.  The likely reason is that the Moroccan boss, mimicking the king and his entourage, finds power—and the exhibition of power—more compelling than profits.

    “The prosperity-crushing influence of government on Muslim entrepreneurship has nowhere been more evident than in Turkey.  In the early nineteenth century, the Turkish sultan, like the Egyptian pasha, tried to import Western science and military methods without introducing Western rule of law.  ‘The Ottoman Empire fell into poverty because the dominant concern of the sultans was always to avoid the emergence of a competing power’, explains Turkish economist Evket Pamuk.  And the possibility that they feared the most was the birth of a Westernized Turkish bourgeoisie, its power based on private ownership.

    “When the empire became the Turkish Republic in 1921, little changed.  The republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal (later called Atatürk, a name he chose that means “Father of the Turks”), was fascinated by the fashionable Italian fascist ideal.  The Turks lacked entrepreneurial spirit, he believed, so it was up to the government to act as a collective entrepreneur and pick those who deserved to start new businesses. Under his regime, which became a military dictatorship after his 1938 death, the Turkish economy made little progress, though a small group of well-connected businessmen grew extremely wealthy.

    “Islam wasn’t to blame for Turkey’s poor economy.  Indeed, the new republic was fiercely secular; for decades, no openly devout Muslim could hold any significant position in public service, in the military, or even in business.  Modern Turkey started to grow economically only after it began to free up the market under former World Bank economist Turgut Özal, a devout Muslim whom the military had installed as prime minister in 1983 to bring inflation under control.  Özal’s reforms opened the way for the openly Islamic, pro-market Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which has ruled Turkey since 2002.  Whatever criticisms one might make of the AKP—it has on occasion sought to impose religious norms on a secular society, among other troubling signs—it has brought about an astounding transformation of Turkey’s economy.  The state’s budget is balanced, prices are stable, free trade is enthusiastically embraced, and crony capitalism has been constrained.  As a consequence, the Turkish growth rate has been one of the world’s highest: 8 percent annually for several years now. Turkey’s per-capita income is now higher than Saudi Arabia’s—and Turkey has no oil.

    “Fueling this economic expansion is a new generation of entrepreneurs from Anatolia, in eastern Turkey.  These businesspeople are conservative Muslims, but they aren’t extremists.  The Anatolians are astonishing; no one can say for sure how they arrived on the scene as the dynamic engine of Turkish modernity.  Ask an Anatolian entrepreneur about this success and he may credit a strong work ethic, combined with family values ingrained in the Muslim faith.  Or he may mention the business traditions of Anatolia, a crossroads between Asia and Europe under the Ottoman Empire.  Pamuk, a secular Turk, points to mundane factors like the Anatolians’ low labor costs and Turkey’s proximity to the vast European market: Turkey now exports 25 percent of its national production, up from 3 percent in 1980. Whatever the reason for the Anatolian breakthrough, Islam has not impeded it.

    “Will the Turkish model spread to nearby Arab countries?  This year’s revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt may answer that question. Remember the man who inspired the revolutions: Mohammed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian who earned a university degree but could find no decent formal employment, a situation all too common for educated young Arabs.  Bouazizi sought to make a living from a tiny fruit-and-vegetable stand, but last December, because he hadn’t registered it with the authorities, police confiscated it.  Bouazizi then set himself on fire.

    “Bouazizi’s suicide brought millions of Arabs to the streets because they could identify with him.  Human rights leaders didn’t start the revolutions; neither did long-banned Islamic movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.  The upheavals weren’t characterized by Islamic banners or by Israeli flags going up in flames (though there were disturbing reports of Muslims attacking Christian churches in Egypt after the police had vanished from the streets).  No, the dominant message of the Arab Spring was that the Arabs didn’t want to remain separated from the rest of the world.  The Egyptian students in Tahrir Square couldn’t have put it more clearly: they wanted democracy, globalization, and market prosperity, not Islamicization.  ‘We want a normal country, which means free enterprise and democracy’ said one of their leaders, Amr Salah of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights, in Paris this April.  Even the notorious Muslim Brotherhood is on board with capitalism: ‘Our economic program is a free-market society in order to pursue social justice’, says Sameh al Barqui, an American-educated economics expert with the Brotherhood.

