 Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for sticking around because we have another great speaker for the afternoon session. It's my distinct honor to introduce our second speaker today, Peter Mandeville. Dr. Peter Mandeville is Professor of Government and Politics in the Sharr School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He's also a non-resident senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution next door, a junk scholar at the Rand Corporation. Between 2015 and 2016, he was a senior advisor in the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. State Department. Previous government experience includes serving as a member of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's policy planning staff in 2011 and 2012, where he helped shape the U.S. response to the Arab Spring. Peter was previously the Founding Director of the Center for Global Studies and also Director of the Ali Wurlak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. His previous visiting affiliations have included American University, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Pew Research Center. His research focuses on the comparative study of religious authority and social movements in the Muslim world, with an emphasis on youth groups, transnational networks, and new media. Peter is the author of among other titles, Islam in Politics with Multiple Editions, which is a broad global overview of Islamic social and political movements. Global Political Islam with Two Editions and Transnational Muslim Politics Reimagining the Ummah, which is a study of Muslim communities in the United Kingdom. He also is a co-editor of several volumes of essays in the fields of international relations and Islamic studies, including Politics from afar, Transnational Diasporas, and Networks from Columbia University Press. Peter holds degrees from the University of St. Andrews and the University of Kent and has studied at the American University in Cairo. We're honored to have him here. Please welcome Peter Mendeville. Thank you very much, Kadir, for the kind introduction, and I'm also very grateful to you for the invitation to address this conference, which is on a topic that has been of abiding interest to me for many years, and I just want to mention up front how important that I think the research that you've done with this project is and the sorts of gaps that it helps to begin to fill. In the time that I have this afternoon, there's essentially three things that I want to do. There was originally only one thing that I was going to do, but the hazard of going at the end is that you've sat through all the other presentations and you get ideas and there's things you want to respond to. So I will kind of deliver my official remarks, which is going to be something of a retrospective evaluation of where and how Islam has figured in U.S. foreign policymaking over the years. Certainly, towards the end of the remarks, getting into some of the more practical and tactical questions with respect to governmental engagement with religious authority, you heard from my former colleague, Sean Casey, this morning about the work, some of the work that we did in the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the State Department, and I do want to kind of drill down in a little bit more detail on some of the points and questions that he raised in that context. The two other things that I want to do briefly are, because the question of Saudi Arabia and the ongoing discussion and processing of what Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman could possibly have meant when he said that Saudi Arabia is going to return to moderate Islam and having like Anel just returned last night from Saudi Arabia myself, I can't resist kind of saying my little piece on that whole question. And then finally, in the vein of, again, hopefully encouraging our good friends at the Loose Foundation to continue to support this work, I wanted to talk a little bit about some opportunities and avenues for future research, things that we know that we don't know to hopefully kind of sketch out some ideas about what a future research agenda in this area looks like. I think it's fairly conventional to say that Islam became a subject of U.S. foreign policy in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. And by subject I mean that was the moment at which Islam appeared to be a thing that U.S. foreign policy had to contend with in a systematic fashion. It is, of course, not in any sense the first time that Islam and considerations of Islam have figured in U.S. foreign policy making. It's possible, for example, to, you know, if you go back through declassified State Department cable traffic dating back to the 1930s and 40s, you can see the U.S. Embassy in Egypt trying to kind of figure out what this thing, the Muslim Brotherhood that Tadeg Masud talked about, what is it, how should the United States think about it. Certainly, and this is, I think, the untold story, at least untold in a systematic fashion, where Islam fit into U.S. Cold War geopolitics. It is certainly the case that the United States, during much of the Cold War, actually viewed Islam as a usable and useful thing, as a counterbalance, a countervailing force to the spread of global communism. In that sense, you know, we talk a lot about Saudi Arabia's support for the export of Wahhabism around the world from the 1960s onwards. Much of that activity was undertaken with the firm support, encouragement, and in some cases direct collaboration with the U.S. government, including some of its kind of covert arms. So, for example, the Muslim World League, one of the kind of leading peristatal organizations responsible for Saudi Fundedawa over the last half century, this is an organization that amongst its many activities supported the publications of Islamic magazines around the world, including in countries where Socialists and Communist parties and groups were trying to make headway, and the U.S. government, I think, viewed those publications as a sort of very useful accessory in its own broader Cold War policies. And so I think that's absolutely kind of something that we need to study and understand more about. 