Crossing the Crescent

Sunday’s WikiLeak deluge and the official response to it have reaffirmed my axiom for the digital age: too much information, not enough knowledge.

After the flood of more than 90,000 low-level classified documents splashed onto the front-pages of the Western world’s three leading newspapers, the U.S. government delivered a tongue-lashing to WikiLeaks, mainstream media wrote ominously of repercussions for Obama’s ability to secure Congressional war funding, and bloggers plunged into the data headfirst in the search for scintillating information.

And while a few morsels have surfaced here and there, what, on balance, have we learned? What has really changed? As it turns out, very little.

It comes as no surprise that the war is going badly, that civilian casualties have been downplayed, or that Pakistani intelligence maintains ties to militants operating in Afghanistan.

Former soldier and Center for a New American Security analyst Andrew Exum writes, “I have seen nothing in the documents that has either surprised me or told me anything of significance,” and calls comparisons to the Pentagon Papers “ridiculous.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/opinion/27exum.html)

As for the stern lectures about the leak’s potential to cost lives or compromise national security, a Pentagon review of the documents “has so far found no evidence that the disclosure harmed U.S. national security or endangered American troops in the field.” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38417666/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia)

So much for that.

Glenn Greenwald, one of the sharpest progressive bloggers, linked to what he called “a very perceptive analysis” by The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson that explains “how and why [the leaks] reveal clear official deception about the war.” But I found nothing of the sort in Davidson’s brief post, nor does she herself claim to have offered such an explanation. (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2010/07/wikileaks-and-the-war.html)

One story, had the U.S. media evinced any interest in pursuing it, might have been the suppression of reports on civilian casualties and possible war crimes. But such pedestrian concerns carry little currency here, as blogger Sahar Habib Ghazi pointed out in a post that appeared in Pakistan’s major daily, Dawn:

“[I]nstead of focusing on the many war crimes, cover-ups and evidence of an occupation mentality in Afghanistan, most American news networks and publications have seized the opportunity to either berate WikiLeaks for divulging secret information or to point fingers at Pakistan…’” (http://blog.dawn.com/2010/07/27/the-isi-america%E2%80%99s-favourite-scapegoat/)

One reason the leak will not become Pentagon Papers 2.0 is that the contents tend to confirm, rather than contradict, the general trend of the news about the war in Afghanistan for anyone who has been paying attention.

But there is also another reason: we live in America 2.0. We are far removed from the era of social and cultural tumult that accompanied the Vietnam War. We have decided to shift the burden of our war-fighting from conscripted young men to a smaller, leaner, and better-trained all-volunteer force, which we have equipped with deadlier and more automated technology. Most Americans are more connected to their iPads than to the American soldiers or foreign civilians whose deaths will register only as news blurbs on the gadgets’ screens now and then.

So while we’re ceaselessly drenched in new information—leaks, Rolling Stone features, official reports, policy studies, investigations, blogs, up-to-the-minute news—we (collectively speaking) have no hard incentive to enhance our knowledge.

And as we’ve been repeating the same mistakes for the past ten years, in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world, it certainly shows.

(Published on FPIF blog)

Though the New York Times is a valuable source of information, its tone and content sometimes betray its mainstream liberal bias to an embarrassing degree. This Monday’s front-page piece, titled “Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap” well illustrates the point.

Published in sync with Hillary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan, the report says that the absence of an equitable tax system is helping to “[create] conditions that have helped spread an insurgency that is tormenting the country and complicating American policy in the region.”

Tongue-clucking about Pakistan’s failure to do its part in America’s war, it describes “a sorry performance for a country that is among the largest recipients of American aid, payments of billions of dollars that prop up the country’s finances and are meant to help its leaders fight the insurgency.”

Nowhere in the article, however, does the Times offer any evidence, statements of fact, expert commentary, or testimony from ordinary Pakistanis to substantiate its claim that its tax policy has “created the conditions” for the insurgency.

It is doubtless true that inequality is rampant in Pakistan, and it is equally true that its ruling elite is corrupt, parasitic, and stunningly myopic. But that is not unusual in a poor country, and it does not explain the rapid rise of the blistering Pakistani Taliban insurgency.

A more methodical tax collection effort would certainly bolster state revenue, but most uncollected taxes would be drawn from major cities like Karachi, which lies far to the south, and from the playgrounds of the rich that pepper Islamabad, the country’s capital.

The insurgency, on the other hand, is burgeoning in the North Western Frontier Province that lies north and borders Afghanistan. The government exercises little administrative control there because of the fierce Pashtun tribalism that prevails on both sides of the border. That has been the case since the country’s founding more than sixty years ago.

So how could a long history of unfair wealth distribution explain an insurgency that has sprung up only recently? If mere poverty were a kindle for political violence, wouldn’t the populations of, say, Bangladesh or North Korea be engaged in mass revolt? And if taxation policies benefiting the rich were responsible for the violence, shouldn’t America have been in the throes of an insurgency after G.W. Bush enacted massive tax cuts for the country’s richest citizens?

