A critique of RAND Corp.'s plan for Islamic reform

Presented by the students of "Modern Islamic Thought"

Georgia State University

In 2003, the RAND Corporation produced a document, freely available to the public, which was an attempt to consider what the position of the United States should be regarding Islam in the post September 11 world. Because RAND Corp. has a long history of being enormously influential in defense and strategic planning circles, and because the author, Cheryl Benard, is married to a very prominent neoconservative and Bush Administration insider, Zalmay Khalilzad (in 2005 made the US ambassador to Iraq), it seems quite possible that this document might make an impact on the thinking of those in power. We thus have taken it upon ourselves to provide some initial analysis of this document. A few others have done so, but none in much depth. The following are the unedited reporting of students in a course on Modern Islamic Thought and Movements. While the papers have not been edited or made to fit together entirely cohesively, they are in several ways worth reading.

The following are links to the relevant sections of the analysis. First is the actual RAND Corp. document by Cheryl Benard.

In the following link, Zaynab al-Ansari analyzes Benard's seeming fixation on women's headcovering, as well as other aspects of her analysis. Chris Low points out how unlikely it is that Benard's desire to create a wedge between the "traditionalist" Muslims and "fundamentalists" will bear any fruit and may create more "blowback". And Nikki Siahpoush argues that Benard has fundamentally misread the question of modernity in the Islamic world.

In the following section, Joshua Herbstman, Kendra Cauble and Paa Kwame Mante jointly analyze some of Benard's policy suggestions, and decide that there is something useful here, but it is mixed.

Kevin Keller gives us some information about the RAND Corporation itself and on the Smith Richards Foundation, which funded this study.