1979, as a year, is going to kind of figure quite prominently in my remarks. For those of us who studied the intersection of Islam and politics, 1979 is of course one of the kind of watershed years, right? It's the year of Iran's Islamic revolution, of course. It's the year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and just kind of telegraphing ahead somewhere that I'm going to go in a moment when we circle back to Saudi Arabia is of course the year of the Grand Mosque seizure. And I think 1979 is useful because it precisely allows us to get a sense of this rather ambivalent Janus-faced approach that the United States took to Islam in its foreign policy. Because more or less simultaneously in the early 1980s, we have the United States viewing Brandeit al-Homeini and the political Islam that he represents as this enormous threat to U.S. interests and national security equities. At the same time, as the United States is beginning to fully and enthusiastically support a wide range of Islamic forces and causes that are converging on Afghanistan in order to push the Soviets out of that country. So we have this sort of simultaneous, almost schizophrenic, political Islam is something bad and dangerous, and political Islam is something useful and usable. And I would contend that in various ways that tension has continued to be present and to persist in U.S. foreign policy even if the specific forms of it have changed. Really, it's the post-911 period that I want to kind of leap to now. There's interesting detours that we can take and I'm happy to kind of talk about it if you want later in the period that we have for open discussion of the evolution of U.S. policy towards Islamist movements, I think there are kind of more mainstream Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood because policy thinking that regard has evolved enormously over the years, that's a whole session or several unto itself. But because so many of our presentations this morning, I think, did and Sean Casey's remarks did kind of engage with the specific problematics posed to U.S. foreign policy by the aftermath of 9-11, that's where I want to kind of concentrate the next section of my remarks. It's very clear that the aftermath of 9-11 initiated this kind of new phase of sort of politics of good Islam and bad Islam to use the framing of Mahmoud Mandani's book. The idea and a sort of bifurcation in U.S. geopolitical thinking of the idea that there are out there somewhere in the world bad Muslims, you know, broadly understood amongst those who kind of, you know, those with more detailed and accurate information as a very specific limited range of sasa Salafi jihadi movements, although in U.S. foreign policy discourse at the time, this is the sort of GW Bush administration, there are any number of groups that were working very hard, there's already enormous influence on U.S. foreign policy thinking to kind of convince American policy makers that Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are essentially the same thing. That any form of politicized Islam is something that inexorably leads to a worldview and behaviors that we had come to identify with Al Qaeda and later ISIS, because we've seen a return to that dynamic around the rise of the Bash. And of course, the flip side of that was the idea that, well, maybe, and this is where we do start to get to questions of religious authority. It's their idea that there's these bad Muslims out there pumping bad Islamic messages around the world through tendrils and networks and narratives. And so, you know, we need to identify the good Muslims that can sort of, you know, provide a counterbalance to that. And that, you know, that work was well underway, I think, most clearly embodied by the now rather infamous 2005 RAN Corporation report, Building Moderate Muslim Networks, which was essentially a sort of full-throat endorsement of the idea that Sufis are cuddly and kind and peaceful. And if we were to undertake a robust effort to fund them and amplify their voices, these Sufis are the ones that would be able to defeat the Salafi jihadis. Again, you know, for those of you who are versed in religion and Islam and these issues, you realize immediately how ridiculous of a proposition that is. But, you know, these are the kinds of ideas that we're actually getting some level of traction in policymaking circles at the time. This is also mid-2000s when we had the beginning of what I now like to refer to as declaration culture. This is a series of efforts, sometimes with, often with strong governmental support behind them to convene religious scholars to issue grand statements that affirm the moderate nature of Islam and reject the views and the motivations and agendas of the radical groups. You know, so we have the Aman message, we have the, you know, a common word, you know, and we've had a whole series of these kind of statements since that continue up to this present day. And I mention them because this sort of, this, the persistence of this declaration culture and this sort of tolerance symmetry phenomenon, you know, where we see every few months somewhere in the Gulf religious leaders convene to kind of issue some statement about how there should be peace in the world. And the governments that then sponsor that use that to kind of show off their credentials as, you know, supporters of pluralistic, moderate, progressive approaches to religion, even as they continue to bomb hospitals in Yemen. So we have this sort of idea that there is hearts and minds and a war of ideas going on, you know, at the time of the Georgia W. Bush administration, the sort of search for these moderate Muslims. And then comes the Obama administration, the one that I served in. And, you know, you'll remember the sort of signature hallmark moment here being Obama's much-vaunted speech in Cairo in the summer of 2009, subtitled A New Beginning with Global Muslim Communities. This was the sort of Muslim world version of the reset button. The United States was going to declare a new way of engaging with Islam in its conduct around the world. You know, very deliberately and distinctly understood by those who were the makers of this approach to be a direct kind of polar opposite to the previous George W. Bush. And I think the sort of chief direction, orientation of this pivot, if you will, is not found primarily in the Cairo speech itself. The Cairo speech is its most sort of detailed statement, but the kind of best encapsulation of it comes in a speech that Obama gives in Ankara, actually, to the Turkish National Assembly in the spring of 2009, which is mainly a speech about the importance of the U.S.-Turkish bilateral relationship. Towards the end of the speech Obama decides if he's going to say something broader about Islam and the Muslim world. And he essentially says that from this moment forward, U.S. engagement with Islam and Muslims will cease to be about primarily terrorism and security, and will instead be about partnership. The idea that Muslims and Americans should be working together to achieve great things in the realm of human development. So a lot of focus on the empowerment of women and education and research and entrepreneurship. All wonderful good things shall flow from this. And so then Obama gives the Cairo speech later, in which he says in the first half of the speech some really ambitious and quite revolutionary things with respect to U.S. foreign policy around the question of Iran, support for democracy in the Middle East, peace between Palestine and Israel that really got a lot of people excited. You recall he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, arguably essentially for that speech. And I began to worry shortly after this speech