    “The transition from the Arab world’s authoritarian regimes to democracy, markets, and the rule of law is far from guaranteed, of course.  For a reminder of the difficulty of installing successful Western-style capitalism, consider Rifaa, who returned to Egypt after seven years in France and became the pasha’s main advisor—overseeing the translation of French scientific books into Arabic, founding the first Arabic newspapers, and opening schools for girls.  Though Rifaa faced the hostility of Muslim conservatives, his reforms, accompanying the era’s shifts in sharia, inaugurated an era of modernization in Egypt.  By the late nineteenth century, Cairo was starting to look like a European city, with electricity, sanitation, universities, and an independent press.  But the renaissance didn’t last long, because Rifaa repeatedly failed to persuade the pasha to accept a Western-style constitution, which would have limited the ruler’s arbitrary power.  What kept Egypt back was its failure to establish the rule-governed institutions familiar in the West.

    “It should be sobering, therefore, that the military isn’t likely to surrender its political privileges easily in any Arab country.  Still, most of the political parties emerging in the ferment are supporters of free markets. (Some socialist parties remain in Morocco and Tunisia, where the French influence left its mark, but they are socialist in name only.)  The young men and women behind the Arab Spring will continue to push for more open markets where millions of Bouazizis will be able to become entrepreneurs—where it won’t take two years and countless bribes to open a bakery.  And there appears to be no cultural or religious reason that someday, in the not-so-distant future, we won’t find cafés in Cairo that run as efficiently and reasonably as those in Marseille”.

III.  Islamic Principles of Social and Economic Justice

A.  The First Islamic Precept of Economic Justice: Private Property

In order to understand the past, present, and future impact of Islamic shari’ah on the future of the Arab Spring, one must contrast it with its two rivals, namely, Arabism and capitalism.  Very briefly, the Islamic concept of economic justice is based on two principles.  The first is the ultimate sovereignty of God over all of creation.  This means that private property ownership of the means of production is sacred, but only because it implies the responsibility of stewardship by the individual owner.  Whoever earns from the use of capital, including land and infrastructure, has a right to enjoy the profits, but he must earn them honestly and spend them to support the needs not only of his own family but of the marginalized in society who through no fault of their own either are poor wage-slaves or incapacitated.

This social element in private ownership is based on the fundamental Islamic virtue known as infaq, which is the inclination to give rather than take in life. This is universal in every person but must be cultivated culturally because otherwise the selfish nature of every person, known as nafs al ammara or “the commanding and demanding self,” will claim absolute sovereignty over what belongs to God.  This is why one of the “five pillars” or actions to maintain one’s submission to God is charity (Zakat).

Charity consists both of sadaqa, which is voluntary giving to others based only on their need, and zakat, which is mandatory and is based on the capital intensivity of the means of production with rates decreasing in proportion to the increase in human input either through labor or capital.  Earnings from labor are taxed at 2.5% of one’s wealth (not on income), but 5% on income from irrigated land by human effort.  Agricultural earnings from un-irrigated land are taxed at 10%, because rain water comes from God and does not involve human effort.  Profits from uncultivated land as well as from mining ores, which come primarily from the bounties of God, are taxed at 20%.  This provides incentives to invent and apply technology and pursue science in order to improve it.  Endnote 1

B.  The Second Concept: Interdependence of Economic and Political Power

The second basic principle of Islamic economics is that economic power and political power are interdependent.  Economic justice is not merely one aspect of political justice but provides its foundation.  Neither is possible without the other.  This is part of the Islamic concept of tawhid, which teaches the interdependence of everything in the universe as a multiplicity that derives its coherence from the Oneness of the Creator.  The pulverization of knowledge into unrelated parts is the principle cause of chaos. The principal cure is recognition and reestablishment of a coherent order in the universe.  Endnote 2

The most important derivative of this second principle for Islamic economic thought and the most important aspect of haqq al mal or respect for private property ownership in the means of production is recognition that such ownership is a universal human right.  It may not be usurped by government as in socialism, whereby the “ownership” by the proletariat is pure fiction.  Furthermore, Islamic principles of universal ownership are incompatible with the welfare economics of capitalist economies, which have constructed barriers to universal access to ownership and justified this politically by redistributing profits from the rich to the poor. The result is the concentration of ownership and a constantly growing wealth gap both within and among countries.  Endnote 3

Economic justice in traditionalist Islamic thought may be compared to the design of modern input-output theory, whereby every person has a right to participate through either labor or capital in the production of wealth, and an equal right to the distribution of this wealth based on one’s own input.  The sole role of government is to maintain the principle of limitation through the principle of harmonic justice, which is to assure that contributive and distributive justice remain in balance.  Both economic socialism and either monopoly or oligarchical capitalism violate all three principles.

