Engaging with truth

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and president of New America Foundation, Steve Coll, is one of the most important commentators on contemporary Islamic conflict. Excerpts from an interview with Coll:

Where do you think the Indian Muslim fits into the global Islamic narrative today?
Whatever their condition 20 years ago, today, I believe that it is naive and complacent to think that any Muslim community in their local circumstances is so different that it is not involved in the global discourse. Obviously in India there is an enormous diversity. Sections of the community are more globalized and sections, more isolated by economic and social circumstances. We’ve seen the globalized Muslim community in India in lots of forms over the last 20 years, some of them constructive, some not so much. I would expect the process to continue. I look at the strength of the Indian constitutional system, for all its flaws and failures, and that strength seems durable to me in the face of this challenge. I think there are probably other challenges more severe to the Indian system than the threat of religious radicalisation — the Naxalite narrative for instance.

 An astounding ignorance about Islam and its countries came to light post 9/11. Ten years hence is there a sense that Islam is being over-debated?
I think the most important discourse exists within Islamic communities themselves. The debate outside is valuable primarily so that American and European political communities and voters can evolve a sustainable relationship with the Islamic world. The reason this discourse has been so pervasive in the West is not just because of terrorism. There is also a structural problem. No one is quite sure how to break the bonds that Arab governments impose on their own people — how do we find a way for these societies to realise their own potential and in doing so, create a sense of normalcy in this hugely important piece of geography between Europe and Asia. This discourse is tied up with Islam but not about Islam because a lot of Asia’s success is Islamic success, like in India.

Your books on the subject have been thorough investigative reports. What are the other interesting ways in which Islam is being written about?
I find that the most useful books, just for a contextual understanding are by sympathetic travelers from diverse and independent perspectives. I’ve been reading travelers’ books, that go back to the 16th century and a few manuscripts from the 12th and 13th centuries too. Those travels are updated today from lots of different perspectives, including Muslim perspectives. For example, I read a book by a Moroccan anthropologist, a kind of a travelogue, coming from Morocco to the heart and back. He’s a globalized character who is not really sure why he’s going on Haj. It’s a beautiful and detailed retelling.

How are contemporary writers on Islam negotiating with the complex politics of the subject? You for instance have been accused of sympathising with the US. Is it challenging in that sense?
The dilemmas of a Western writer are different from the dilemmas of writers outside, Muslim or not. When I wrote The Bin Ladens, I was very conscious about this but I wanted to just do my work — seek an understanding and tell a story. As a traveller who has spent a fair amount of time in Saudi Arabia, I had a sense of the place, which was completely missing from American understanding. No one’s making films about the real Saudi Arabia, there are no Saudi storytellers. There are societies where the outsider has to do something the local writers are simply not permitted to do.

Outside of the west there is an important discourse underway within the Muslim world about how to write narratives for communities that are caught up in this post 9-11 decade — how do we want to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others. If you could unlock the Arab world and ask it to tell truthful stories about itself you’d be amazed at what would come forward. So also with Turkey, India, Pakistan. In fact, just the Pakistani novel in English is such a contribution.

India still feels complacently insulated. How much more of an active role should it be playing in the global Islamic narrative?
I think that the best way for both America and India to tell their stories on the global stage is to do it in a way that includes their internal diversity, debates, failings and aspirations. You tell people that this is how we are and you are welcome to join us. There was one enduring generation of ideas of India that subsisted with the Independence movement. Those ideas need to be updated. They need to be an expression of what modern India is, what the next generation is doing, thinking, debating about — how do the Indian democracy and values relate to the global world.
But to do it such as to let it all hang out, rather than in a focused way like “Are the Muslims happy in India.”

What about the future of India’s alliance with the US? We all know that India has a strong lobby in the US but there is also a perception that unlike the Bush administration, the Obama administration is pro-China.
I’m not so sure about that. I know it is a perception here and therefore it’s important but I don’t know how important it is to Obama. The truth is that the US-India relationship is now durable. There are only a few relationships like this, handed down from one president to another, across party lines, and distributed in the congress in fixed ways. It is young but the nuclear deal and a lot of other structural bindings that are now building up will continue.

How does cooperation on counter-terrorism fit in into this relationship?
My observation from the Washington insides are that the working level between security services has seen lots of improvement, pretty much transformational change since the Mumbai attack — a lot better working group structure — real, practical, not just trading sanitised lists of names. In higher levels of the government there is still frustration, probably on both sides. On the American side, it is born from the fact that frankly, the Indian Foreign Service and the Indian international bureaucracy are still dominated by old mindsets and old personalities. If Bollywood was leading or this work was handed over to Bangalore, the relationship would have a completely different feel by now! But these guys always want to “get back to you” and you see them walking in with a big huge cloth binder. It frustrates the Americans because they’re like ‘let’s go, we need to fix this now’.