was given about something that gave me a little bit of disquiet and the whole way that something called global Muslim communities were being framed and talked about as something that U.S. foreign policy was suddenly becoming very interested in, even if the sort of intentionality behind it, even if the kind of normative valence of this new American approach was positive, was about reaching out and embracing and hugging this global Muslim for collaboration and partnership. What gave me disquiet was the fact that for the first time the United States was essentially constituting an entire world religion as an object of its foreign policymaking. So one of the things that the U.S. government did later that same year in 2009 is to create at the State Department a new position called the Special Representative to Muslim Communities. This is weird. This is bizarre. This is the first time in the history of U.S. foreign policy that the U.S. has appeared to appoint something like an ambassador to an entire world religion. And consider for a moment what message is being sent by that gesture. The United States government is saying that at some level there is a sense in which 1.7 billion people in the world are to be viewed, are to be engaged, are to be thought of primarily in relation to their religious identity, that it is somehow their religion that defines them. This is essentially the U.S. government projecting Muslim-ness of some sort onto a billion plus people who, yes, if asked about their religious affiliation might identify as Muslim, but where the U.S. government is telling them, for all intents and purposes in our policymaking and programmatic initiatives, you are a Muslim first and foremost. And I think what worried me about this is that the internal policy discussion of it was very much about trying to repair the damage of the Bush administration. And I sort of talked about is we need to normalize U.S. relations with Muslims. To my mind, if you want to normalize relations with a particular community or group of people that feel that they've been stigmatized or singled out for a period of time, you normalize relations by treating them the way you treat everyone else. And the way the U.S. usually treats non-U.S. persons around the world is to regard them first and foremost through their citizenship of a particular nation-state. But no, in this sort of new approach, Senegalese, Indonesians, Turkish people, Jordanians have all become Muslim. They've been turned into Muslims in the U.S. foreign policy gaze. And so what worried me about this is that even though, again, even though the intention behind it was to reach out, befriend, enable partnership and collaboration, there was a weird sense in which the Obama administration's Muslim engagement efforts served to, I think, reproduce a version of the same exceptionalism that had characterized the Bush administration's approach to Islam, i.e. the idea that there's something about Muslims, as distinct from other religious groups around the world, that mean that they need their own special representative. They need their own Muslim-specific programming lines. And so this sort of persistence to continually exceptionalize Islam and Muslims, which I think continues in various forms to this day, is very worrying to me. A lot of these programs funded by the Obama administration's global Muslim engagement efforts, as I mentioned, focused on things like entrepreneurship, educational development, in a sense. My concerns that I had with it, and I should add in full disclosure that my concerns by this point were rather practical and operational in that one of the tasks I was handed upon entering onto duty at the State Department in January 2011 was to kind of oversee that whole basket of global Muslim engagement programs, which I looked at with utter horror and did everything I could to shut down. Writing what I thought were incredibly erudite policy memos about what was wrong with this and the sort of problems with projecting essentialized identities onto people. And this is the steep learning curve of an academic entering government that the reduction of some essentialism and the projecting of identities onto people isn't terminology that works well in governmental circles. So I needed to kind of find other ways of trying to kind of explain what was wrong with this. And I think there were other ways that you could talk about what was wrong with it. One thing that was wrong with it, I thought, actually, was that there is a sense in which the U.S. government's embrace of a global Muslim engagement world view actually at some level validated the narrative and world view of Al Qaeda. And Osama bin Laden. Because it would be very much the Al Qaeda line and later the ISIS line that, yes, these people are not primarily Senegalese or Jordanian or Indonesian. They are first and foremost Muslim. They need to regard themselves as part of an umma and they need to be engaged with and connected with the global struggles of their co-religionists. And at some level, the United States in this approach was helping to enable that omatic identity, if you will, by kind of engaging in a new sort of global Muslim outreach effort. But I think from policy point of view, what was wrong with it can be best encapsulated by the conversation I had with the former colleague at the United States Agency for International Development. And he was going on and on about how we have these great Muslim engagement programs that are focused on fostering entrepreneurship in Turkey and Indonesia and Jordan. It's amazing work. And I said, let me ask you something. We, the U.S. government, we fund and run small business development programs in Ecuador, right? He said, yeah, yeah, we absolutely do that. All right, I said to him, wouldn't it be weird if we called that work Christian engagement? After all, the population of Ecuador is 98% Christian. And he said, of course that would be weird. Christianity has nothing to do with religion. I said, well, why is it any less weird when we call those same programs Muslim engagement when we happen to run them in Muslim engagement? Muslim majority countries, right? But what's the unspoken assumption that's being made in that entire leap? So having told you what's wrong with the Bush administration's approach and told you what's wrong with the approach that the government I served in, the administration I served in, let me begin to kind of wind things down by talking a little bit about my own experience of how U.S. foreign policymaking thought about figures of religious authority in Muslim world in more recent years. My second stint at the State Department coincided directly with and indeed I was brought to work in government precisely on the religious dimensions of the U.S. approach to the rise of ISIS. And I think it's fair to say, and I also think I should say for the benefit of my governmental colleagues, it was fully understandable. But in their mind, the idea is that we need to