Source: The Washington Post
The latest flap in the blogosphere is about NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr.’s observation, in an interview with Al Jazeera, that President Obama wants his agency to conduct more outreach with what Bolden called “dominantly Muslim nations.”
“He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering,” Bolden said.
“Fatuousness,” Charles Krauthammer grumbled.
“The space program is being transformed into a tool of Obama foreign policy, which views American national greatness as an anachronism,” Elliott Abrams objected.
Others complained that Bolden had said that Muslim outreach was perhaps his “foremost” purpose, ahead even of space exploration itself.
In a written statement, the White House pointed out that Bolden was just talking about engaging “the world’s best scientists and engineers as we work together to push the boundaries of exploration. Meeting that mandate requires NASA to partner with countries around the world like Russia and Japan, as well as collaboration with Israel and with many Muslim-majority countries. The space race began as a global competition, but, today, it is a global collaboration.”
Fair enough. But I still found Bolden’s comment troubling, for a reason of my own: since when is it U.S. government policy to offer or refuse cooperation with various nations based on the religion their people practice?
Last time I checked, the Constitution expressly forbid the establishment of religion. How can it be consistent with that mandate and the deeply held political and cultural values that it expresses for the U.S. government to “reach out” to another government because the people it rules are mostly of a particular faith?
To be sure, the U.S. government has an interest in good relations with all the people of the world, regardless of their religion. We have, perhaps, a particular interest in combating hostility toward our country and its people among the Muslim faithful, because much terrorism is rooted in extreme Islamist ideology.
But does it follow that the U.S. government should seek cooperation on space projects with the government of a particular country explicitly because its people are mostly Muslim?
Doesn’t this put us in the position of categorizing nations by religion as opposed to other characteristics, such as whether they are democratic? We did not pursue space partnerships with Europe because it was “Christian” or Israel because it was Jewish, did we?
There are two risks here. The first is to encourage Islamic identity politics in states that already consider themselves Islamic — Pakistan comes to mind. The second is to discourage those prospective space partners that do not accept the label of “Muslim” or “Muslim-majority” that the administration seems so eager to pin on them.
Take Indonesia. Back on Feb. 16, Bolden observed that “we really like Indonesia because the State Department, the Department of Education [and] other agencies in the U.S. are reaching out to Indonesia as the largest Muslim nation in the world. We would love to establish partners there.”
Note that, according to Bolden, it’s not just NASA that’s reaching out to Indonesia because it is a big “Muslim nation.” State and Education are, too. Indonesia does not, however, define itself as a Muslim country. Ninety percent of its people are, indeed, of that faith. Yet the country’s official flag and coat of arms do not include any Muslim symbols (in contrast to Turkey or Saudi Arabia). Its official ideology, Pancasila, is studiously nonsectarian. The national motto is “unity in diversity.”
Article I of the Indonesian Constitution establishes a republican form of government that recognizes the sovereignty of the people.” Article XI of that document declares, ecumenically, “The State shall be based upon the belief in the One and Only God. The State guarantees all persons the freedom of worship, each according to
his/her own religion or belief.”
Compare and contrast with the preamble of Pakistan’s Constitution: Whereas sovereignty over the entire Universe belongs to Almighty Allah alone, and the authority to be exercised by the people of Pakistan within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust; And whereas it is the will of the people of Pakistan to establish an order . . . Wherein the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance and social justice, as enunciated by Islam, shall be fully observed; Wherein the Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Quran and Sunnah,” etc.
To be sure, Islamism enjoyed a bit of a surge in Indonesian politics following the ouster of the Suharto regime in 1998. But Islamic parties have been on the wane more recently. The ones that espouse an Islamic state garnered only 17 percent of the vote in this year’s legislative elections. More pluralistic Muslim-based parties got about 12 percent.
It makes as much sense to define this vast, diverse, rapidly modernizing archipelago as “Muslim” as it would to define Brazil as Roman Catholic.
Better for NASA to say that we seek partnerships with all countries that respect the rights of their people, that share our pluralistic values and that seek, as we do, to understand the mysteries of space — and leave it at that.
To Read More: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/07/nasa_mission_to_mecca.html