To find the real catalyst for the insurgency, the Times ought to have looked a little closer to home. Before the United States launched its invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistani extremists were either working with the state or lying low. Indeed, it is only very recently—when the U.S. woke up from its neoconservative-induced coma in Iraq and shifted focus back to Afghanistan—that Pakistani cities, mosques, shrines, government centers, and military installations have regularly become scenes of bloody militant attacks.

Though the Pakistani Taliban have certainly exploited the poverty of the rural masses, their rallying cry has not exactly echoed the slogan of “no taxation without representation”; it has instead homed in on the Pakistan’s support for the U.S. led war along the “Af-Pak” border. Its bloodiest assaults, including the cowardly massacres at an Ahmadi mosque and a Sufi shrine, came only after Pakistan launched a 2009 summer offensive in parts of the NWFP.

Of course, the American-led war in Afghanistan is not the only reason for the insurgency, even though the Pakistani press, reflecting the impotence of the people, has heaped all blame on America. The Pakistani elites have themselves been playing a cynical and myopic double-game with militants, hoping to leverage ties with extremists such as the local Haqqani network and even the Afghan Taliban to shape Afghanistan once the United States exits the stage. According to one recent report, the ties are even more extensive than previously believed.

The Pakistani military, blind to the pernicious effects of empowering illiterate and backward Pahstun tribal elements who imagine themselves to be pious Muslims, thinks it can harness the extremists’ violence against Indian interests in Afghanistan—even though these Pakistani “Islamists” have so far succeeded only in killing Muslim civilians and Pakistani soldiers at an unprecedented pace.

The Times’ fixation on Pakistan’s tax policies is curiously off the mark, blaming Pakistan for the insurgency without pointing to either of the actual reasons to blame. It is the presence of thousands of American troops in neighboring Afghanistan and the Pakistani state’s tacit support for extremism, not an absence of tax collectors, that is most responsible for kindling the flames of the insurgency.

(First published on FPIF Blog)

It has been said before that Al-Qaeda’s greatest victory was not September 11^th but Abu Ghraib. Indeed, the images of Americans reveling in the humiliation of Arab prisoners enhanced the potency of al-Qaeda’s narrative and won it scores of new recruits.

But to achieve this propaganda victory, the terrorist organization first had to accomplish something more basic: provoking a vigorous hatred of Arabs and of Islam among Americans. In that sense, September 11^th was not so much a lesser victory as it was preparation for the real goal.

As Muslims in New York are learning, that preparation continues to exercise a powerful effect.

Some New Yorkers—egged on by Israeli loyalists who are eager to intensify American animosity toward Muslims—are expressing increasing hostility to plans for new mosques.

To take one example, The New York Times reported yesterday on a meeting Wednesday night on Staten Island, where tensions have erupted because of a Muslim group’s plans to convert a Catholic convent into a mosque; the church’s pastor has signed an agreement to sell the property. but a slew of administrative hurdles remain.

The meeting, held by the local civic association with the aim of defusing tensions, merely shed light on the mob mentality of much of the audience. The three invited Muslims, leaders of the Muslim American Society, were interrogated, jeered, shouted down, and booed by an audience that included rabid supporters of Israeli colonialism such as Robert Spencer, the presiding ayatollah at Jihad Watch.

Spencer, following the neoconservative rulebook to the letter, lobbed predictable smears and loaded questions, asserting that MAS had ties to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood. In a touching display of restraint, he apparently did not assert the three guests were hiding Osama bin Laden under their beds.

But Spencer, along with more than a dozen other audience members, did insist that MAS was on some sort “terrorist watch list.” As the Times noted, that is false:

“The State Department maintains a terrorist watch list for foreign organizations, and the Justice Department has identified domestic groups it considers unindicted co-conspirators in various terror-related prosecutions. The American Muslim Society is on neither of those lists.”

The interrogation session ended abruptly when it “eventually collapsed in shouting around 11 p.m., prompting the police and security guards to ask everyone to leave.”

Before that happened, however a shamefully revealing exchange took place:

“But just 20 minutes earlier, as Bill Finnegan stood at the microphone, came the meeting’s single moment of hushed silence. Mr. Finnegan said he was a Marine lance corporal, home from Afghanistan, where he had worked as a mediator with warring tribes.

After the sustained standing ovation that followed his introduction, he turned to the Muslims on the panel: ‘My question to you is, will you work to form a cohesive bond with the people of this community?’ The men said yes.

Then he turned to the crowd. ‘And will you work to form a cohesive bond with these people — your new neighbors?’

The crowd erupted in boos. ‘No!’ someone shouted.”

It is dispiriting to see these Americans—who probably imagine themselves to be patriots—united in hostility to fundamental First Amendment rights. But Muslim organizations have nonetheless adopted a posture of engagement, secure in the conviction that, in America, bigotry slinks away under the enduring gaze of fairness.

“We are newcomers, and newcomers in America have always had to prove their loyalty,” Mahdi Bray, MAS’s executive director said. “It’s an old story. You have to have thick skin.”