figure out how these religious leaders can be partnered with in order to discredit the religious messages and the religious interpretations being promoted by ISIS. And it was very clear that in the minds of most of my colleagues in government, religious authority figures were relevant insofar as they might be able to provide something akin to theological antidotes to Salafi jihadism. And again, we're kind of back to a version of the Bush administration's good Islam, bad Islam. That there is these bad ISIS messages being put out there about things that are supposedly in the Quran and hadith that justify the extreme acts of violence and gratuitous murder and genocide, frankly, in northern Iraq that ISIS engages in. And so we need religious leaders who can clarify that those understandings of Islam are wrong. And so one of the things, the first things our office was asked to do, and I think Sean was a little bit more obliquely alluding to this, was to say, all right, we need a list from you, this new religion office. You guys are the religion experts that tell us the religious leaders that we should engage and partner with who will be able to explain why ISIS is bad and incorrect and wrong. And it's understanding of Islam. And we were very wary of doing so for many reasons. There were, in short, very good substantive political and legal reasons why the U.S. government needed to keep some distance from appearing to support or endorse particular interpretations of Islam, not least of all this thing called the U.S. Constitution, where the first amendment, establishment clause of the first amendment specifically forbids the U.S. government from taking positions on matters of religion. We can't endorse any particular interpretation of religion. And there were odd ways, I think, that we got close to doing so unwittingly at points. And this is where our office did, on a couple occasions, kind of operate in high gear. I may recall that there were a couple of occasions at the height of the U.S. counter-ISIL strategy where former Secretary of State Kerry referred to ISIS as apostates. And we had to pull them aside a couple times and say, Mr. Secretary, you can't use that kind of language. Why not? Well, because for the U.S. government to label someone as an apostate suggests that the U.S. government has a position on what constitutes the boundaries of Islam that we know who's in and who's out. That is effectively taking a position on a matter of religion, so we can't do that. And I think there was some frustration because our office was very worried that we were being looked at, we were being looked toward to give names, and then these people on the list that we gave them would be funded, would be flown around, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There was already a lot of this going on. There were certain figures that had stepped up in a big way to appear at U.S.-sponsored countering violent extremism summits, religious scholars of some considerable standing in contemporary Islamic jurisprudence who had seemed to sign on big time to the emerging counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism bandwagon gathering ahead of steam in Washington, D.C. in 2015 and 2016. And I think that our offices, I think, well considered in the eyes of some failure to deliver on handing over the list of the right scholars to engage, had some impact on how we were perceived, because this was seen to be the foreign policy challenge of the day, and dammit, why aren't you religion experts telling us the Islamic leaders who will provide the antidote, which is why, and here I think I'll echo something that Sean alluded to this morning, this idea that, you know, I'm actually very glad that this research was not published while I was in government because I would have then had to engage in sort of, you know, the inside the State Department policy equivalent of street fighting messaging with my colleagues in the counter-terrorism and the counter-messaging and the kind of public diplomacy and communications bureaus about, no, no, no, no, no, no, this does not mean that we should, you know, form a firm partnership with the Grand Cheikh of Al-Azhar, even though his numbers seem to be pretty good in order to defeat ISIS. But this is research that shows that, and here are these lists, and, you know, our line of view, it doesn't work that way, that's not how it works. And in that sense, I'm glad that this research didn't come out during the time that I was in government. That said, I think this is incredibly important work for helping us to understand with greater specificity, you know, some of the more precise dimensions of what personalized religious authority looks like in the Muslim world, because it's a conversation certainly in the policy space that tends to take place in very, very abstract fashion. And this idea of sort of counter-narrative and counter-messaging and the idea that if we have these messaging centers and there's religious scholars whose views are being amplified by these messaging centers, that you kind of create a communication and dispersive environment in the Muslim world that will dilute the appeal and render more inert the effectiveness of ISIS-type stories and messages. And I have to say that I am very skeptical that religious authority operates in that way. And so this is where I'm going to put aside the kind of, the Mohammed bin Salman returned to moderate Islam stuff and you know, happy to get into it if you want to do so during Q&A. And instead I want to turn to by way of conclusion now to talk a little bit about where our scholarship and research around these issues might want to go in the future. You know, when one kind of gets at religious authority through a list of names, what it doesn't tell us a lot about is the uses of religious authority. And I think we need to rather than to assume that because someone carries the title of alim or sheikh or mufti that they are in an authoritative position to determine how a particular individual understands and makes sense of his or her religious beliefs. I think asking who questions about religious authority is an important step forward and that's why I think this project has broken some important new ground. Going forward I'd love to better understand for example questions around when is religious authority relevant. What are the circumstances under which the utterance of someone carrying one of these august eminent titles actually has an impact in the world? I had this phenomenal opportunity in 2006 when the good folks at the Pew Research Center that were doing a lot of polling in the Muslim world at that point called me up and said hey, a question has just dropped out of our poll and the last minute for our next wave of global attitude survey in 44 countries including 20 some Muslim majority countries, we have the opportunity to insert a new question that will be asked and we'd like you to tell us what question you think should be asked. This is like