C.  Modern Islamic Economics

The father of modern Islamic economics is Shaykh al Islam Muhammad al Tahir ibn Ashur.  He taught at Zaituna University in Tunis, which traditionally ranked right after Al Azhar in Cairo as the leading Muslim university in the world, and rose to become the Grand Mufti of Tunisia.  His major contribution to Islamic thought was to revive the normative study of Islamic jurisprudence in the first half of the twentieth century.  Endnote 4 Ibn Ashur died at the age of 94 in 1973, but he led the way toward a renaissance of higher purposes in Islamic thought by developing an open-ended framework of respect for new responsibilities that became the foundation for an Islamic science of human rights.  He published his magnum opus, Maqasid al Shari ‘ah al Islamiya, in 1946, when Marxism had captured the minds of almost the entire body of the world-wide Muslim intelligentsia, both liberals and conservatives. Endnote 5 His position was that Marxism is un-Islamic in theory and would be catastrophic in practice.

His most radical proposal was that wealth in a capital intensive economy is created primarily by capital rather than by labor.  He thereby stood Karl Marx on his head, who had asserted, contrary to all the evidence, that labor is the only factor in wealth creation and that capital is merely a “congealed form” of it.  This so-called labor theory of value justified the expropriation of all private ownership of capital by the state on behalf of the workers, who otherwise would be doomed forever to the status of wage-slaves.  This Marxist labor theory of value is still dominant in much of the Muslim world, but only because it is still almost universally accepted in the best American universities.

Grand Mufti Ibn Ashur developed the principle of equality of opportunity and associated it with access to and preservation of private wealth.  He considered that respect for private property in the means of production and its preservation and safe-guarding (hifz) form the core principle of haqq al mal.  Akin to Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand underlying the free market economies, Ibn Ashur posited as a basic principle of subsidiarity that, “the preservation of private wealth leads eventually to the preservation of the community’s wealth, because the preservation of the whole is achieved by preserving its constituent parts” (p. 121).  This principle applies to self-determination in both economics and politics.

Ibn Ashur was almost a century ahead of his time by inventing not merely binary economics but trinary or three-factor economics, which is critical to such tools of expanded capital ownership as community investment corporations. Endnote 6 He wrote, “There are two ways for the community and its members to create wealth: owning (tamalluk) and earning (takassub).  Owning is the basis of wealth formation by humans” (p. 280).  Tamalluk means owning property (p. 282), in other words ownership of all non-human means of production, which one may define as “capital.”  Takassub is equivalent to labor or human work in employing capital.  Ibn Ashur writes, “Earning (takassub) depends on three primary factors or ‘usul: 1) land (‘ard), 2) labor (‘amal), and capital (ra ‘s al mal)” (p. 282).

Land includes natural resources, such as oil, which is created by “God” rather than by either labor or capital.

Labor as a means of production includes ingenuity in management within a corporation to determine the efficiency of the corporation in bringing together the three factors of production, land, labor, and capital.

Capital may be construed to include the results of human effort after completion, such as a highway system as part of the economic infrastructure, technological processes, robots, and patents.  Ibn Ashur defines capital as follows: “Obviously, means of work, such as engines, steam-driven machines, electrical equipment, and even animals used for packing and plowing, would constitute part of capital” (p. 284).

These three factors of production can all be privately owned.  As a general principle in Islamic economics, according to Ibn Ashur’s outline of economic justice, everything that can be so owned should be.  The corollary is that the process of broadening ownership of future wealth must not deprive existing owners of their accumulated ownership rights from the past, because any confiscation of such rights would violate the sacred value of ownership as such.  The only exception would be eminent domain, whereby, for example, the community through its government can appropriate land for urban renewal after paying market value to the existing owners, so that the present and future residents can form a land-based community investment corporation.  Funds for such acquisition, as well as for the establishment of new industries on the land through a community investment corporation, can and should come from the cost-free creation of money by the central bank for productive enterprises individually owned by every member of the community.

D.  Role of Money and Government

A fourth branch of the economy, in addition to the factors of production, is the invisible infrastructure of government, including the legal system and the laws that govern banking, taxes, and corporations.  This publicly “owned” infrastructure of society functions either to further concentrate private ownership or to de-monopolize ownership of the rapidly growing wealth of society as part of a public policy to narrow or close the wealth gap.  Since government has the only legitimate monopoly of police power in society, it should minimize its own power by maximizing the power of civil society and of every person.  This can be accomplished best by promoting economic democracy as the surest means to pursue the vision of political democracy.

