Lectures
Islamism and the American Freedom Agenda
Synopsis
The so-called “freedom agenda” of President Bush is a crucial foreign policy component of the United States’ War on Terror. The idea has been to promote democracy and thereby to reduce the perennial instability, poverty and alienation that breed radicalism in the greater Middle East. In particular, U.S. foreign policy has sought to undermine the political conditions and intellectual climate that justify violence and feed transnational Islamist terrorism. American strategy has had some short-term successes and certainly has shaken things up in the Middle East. But the achievement of its long-term goals remains very much in doubt. In this presentation Dr. Farr will argue that the achievement of “freedom” in the Middle East is a goal both insufficiently concrete and too secularist in its implications to be successful. Whether we like it or not, practitioners of political Islam will determine the fate of liberal governance in the Muslim nations of the Middle East and beyond, and will either support or undermine Islamist terrorism. Dr. Farr will argue that U.S. foreign policy must overcome its own secularist prejudices, identify Islamists who are tempted by democratic norms, and find ways to move them toward liberal democracy.