(First published in FPIF blog)

Shortly after the failed Times Square attack, Gen. David Petreaus characterized the lone suspect, Faisal Shahzad, as a “lone wolf.” A day later, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder offered a sharply divergent view, describing the suspect as “intimately involved” with the Pakistani Taliban.

The competing assertions about Shahzad’s links relationship with Pakistani Taliban reflect a broader debate both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and Pakistan over how to handle Taliban elements in Waziristan province.

The Pakistanis, who have been rounding up militants and conducting their own interrogations, fumed at Holder’s assessment. They questioned the only real lead thus far, a friend of Shahzad and quasi-active member of the banned Islamist group Jaish-e-Mohammad named Muhammad Rehan, and concluded that Rehan did not introduce Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban.

“There are no roots to this case, so how can we trace something back?” an anonymous Pakistani security official said.

FBI agents also questioned those detained by Pakistani authorities; they have not produced any evidence or made any statements that contradict Pakistani findings—at least not publicly.

Pakistani officials believe the U.S. is trying to use the Shahzad case to pressure the country to launch a ground offensive against the militant hornets’ nest in Waziristan province.

“There is a disconnect between the Pentagon and the [Obama] administration,” a senior Pakistani government official said of the wide gap between Petreaus’ and Holder’s assessments. “The Pentagon gets it that more open pressure on Pakistan is not helpful.”

It may not be helpful, but is it true? On Tuesday, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kit Bond, cast doubt on the Holder version of events.

“I am not convinced by the information that I’ve seen so far that there was adequate, confirmable intelligence to corroborate the statements that were made on Sunday television shows,” Bond said a classified briefing.

Another possible reason for the administration’s eagerness to push a Shahzad-Taliban connection is that it would vindicate Obama’s drone-heavy strategy.

“[B]ecause of our success in degrading the capabilities of these terrorist groups overseas…they now are relegated to trying to do these unsophisticated attacks, showing that they have inept capabilities in training,” said John Brennan, a White House counter-terrorism official.

Can anyone else hear in that rationale the faint echoes of a certain conservative? It seems to me that the expanding reach of terrorist violence is proof of the drone program’s success in the same way that the growing violence of the Iraqi insurgency was proof that it was in its “last throes.”

And the crux of Brennan’s theory—that drone strikes have so harried the world’s experts in blowing people up that they can no longer properly train people in explosives—strikes me as wishful thinking.

His view is certainly a more reassuring one for the administration than the alternative, which is that the drone attacks’ collateral damage actually inspired the radicalism of Shahzad, a seemingly integrated American citizen.

The truth may be a combination of both, or something else altogether. It’ll be hard to know until—if—the fog of competing political agendas lifts.

(Published in Foreign Policy in Focus)

It is hard to overstate just how deeply unpopular the United States is in the Muslim world.

A 2008 poll of six majority Muslim countries found that overwhelmingly large portions of the population, ranging from 71 percent in Morocco to 87 percent in Egypt, held unfavorable opinions of the United States. A 2009 poll in Pakistan revealed that 64 percent of the public views the United States as an outright enemy.

So it is a curious paradox that, despite the antagonistic and sometimes violent relationship between the United States and the Muslim world, Muslims here have fared relatively well. According to a 2009 Gallup poll, 41 percent of Muslims in the United States describe themselves as “thriving” — only five percentage points below the national average, and higher than the percentage reported in any Muslim country aside from Saudi Arabia. A full 40 percent say they have at least a college degree, making them the second-most educated religious group after Jews (at 61 percent).

Further, U.S. Muslim women, after their Jewish counterparts, are the most highly educated female religious group in the country, and Muslim economic gender parity is the nation’s most egalitarian at both the low and high ends of the spectrum.

An earlier 2007 Pew study painted a similar picture. Titled Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream, it described the Muslim minority in the United States as “largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.”

Events of the last few months, however, have called into question the pertinence, if not the validity, of that rosy general assessment. Though terrorist suspects had in the past almost always been foreigners, several of those implicated in more recent plots against American soldiers and civilians were Muslims born or raised in the United States.

U.S. Muslims as a Domestic Threat

The November 2009 incident at Fort Hood, the Texas Army base where Maj. Nidal Hasan is suspected of gunning down 10 fellow soldiers, presents the most striking case. A steady stream of unsuccessful plots has also garnered attention: the 25-year-old Queens coffee vendor who pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to destroy the New York City subway system in September 2009; the five youths who left Washington D.C. in December 2009 allegedly to join a Pakistani militant group; the middle-aged, self-proclaimed convert from Philadelphia who reportedly planned to kill a Swedish cartoonist last month; the 25-year-old New Jersey man who was caught in Yemen a week later purportedly trying to join al-Qaeda.

And just this Monday, one day after the most recent terror scare, police arrested a 30-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan; they suspect him of having loaded a sport utility vehicle with the bomb-making materials that were designed to explode in the most iconic part of our country’s most celebrated metropolis: Times Square, New York City.

