Interview with Ali Allawi

June 02, 2009

By James Robertson

You call for a ‘new Islamic architecture’ for human rights. Is pan-Islamic unity on such a contentious issue feasible?

I think so. Obviously, the way that the Muslim world runs its human rights is not up to the standard of either the Universal/Western understanding of human rights, or in terms of Islam’s own understanding of what should be the rights and duties associated with human beings. In most countries it is very poor, or even appalling. So, if you have a kind of common construct as to what constitutes the basic vision of a human being in Islam, and you build an architecture of rules, regulations and laws governing these things, then I think you’ll end up with the same result, by and large, but expressed in different forms.

Regardless of whether it’s philosophically possible, isn’t the international community going to be suspicious about the ability of an Islamic system to comprehensively defend human rights?

It depends on who is doing the talking. Muslims should theoretically believe that their world vision does have something to say about representativeness, justice, rights of groups, and that it should be expressed on their own terms. Whether everyone else accepts whether Sharia trends in that direction is really a non-issue. I don’t think people in the West care what Muslims think about their laws. It is a failure of imagination to come up with a credible and workable alternative that addresses these concerns, while at the same time being an expression of the vital force of that civilisation.

Why do so many attempts at asserting a pan-Islamic perspective on the international stage break down?

Well, I think because of the deep-rootedness of non-Islamic frame of mind, of institutions and also legacy systems that we are working with. It’s very difficult to speak of a new financial bloc if all the relationships are of different economic systems, or different political orders. Although the sense that something needs to be done wafts over the Islamic world, this is in spite of certain inherited power relationships. In many cases this process has gone quite far. It is very difficult to think of a political unit outside of the nation-state, or an alternate economic order outside of the Bretton-Woods institutions.

How critical will Obama’s troop withdrawal be for Iraqi security?

Inside Iraq, I think we have gone beyond the need for a large American presence to act as a countervailing power to the other threats in the region. The central state is quite strong now, and able to meet direct challenges.

Strong enough to fill the boots of the American forces?

They’re being withdrawn from combat operations at a very rapid rate, so most of the policing work is already being done by the Iraqi army. There may be an increase in violence, but this will go down in time. The question is really whether regional political settlement accelerates quickly enough to stop a slip back into violence. I don’t think we will see violence of the sort which we saw between 2005 and 2006, but it will still be an unstable country for some time.