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Muslim Grrrls
by Rafia Zakaria

After successfully employing Islamic law in the U.S. court system, our writer realizes that Sharia and feminism aren’t always mutually exclusive.

Four or five years ago, the term Sharia, which for Muslims denotes Islamic law, meant scant little to Americans. As I write this in the fall of 2010, America’s perceptions of Islam and Muslims have changed markedly. A few months from now, when Oklahoma voters march to the polls, they will face “question 755” on their ballots. Born out of the “Save Our State” constitutional amendment passed by the Oklahoma legislature earlier this year, question 755 will implore voters to forbid courts from using international law or Sharia law in their decisions. In state legislatures in Tennessee and Louisiana, similar bills await consideration. And in New York, Tennessee, Florida, and California, Americans are fiercely protesting the construction of mosques. These local cataclysms have been fueled by a steady stream of Taliban executions and floggings, all carried out under the supposed imprimatur of Sharia. It is in this landscape, constructed of faraway images of women whose burqas flap about in the dust, as well as of avenging state senators in the American heartland, that I am often asked about the possibility of Islamic feminism.

I grew up in the eighties in a Pakistan that had just escaped the shackles of military rule. My own dawning political awareness came at the euphoric time when Pakistan was about to elect its first female prime minister. It had been a grisly decade, one in which Pakistan’s own militarized version of Sharia law had played a defining role. In the late-seventies, in an effort to legitimize his dictatorship, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haque, who had grabbed power in a military coup, initiated an “Islamization” program. With the goal of producing a pure society by criminalizing all temptation, Islamization produced laws whose draconian and misogynistic character was conveniently packaged in Islamic-sounding terms and references. In real life, this meant that men and women could be asked to produce their marriage documents by any police officer. Women on television covered their hair and were never shown having any physical contact with men, leaving children like me to digest British sitcoms so censored that they often lasted only ten minutes.

It is not that preoccupations with Islamic law took up much of my attention in those early years of my life, or that I worried about the fact that legally I counted as only half a witness while my twin brother, with whom I competed and fought daily, counted as a whole. Yet these precepts, because of their existence and their ubiquity, were an invisible yet determinative theme in my life. They dictated, for example, the manner in which our home was arranged, such that an entering unrelated male could be led directly to a reception room in the front of the house, never encountering any women. In later years, it would decide who I was allowed to visit and when, which schools I would be sent to, and myriad other details of my own life and the lives of the women in our family.

My aunt Amina was married before I was born so she didn’t live with us, though she was a frequent visitor. Her visits were a cause of much excitement for us kids, whose ordered lives of school and homework did not allow for many novel experiences. The highlight was the fact that in the early years of their marriage, her husband, Uncle Sohail, rode a motorcycle. This vehicle provided hours of entertainment and speculation. If adults were around, we were sometimes allowed to sit and pose on it, a delight for my brother especially. Once, and only once, I remember my brother and I being given a ride around the block on it. Oh, the exhilaration of the achingly familiar landscape of our block transformed into a whizzing blur of shapes. Other times, Aunt Amina would come alone to spend an afternoon with us, often bearing special treats that she had made for us during the week.

The adult worlds of my aunts and grandparents were separated from us not simply by the boundaries of age, but also of language. My paternal grandparents, migrants from India, spoke a North Indian dialect that I was never formally taught. A quick turn into this language could insulate adult discussions from being overheard by children or servants in a world with little privacy from either. Of course, not being taught does not mean not learning, and at the age of six I could decipher just enough, quickly translating the words falling from my grandmother’s mouth as I played with a doll or stared at a jigsaw puzzle. When conversation slipped into this dialect I became immediately alert that some juicy bit of news was about to be divulged. It is through these shreds that I pieced together my Aunt Amina’s struggles with her in-laws and her husband. After seven years of marriage, she had failed to bear children, and her infertility was the source of unending troubles for her. Subject to constant taunts, she was often treated like a maid, given the crudest of tasks as a reminder of her status as a barren woman. Weddings were particular trials, as she was often excluded from celebrations. In one horrific instance, her oldest sister-in-law would not let her greet and kiss a new sister-in-law, saying loudly to all present that the touch of a barren woman was inauspicious.

Uncle Sohail hadn’t died, but perhaps it would have been better if he had. Instead, he had chosen to take a second wife.