Although attention lavished on individual cases should not obscure the broader picture — of the 14,000 homicides committed in the United States last year, only 14 are attributable to Muslim militancy — the sudden swell of homegrown Muslim extremism is significant. Most acutely, it has thrust into the foreground questions that have lingered in the minds of many Americans since September 11: Does Islam cause terrorism? Are all Muslims potential terrorists?

For conservatives, the latest string of incidents will only harden their conviction that the answer is a resolute “yes.” They have long insisted that Islamist terror isn’t fueled by policy or circumstance but is instead an article of the Islamic faith. And where no trace of terror can be found, conservatives have gleefully cooked up charges against Muslims, as illustrated by the smear campaigns directed at Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan, former Obama adviser Mazen Asbahi, Organization of Islamic Conference envoy Rashad Hussain , and the original principal of New York City’s first Arabic-language school, Debbie Almontasser.

For some liberals, too, the recent developments will cause unease. It was one thing to face attacks from abroad, but the presence of a homegrown Muslim threat seems to shatter the old shibboleths about multiculturalism and diversity. Some on the left had neatly apportioned Muslims into categories of “good” and “bad,” and the old paradigm that accepted only “assimilated” and “modernized” Muslims as safe is now under threat.

This liberal unease has already reached an advanced stage in Britain, typified by the writer Martin Amis, who insists that he despises “Islamism” but not Islam. This qualification notwithstanding, Amis regularly lets his mask slip with puffed-up declamations such as this one: “[N]o doubt the impulse toward rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male.”

In fact, there is a shared element between conservative and liberal views on Islamist extremism: certainty that the main problem lies with Muslims themselves.

Their Violence, Our Violence

The palatable and politically safe answers — for conservatives, that Muslims are inherently violent, and for left-liberals, that only a small minority is violent — have always skirted around one important detail: our own violence.

This is no surprise. The notion that our violence motivates terrorism has always lost out to the notion that terror is absent from our violence. It was George Orwell who observed in 1945 that, “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

But this “remarkable capacity” is not shared by everyone. Civilian deaths and accounts of torture from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine have fueled the radicalization of a minority of Muslims abroad, and it was only a matter of time before it produced the same effect on a minority of Muslims here, too.

It is only now, amid this growing domestic radicalization, that we are seeing some willingness to cure the deafness Orwell once wrote about.

Hope for the Future?

In a December 2009 New York Times article, top U.S. terrorism experts spoke bluntly about what motivates these attacks. Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism researcher at Georgetown University, noted that American military interventionism was the only logical reason for the spike in homegrown terror cases. “The longer we’ve been in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more some susceptible young men are coming to believe that it’s their duty to take up arms to defend their fellow Muslims,” he said. Robert Liken, from the Nixon Center in Washington D.C., echoed that theme: “Just the length of U.S. involvement in these countries is provoking more Muslim Americans to react.”

In March, the Center for Strategic and International Studies went a step farther. In its 22-page report on homegrown terrorism, it not only recognized the motives of homegrown terrorist suspects but advised the government to shift its policy accordingly:

[S]everal of those arrested last fall seemed to harbor the belief that the United States is at war with Islam…The United States must continue to work to puncture this narrative. White House officials already have discarded phrases like ‘war on radical Islam.’ But ultimately, the United States needs to go further than this, because al Qaeda seizes on more than just U.S. rhetoric to galvanize support for its agenda; the group also points to America’s military presence in Muslim countries as evidence for its preferred narrative. The United States, then, should consider how to balance the need to combat global terrorism with the drawbacks of large-scale, direct military intervention.

That study, along with a January report co-issued by Duke University and the University of North Carolina, also urged the government to open more lines of communication with the Muslim community.

The Obama administration at least appears to be listening on both counts.

In an April 14 speech, the president broke with a long tradition of enforced silence by asserting that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has ended up “costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.” Ignoring the cacophony of neoconservative complaints, the administration has also allowed Tariq Ramadan back into the United States and defended its choice of Rashad Hussain as special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Moreover, Arab and Muslim community leaders feel they are finally being heard. “For the first time in eight years, we have the opportunity to meet, engage, discuss, disagree, but have an impact on policy,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. “We’re being made to feel a part of that process and that there is somebody listening.”

These moves are encouraging. That some Muslim extremists now hail from our own country has, paradoxically, brought us closer to curbing terrorism. It is doubtless more difficult to conjure fantastic and absurd explanations for suicide attacks — endless virgins, inexplicable evil, exotic culture — when those carrying out such attacks are integrated and functioning members of our society rather than easily caricatured foreigners.

If the Obama administration follows through on its hesitant first steps, scaling down its military interventions, tempering its support for Israeli colonialism, and increasing engagement efforts with Muslims here and elsewhere, it will lay down a solid framework for building trust and respect.

As Audrey Kurth Cronin of the National War College observed, those assets are valuable in combating militancy: “To me, the most interesting thing about the five [Virginians] is that it was their parents that went immediately to the F.B.I. It was members of the American Muslim community that put a stop to whatever those men may have been planning.”

