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Your paper opposes Daniel Pipes's nomination to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace because "Muslims" see him destroying cultural bridges to the Muslim world ["Fueling a Culture Clash," editorial, April 19].
This Muslim wishes to protest.
To begin with, "Muslims" are not a single bloc. Yes, apologists for Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat take issue with Pipes's work, but many other Muslims support it. To wit: While your paper opposes his nomination, the California-based weekly that I publish, Pakistan Today, endorsed him. Hence, this debate has little to do with a "culture clash." It is rather a "politics clash," in which some Muslims agree with Pipes and some do not. Ditto for non-Muslims.
At best, your editorial confuses Pipes's opposition to militant Islam with opposition to Islam as a whole. At worst, it reduces all Muslim opinion to an enthusiasm for a totalitarian form of the religion. Fortunately, a broader spectrum of Muslim opinion exists. Unfortunately, many anti-militant Muslims do not speak out, fearful of retribution even in the United States.
For someone accused of destroying cultural bridges to Muslims, Pipes sure has had an odd career. He studied the Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages; lived three years in Egypt; earned a doctorate in early Islamic history; has had books and articles translated into languages spoken by many Muslims; handled Middle Eastern issues in the State Department; spent three years overseeing the Fulbright exchanges between the United States and Muslim countries; and sat on the boards of the American-Turkish Council and the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon.
The premise of the U.S. government over the past decade has been that political activism on behalf of Islam is or can be made moderate. Sept. 11 should have made clear the falsehood of this assumption. Had the true nature of militant Islam been better recognized, thousands of lives might have been saved; worse, we now jeopardize more lives by not shaking off lazy attitudes, especially in such critical areas as immigration policy and law enforcement.
I, for one, appreciate what Daniel Pipes is doing because I fled my homeland of Pakistan to escape militant Islam. The Senate should confirm his nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace.
(The writer is editor in chief of
Pakistan Today.)
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