Through the fog of memory it is difficult to know when and where cultural perceptions transmit themselves to children, but I remember often feeling terribly sorry for my aunt. My brother and I, always looking for new playmates who in our imaginations would have piles of new toys to share with us, imagined a childless house to be a singularly boring place. No playmates meant no toys. Aunt Amina proved us wrong every time with a collection of toys she kept just for us. Her little house, fascinating to us because it represented a miniature version of the large dwelling we inhabited ourselves, was decorated everywhere with pictures of children. Babies from all over the world, cut out from calendars and magazines, adorned the walls of the kitchen, living room, stuck between cabinets and even under the glass of the dining table. Shining happy talismans of hope, they formed the silent chorus of encouragement that my Aunt clung to.

It was just another pleasant winter morning when I woke to find Aunt Amina sitting at our breakfast table. Her presence was ominous since she had never, in my ten years, spent a night in her father’s house, always returning to sleep in her husband’s home as tradition and culture demanded. Her hair, always neat in a thick dark braid, was unkempt, her wheat-colored skin, usually flawless, was covered with blotchy tear stains. She managed a wan smile as I, already in my school uniform, looked at her with the mixed curiosity and apprehension of a child who does not yet know how to react to distraught adults. I was given little information that morning, even though I did manage to inquire on my way to school whether Uncle Sohail had died.

I can imagine what my mother must have thought of that question. Uncle Sohail hadn’t died, but perhaps it would have been better if he had. Instead, he had chosen to take a second wife, a woman who worked with him at the bank. Aunt Amina had come to our house after refusing his request to take a second wife. The annex that he had been building all year, supposedly to accommodate visiting relatives, was in fact quarters for a new wife. For three days and nights she had pleaded with him to reconsider, and every time he had refused, reminding her that this was his right as a Muslim man. (Though polygamy is not very common in urban Pakistan—indeed, at the time, I had never heard of it and no one in our family had multiple wives—lately it is being popularized as a religiously prescribed social panacea to the problem of too many destitute women.) My aunt recounted to my grandfather and father, her male guardians, how she had told him that it was better to kill her than to force her to watch him marry and share everything that was theirs with another wife.

In hushed tones, the topic of divorce, or khula, was discussed. How would it happen? Would he allow it? Aunt Amina’s marriage contract, signed years ago, had been drafted by an old imam, who had not thought to add a clause allowing her to petition for divorce. I did not understand the impute of the discussions then. I did know that I had never heard of divorce; the women around me, every single one, were either too young to be married or awaiting marriage or married with broods of children. I invested the idea of divorce with the same foreboding invested in it by the women of the family.

For days, my aunt remained in my grandmother’s room, leaving only to pray after the neighborhood mosque sounded the call. Sometimes she would join us at the dinner table, but she ate little, and did not speak at all. A few times we tried to joke with her, imagining that our childish insistence could lift her out of her misery, but we were unsuccessful. Parades of older male relatives came to the house and had conferences with my father and grandfather, from which all the women were excluded. The imam, who had performed her marriage, came to advise the family of the religious and legal options, providing little solace. The marriage contract he had drafted did not provide any options for her; it did not contain a clause forbidding polygamy, it did not provide for a significant settlement to be paid to her. As a divorced woman she would be destitute, stigmatized, and even more humiliated than as a rejected wife.

Then, one morning, as suddenly as she had appeared, my Aunt Amina was gone. Her belongings, which were neatly arranged on a bureau in my grandmother’s room, had been replaced by the porcelain knick-knacks that had stood there before her arrival. I was told that she had returned to “her” house, her husband’s home. Because the information supplied was so meager and because the uncomfortable silence she left in her wake provided so few clues to what had happened, I spent hours imagining what she must be going through. Her husband would marry this new woman and she would be there to witness it. Weddings are noisy affairs in Pakistan, and the arrival of a bride was always accompanied with fireworks, music, and fanfare. I imagined her standing at the upstairs window of her house looking down into the central courtyard and the other apartment, the one where the new bride would soon live. I imagined her alone, watching her own husband as a bridegroom greeting a new bride. The same relatives who had welcomed my aunt into the family, people who knew her family, who had pretended to care for her, would now sit, consuming large celebratory plates of rice and mutton and sweet delicacies to celebrate the second wife, unconcerned at how a life lay destroyed just upstairs.