For ten years, America has hitched its foreign policy train to an engine of war and occupation. As a result, America’s standing in the Muslim world has declined disastrously. It’s long past time to switch tracks.

(Published in Foreign Policy in Focus)

In his Cairo address, President Obama boldly asserted a broad commonality between the United States and a quarter of humanity: “America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

Yet the most striking part of Obama’s speech contained not his own words but those of others: “I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.”

In conveying this salutation of peace from American Muslims, the president did more than link the promise of American ideals to the piety of the Islamic faith. He pointed to the existing reality of a community that he believes exemplifies his message — Muslims living and practicing freely in the citadel of the Western world.

Islam and the United States

There are 3-7 million adherents of Islam in the United States, about two-thirds of whom are first-generation immigrants. On the whole, Muslims hold above-average incomes and enjoy more liberty as a minority here than that available to them as part of a majority in most Muslim countries.

But these are only the broad, faint outlines of an unfinished montage, some pieces of which are gripped in uncertain, nervous hands — including my own.

As a young American Muslim raised in this country, I’m not sure whether America is willing to truly incorporate Muslims or merely assimilate us; whether the nation views us as a potential pillar or a probable fifth column. Fine phrases about freedom cannot, after all, gild the discrimination, suspicion, and occasional outright hostility we have faced here amid the sustained neoconservative assault of the past decade.

Subject to open suspicion and closed minds, the conscious American Muslim learns to reach with a long arm for knowledge about his religion, its teachings, its history, and its richness. This knowledge isn’t caked in rote rituals delivered downstream by the diluting currents of reflexive custom, as is so often the case in Muslim “home” countries. Instead, it’s sought out with covetous hands and seized fresh from thrashing waves underneath which it threatens to disappear in the foam of assimilation.

But it would be dishonest to pretend that this ceaseless sense of embattlement and isolation is healthy, or even sustainable. We intuitively yearn for the familiar — that which links not only past and present, but our particular past and our particular present — to achieve a sense of belonging at the deepest levels, those of community and faith. Without these, we are lost.

Young American Muslims in particular must often choose between two outcomes: a meek retreat into an insular Islam divorced from one’s surrounding community, or a tight embrace of an America that is wedded to anti-Islamic animus. Neither accords with the president’s vision of inter-civilizational exchange, and each involves a profound loss, either of self or of community.

But there is an alternative.

Straddling the Divide

Conscientious young American Muslims born or raised here can jettison the dichotomy of dueling identities and adopt the notion of dual agency: We are both members of the Ummah (Muslim community) and citizens of this country, capable of influencing both Islamic and American cultures by way of example and action.

In recognizing its particular joint membership, the American Muslim community can improve the future of Islam and its relationship with the West without sweeping aside the Islamic past or being swept away by the Western present.

It is easy to make a statement so broad that it invites only further questions: What practices and customs are integral to Islam, and what has simply coexisted with Islam in various societies? What needs restoration, and what needs reformation? The very term “Islamic renaissance” betrays an obsequious tendency toward unthinking imitation, but a carte-blanche rejection of change because it resembles a Western development is puerile. What, then, can be done?

I have no profound solutions or pat answers, only a small story about a cap — or, in Pashtun parlance, a pakol — which might in some small way illuminate the contours of the questions themselves.

The Hat

For the past few winters, I have been content to don simple winter hats to help cope with the cold. While they serve their purpose, they also tend to look like dollops of ice cream plopped on the head.

When I lost my latest winter hat, an occurrence as predictable as the onset of winter itself, I was determined to find a more dignified piece of headwear.

Pondering alternatives, I recalled a saying of the Prophet Muhammad found in philosopher Frithof Schuon’s Understanding Islam: “The turban is the frontier between faith and unbelief.” I did not consider wearing a turban, per se, partly because I could not much relate to it culturally. But I scanned my memory for something somewhat closer to my heritage and recalled a circular, thick, tough wool hat I occasionally came across during my childhood summer sojourns in the port city of Karachi, Pakistan.

A quick Google search turned up what I was looking for: a pakol, commonly worn by Pashtun men in northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan.

While I took a liking to its appearance, I was especially glad to find a piece of attire linked to the country of my birth and worn by people of my faith. I placed an order over the Internet.

However, it was not long before a sense of unease slowly crept into and then enveloped my mind.

For the past seven years, iconic images of bearded villains donning headwear of one kind or another have been beamed into the retina and burned into the memory of millions of Americans. Although the mere sight of a bearded, brown “towel-head” no longer inspires violence, as it did in the weeks following the September 11 terrorist attacks, a negative association still persists, occasionally with ugly consequences — like a bully’s attempted eye-gouging of a Sikh turban-wearing 18-year-old classmate two years ago in New York.

A more specific concern also commanded attention: the withering gaze of the war hawks had shifted from the Tigris and Euphrates to the mountainous and rural areas straddling the Pak-Afghan border, which is mostly inhabited by Pashtuns and which is also, after decades of neglect, mismanagement, and provocation, in the grip of Taliban militants.