Following the universally accepted principle of Islamic economics, Ibn Ashur did not consider money itself or even credit and shares of stock as a means of production or “capital,” because they are only symbols that may be backed by capital but have no value in themselves.  Such symbols are used to facilitate the transmission of thought in linking people to the economic process by making individual or joint choices among economic activities and transactions.  Money, credit, and stock link people to the instruments of production, known as capital, by enabling them to direct the employment of these instruments.  These symbols of value are media of exchange, which quantify economic value and permit the implementation of promises as a social value.

This view of money as a measure of value but not as a factor of production led to the view that charging interest for the introduction of money into the economy by either the government or a private person is illegitimate.  If a person or a company loans money to a borrower, the lender would incur the “opportunity cost” of not lending to someone else and earning interest from this.  But this does not affect the theoretical illegitimacy of earning money from money or selling instruments of debt, such as derivatives, in order to earn a profit by selling at interest what essentially has negative value and actually deprives the economy of productive capacity.

E.  Interest and Concentration of Wealth

The strongest argument against interest-burdened finance is that it concentrates wealth.  The lender to an economic enterprise does not share the same risks as does the borrower, because the debt must be repaid before the calculation and distribution of profits.  This gives an advantage to the wealthy who can afford to lend money and a corresponding disadvantage to the borrower, thereby gradually producing or increasing a wealth gap within society with all of the attendant social friction, alienation, and extremism that may accompany this stratification of society.

The Islamic alternative is to use only what is known as “merchant banking,” wherein those with money invest in economic enterprises or projects that commercial bankers have judged to be reliable in returning a profit.  To the extent that there is a profit the investor might earn more than he could charge in interest, but if there is a loss he must share it equally with the entrepreneur and may lose what in an interest-bearing transaction would be both interest and principal.  This arrangement does not inherently concentrate wealth and may even broaden capital ownership.

The same risk-sharing arrangement would apply to the creation of money by a country’s central bank or by private banks in countries where there still are such things as there were until the creation of the Federal Reserve System in America in 1913.  The model for such an Islamic system of banking was developed as a theoretical construct in Pakistan as part of the introduction of “Islamic banking” in 1982, but it was never implemented because it required an accounting system that was immune to corruption.  According to this pure system of money creation, based on shared risk rather than on “guaranteed” interest, the local bank would provide money for a productive enterprise in return for a percent of the profits.  The risks to the owners of the bank from doing this would be distributed among many local banks by a system of insurance.  At the next higher level, the regional bank would provide money to the local banks in return for a percentage of the local banks’ profits.  At the top of the pyramid, the central bank would issue money to the regional banks in return for a percentage of their profits.  The central bank would regulate the money supply by setting the percentage of profits that each level of banks could charge.

This system would work, of course, only for investment banking.  Loans for consumption by definition are not self-financing and therefore have no return on investment.  They would lead to an imbalance between production and consumption.  They are inflationary because the money loaned does not produce products to sell that can absorb the additional money infused into the economy.  This, in turn, might lead to counter-measures that could trigger a recession or a cycle of boom or bust that would discourage long-range investment planning.  For these reasons, loans at interest for consumption by individuals is considered to be un-Islamic orharam.

The original plan for Pakistan in 1982, as described at the time in a position paper on the subject of Islamic banking, commercial law, and Islamic accounting by one of the authors of the present book, provided for the gradual application of Islamic banking over a period of many years, because it was thought that the pure system would be politically acceptable only if a number of stop-gap compromises would accompany its introduction.  For this purpose, seven major techniques that are legal in Islamic law were recommended to avoid Islamic banking in principle while employing interest-based banking in practice.  The justification was that such apparently fraudulent practices would be phased out as soon as they were no longer necessary. Endnote 7

Some other Muslim legal scholars took the position that it would be better openly to accept the legitimacy of interest-burdened finance, known as riba, than to engage in a game of pretence.  Some scholars argue that the ban on riba applies anyway only to exorbitant interest, which in Western law is defined as usury. Their focus is on the harm to the individual from charging interest, rather than on the harm to the entire society from aggravating the wealth gap.  This, in turn, has been countered by traditional scholars, like Shaykh Ibn Ashur, who argue that the real issue is whether one should own or be owned, and that the real moral issue is whether human dignity can be maintained in a society of wage slavery.