The marriage happened. The new wife’s name was never mentioned in our house, a wishful invisibility, perhaps, that became a habit. In the end, their marriage arrangement was both surreal and terribly ordinary in its pragmatism. Her husband rotated wives every week; during “her” week he would live upstairs, take all his meals in her section of the house, and the following week he would switch. In the weeks she was “off,” my aunt was excused from all wifely duties. His affections, of course, were similarly divided; for years hence she would still talk of how hurtful it was to watch them get dressed and go off in the car while she watched from her upstairs window. Much of my aunt’s life was thus defined by this watching from windows, a constant vigil to see how her husband changed as he descended the stairs from her life with him to another one entirely. Divided thus between “off” and “on” weeks, her life oscillated between loved wife and abandoned wife, loneliness and servitude.


In the decades since I migrated to the United States, it was convenient to think of Aunt Amina’s story as something that took place “back there,” that had little or no relevance to my life as a Muslim woman in the U.S. I felt that a clean line could be drawn between the legal secular world in which I was being trained and the transcendent gray area of women’s rights and responsibilities in Islam. Muslim women living in the West could take advantage of rights available to women in the West, get divorced, remarry, and not have to worry that their husbands could take another wife. I was a practicing Muslim, but I did not believe that the messy issue of Sharia had any place in an American courtroom. It was easy, it seemed to me, to leave the vexing terrain of Sharia to be wrestled within the Muslim world.

It was with these assumptions that I began a one-year stint working at a domestic violence shelter in Indianapolis, Indiana. I had just finished defending a dissertation that focused on the choices between religious and gender identity that Muslim women face as members of minority communities in the West. A partnership between the domestic violence shelter and a local Muslim community organization provided a unique opportunity to work with women I had written about. The project aimed to provide legal assistance to Muslim women who were filing for divorce with the idea to show them that the community supported survivors and not their abusive husbands. It was meant to tackle head-on taboos that would otherwise prevent women from seeking separation. Providing a context that was sensitive to religious and cultural identity would help in the transition to independence.

Academia, with its well-known insularity, provides depth but also isolation. So, though I had passed the bar and begun to practice law, I had little experience working with abused women. I was well-schooled on the struggles of Muslim women, including their efforts to redefine the faith from within and to lobby for increasing representation and equality within mosques. But I saw the battle to define positions of equality within American Islam as issues only important to a small activist and scholarly minority, far from the realities of everyday lives of ordinary Muslim women. A secular legal system, in my opinion, provided sufficient protection to Muslim women in diaspora communities. In American law, I believed, lay the bulwarks of equality that would insure that, at least in the West, Muslim women would not be discriminated against.

I picked up Zainab from the motel where she had been abandoned by her husband, Said. Married only a year earlier in Amman, Jordan, she could not drive and spoke little English. Zainab, whose name I’ve changed to protect confidentiality, had left friends, family, and a job behind to be with a man who had promised her a life of comfort in the United States. They had met at a wedding two years before, when her cousin had wed one of his brothers. Punctuated with the romance of the wedding, one of the few instances when young men and women could socialize in Amman without the usual restrictions, they had a few clandestine conversations. During one of these, he had slipped her a small gold ring and asked her to marry him. The act was unusual. Marriages were nearly always initiated by elders in Zainab’s conservative family and the fact that he had taken the step of asking her himself, even if secretly, was indescribably winning to a young girl who had never before been the subject of such attentions.

The couple’s marriage was arranged by Said’s family, who showed up at Zainab’s home a few months after Said’s departure. Zainab remembered well serving tea to his mother, as the old woman inspected her from head to foot without any hesitation at all. Said’s family was known to Zainab’s, but this was the first time they had visited. A little daunted by the severity of her potential mother-in-law’s black attire and scrutinizing gaze, Zainab consoled herself with the thought that she would not have to live with the old lady. When her father called her to his room later that night to formally ask her if she wanted to accept Said’s family’s proposal, Zainab was delighted to say yes. Even though she had exchanged a bare twenty words with Said and had not been alone with him for a single moment, Zainab called their match a “love” marriage.

The departure of many young males abroad has made the transnational marriage a common occurrence. Embellished with the glamour of life abroad, these young men return to their home cultures and are often able to have their pick of brides. Young girls like Zainab, daunted by the specter of marital futures defined by meddling mothers-in-law, expectations of producing broods of children, and often also juggling careers in tough economic times, covet a proposal from abroad. Many imagine that the man himself, after having lived abroad, is likely to have less traditional views and be less dominated by the views of his family, adding to the allure of the match. In the piles of glossy wedding pictures that Zainab and I pored over the days that followed our first meeting, I saw an opulent ceremony attended by hundreds, and a resplendent bride who barely resembled the drawn and terrified woman I saw before me.

