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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Sun Apr 27, 2003 7:00 am
Subject: Fed Up With Fundamentalism

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...politics&show=0&cid=53131

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/politics/national/features/n_
8621/index1.html

(various excerpts):

Fareed Zakaria

He's an Indian-born, Yale- and Harvard-educated Muslim who moves
easily between Condoleezza Rice and Pervez Musharraf, Tony Blair and
Prince Turki Al-Faisal. He's a conservative who is willing to
question one of the most cherished principles of the West-democracy-
but also a naturalized citizen who believes in America's world-
historical mission. And this week, he publishes The Future of
Freedom, a contrarian book that mixes history and political analysis
to make a case that individual liberty, not democracy, is the
prerequisite for a nation's economic and political growth. This just
as the country wraps up a war to bring democracy to Iraq.

The pressure on Iran is the pressure of modernity. They're fed up
with fundamentalism. We're sanctioning them, but we should be
overwhelming them with contact and capitalism.

"Fareed is one of those people who believe that specialization is for
insects," says Frum. "You need to be able to talk about what should
be done in Baghdad while quoting Swinburne over duck that you've
cooked yourself."
The essay openly criticized the Bush administration for its failure
to conduct diplomacy and attempt—or even pretend to attempt—to build
an international consensus for our action in the Gulf. "The point is
to scare our enemies," he admonished in his essay, "not terrify the
rest of the world."

Not that Zakaria is eager to trade on his religion with Americans or
Arabs. "By and large, there is a suspicion that I'm betraying my
roots, whatever that means," Zakaria says. "The only way I can
respond is to say I've simply never been defined by religious
identity, so I can't be defined by that now just because it has come
into the question."

Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria has the perfect intellectual
pedigree (Indian-born, educated at Harvard, conservative) for a fast-
changing world, and the kinds of friends in high places who can push
a career into overdrive. The first Muslim secretary of State? Don't
bet against it. Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from
observing the Indian state. "People often say, 'How could you, living
in India, end up a Reaganite?' Well, the answer is, live in India.
There are two things that people don't understand. One is the degree
to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption
because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be
believed. Although they were practicing Muslims, the Zakarias shared
the original Indian ideal of a secular modern republic-which tended
to begin with a vigorous immersion in British culture. At the
brothers' school, each day started with Christian hymns. "I probably
know the Book of Common Prayer," he says, "better than most
Anglicans." Progressive India needed engineers, and the education
system encouraged the most promising students to study math and the
sciences. "The smart kids did science," Zakaria says, "the rich kids
did economics, and the girls did humanities."

What he hopes does define him-the ideas expressed in The Future of
Freedom-is likely to cause the noble Bedouins no end of aggravation.
His book points to the Gulf regimes as the worst examples of rich,
authoritarian states that are making no progress toward the kind of
meaningful personal liberties that produce lasting economic growth
and social stability.

It was the destruction of the World Trade Center that brought Zakaria
into the national limelight. Marshaling both his intellectual and his
personal experiences, Zakaria wrote a 7,000-word cover story
called "Why They Hate Us" that punctured the knee-jerk explanations
that simply blamed Islamic religious intolerance. It was the uneven
path of globalization, especially in modernizing Arab aristocracies,
Zakaria wrote, that stoked the homicidal rage. The Arabs had grasped
the wrong end of the global stick, importing the vapidity of Western
culture but raising walls against its ennobling influences-a formula
for an explosion.

"They see the television shows, the fast foods, and the fizzy
drinks," Zakaria explained. "But they don't see genuine
liberalization in the society, with increased opportunities and
greater openness. As a result, the people . . . can look at
globalization but for the most part not touch it."

SFG75 · Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2005 7:33 pm Post subject:

Zakaria is a heck of a good writer. I also like to watch George Stephanopoulos's sunday morning talk show which features him. He's very refreshing and original in his commnentary on the middle east and other matters of the ady. Fundamentalism is a historical reaction by people who hate change and who want to resist modernity. It's a natural reflex, though a neurotic one.

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