F.  Economy Based on Private Ownership

Ibn Ashur was not equipped to devise specific institutional means to create money and credit based on future profits rather than on past savings, which is the key to modern binary and trinary economics.  His framework, however, leads inevitably to the concept that it is a universal human right for every person to participate in owning productive wealth.  This leads to the concept that it is a universal responsibility of individuals in moral community through government to facilitate this through the perfection of financial institutions so that they will broaden rather than concentrate capital ownership and reduce rather than increase the wealth gap, which otherwise would be inevitable in a modern capital intensive society. Endnote 8 Western economic theoreticians have developed parts of Islamic economics but few have had the vision to see these parts as constituents of a single holistic framework of an ownership economy, much less as part of a higher paradigm of transdisciplinary thought. Endnote 9

This right to what may be called contributive justice, i.e., the right to contribute to one’s own and the community’s wealth through one’s own ownership and management of capital, presumes the right also to distributive justice, i.e., the right to the proceeds of one’s contribution, whether in labor or capital.  Ibn Ashur called for social justice, also known as harmonic justice, as a responsibility of government to assure the integrity and equity of both contributive and distributive justice based on broadened ownership.  As he put it, “One of the Shari’ah’s objectives is to regulate the management of wealth” to assure equality of opportunity (p. 278).

Ibn Ashur insisted that justice calls for free markets and transparency in all transactions, which is essential for both contributive and distributive justice. Free markets provide the only way to quantify economic values and permit individual choice among them.

The government may reflect the community’s priorities in non-quantifiable values based on absolute principles, which the free market then can apply, but these social values are set by different standards than individual choice.  For example, the government can de-monopolize power by acknowledging universal individual private ownership of natural resources based on the principle that every person is a steward of nature and therefore has an equal right to land and therefore to its rental value and to all the profits from all that it contains.  Of course, the government can impose concentrated ownership by an oligopoly of concessionaires through its monopoly of coercion, but this is precisely what Ibn Ashur condemned.

If Ibn Ashur may be called the father of modern economics in the East, Louis Kelso was its father in the West.  Both of them reached the same conclusion in 1944 when they observed that as the input of capital increased in the production process, the role of human inputs proportionally declined.  This meant that the immoral redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor would be necessary in order to forestall revolution from below in a capitalist order.  Marx was wrong in failing to see the power of redistributive politics in prolonging the unjust concentration of wealth.  But, Kelso and his alter ego, Mortimer Adler, who is considered by many to have been America’s greatest philosopher, saw that redistributing wealth through the power of government is also unjust because it violates the sanctity of individual ownership rights, on which the integrity and stability of every civilization depends.

Once one accepts the system of ownership economics based on the trinary factors of production, as envisaged by Shaykh al Islam Ibn Ashur in his revolutionary introduction to Islamic normative justice, the ways to implement it are universally applicable. They are limited only by human imagination and ingenuity and by the courage needed to perfect the existing system of money and credit so that it will effectively democratize economic opportunity and thereby facilitate real representative government.

Endnotes

1.  Crane, Robert D., Islamic Commercial Law, U.S. Department of State, 1982, 120 pages.

2.  This recovery of the transcendent is represented in the “global spiral” found in Native American petroglyphs, which date back to the dawn of human habitation and are so beautifully treated in the set of often lengthy novels by the husband and wife team of archeologists, Michael and Kathleen Gear, 1990-98, Dom Doherty Associates, New York, especially the first two in the series, People of the Wolf and People of the Fire.

3.  Statistics and analysis in Crane, Robert D., “Economic Justice: A Cure for Terrorism?”, www.theamericanmuslim.org,September 29, 2002.

4.  Ibn Ashur was inspired by the publication in printed form of Al Shatibi’s manuscript, Al Muwafaqat, when Ibn Ashur was a boy and by his association as a student at the age of 24 in 1903 with Shaykh Muhhamad Abdu.

5.  The International Institute of Islamic Thought, headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, is producing an entire library of books in both Arabic and English to make available the best writings, both classical and modern, on the Islamic heritage of enlightened jurisprudence and human rights.  The three most seminal of these books are: 1) Maqasid al Shari ‘ah as Philosophy of Islamic Law: A Systems Approach, by Jasser Auda, HIT, London and Washington, 2007, 333 pages; 2) Ibn Ashur, Treatise on Maqasid al Shari ‘ah, by Muhammad al-Tahir ibn Ashur, translated by Mohamed el-Tahir el-Mesawi. HIT, 2006, 489 pages; and 3) Imam al Shatibi ‘s Theory of the Higher Objectives and Intents of Islamic Law, translated by Ahmad al Raysuni, 2005, 441 pages.

