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  • Does Foreign Policy Need Religion?

    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.
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