By wearing a pakol, would I be conflated with current war targets?

I resolved not to let these anxieties influence my choice. If I could not be graced with the presence of the Prophet Muhammad in my lifetime, or that of a society shaped in part by the revelation he brought, I could at least symbolically recognize his wisdom in a public way.

Pakols and Kalashnikovs

As I anxiously waited for this newfound symbol of identity to arrive at my doorstep, halfway around the world the disturbing consequences of Pakistan’s appeasement of the Taliban had already become painfully clear: in the plaintive cries of a young girl beaten and ground into dirt before a circle of silent men, in the blood splashed across a mosque where two youngsters were executed for supposedly daring to elope, in the rubble of a school and the corpses of children whose inner lights were extinguished inside. In these spaces, the Taliban declaimed as they donned pakols and shouldered Kalashnikovs, lie the sweet fruit reaped by pure and genuine Islam.

The Prophet Muhammad, were he alive today, might recognize some passing similarities in attire with those now marauding across northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. But would he recognize anything else in them save the very iniquities — ignorance, illiteracy, misogyny — that, according to the accounts of his closest companions and Islam’s earliest converts, he strived to replace in his own lifetime?

The Taliban’s inversion of core Islamic values aborted my embryonic ambition to establish a putative link between myself and my heritage.

True, I am no Pashtun tribesman, nor have I ever pretended to be. There is also nothing intrinsically Islamic about the pakol, or many other aspects of Pashtun culture. And not all Pashtun are Taliban. But for me this was all quite beside the point. I wanted to wear the pakol out of an aching need for a tangible link to Islam, in a country where Islam is almost invisible — unless it is being vilified. Those committing harsh atrocities in the name of God had cut short my attempt to achieve this bond.

American Muslims often struggle to express a desire for a link to the faith at a most basic level, sometimes with curious and scattershot results. Some men wear jewelry emblazoned with Arabic calligraphy extolling God, and some women eschew headscarves because they attract rather than deflect attention, opting instead for modest dress alone.

Whatever the particulars, adherence to an Islamic identity establishes a degree of closeness among other Muslims. However, as I discovered through experience, it is not necessarily helpful to reach reflexively for symbols of another time and place in an attempt to avoid slipping into an imagined generic mass.

An alternative path may be best illustrated by way of analogy. A Muslim closely observes all the ritual dips, bows, and kneeling of salaat (prayer) not because these acts instantly bring about a deep spiritual connection. Rather, when combined with sincere belief, such rituals help to cultivate an internal state that is more open to connection with God.

Along similar lines, American Muslims might invite themselves to collectively craft traditions reflecting their own understanding and experience of Islam — not because this will instill a profound sense of camaraderie on command, but because it can form a protective boundary for the fledgling American Muslim community within which their Islam can more fully develop.

Encouraging its own unique norms would place the community neither outside America nor outside the Ummah. It would instead situate it in an overlapping space comprising the best of each world, one infused with ideas and practices that lie within the sphere of civility and the realm of reason and free from the extremes of anti-Islamic miasma and anti-Western zealotry.

These protective boundaries might comprise a new, modern “frontier between belief and unbelief” for Muslims. If Muslims here do choose to lead, practicing a religion of tolerance in a land of tolerance, they may protect even as they are protected. They can show fellow Americans an Islam that is not a battle cry for fanatics in some exotic land, but a religion practiced by their neighbors. At the same time, they can familiarize fellow Muslims with an America that is not an arrogant entity quick to unleash war, but a country of their own neighbors.

Uniquely positioned to serve as a bridge between Americans who desire lasting security and the outside Muslim world which seeks genuine respect, Muslims here can serve as the great inter-civilizational fulcrum of our time.

Overcoming Islamophobia

Some here and abroad will doubtlessly mock such thinking with open contempt. Islamophobes and some “Islamists” alike are curiously united in their conviction, unshaken by ample evidence furnished over 1,400 years, that Islam is somehow fixed and unchanging for followers across time and space. For the deaf, even the most melodious tune registers only as uninterrupted silence.

But for the rest of us, there lies another, greater path. The Poet of the East (Shair-e-Mashriq) Muhammad Iqbal, whose thinking inspired the creation of Pakistan, once reminded Muslims that “a hundred new worlds” lie within the Qur’an’s verses, and that for the man of faith, “When one age becomes decrepit upon his body/ The Qur’an can yield him a new one.”

Foreign Policy In Focus contributor M. Junaid Levesque-Alam, 27, lives in New York. He has been published in several outlets, including Altmuslim.com, CounterPunch, WireTap Magazine, and ZNet.

(Nov. 10th) As reporters and investigators comb over the history and background of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the prime suspect in the Ft. Hood attack that left thirteen people dead, some noteworthy new details have emerged.

For one, it turns out that contrary to his family’s assessment that he was an “observant” Muslim, Hasan apparently frequented a local strip club three times this month, sipping beer and buying lap-dances. (Yes, it’s Fox News, but it directly quotes staff at the club).

