How should a progressive Muslim (British or otherwise) approach the issue of Saddam Hussein’s execution (leaving aside the thorny issues about the death penalty)? Ironically, a question to which the answer would once have been emphatically clear is no longer so. Some four years ago, many Muslims would probably have agreed that Iraqis taking action to rid themselves of their sorrowful dictator was a good thing. But in the nightmare world of today’s Iraq, even this straightforward conclusion is questionable.
Of course, no one wants Saddam to exert his terrible presence over the Iraqi people and polity anymore, be it through his glowering presence in the courtroom where he was being tried, or, as a political spectre in the Hades of modern Iraq. But, for Muslims, as for others, there is a profound sense of unease about an execution that seems less about progress and more about a continuation of the unmitigated bloodletting kicked off by the coalition invasion in 2003.
There are two prevalent narratives of the modern history of the West’s interaction with the Muslim world. The first provides that the West has continually oppressed the Muslim population of the Middle East by propping up the state of Israel and supporting client rulers (of whom Saddam was one for many years) in order to obtain access to oil. The other has it that the West has attempted to interact with the Middle Eastern powers and populations by encouraging democracy where possible, opposing undemocratic movements and forces and ensuring that the right of the Middle East’s only democracy, Israel, to exist is not jeopardised.
The views of most progressive British Muslims probably lie somewhere in the middle of those two narratives. And therein lies the difference in our views and those of other, non-Muslim, progressives, and, the difficulties that many European Muslims face in engaging in the political discourse about what our countries ought to be doing in the Middle East.
For many Muslims, Saddam’s death is a paradigm for the West’s intervention in the Middle East as a whole. But for a Muslim to say that intervention in Iraq is a mess, that protecting Israel’s right to exist has gone way beyond that laudable goal, and, the opposition of undemocratic forces has in itself been undemocratic at times, is to court being labelled “un-progressive” and having one’s position in the progressive British community questioned. This is not simply lazy stereotyping, it is largely because many Muslims have made exactly such calls and wilfully ignored (or accepted) the fact that Iraq was a mess before the coalition intervention (thanks to Saddam), that there are many forces that wish not simply to restrict Israel’s building of illegal colonies on occupied land but the destruction of Jews and the Jewish state, and, that many of the undemocratic forces that have been repressed would, had they not been opposed, have led to a Talibanisation of various parts of the Middle East.
Our discourse is flawed by both sides in this way and no one benefits. Western Europe’s Muslims are increasing in their numbers and importance. We in Britain (both Muslims and non-Muslims) have the opportunity to create a model of how Western nations can bridge the divide with the Muslim world. In doing so, we may begin to make the great leap forward in normalising the West’s relations with the Middle East.