6.  For modern applications see The Community Investment Corporation: Linking People to Land and Technology through Ownership, Norman K. Kurland, 2000, and The Community Investment Corporation: A Vehicle for Economic and Political Empowerment of Individual Citizens at the Community Level, 1992, both of these by Norman G. Kurland and published as occasional papers of the Center for Economic and Social Justice.

7.  Crane, ibid, Islamic Commercial Law.  See also on parallel legal systems, Crane, Robert D., “Arbitral Freedom from Substantive Law,” in The Arbitration Journal, Fall, 1959, based on the author’s dissertation at Harvard Law School, Commercial Arbitration in European Civil Law,1959.

8.  On the moral duty of individuals to act in community in order to promote justice by perfecting societal institutions, rather than merely by acting morally and charitably as individuals, see the foundation documents of modern post-capitalist or Just Third Way economics by Father William Ferree, S.M., PhD.  These are Introduction to Social Justice, Paulist Press, 1948; Social Charity, a transcript from a seminar on April 11-13, 1956; and Reverend Feree’s first major publication on the subject, The Act of Social Justice, Catholic University of America Press, 1942. All are available online at www.cesj.org

9.  For pioneering econometric analyses of the basic elements in economics that takes into account all factors of production, see Mohammad Ali Chaudry, PhD: “Net Income and Productivity Analysis (NIPA) as a Planning Model,” in Economic Analysis of Telecommunications: Theory and Applications, L. Courville, A. de Fontenay, and R. Dobell, Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam, 1983, 413 pages; B. E. Davis, G. J. Caccappolo, and Muhammad Ali Chaudry, “An Econometric Planning Model for American Telephone and Telegraph Company,” The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 1973, pp. 29-56; and M. Ali Chaudry, Projecting Productivity to the Bottom Line, Productivity Brief 18, American Productivity Center, October 1982, 8 pp.

 
IV.  Paradigm Spring and the Clash of Civilizational Paradigms

    Paradigms are premises of thought that frame one’s outlook on life and one’s interpretation or even one’s recognition of facts.  A paradigm may narrow one’s vision and blind one to changes that have accumulated over time.  Or paradigms may widen one’s global vision so that one can identify facts relevant to a possibly transforming world and thereby more effectively set an agenda for intelligence gathering and policy planning.

    According to chaos theory and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, which apply in all fields of physical science, all truly major change occurs only after the old theory is bankrupt in explaining facts to the point that suddenly new states of nature and of understanding replace the old.

    The most unchanging fact about any kind of forecasting or planning is that most people are unaware that they have unspoken premises, which is why the parties to a disputed issue speak past each other and never come to grips with their real differences.  Perhaps more often than not, this failure to communicate is based on a deliberate decision to keep their unspoken premises secret for political or other purposes.  Sometimes there is nothing more sensitive than the public revelation of one’s own ultimate reasons for advocating anything.

    One result of such covert paradigm management is to brand anyone who advocates anything out of higher principle as “a loose cannon on a rolling deck”.  Such people cannot be bribed, which makes them inherently dangerous for people who consider principles of any kind as a dangerous form of baggage.  Even the very concept of a paradigm seems threatening.

    As a test case, based on reading just a few articles in the Washington Post at the end of June, 2011, one could conclude that we are entering a Paradigm Spring, where institutional constraints on the free market of thought are replaced by new perspectives in an era of global vision.  We may even be entering the age of an epistemological revolution, a revolution not merely in what one knows but of knowledge itself.  This perspective is brilliantly explained by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Chapter 8, “Islamic Education, Philosophy, and Science: A Survey in Light of Present-Day Challenges”, in his new book, Islam in the Modern World: Challenged by the West, Threatened by Fundamentalism, Keeping Faith with Tradition.

    Part of the new ideative revolution is the increasingly sophisticated use of mimetic warfare, which is the use of memes (words and symbols) to subliminally control human thought.  The followers of old paradigms in foreign policy castigate those who disagree with them as conspiracy mongers.  In turn, increasingly these so-called conspiracy mongers cast their critics as the true conspirators.  They both use a boomerang strategy that can reflect back on oneself by using memetic warfare to degrade the very concepts of truth and justice.  Whoever can manipulate an opponent’s mind by either subliminal or merely psychological warfare has won half the battle.

