Meeting the Challenge of Coexistence
With Alastair Crooke, Panel on Mitigating Religious and Ethnic Conflict, Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, September 20, 2006
MARY ROBINSON: When you say you think we have Islamism totally wrong can you briefly say why?
ALASTAIR CROOKE: Yes. We perceive the West as engaged in a struggle against what we see as a continuum of Islamist extremists. And we see this is the struggle that we are facing.
In fact, there’s just as much of a struggle within Islamism, and more than that, when you listen to Islamist groups you hear them speaking both from what I call the revolutionary wing and the revivalist wing.
They use language which is quite interesting, and people say, well how do we do politics with these people because they don’t seem to have a political agenda?
But quite often the words that they’re using are words like respect, dignity, and justice. And maybe these are words that are familiar here, particularly in the United States, and I think they were the sort of language that came out of the civil rights movement here. And I think what you are seeing, partly in the Muslim world, and what Islamism is about is, it is the politicization of a deep discontent with the world order. It’s not simply about religion. It’s about a deep discontent at the world order and a desire to confront not the West, but Western hegemony. There is a distinction between being anti-West and being against Western hegemony.
Read the complete 38-page transcript (PDF) of this panel discussion between Alastair Crooke, Mark Drewell of Barloworld International, and Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, former president of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, moderated by Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland. And to learn more about the Clinton Global Initiative, go to the CGI web site.