From Dhaka, With Hope

This sleepy town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore is deeply rooted in the 18th century. Crab fishermen still ply the waters of the Chester River, and painstakingly restored homes bear witness to its history as a remote outpost of the British Empire long before it joined the upstart United States. Yet Chestertown has improbably become the laboratory for a bold new experiment in the war on terrorism.

Against this colonial backdrop, 21 young Muslim student leaders from South Asia, chosen from among hundreds of applicants, spent their first summer in the United States. Like their American counterparts, they went to cookouts, baseball games and Fourth of July parades. Unlike most Americans, they hotly debated the fine points of the U.S. Constitution, explored the rising importance of Islam in America and stayed up late at night seeking solutions to the Kashmir conflict.

Six months ago, the State Department asked me to organize the first American Studies Institute -- an experimental summer school on American values for students from the Muslim world. The brainchild of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the program is a visionary idea on several levels. By reaching out to foreign college students -- which the department’s educational programs have not done for nearly half a century -- the program offers an alternative to the madrasas that have been training young Muslims in the fanatical extremes of anti-Americanism. By asking American colleges to run the programs, the federal government entrusts the teaching to independent scholars, avoids the taint of propaganda and widens public participation in our foreign policy.

In the 1990s, the U.S. committed a serious error when we eliminated many of the overseas cultural programs that had been in place since the Cold War. American educational centers and libraries were closed down in places like Pakistan, where they had never been more desperately needed, and under pressure from then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the U.S. Information Agency was folded into the State Department and effectively eliminated. Is there any wonder that foreigners have trouble understanding us?

But now, called to attention by the events of 9/11, the U.S. government is groggily waking up to the need to explain itself better to an uncomprehending, often resentful world. Just as we did in the late 1930s, when the State Department created a cultural division to counteract the rise of fascism, and again in the 1950s, when the Cold War led to some of our best efforts to wage cultural diplomacy, we are discovering new incentives to explain the ideas that animate us.

After some hurried spring planning, the first of three American Studies Institutes opened at the beginning of July. Twelve women and nine men, ages 19 to 27, came to Washington College from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. (A second program at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., taught Middle Eastern and North African students, while a third at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Ill., taught Iraqis). At Washington College, we prepared an ambitious five-week course of study that included reading, outside speakers, road trips and lots of classroom discussion. There was a heavy dose of American history, which they were not expecting, and a generous immersion in current events, which they were. We tried to tell the story from all sides, with pride in the things that Americans have done well and unflinching honesty about the things they have not.

Yes, there were hilariously inaccurate assumptions on both sides. We were told that all of the students would be vegetarians -- but the first one we met, Sazidul Islam of Bangladesh, told us that he was a pure carnivore who hated vegetables. For their entertainment, we planned a tasteful menu of Capra-esque Hollywood Golden Era films, but that fell apart after another Bangladeshi brought a suitcase full of recently pirated films he had bought for a dollar apiece at home. (“American Pie” is apparently very big in Dhaka.)

The students were expecting severe taskmasters, in coats and ties, asking them to memorize statistics confirming American superiority. Instead, they found typically irreverent young American academics. It was an education for us as well -- discovering our own deep reservoirs of patriotism too rarely expressed in academe, learning about the dignity of Islam, and in the end achieving something like equality on the scrubby cricket pitch we created, where it quickly became apparent to our amused students that none of us knew how to play the sport they loved.

From the pitch to the prayer house, daily lessons in tolerance followed.

A visit to a 17th century Quaker meetinghouse left them sufficiently moved by America’s religious origins that they asked permission to pray silently, reminding us that Allah and God are different names for the same divine presence. When we visited a mosque one day, a female student was thrilled: She had never been able to publicly participate in the prayer ritual before. The imam, a Syrian cleric who is the Muslim chaplain of the Baltimore Police Department, beamed and replied that America is the freest place on Earth to practice Islam.

One of our most devout Muslims, a brilliant Pakistani woman who intends to be prime minister, showed up one day in blue jeans and a SpongeBob T-shirt after wearing only traditional garb for weeks. On their last night in Chestertown, the students staged a cultural celebration of East and West that can only be described as “The King and I” meets “Show Boat.” We spent a lot of time exploring what was called civics in the 1950s -- the little Tocquevillean ways that Americans contrive to make a community hum. The students loved our mayor, Margo Bailey, who led a successful nine-year fight to keep out Wal-Mart. They met a policewoman, a convert to Islam who gives public poetry readings. They visited our small weekly newspaper, where the editor pulled out a yellowed 1851 issue. The first editorial we turned to declared, “It is indeed the mission of the American people to promote human freedom throughout the world, but this is not to be done by assisting its principles at the point of a sword.”

Small-town civics wasn’t the only lesson in American democracy. We also had some big-ticket events, including hearing Secretary of State Colin L. Powell speak at a reception in Washington, and meeting with former President Clinton in his Harlem office. He joined in a heated conversation with two of our students, Omer Chaudhary and Akbar Ansari, who intend to resolve the Kashmir dispute when they become, respectively, the prime ministers of Pakistan and India. Wherever we went, we could not pay for taxis, because South Asian drivers refused to take our money.

The entire cost of the program was a little more than $200,000, paid for by the State Department’s South Asia bureau. It would be difficult to think of a better investment in the future. A Patriot missile goes for as much as $2 million, and the Pentagon is asking for $400 billion for its 2004 budget. The $45.3-billion increase in the defense budget between 2002 and 2003 was the highest one-year rise since 1966. For a tiny fraction of that cost, we have introduced 21 future leaders to American democracy. They will be the most honest ambassadors we could hope for as our nations reckon with a daunting future.

The program’s success suggests that it is time to rethink some of the severe restrictions that we have placed on foreign students from predominantly Muslim countries at our universities in the wake of 9/11. American education is a powerful magnet to young people on every continent. There are more than half a million foreign students in the United States. They come for our opportunity and openness -- exactly the values we are struggling to spread through military means, at many times the cost.

Successful foreign policy depends on many things, including the judicious use of force. But we should never ignore the great power of our ideas -- what Harvard’s Joseph Nye has called “soft power,” though there is nothing soft about it. It is in the world of ideas that fundamentalists find young converts zealous enough to kill themselves and Americans for their cause. These medieval thoughts are the real weapons of mass destruction. And it is in the world of ideas, ultimately, that America will fight back with all the strongest weapons in our arsenal: hope, tolerance and an educational system second to none.