    Recent trends point to the bankruptcy of old paradigms and of their accompanying euphemisms, such as “the clash of civilizations”, since the clashes are primarily among paradigms within civilizations not among them.  Another well-known bankruptcy is the NeoCon oxymoron known as “democratic capitalism”.  This concentrates capita ownership rather than broadening access to such ownership and thereby produces an escalating wealth gap that inevitably concentrates political power and in the future can be a major cause of terrorism.

    New memes or symbols in the growing free market of thought accompany the designation of old paradigms, such as “promiscuous interventionism”, once known as unilateralism.  Sometimes a really new paradigm arises based on an ancient paradigm common within all the major world religions, such as “peace, prosperity, and freedom through compassionate justice”.

    The results of the Arab Spring and the task of both forecasting and planning the future could result in a new academic discipline entitled Paradigm Management, because facts have meaning only in the context of the paradigms used to understand them.  The Washington Post during just a few days in late June, 2011, revealed several examples of paradigm shifts, for either better or worse.

    Perhaps the most significant and no doubt the least noticed was the expansion of the term “Islamist” to include all radical and violent movements led by self-declared Muslims.  Previously, the accepted meaning of the term “Islamist” was the specific organization known for half a century as the Ikhwan al Muslimun or Muslim Brotherhood, which originally followed a pacifist strategy of education under Hasan al Banna but metasticized to violent extremism under Syed Qutb.  During the past twenty years, however, the Qutbian radicals have left to form new radical groups and movements, like the Jamaat al islamiyah and its offspring in Al Qa’ida.  To lump such groups into a new generic term, “Islamist”, makes it difficult to comprehend reality and leads inevitably to the condemnation of Islam as a religion.

    Even Fareed Zakaria, who is one of the best informed pundits in the world on Muslim affairs, in his Washington Post article of June 23, entitled “Pakistan’s Military Crisis”, writes, “Pakistan’s military has traditionally been seen as a secular and disciplined organization.  But the evidence is now overwhelming that it has been infiltrated at all levels by violent Islamists, including Taliban and Al Qa’ida sympathizers”.  Neither of these groups are by any stretch of the imagination Islamists.  The Taliban are nativists who would oppose all foreigners, even the Chinese, whereas the core leaders of Al Qa’ida are focused on destroying the United States as a means to impose their own global caliphate.  To confuse the essence of these groups and therefore to lump them in a generic “Islamist” category makes it impossible to understand Islamists, who abandoned violence as either a strategy or tactic a quarter century ago.

    Although there still are some “radical activists” among the Islamists throughout the world in opposition to what is now the Old Guard, it is misleading for Zakaria to state that “Radical Islamist ideas - with America as the Great Satan - are now reflexive for many in Pakistan’s military”.  Zakaria may be right that radicals, who almost by definition are not Islamists, appear to be growing rapidly in Pakistan, especially among the military in response to what George F. Will in his article on June 23rd, 2011, termed America’s promiscuous interventionism.  The title of Will’s article was “McCain, Caped Crusader: Under his doctrine, America would be stuck in never-ending war”.  He was referring to McCain’s doctrine that the United States must intervene wherever America’s values are affronted.  This required the non-sequitur or logical disconnect in McCain’s mind that,“If Qaddafi survives, he will try to harm America”.  This catastrophist, hyper-security paradigm requires the accompanying paradigm of promiscuous interventionism.  According to George Will, this means quite simply that, “We must continue fighting because we started fighting”, and therefore never stop, even if continuation of the intervention carries blowback worse than the danger we originally foresaw.

    An excellent example of such memetic disinformation, whether deliberate or merely misguided, and of its impact on global affairs is the demonization of the Talibanic religious nationalists in Central Asia as a threat to America’s vital interests, who according to Colbert I. King’s Washington Post article of June 25th, “A Familiar Story in Iraq and Afghanistan”, are a local phenomenon.  He writes, “The Taliban has strongholds in Afghanistan, but it does not now, nor has it ever, posed a threat to U.S. soil”.  Misreading of what motivates the Taliban, and in fact of what motivates most of the world, has led to the deteriorating prestige of America as a model society, as shown by Griff Witte in his Washington Post article of June 23, entitled “Pakistan Courts China as U.S. Ties Sour”.  In the section entitled “Geostrategic Importance” he cites the Pew Research Center survey, according to which, “Pakistanis love China just about as much as they dislike the United states: 87% of Pakistanis say they have a favorable view of China, compared with 12% who say the same thing about the United States”.

