DOES FOREIGN POLICY NEED RELIGION?

Gerard Russell
guardian.co.uk
Monday 8 March 2010 15.00 GMT

Do we need more religion in foreign policy? A US thinktank, the
Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, thinks we do. In a recent report,
it urges diplomats to get over the instinctive queasiness they feel
when they step off their normal turf of secular politics.

The report hints that the US should be open to dialogue with
hardline religious groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah., under certain
circumstances (and this is interesting, because Martin Indyk, former
US ambassador to Israel, is among the signatories).

But its main message is twofold: first, that "religion that is civil
and public", not secularism, is the answer to religious extremism; and
second, that engaging with religion is not just about de-radicalising
Muslims. Religion, it suggests, is a global force for good that the US
should do more to harness. In order to do so, US aid agencies should
direct more funding through faith-based organisations, and diplomats
should learn more about the religions of the countries to which they
are posted.

There are good reasons to disagree. First of all, forays by secular
governments into the field of religion often end up seeming clumsy and
manipulative. Worse, categorising people by their religious belief
can be dangerously divisive – as some Iraqis claimed to me in 2003,
for example, when complaining about western emphasis on the difference
between Shia and Sunnis in Iraq.

It is also simplistic. An approach to the world that divides its people
by religion has little to offer one Jerusalemite who told me proudly
he was "Armenian by ethnicity, Palestinian by nationality, religiously
Christian and culturally Muslim". His words are a reminder that there
are very few foreign policy concerns that are the property of only one
religion. Christian Arabs care about Palestinian suffering as much as
Muslims do; the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas angered
many Afghan Muslims, not just Buddhists. When we begin to address
these issues as if they were the concern only of one religious group,
we risk undermining the concept of universal human rights.

In Britain, the only parliamentarian who has unequivocally been elected
by British Muslims is George Galloway – whose own religious beliefs
are rightly his own business, but who has not advertised himself
as a Muslim at all. In other words, Muslims may not seek for their
religious scholars to represent them politically – any more than I,
as a British Catholic, would want to be represented in parliament by
the pope. So let us not assume that dialogue with religious scholars
is a shortcut to avoiding the knotty, secular, political issues that
matter to the people who share their faith.

The report is right, though, in a more fundamental way. Before
I defend it, let me make a full disclosure. Immediately after 11
September 2001, the Foreign Office asked me to set up a unit wholly
dedicated to political dialogue with Muslims – the first of its kind,
as far as I knew.

I got the news as I stood on the steps of a Ramallah restaurant and my
first thought was: they have the wrong man for the job. I knew about
dialogue with Muslims, because that was what I had been doing for
three years. I knew little, though, about dialogue with Islam. The
Muslims that I knew were mostly Palestinian leftist intellectuals
and nationalists. They read Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said, not Ibn
Taymiyya or Abu Hanifa. They didn’t want a dialogue with the west
about religion: they wanted to hear about social justice and a vision
for peace.

Nonetheless, I feel that the Foreign Office, and the Chicago Council,
were and are pointing in the right direction. If foreign policy
is increasingly to be about shaping the culture and beliefs of
people around the world, rather than simply doing deals with their
governments, then diplomacy will have to change. In the past 50 years
the attention of European governments has been focused on multilateral
institutions and international law. For what were originally good
reasons, culture and beliefs have taken a back seat. This is clearly
due for a reappraisal, in an era in which it has become obvious
that negotiations in Washington, New York or Geneva are inadequate
as a way of making disenfranchised people feel that the world order
includes them.