STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT
From Binary to Complex Thinking

By Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool

In previous articles I argued that there was a ‘missing middle’ in the Ummah’s thinking – an absence of wasatiyah – not understood as moderation, but as embracing complexity and engaging strategically towards sustainable statecraft for a Muslim world in the eye of the storm.

Caught in an enduring binary between the colonial state, on the one hand, and the authoritarian one, on the other, the last 70 years have seen the ummah in perpetual conflict, with the Arab Spring offering a glimpse of hope, but easily falling victim to counter-revolution, while Islamism itself was hijacked by forces of extremism.

I want to argue further that while the binaries may change, the constant weakness is binary thinking: thinking in opposites, in exclusionary terms, avoiding synthesis, judging all matters either to be halaal or haraam, right or wrong, black or white. We avoid complex thinking, sequenced strategy, gradual achievement of goals, lesser of two evils evaluation, implementing ideals in relation to balance of forces and power and thus, we completely vacate or demolish the middle!

This middle is a way of thinking – strategically – and a bridge between where you are now and where you want to be. The absence of this middle has been the primary reason for the parlous state of the Ummah. Of course, some will argue that the preponderance of western interventions, the Zionist forces, the US proxies, etc. are the primary factors for the state of the Ummah. My riposte is that vultures never tackle the strongest, but always the most vulnerable, the stragglers, the confused, those with no vision or purpose, and those bereft of a clear path.

The victims of the vultures are easy targets because they deal in binaries: the authoritarians have no legitimacy and fragile consent and thus, invite the vultures to strengthen their rule, while their opponents have lofty principles (from Islam to freedom) but they have no strategy, so their desperate tactics set them up as extremists.

Secondly, our visions of statecraft are often based on a dislike of secularism (on the belief that it is anti-God) and therefore, its binary opposite is the theological or Islamic state (which is also capable of totalitarianism); and thirdly, we decry concepts like democracy, human rights and freedom on the vague understanding that an undefined notion or binary opposite would be Islam’s perfection of all rights. Such binaries – based on our own lack of rigorous analysis – create the permission for authoritarians and imperialists to assert that their denial of democracy, rights and freedom is consistent with our own sense that they’re un-Islamic. Similarly, we give that same permission to anyone who claims that what they are doing is consistent with Islam.

The absence of a middle ground in our thinking and the prevalence of binaries would be merely theoretical if the consequences were not so profoundly tragic. I have been hovering between a spectator and a participant-observer in a few dramas and tragedies across the Muslim world. Three of these are the Arab Uprising in Egypt, the impasse in Sudan, and the conflict in Afghanistan. At the risk of being simplistic, let me show how binary thinking has brought setbacks to the finest Islamic values and ideals, including human development.

Through the Arab Spring in Egypt there was a dominant strain in the Muslim Brotherhood that favoured a winner takes all approach as the antidote to a terrible legacy of dictatorship. The idea of a transitional government of unity and sharing responsibility, phasing progress, managing the west, relaxing the authoritarian neighbourhood, and gradually winning over the other 49% of Egyptians, was not the kind of middle solution for those who wanted all power. They wanted Mubarak on trial and didn’t care about financial flows from the West. This binary approach was just what the opposite side – the military and Mubarakists’ wanted – the appearance of extremism in order to foment and gain legitimacy for the brutal counterrevolution.

In Sudan recently, the dethronement of Omar Bashir established a military government loyal to the ‘Islamism’ of Omar Bashir, thus legitimising their rule through Islam as they understood it. On the other side of the binary was the one party with the capacity to conduct conflict – the SPLM-N – who bore the brunt as Muslims of Bashir’s strand of ‘genocidal’ Islamism. The SPLM-N was, therefore, implacably against any form of religion in the state, and therefore, may even settle for a strict secularist state. My role was to show that between the binary of Islamist and secularist was a world of Islamically-sanctioned alternatives from the civil state to the citizenship-based state.

Finally, my work on Afghanistan took me to discussions with Gani’s then-government, Afghan civil society, and the Taliban, each one with divergent (binary) views of the future. As Trump prepared for the USA to cut and run, and as Biden supported this enthusiastically, there was a purple patch in which the three sides to the Afghan situation approached the middle ground, and showed a willingness to transcend the binaries: a combination of the Taliban’s Islamism and the other parties’ secularism; the Taliban desire to return to “Islamic” principles on women, and civil society’s resistance to relinquishing rights they gained, etc. As we edged to the middle, Biden’s haste to exit, and Gani’s indecent departure, allowed the Taliban to return to their binary and exercise their power to take Kabul instead of their pragmatism.

If this sounds like a travelogue, then it’s more one that comes from binaries to the middle and back. The result, however, is a setback for the Ummah, and underscores the need to populate the middle with the concepts and instruments of strategy and statecraft.

The initial attention we got from the Ikhwan in Egypt, the SPLM-N in Sudan, and the Taliban in Afghanistan is an indication that, if the middle is located in the Islamic Scripts and milieu, then there is a chance of success. We will explore more of this next time, InshaAllah (God willing).