With the Arab Spring still unfolding, former Washington Post reporter Robin Wright’s latest book puts the popular uprisings that have swept the Arabic-speaking Middle East from North Africa and the Levant to the Persian Gulf in the context of a larger movement: counter-jihad. Muslims around the world, she writes, are “increasingly rejecting extremism. The many forms of militancy — from the venomous Sunni creed of al Qaeda to the punitive Shiite theocracy in Iran — have proven costly, unproductive, and ultimately unappealing.”
In other words, Osama bin Laden’s efforts produced a result contrary to his intentions. After 9/11 dragged the United States into the Middle East in force, Muslims turned not toward extremism but moderation. According to Wright’s survey of the Muslim world, bin Laden’s message was dead long before the Navy SEALs brought him down in May. “Rock the Casbah,” then, is an introduction to the Muslim world 10 years after 9/11, and the author’s purpose is partly to illuminate and partly to instruct.
"Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World" by Robin Wright (Simon Schuster. 307 pp. $26.99)
From Wright’s perspective, Americans’ view of Muslims and Islam hasn’t caught up to the reality. In spite of developments in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world, she argues, the past decade here in the United States was “shaped largely by fear of everything from a global clash of civilizations to a new neighborhood mosque.” What’s now required of Americans and their elected officials “is moving beyond fear as the most influential factor in decisions.” And that, she argues, “means more exposure to Muslims or education about Islam.”
Regarding this last, Wright’s book succeeds handsomely. As one of this country’s top Middle East reporters for more than four decades and the author of five other books about Islam and the Middle East, she deftly escorts her readers around the region. Wright introduces significant, albeit lesser-known, figures such as Saudi feminist Wajeha al Huwaider and breathes life into the stories that have made the news over the past couple of years. For example, she provides biographies of the Tunisian vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation last December kicked off the Arab Spring, and Neda Agha Soltan, the 26-year-old woman whose June 2009 murder at the hands of Iranian security services continues to galvanize Iran’s Green Revolution.
And then there are considerably more controversial characters. For instance, in Saudi Arabia Wright interviews a prominent sheikh, Salman al Oudah, formerly an ally of al-Qaeda. “One of bin Laden’s earliest role models,” as Wright notes, Oudah eventually turned on his onetime colleagues and became instead a driving force in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s jihadi reeducation program.
In its efforts to reeducate extremists, the Saudi government recruited 150 “sheikhs and religious scholars to counsel its militant inmates,” who numbered in the thousands. None of the clerics was more important than Oudah, who endorsed the program and who “in his 2007 open letter to bin Laden” praised those with “ ‘brave hearts’ and ‘courageous minds’ who had defected from al Qaeda.”
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