For another, authorities monitored and knew of Hasan’s communication with a radical American-born imam who now serves as an al-Qaeda cheerleader in Yemen, but didn’t think the contact warranted further investigation.

It’s always easy to pass judgment in hindsight. No family member can know with full certainty what a loved one does with all his time, and no government official can be expected to assume from one or two exchanges that a man is teetering on the edge of violence.

Yet there is a third, crucial piece of information about Hasan that should have absolutely set off alarm bells, and the fact that it never did indicates a serious, glaring problem in the Army.

In June 2007, Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic of his choice to an audience of other military personnel, including supervisors who served as senior Army doctors. Instead, he presented an utterly bizarre and disjointed 50-page PowerPoint that was nominally about Islam.

Hasan’s rambling slides, replete with basic grammatical and spelling errors, argued in part that the military should let Muslim soldiers opt for conscientious objector status in order to avoid “adverse events” arising from opposition to serving in Muslim countries. For obvious reasons, this is the focus of media’s attention.

But more importantly, a look beyond the first few slides makes it blatantly obvious that Hasan was merely projecting and telegraphing his own growing confusion, ambivalence and frustration with serving in the U.S. military as a Muslim. The cherry-picked verses, un-cited assertions, basic theological errors and huge assumptions about what constitutes offensive and defensive jihad clearly signify that he had begun to go off the rails.

For instance, in suggesting that Muslim soldiers would oppose the wars specifically because it meant that they would be fighting other Muslims (there are plenty of other reasons that millions of Americans have opposed either war), Hasan evidently forgot that the Islamic extremists themselves have overwhelmingly been killing other Muslims, that terrorism violates one of the most basic tenets of the faith and that one obligation incumbent upon Muslims is to stop fellow Muslims from committing injustice.

Stunningly, however, not one person among the 25 attendees picked up on the significance of the presentation. It went unreported to any authorities. It seems that Army staff and leadership were so uniformly ignorant about Islam that they took this warped, radical presentation as an accurate, if unsolicited, reflection of mainstream Muslim thinking. It cannot be argued that Hasan presented his slides as an effort to show how only extremists think: the whole point of the exercise was to convince those assembled that Muslims in their own ranks essentially couldn’t be trusted if they were true Muslims.

We’ve already seen many instances since September 11 — indeed, including September 11 — where absence of critical information about Islam or Muslims has led to disaster. Lawmakers’ ignorance about something as basic as the difference between Sunni and Shia, for instance, enabled blunders that contributed to the bloody panorama that was the Iraqi civil war.

That senior officers within the Army as late as June 2007 were utterly unable to distinguish a rational presentation of Islamic thought from the wild distortions of a man desperately trying to telegraph his own radicalizing views reflects poorly on the institution and is part of the problem Adm. Mike Mullen identified in a recent address:

“Good communication runs both ways. It’s not about telling our story. We must also be better listeners. The Muslim community is a subtle world we don’t fully — and don’t always attempt to understand. Only through a shared appreciation of the people’s culture, needs, and hopes for the future can we hope ourselves to supplant the extremist narrative.”

By all accounts, on November 5, Army Psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 12 soldiers and one civilian at the Fort Hood Army base where he was stationed.

While investigators and reporters try to piece together the events and what prompted them, one fundamental aspect of the rampage is not in doubt: the alleged attacker was Muslim.

Writing shortly after the incident, the perceptive young American Muslim writer Wajahat Ali understandably cautioned against leaping to conclusions:

“A cousin of Hasan, interviewed by reporters, has suggested an alternative motivation, not necessarily influenced by religious conviction. ‘He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,’ said Nader Hasan. ‘He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there [in Iraq and Afghanistan].’”

But in the face of additional evidence that emerged today, it is not reasonable or logical to pretend that some great wall separated Hasan’s own sense of Muslim identity from his motive. Witnesses report that he shouted “God is great!” ahead of his rampage; family indicated that he was deeply upset over discrimination he said was visited upon him for being Muslim; and he openly expressed his hostility to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by describing it as a “war against Islam.”

Of course, we do not yet know precisely what combination of factors led to the attack, and with more than 20,000 Muslims actively serving in the U.S. military, it would be absurd to mistake one man’s warped and skewed understanding of Islam and graft it onto every other Muslim.

But the scale and nature of this incident raises a number of uncomfortable questions about what usually goes unseen and remains unsaid outside of military circles.

A psychiatrist, Hasan heard the stories of soldiers returning from combat: did these accounts of killing, abuse and other horrors fuel his anger at American policy as the date of his own deployment to Afghanistan neared? What kind of harassment was Hasan subjected to on base for his Muslim identity? How widespread is enmity toward Muslims and Islam among the very soldiers who Gen. McChrystal is sending to fight alongside Muslims against Islamist extremists?

There are also other, equally pressing questions that directly affect young Muslims, such as me, who call this country our own. People will invariably ask why and whether Muslims are in the military — or perhaps even in the country at all — and what sort of measures will be taken to “monitor” this minority.

