Reading the recent RAND Corporation report on ‘Civil Democratic Islam’ by Sheryl Bernard, I could not help but feel as if I had fallen into some time-warp and had been transported back to the 19th century when Orientalist scholarship was at its peak and Orientalist scholars and policy-makers like Snouk Hurgronje were working closely with the colonial governments of Western Europe, formulating strategies on how to divide and rule the Muslim world.

The fact that the RAND report is meant to serve the needs and aspirations of American power is clear when we look at its contents and see for whom it was written.

Conceived within the RAND National Security Research Division and commissioned by the Smith Richardson Foundation, this is no mere work of a poor post-grad researcher trying to earn some money to pay off his car loan.

RAND’s intimate links with US power is well known to all, and the RAND corporation has also worked closely with the US army, as its RAND Air Force Project testifies.

The RAND report by Bernard divides the global Muslim community according to a typology of Islamist types or categories, ranging from ‘Fundamentalists’ and ‘Traditionalists’ to ‘Modernists’ and ‘Secularists’.

It then proposes a number of crude strategies to get the fundamentalists and traditionalists to slog it out against one another, while keeping the modernists at bay and the secularists close at hand. Interestingly, the report states that moderate Muslims should be kept apart from ‘left-wingers’ and anti-glonbalisation activists who are opposed to US economic, military and political interests.

The overall aim, as the report puts it, is to “find strategic partners” in the Muslim world to help in the promotion of “democratic Islam”, which the author hopes will be the antidote to the problem of “militant Islam” (or, as the term is increasingly used today, ‘Jihadism’).