a social scientist fantasy, the juggernaut of the Pew Research Center of Global Polling Machinery being offered to you to insert a question in. I said you know what, I would love to know something about these Muslims that you're polling. When they want guidance in matters of religion, where do they turn? We don't know anything about that. So we inserted in the 2006 Pew Global Attitude Survey, you can find it, the reports are available online. We inserted a question that asked people in Muslim majority questions and it just so happened that in that year Pew was doing an oversample of Muslims in Europe so we asked the question in some Muslim minority context as well which produces interesting comparison. We asked people, when you are seeking guidance in matters of religion, where do you turn? And we didn't name names. We gave people, we referenced certain kinds of spaces, certain types of sources. So the options I think we gave people were your friends and family, religious leaders in your local mosque or religious institution, national religious leaders affiliated with the state, so that's the official ulama that we've talked so much about today, or finally international figures that you access through satellite television or the internet. So I waited, you know, kid on Christmas for the results of this to come back. And there's one very clear pattern that occurred globally because these are questions being asked in South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Muslim majority sub-Saharan Africa. It was very clear that the vast majority of people when seeking guidance in matters of religion in 2006 turned to friends and family or religious leaders in their local institutions. National and official level religious leaders scored very poorly and that's why some of the findings that came out of this study surprised me to some extent. And I have to say, and I think this is a very relevant finding that the study offers that does directly contravene some of the policy guidance that the religion office was offering our colleagues in government at that time, which was this idea that, oh, we need to steer clear of these figures of official Islam who are simply viewed as mouthpieces of the government. They would never be credible voices, you know, for delivering the kinds of messages that the U.S. government would want. Although the findings of this research would suggest that maybe we need to revisit that. I don't know. I'm still haunted at some level by this idea that... I don't know. I just, I don't think that most Egyptians when wanting to understand their religion turned first and foremost the likes of Shauki Alam or Ahmed Al Tayyib as the person who sort of helps to steer them through their religious life. So it's not to say that those figures aren't relevant and the fact that people endorse them does tell us something important and how they were endorsed and where those endorsements feature in relation to other sorts of figures, that is relevant information to have. And I guess what I'm saying is that as we go forward, I think we want to know more about what the sort of, the uses of religious authority in the realm of everyday life looks like. Are people shaped by religious authority? Or are religious authority figures shaped by people? To what extent do the figures we call religious authority figures in the Muslim world and frankly in the Christian world, to what extent are they responding to market forces? Knowing that there are trends at work and if they want to remain relevant and want to maintain some sense of legitimacy or popularity, they need to to some extent reflect where the markets at in the way that they talk and do religion. And finally as a sort of trend that I noticed and I, there was at least one of those speakers this morning that alluded to it. I think it was, buddy I'm actually talking about Iran, that I've noticed this trend as I kind of done compared to research around the Muslim world, particularly among young people. And this is connected to the kind of proliferation of social media and the wide range of sources that one has access to has meant that, you know, there's been this, I think, fragmentation. Frankly, if such a thing ever even did exist there was a sort of single pathway approach to religious authority where one, you know, takes a single religious scholar or a single trend or mother hub if you want to get into questions of jurisprudence and follows it, but rather a trend towards religious eclecticism. I want a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I like this scholar for this, I like, I think that person's chronic recitation is fantastic. And I like this person on questions of social justice and what he has to say about that. And it's this sort of curation of a personalized religious experience that draws on a wide range of sources and a wide range of disparate sources. Some of them perhaps traditionally and classically trained Islamic scholars but some of them figures like the sort of the kind of Muslim Joel Austin, Amr Khaled that Tarek referred to. And, you know, you can talk about Aagim in Indonesia as the sort of, and I'm not sure if Amr Khaled is the Aagim of Egypt or if Aagim is the Amr Khaled of Indonesia, but their mode of operation is essentially the same. A combination of self-help, 12-step programs and pop psychology, so popular around the world with Islamic flavors and popular culture mixed into it, right? And so you get people combining in their religious experience, their day-to-day religious experience, a wide range of quote-unquote religious authority sources, some of whom, in theory, are not supposed to work together very well, right? So I like this Sufi figure for that thing, I like this Salafi figure for this other thing, I like this Muslim Brotherhood person about foreign policy and it's all kind of mixed and matched and kind of it's this composite mosaic. And it's engaged within a sort of pragmatic fashion and I think that's sort of the trend and if that's where we're going in religious life, and again, this is not limited to the Muslim world, I think you could make a similar kind of comparison analysis with Christianity today. I think that has profound implications for how we think about and engage with questions of religious authority and how we understand it. I've already spoken longer than I intended to, so I will wrap up now and very much look forward to your thoughts and reactions and questions, but thank you very much. Peter Harpreet, Intel analyst and a former diplomat. I honestly think you're a little bit out to launch on this. By your logic, we should close down the embassy to the Vatican tomorrow morning, for example. I imagine that the Mithraits have a huge resurgence in the eastern Mediterranean and the Mithraits, they don't believe in collecting interest on loans and they're really pretty hard on women and if you ask a Mithrait what he is, the first thing he'll say is I'm a Mithrait. He won't say I'm a Roman Mithrait or