Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with former Iraqi Minister of Defense and Minister of Finance Ali Allawi about his new book, "The Crisis of Islamic Civilization."
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LISA MULLINS: I'm Lisa Mullins. And this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH, Boston. More than a billion people around the world are followers of Islam. Some in the West are uncomfortable with that fact. Many of them associate Islam with intolerance, with autocratic governments, and with the subjugation of women. But that is not what Islam means to Ali Allawi. Mr. Allawi served as Minister of Trade, of Defense and of Finance in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He has written a new book called: "The Crisis of Islamic Civilization." It's being released today. In it, Mr. Allawi recalls growing up in Iraq in the 1950s in a Muslim world that seemed to be pulling away from the outward manifestations of Islam.
ALI ALLAWI: Women, not only in my family but probably in all the other middle classes had stopped wearing traditional clothing, they stopped putting on the Islamic veil, western clothes. Modernity in the form of various western style entertainments were taking over. The landscape, cityscape, was changed to reflect modern ways of living.
MULLINS: Does this mean they were less religious?
ALLAWI: Not less religious in the believing sense, but they were less committed to the outer norms and outer rituals of Islam. For example, public prayers, Friday congregational prayers, were not held with the same degree of enthusiasm as you see nowadays. The Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, was undertaken only by those who are extremely old.
MULLINS: It would be kind of an insurance policy? I'm going to be dying so I better do the Hajj?
ALLAWI: Yes, I mean, it was highly unlikely to see somebody younger, say, than fifty going on Hajj, which is not the situation now. At the same time Islam as a political ideology was hardly on the radar screen at that point.
MULLINS: Okay, I want to talk, obviously, a lot more about this because this is the subject of you but you left Iraq when you were a teenager, how come?
ALLAWI: That's right. Well, we had a revolution in 1958 which overthrew the kingdom of Iraq and my family was involved in the monarchical regime so we were sort of on the losing side of a coup d'etat and as a result of the turmoil in the country we were sent abroad to continue our education.
MULLINS: Where did you go?
ALLAWI: I went to England, at first.
MULLINS: And you went to MIT, you went to Harvard, you went back to Iraq after the fall of Saddam. When you went back what did you detect about what was happening, not only in Iraq, which may be a special case, but throughout the Muslim world that had radically changed the way Islam was practiced?
ALI ALLAWI: When I came back to Iraq you could see that there was had been a sea change. I mean, Islam erupted back onto the public arena in a very, very powerful way and began to affect the way people conducted themselves, affected relationships between genders, affected relationships within families. And the state, which was in the past secularizing, modernizing, became, in many ways, more concerned about maintaining, as it were, the Islamic outer form.
MULLINS: Is what you have said right now, at least in the English language version of this book, to what extent has it been nourished by your own experience in the post Saddam government of Iraq, because as Minister of Trade and Minister of Defense, certainly, you had to deal with western governments, you had to deal with the United States. To what extent have you integrated what you learned, what you saw as the obstacles to communication with those governments in this book?
ALLAWI: Well, I mean, what really prompted me to write this book is the huge gap between what people supposed to be, or presume to be Islamic ethics and that reality of what I saw.
MULLINS: Let me interrupt there. There are many examples that you give in the book, including seeing the Sunni versus Shiite violence, much of the violence that you witnessed firsthand, which made a deep impression on you. Give us, perhaps, one other example that we could visualize that led you to see, very vividly, this dichotomy between the way Islam is supposed to be practiced according to the Quran and the way, in your view, it's been corrupted now.
ALLAWI: Well, I have another example is corruption. I mean the appalling levels of mismanagement of public resources, the huge amount of theft of public funds.
MULLINS: But does anybody justify that using the Quran?
ALLAWI: No, they don't, but most of these people who run Iraq are, one way or another, connected with Islamist parties, and connected with parties that use Islam as an ideology.
MULLINS: Did you confront them?
ALLAWI: Yes, in many cases.
MULLINS: We should say you do have enemies in Iraq.
ALLAWI: Well, I hope not the kind of enemies that I cannot reason with. But I'm sure there are people who feel that what I did, especially when I was Minister of Finance, were really dangerous to their ambitions. I mean, I exposed, possibly, the biggest theft of public assets anywhere in the world: the theft of the Ministry of Defense by its own staff of nearly a billion and a half dollars.
MULLINS: Was that justified, by those who perpetrated it, using Islam?
ALLAWI: No, but some of the people who actually took advantage of it and benefited with it were stalwarts of the Islamic movement. They were stalwarts of the Islamic political party. Some of them used to give public lectures on ethics and morality and so on.
MULLINS: So, to them, you would say, or you did say, what?
ALLAWI: I said don't, this is hypocrisy. You cannot use Islam in order to gain political power and convince people of your credentials while what you are doing is really no different than, often worse than the worst kind of corrupt dictatorships. And people don't like to hear that because if you use a religion as a basis for your political action than what does that mean? That you have to abide by its ethical precepts, and if you don't than not only do you put yourself in some kind of moral jeopardy but you tarnish your religion in the process. And to present this as Islam, I think, does a huge disservice to the religion and to its civilizing potential.
MULLINS: Ali Allawi is the author of the book just released today, "The Crisis of Islamic Civilization." Thanks for coming to the studio, nice to speak with you.
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