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Javad Hashmi, a physician and director of research at the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), spoke to a May 26th Middle East Forum Webinar (video) in an interview with Sam Westrop, director of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch (IW) project, about political trends in American Islam. The following is a summary of Hashmi’s comments:
Post-9/11, many Muslims who voted previously for President George W. Bush began to consider the Republican Party “anti-Muslim.” Listening to “right wing cable news” at that time gave Hashmi the impression that “I am not truly an American, even though I was born and raised in America.”
To resolve the “cognitive dissonance” Muslims experienced during that time, many shifted further to the right and became more fundamentalist in their religious practice.
Decades later, Muslims in their twenties and thirties remain susceptible to radicalization, but by online forces rather than by the mosques and “mainstream Muslim organizations” the Right has focused on. For instance, Daniel Haqiqatjou, an online preacher whose website, Muslim Skeptic, has a large following, offers “Islam as a solution” to the progressivism of the Left. Haqiqatjou, “a fringe figure” who gets much overseas support, is spreading “dangerous ideas” that combine “misogyny and the men’s rights movement rhetoric” with Islamic fundamentalism, notwithstanding that he operates within the law’s free speech protections.
“I think it’s all grift on his [Haqiqatjou’s] side,” said Hashmi, stressing that MPAC “does not believe in getting foreign funding at all.” Hashmi bemoaned the fact that Sheikh Hamza Yusuf of the Zaytuna Institute, who has been “an overall positive force for Islamic intellectual thought in America,” has “stepped back from the online space.” In the vacuum, people like Haqiqatjou “rise in prominence.” To counter internet radicalization, Hashmi actively engages online to offer his “better ideas.”
Although Hashmi finds the term “Islamism” used “too loosely,” he acknowledges the “initial inkling” of some mainstream Muslim organizations that were influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt in the 1960s and 1970s. In general, however, he believes the Islamist connection to Muslim organizations is “largely exaggerated” and that America’s pluralistic society changed viewpoints held by “an immigrant generation. . . . Now you have Muslims who are born and raised in America and they’re really making their voice felt, and they have no connection to the Muslim Brotherhood or any other such organizations.”
America’s historic support for right-wing Islamism, particularly during the Cold War, was conceived to act as a “bulwark against the Soviet Union.” U.S. support has also served to counter Arab nationalists in the region. In the 1950s, the U.S. supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt against secular nationalist Gamal Abdul Nasser, and Washington supported the transnational jihadists in Afghanistan prior to and during the Soviet invasion in the late 1970’s. Current alliances between a growing number of Muslims and the American Right, Hashmi argues, are part of a similar “strategic” ideological shift.
Hashmi rejects the notion of an Islamist-leftist alliance, but concedes that “there are Muslims who ally themselves with the Left, American Muslims, and many of them became leftists themselves.” And although there are Muslim leftists, he sees the intolerance within the Left for other ideas in America’s cultural wars as a catalyst for the rightward shift by many Muslims. “If they can shift on that issue, they can shift on any number of issues.”
There is certainly ideological diversity and dissent among American Muslims. A recent poll indicated that a majority of American Muslims who grappled with the LGBTQ issue now support gay marriage, but as “cultural wars” escalate, some are experiencing a “bit of buyer’s remorse.”
The current trend whereby Muslim parents align with the conservative Right in objecting to a perceived leftist ideological indoctrination of children in public schools is “superficial” and unsustainable because Hashmi believes the West is moving towards ethnonationalism. “I don’t think Muslims or anything brown is going to have any legs in that ethnonationalist kind of mentality.”
Hashmi pushed back against the accusation that American Muslim organizations collaborate with “undemocratic regimes,” such as Pakistan, Turkey, and Qatar. He was quick to point out a “double standard,” whereby influence from such regimes is regarded as a threat, while influence from countries such as Israel is welcomed.
Whether it is Israel, Iran, or Pakistan, “money always comes with strings.” Organizations that fundraise from governments with deep pockets, such as Saudi Arabia, are “definitely concerning.” Even with the kingdom’s recent changes, Saudi Arabia exerted a “deleterious effect” on Islam globally over the decades. MPAC refuses to take any foreign funding, Hashmi said.
Hashmi contrasts the success of the American Muslim experience with the unsuccessful treatment, in the name of multiculturalism, of minority communities by European governments. European pluralism differs from the U.S. model in that American Muslims “are just more integrated into their societies as individuals.”
Still, Hashmi calls out the “double standard and hypocrisy” of American Muslims who consider themselves progressives. While some oppose “Islamophobia” and other allegations of discrimination, they are silent regarding the persecution of the minority Ahmadiyya sect, whom Pakistani Islamists and others consider blasphemers and “non-Muslim.” MPAC has a “non-discrimination policy,” and Hashmi has denounced hatred direct at Ahmadiyya Muslims, despite receiving “flack” for doing so. MPAC would work with Ahmadiyya Muslims, he declared.
Hashmi considers himself a Muslim reformist, but he is dismissive of the explicitly counter-Islamist groups such as the Muslim Reform Movement and one of its activists, Asra Nomani, for not having any “credibility” in the Muslim community. Hashmi denounced them as “stooges” and “grifters” and accused them of being in it “for the money, for the fame.” He said he is the “real reformist” because he is accepted as such “within my community.” [Ed.: The Middle East Forum reached out to Asra Nomani for a response. We will append it to this article once it is received.]