a Turkish Mithrait or a Scythian Mithrait. He'll say I'm a Mithrait. So if you want to establish policy that makes sense toward the Mithrait community, it would be nice to have somebody who's the Mithrait ambassador who knows these issues inside out and backwards so he doesn't try to do something stupid like establishing a micro-landing institution in Mithrait communities or send women preferentially to represent US issues with the Mithrait community unless you have those sensitivities in one individual who can counsel the rest of the State Department. I think you're really out to launch. No, I actually think you're in a roundabout way completely endorsing the position that I offered for the following reason. I would be the last person to suggest that we should shut down our diplomatic mission to the Holy See, not least of all because it's very conventional diplomacy. The Vatican is a sovereign state, and it's consistent with the US tradition of having diplomatic representation of all sovereign entities. And obviously as someone who enthusiastically leapt at the opportunity to join an office focused on trying to help American diplomats better understand the role of religion in world affairs, I'm absolutely someone who believes that religion does matter. What worried me is when I began to see particular religions and followers of particular religions reduced to a little more than their religious identity and how US foreign policy thinks about and engages with them. So for example, when we were running the Muslim engagement programs, one of the first set of confirmations of the uneasiness that I began to feel is when those entrepreneurship programs that were running in places like Indonesia and Turkey, the participants in those programs began to come up to the State Department people on the sidelines of the events and said, look, we really like the substance of this program because we are business people here in central Anatolia and we're trying to connect to small and medium enterprises elsewhere in the region in the world and these are useful skills, but do we have to be labeled Muslims before we can come into this space? Why can't we just do this as entrepreneurship? And people were absolutely pushing back against this tendency on the part of the US government to approach them through, label them by and seemingly define them in relation to their religious identity because they didn't. I mean, if you ask them, hey, what's your religion? They would say I'm Muslim, but my point is that their religion was irrelevant to that particular activity. They would identify themselves as a Turkish businessman, I would guess, would be their first label. I'm not saying that there aren't particular groups whose religious identity has been politicized in a way that would lead them first and foremost to identify themselves primarily in relation to that and we saw that certainly around ISIS in northern Iraq and it is absolutely vitally important for us and we did think about and engage the circumstances around that in that. I'm just saying that I'm pushing back against the idea that it's helpful to approach 1.7 billion people around the world as if their Muslim-ness is the most relevant way to understand who they are and the things that motivate and drive their behavior. I agree with a lot of what you said. Given though that you did say all that, I am kind of surprised you did write that survey question. In other words, what answer were you thinking you were going to get and what kind of policy would you wanted to... Let's say, for example, the answer you got was that I turned to my official state person or what kind of policy did you want to build on that question because then it does seem that you're endorsing the basic enterprise of this project. Yeah, no, I have a very ambivalent orientation towards this project because on the one hand I'm like, I love it, this is awesome, this is my stuff. And then I'm like, oh, but I'm not sure that a list of particular individuals is the best way to understand. We're really going to put Erdogan and Sheikh Hamoza on that list. Are they really religious authority figures? Aren't you just creating a popularity contest that you do it that way? I didn't have in mind a particular policy outcome from that. I wasn't engaged as a policymaker at that point. I wasn't leaping at that opportunity with a policy use in mind. I was leaping at it as a social scientist who, I don't remember how you put it. These models are great to use, just don't believe in them. So when we got the data back, I knew there were enormous limitations. If you have to reduce the possible sources of religious guidance to four choices on a multiple choice question, you're going to be losing a lot of context and nuance. But that's part of the game that we play as social scientists. This was before the rise of social media. Because one finding from that that I didn't relate for the purpose of brevity was that the one global setting where there was clear variation related to Muslim minorities in Europe where accessing figures internationally through internet and television was huge particularly compared to local religious institutions and local religious leaders quite simply understandably because there weren't as many as the setting where Islam is not the ambient religion, there isn't as ready access to mosques and local imams as there is in a Muslim majority country. So I would love to be able to do that again now and see. And I would probably, I mean, on the one hand, I'd be tempted to ask the question exactly the same way to have that longitudinal piece but I think there are more nuanced ways that the choices could even be offered at present. I built pretty much Montgomery College. I'm also, excuse me, a former Foreign Service Officer. But I think this whole conference underscored the importance of understanding the impact of religious leaders and the need to understand the dynamics of religion and society and in politics. I came away from your presentation with kind of the feeling that well, there's really nothing we can do as a government or as a foreign policy to influence these leaders. It becomes counterproductive. I mean, based on your experience, what would you recommend in terms of engagement that would have some kind of influence but not in a counterproductive way? So there are two or three elements in my mind to what a better approach and policy to these questions would be. One is to focus, some of it is, one of them is data-driven finding based on that moment I had with Pew back in 2006 which would, which still, and I persist in still believing that, you know, officially sanctioned, state sanctioned religious institutions and leaders are not the best place to start when you're trying to understand how something like the quote unquote average Muslim understands her, his religion and the implications of religion for conduct in everyday life and that getting a better understanding of what religious authority at the