    Zakaria in the above quoted article adds, “Last November, the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, reported on a high-level meeting in which “the Pakistani military viewed the United States as a hostile force trying to perpetuate a state of ‘controlled chaos’ in Pakistan and determined to ‘denuclearize’ the regime”.

    Fortunately, even the inveterate supporter of the 1960s paradigm, “Peace through power”, Henry Kissinger, in his article earlier on June 8th, 2011, entitled “How to exit Afghanistan”, gave credence to the relatively recent paradigm of “Smart Power” by concluding: “After America’s withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan and the constraint to our strategic reach produced by the revolution in Egypt, a new definition of American leadership and America’s national interest is inescapable.  A sustainable regional settlement in Afghanistan would be a worthy start”.

    The process of paradigm genesis and transformation, so remarkably shown in late-June, 2011, requires its institutionalization in think-tanks, which shape the agendas that control policy.  This institutional shift is introduced by a remarkable full-page article, in the Sunday Washington Post of June 19th, entitled “Continental Drift”, by Richard N. Haass, who has been President of the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) for almost a decade, prior to which from 2001 to 2003 he was director of Policy and Planning in the U.S. Department of State.  He has long been influential in the efforts of the “Eastern Establishment” to reign in the suicidal ideology known as Neo-Conservatism.

    Dick Haass advises against trying to mend broken and outdated alliances, with specific reference to NATO.  He notes that, “Intimate ties across the Atlantic were forged at a time when American political and economic power was largely in the hands of Northeastern elites”.  This was an era when America could justify its overweaning influence in Europe, to the extent even of trying to control DeGaulle, by pointing to the “evil other” as a mortal threat to everyone.  America in recent decades has changed as the West and the South have gained power in Washington and New York.

Most importantly, Haass writes, “The very nature of international relations has also undergone a transformation.  Alliances, whether NATO during the Cold War or the U.S.-South Korean partnership now, do best in settings that are highly inflexible and predictable, where foes and friends are easily identified, potential battlegrounds are obvious, and contingencies can be anticipated”.  He concludes, “Almost none of this is true in our current historical moment.  Threats are many and diffuse.  Relationships seem situational, increasingly dependent on evolving and unpredictable circumstances.  Countries can be friends, foes, or both, depending on the day of the week - just look at the United States an Pakistan.  Alliances tend to require shared assessments and explicit obligations; they are much more difficult to operate when worldviews [known as paradigms] diverge and commitments are discretionary.  But as the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya all demonstrate, this is precisely the world we inhabit”.

    Haass is saying that countries will follow their own interests, based on their own history and values, and that we are past the era when a superpower can force other countries to submit to its own perceived interests.  This means in reference to Libya that Europe should not expect America to clean up a mess in Europe’s own backyard.  This means that the era of unilateralism pioneered by the “realist” Henry Kissinger and by the ideologues of NeoCon infamy is over.

    Most interesting in managing the clash of civilizational paradigms in the era of the Arab Spring is the establishment of a new think-tank, Google Ideas, by the Council on Foreign Relations, with Google as its deep-pocket.  This weekend, June 26-28th, 2011, 80 former Muslim extremists will gather in Dublin with 120 “thinkers, activists, philanthropists, and business leaders” to explore how technology can play a role in de-radicalization efforts around the globe.  The premise for this discussion is that, “Getting terrorists to give up violence may be more attainable than getting them to change their sympathies. ...  We’re not looking for silver bullets but new approaches”.

    In an era when counter-terrorism is viewed in Washington as a military challenge, despite competing paradigms of “Smart Power”, the results around the world suggest that emphasis should be placed on understanding the causes of terrorism (and perhaps of terroristic counter-terrorism).  In the article by Allen McDuffee in the Washington Post of June 25th, entitled “Google Ideas think tank to gather former extremists”, the premise of Google Ideas as expressed by Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt is that, “If we compartmentalize different radicalization strategies, that also means we compartmentalize the de-radicalization solutions”, and that could be a lost opportunity.  Radicalization may result from many causes, especially loss of dignity, but the result is always the same, namely, hatred, extremism, and finally terrorism as their product.

    At stake is the future of civilization, which, in turn, depends on the governing paradigms both within and among nations.  The future of the Arab Spring is much in doubt, but the abandonment of old assumptions and old paradigms of thought is essential to promote the birth of new hope in what we might call a twentieth-first-century “Paradigm Spring”.