The Council of American Islamic Relations released a statement condemning the attack, labeling it “heinous” and contrary to Muslim principles. An assault upon one’s own unarmed and unsuspecting comrades is unquestionably cowardly and immoral, but I suspect that no number of official statements will stave off questions of Muslim “loyalty” to the state or disrupt the almost magnetic attraction between conservatives and anti-Islamic rhetoric.

(Nov. 6th) The greatest and most pressing questions of all, however, are whether incidents like this one mark a growing trend of radicalization, isolation or anger among Muslims in the U.S. — and if so, why? A few years ago, it was commonplace to observe that Islamist terrorists were foreign-trained and foreign-born, but the Fort Hood attack was at least the fourth this year involving American-raised or American-born Muslims.

The status and station of American Muslims — who by and large have enjoyed prosperity and contribute to the country as doctors, scientists, translators, and yes, soldiers, — is a living rejoinder to fantastic rhetoric about a clash of civilizations or religions. But it is not a relationship that can be taken for granted or neglected by either side.

(Oct. 7th)

Last month’s elections in Afghanistan, intended to codify democracy’s arrival only laid bare the corruption and venality of the Karzai regime. New U.S. commander for Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, just finished an exhaustive military assessment that essentially recapitulated the “surge” strategy of Iraq in a land that is nothing like Iraq.

President Obama, who has only spoken with his top commander once since he took office, is looking for any option other than further escalation, but faces pressure from the military, the punditry and the Democrats’ own long-running insistence that this war is a “war of necessity.”

Last month, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen offered his own blunt assessment:

“The problem isn’t that we are bad at communicating or being outdone by men in caves. Most of them aren’t even in caves. The Taliban and al Qaeda live largely among the people… I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”

Mullen’s missive about America’s lack of credibility among the common people is unlikely to generate any immediate changes. And so, as the most powerful men in the world haggle over military strategy, the real needs of people in the region — those whose poverty, desperation and lack of infrastructure enables the militants’ ferocious success — continue to go unmet.

But far away from the war rooms and think tanks, there are those who are trying. Faizan Ahmad is one of them.

Ahmad, who was born in the congested city of Karachi, Pakistan, graduated from the University of Dayton with degrees in physics and mechanical engineering this year. He teamed up with an expert in solar energy, Dr. Richard Komp (pictured right), to embark on an ambitious program to cultivate the groundwork for solar power by training young men and setting up grassroots assembly industries in Pakistan.

Last July, with little more than $3,000, he helped supervise a small photovoltaic pilot project that employed young Pakistanis to bring solar power to areas with poor infrastructure, with the support of Pakistani NGOs and the government’s Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB).

Ahmad says it was a no-brainer to make the project happen: “All that was needed was some organization and channeling of energies in the right direction.”

And, one might add, helpful connections: Ahmad’s grandmother runs an NGO called Galaxy of Youth, which operates a girls’ school that served as the solar cell workshop; his father is a member of a key association of Pakistani engineers, the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Pakistan (IEEEP).

Ahmad headed to Karachi a month early to help make preparations for Dr. Komp. When Komp arrived, Faizan said, “He was enthusiastically received everywhere. I was surprised that hardly anyone asked where he was from while we were roaming the busy markets downtown.”

Ahmad explains that local Pakistani organizations recruited 22 poor and unemployed participants for the project, most of whom were in their twenties. Reflecting some of the difficulties and realities of Pakistan, two participants were recent refugees from the Swat Valley.

The trainees approached the task of constructing solar power modules (to be sold to local residents) with enthusiasm. “There were no issues of disputes or disagreements,” Ahmad says. “It was quite interesting in a way. Given the well-defined class relations in Pakistan, everything was quite egalitarian.”

The point of such solar power projects, Ahmad noted in his grant proposal, is to help close the gap confronting poor countries with overwhelming energy needs and decrepit infrastructure. For instance, in Karachi — a teeming city of 15 million people — the government frequently cuts power during predetermined hours, sometimes for more than 12 hours a day. Solar panels provide clean electricity with little need for maintenance; they operate silently and the sunny climate of most of Pakistan makes it a particularly suitable choice.

Ahmad hopes that the success of the workshop in Karachi can be replicated in more rural parts of the country, where the need is even greater. Even though it was just a pilot, he says that the relative ease with which people can be trained to make the modules can spur small businesses and help provide basic lighting for homes.

He believes that such small-scale projects, nurtured locally and at the grassroots level, offer an alternative to the foreign corporate investment that leads to a smattering of KFC and McDonald’s restaurants but nothing that addresses poverty. “We don’t need foreign development experts who are overpaid and prefer to crunch numbers in offices rather than spend any time in the field,” Ahmad adds.

Given the scant resources and manpower, it requires no great insight to observe that projects like this one are not going to single-handedly erase poverty or illiteracy among unemployed youth — the known breeding grounds of militancy. Such small steps, however, are closer to the solution than the deadly footprints left by massive weaponry, or the endless string of meaningless apologies for civilian losses caused by such weapons.

As Adm. Mullen wrote, “To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate.”