local, district, provincial level looks like is important and at that family level. And this is where the question of women comes in very, very importantly. Yes, just as in most major world religions in Islam, it's generally not women who hold formal religious titles or hold positions in something like clerical hierarchies but women in many Muslim majority societies around the world are very influential shapers of how people engage with and understand religion even though they're not officially, you know, generally counted as religious leaders and I think there's a whole world to that that we're only beginning to explore but even if we are staying within the realm of people that hold something akin to formal religious titles in Islam it's different in Islam, right, because there isn't sort of a central, at least in Sunni Islam there is no centralized religious hierarchy but to get a better sense of what kind of local, provincial and frankly dissident national level religious leadership looks like not because the U.S. government should then throw money at those people or amplify their voices I can't, you know, what better way to spoil whatever legitimacy they might have than for the U.S. government to hold them up and say wow, this is great Islam, we need more of this kind of Islam. Obviously that's not the way to do it. That doesn't mean non-engagement, that doesn't mean U.S. abandonment of this space or these questions it means that we use the leverage we have, use the diplomatic leverage we have in different ways and so to my mind that would mean for example in a bilateral military intelligence to military intelligence channel with the Egyptians say to them, you know, you might want to lay off this person that you have a tendency to crack down on and oppress because even though you perceive that person as a threat to you, that person is actually playing, having a useful effect in terms of holding off groups that would be even more destabilizing, right? So it's a diplomatic overture that is about trying to make space for certain voices and groups to be more influential without having to fund them and hold them up and give speeches about how amazing they are. It's a very subtle form of operation that U.S. foreign policy which tends to either want to throw money or bombs things that it finds in the world that we're not always very good at but it's also something that our seasoned diplomats do know how to do very well and it's not easy and it means sometimes having very difficult conversations but I think it would be a more effective way than just trying to come up with a who's who list and funding or endorsing particularly religious leaders officially. Thank you very much, Benjamin, to another diplomat. As opposed to the policy that the Obama administration, the Bush administration before did of picking and choosing our policy, I think your suggestion and I would agree with, is talking to everyone and trying to understand and getting information and not picking winners and losers. Covertly, we might do a little bit more to advance our interest but for the most part we would be noncommittal simply talking to everybody including everybody and one aspect of our policy that hasn't been touched on or diplomatic practice is the explaining our society and our values and how we respect everybody's route Jews, they respect whether they are believers or not believers, Muslims, Christians and so on and so forth and the second aspect would be exchanges, personnel exchanges which we do a lot of inviting people here to understand our society meet with people of different communities and so on and so forth plus the Fulbright program sending people overseas to better understand these societies. Thank you. I mean I am a huge fan of our public diplomacy programs and our international exchange programs. I think they continue to be just thinking purely as an economist like which I'm not with respect to return on investment. I think what we get from those programs is of enormous value over time and so I think they're very valuable. I think the idea of engaging with everyone is much to learn and at times to express points of disagreement rather than saying I'm not going to talk to this group is the way forward and in that sort of engaging with everyone kind of approach Sean referenced Bill Burns already the keeper of this institution and one of my most valuable lessons as an amateur new diplomat I learned from him. He was Under Secretary for Political Affairs at the time that I started and one of the things my main work when I worked on for Secretary Clinton's policy planning staff was to kind of come up with a new post 2011 post revolution approach to US policy towards the Muslim brother. Basically that was the bread and butter of my work and an opportunity appeared for the US government to become part of a dialogue stream that had been going on for some years whereby representatives of various European foreign ministries in a sort of academic low profile environment had been meeting with representatives of Islamist movements. And so a particular government that was involved in that came to us and said would be in light of what's going on in the region would the US now like to join this dialogue. And I sort of thought this would be a great idea. Yes, of course, it's clear in this new political landscape that's emerging in the Arab world that the Muslim brotherhood is going to be a major player. We have had very little opportunity to meet with people like that despite the best efforts of people like Nathan who even when that was impossible found ways of creating environments where some engagement with Islamist could take place. I was all for it. And Bill Burns, you know, when I recommended this said no, we're not going to do it. And my default gut reaction that was, oh, this guy, he doesn't understand. He thinks, you know, he thinks we couldn't be meeting with people like that. And when he explained it to me, I, you know, this was like, oh God, you know, who am I to think that I understand what's going on. He said, no, look, we have to assume that any meeting like that will appear on the front page of the New York Times and anything in this sensitive environment in the Middle East right now where the main thing we want to emphasize in US foreign policy is that it is the people of the region who will decide their political futures. Any meeting where it looks like the US government has already decided that it needs to have a summit with the Islamists will look like the US has decided that this is the group that is going to win and we want to work with them. You know, and so his point was what we need is an approach to that kind of dialogue and a policy informing it that basically says the US will meet with any group, regardless of its political stripe, regardless of what label is attached to it, you know, we did put some, there were certain parameters that we put on it, you know, that groups, you know, the group in question need to reject violence as a tool of achieving social change. They need to respect the, you know, the full rights of all citizens, including women and religious minorities, but other than that, we'll meet with anyone and with good reason because in terms of US engagement with the Middle East with the Arab world, we had up to that point, those of you who have worked in Middle East diplomacy will know that most of our engagement with the region tended to occur almost exclusively with political, business and military elites. We had very little contact with broader society and in this new environment that appeared to be emerging, so hopefully in 2011, it suddenly looked as if a whole range of new groups and ideological orientations were going to be relevant. Yes, the US needed to meet with the Ikhwan, with the Muslim Brotherhood, and with Salafis, but we also needed to meet with leftists and social democrats and workers movements that we also had neglected in our previous diplomacy. Yes, to learn from them how they see the country's future, and in some cases, including with some of the Islamists, as an opportunity to explain to them what concerns, what frank concerns we have about them. I absolutely agree with that kind of broad framing of the challenge that we were faced with. Thank you. John Anderson, Independent Analyst, OK, Full Disclosure, XFSO also, any rate, sort of in the aftermath of what became known in Egypt and the US about our contacts, diplomatic, et cetera, with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, both prior to the election of Mohammed Morsi and in that period when he set on the throne for that period of time. Elaborate theories, conspiracy theories, hey, sprung up, and they're still out there. I mean, you know, that US, in fact, engineered the Muslim Brotherhood's takeover in Egypt. Some of us think that that's quite often regime-sponsored in the current context. We could talk about that, but in any case, what then is our role in terms of engagement? How do we engage with our own intelligence, for example, in terms of knowing who's saying what and counting that? What are the possible avenues of approach? Can we get on talk shows where crazy stuff is going on? And in fact, through not ourselves and our own spokespersons, State Department and others, but locals that actually are quite interested in countering those kinds of statements, conspiracy theories and others. I mean, what would be our level of engagement and type after that? And just one last thought, thanks very much for your whole speech and characterization of what a lot of us have felt that is that profound discomfort in terms of some of the things we've said and places we've tried to go. Thanks. I mean, with respect to a country like Egypt and, frankly, US policy in the Middle East more broadly, I think the United States just has to have a really, in its frank conversation with itself about what the north stars of its longer term engagement with the region should be. Obviously guided by some assessment of US national interest. And what I would contend is that the previous north stars that have been the guiding principles of US diplomacy in the Middle East over the last 50 years have largely fallen away. And part of the turbulence that we're going through right now is that we're not entirely sure what our interests are. And I think one of the products of this is a knee-jerk reaction to scramble our way back to comfortable ways of doing business. And there's a number of other countries in the region that are feeling the exact same thing. Saudi Arabia and Israel, perhaps chief among them. And this is why there's been this odd, you know, some people have kind of remarked about why it suddenly seems like Riyadh and Tel Aviv, Riyadh and Jerusalem are such close buddy buddies these days. How is that possible? It's because they are experiencing a version of the same form of post-2011 shock. Both of those countries had become very comfortable with a staid fashion of US engagement in business with the region. But the correlates of US geopolitical conduct in the Middle East have fallen away as the realities of the region have evolved. And to me, what this means going forward is that, you know, before we think about, you know, engaging in popular culture and ways to try and have certain kinds of influences, we need to have a clearer sense of, you know, what we're trying to achieve. And, you know, I do agree as someone who occasionally wears the hat of a conventional policymaker that security and stability is absolutely essential. But I believe that the way you achieve that, the way you get that is to engage seriously in the long, difficult one-step-forward, seven-step-back process of starting to take something like genuine political reform and participatory politics seriously. And you can give a democracy and human rights justification for doing that. That's fine. It's a good reason. But you can also give a damn good security and stability argument for doing so with the idea that these societies will only be secure and stable over the long term if you make progress in franchising their populations and citizens. Right? What we're seeing in Algeria literally as we speak, you know, is, I think, confirmation of something that many of us who monitor the region have been saying for years when things started to go bad after 2011, you know, and as some of our closest allies in the region, you know, countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates double down on certain kinds of policy, you know, positions, ones that this administration has been only too happy to enable. And I think it thinks itself to be in control of things that it's not in control of. I mean, the Trump administration, I think the Trump administration is being played by the Emiratis and the Saudis just, you know, to no end. And so, you know, what's happening in Algeria is a confirmation of this idea that, look, given where we've ended up, it's only a finite amount of time before the forces that produced 2011 come back again because the same basic social contradictions that produced those events are still present, you know. And if so, if we're going to go through this again ever so often and if there's diminishing returns on it, meaning that the state has to use ever greater amounts of regulation, enforcement, and violence, we're just going to create a cycle of instability and insecurity. And so, you know, this is why I think it's time for a broader strategic re-evaluation. Of course, you know, I'd say, in a sense, this is a cop-out because I don't have good answers for the, you know, what should we be doing now in terms of the day-to-day influencing of popular opinion. But I think we shouldn't be doing that until we get a better sense of where we think things need to be going in a more strategic fashion. Thank you, everyone. Thanks for being here all day. I want to thank Carnegie Endowment, Nathan, Sarah, and other staff for hosting us here. And have a good day. Thank you.