Sitting in the brand-new Nissan Altima that Said had bought with the wedding money they had received in Jordan, he looked at Zainab calmly and in Arabic pronounced the words “I divorce you” three times.

Things had unraveled fast after her arrival in the United States. During a hurried “honeymoon” in Chicago, Said appeared preoccupied, a marked and drastic change from the attentive groom of a bare week earlier. Several times during the night, he had stolen outside to talk on his cell phone in rapid English, which Zainab did not understand. It was after one of these conversations, when Zainab insisted on knowing who he was speaking to, that Said struck her across the face for the first time. A stunned Zainab lay in her bed crying for the rest of the night, suddenly filled with trepidation about this new life in which she was all alone. After months of nights spent imagining what America would be like, and how she would decorate her new home, Zainab longed for her childhood room and the bed she had shared with her younger sister.

It was not long after arriving at their suburban condominium that she discovered that Said had an American mistress. He made no effort to hide either his phone calls, his visits to her or the fact that he had no intention of leaving her. In a photograph stuck in a kitchen drawer, Zainab saw that she was an older woman, perhaps even older than Said, who at thirty-five was ten years older than Zainab. Zainab had confronted him that night when he returned home. Why had he said nothing in their long conversations and internet chats over the ten months of their courtship? Why had he married her and told her he loved her when he was in love with someone else? She had many questions for him that night, but in exchange she received only blows. Later that night, he raped her. This became a pattern. Every time she confronted him about leaving her alone while he went to visit his girlfriend, she was punished. After one fight during which she threatened to tell her parents and his family what was going on, he imprisoned her in a closet for two days. He disconnected the land line in the apartment and only allowed her to call home through his cell phone with a phone card. He watched her the entire time and did not let her speak for more than ten minutes. If she gave any indication of crying during the conversation, he promised to punish her. But despite the pain and humiliation, Zainab did not leave. Even as she recounted the story in tears in the shelter office that first day, she insisted that she had wanted desperately for the marriage to work because she did not know how she would face her friends and relatives at home if she were sent back a divorced woman.

Zainab had not spoken to her family in over three months when Said dropped her off that day in front of the Extended Stay America motel where I would pick her up a week later. Sitting in the brand-new Nissan Altima that he had bought with the wedding money they had received in Jordan, he looked at her calmly and, in Arabic, pronounced the words “I divorce you” three times. Then he had gotten out of the car and unloaded her things on the sidewalk. Before driving off, he had handed her a stack of legal papers. In the long days that Zainab spent sitting alone, hungry, and frightened in the motel room, she had gone over each page. They were civil divorce papers from a court in Indiana that pronounced her divorced. Said had signed Zainab’s name fraudulently several times, alleging in the papers that the divorce was mutually agreed upon. Only once did she remember signing a page, which Said had pulled out after a rare meal at a restaurant. Zainab had been so delighted at his affectionate behavior that evening, reminiscent as it was of better days in Jordan, that she had not even read the page before she signed it, only glancing at the English lettering before printing her name. Through this trail of deceptions, Said had managed to legally divorce Zainab without ever entering a courtroom.

There I was, with my first Muslim client, confronting a predicament where the American legal tools at my disposal did not promise the best result for my client.

Poring over Zainab’s case in those first few days, I felt dejected. In recent decades, most states have passed legislation that makes divorce a “no fault” issue. This means simply that if either a husband or wife asks a court for a divorce, it is automatically granted without anyone having to prove conditions such as adultery or abandonment, as was the case in decades past. Divorce in America is no longer punitive and courts want to stay away from deciding whether the husband or the wife is responsible for the breakdown of the marriage, an issue considered legally irrelevant to their future lives. All of this makes sense in a post-feminist society where women can marry and divorce at will and are unlikely to be stigmatized by the breakdown of a marriage. In a world of blended families and frequent divorces, few judges imagine a marriage as short as a year to have significantly impeded the life of either the husband or the wife. Spousal support, or the idea that the husband should have to pay his wife till she gets back on her feet, is largely unimaginable. While I could get her case re-opened by demonstrating the fraudulent circumstances behind the divorce decree, there were few options to get her much-needed monetary support beyond the basics of survival that were available at the shelter.

And so I faced the task of explaining an American legal reality of freedom and consent to a woman who had been married under circumstances that could not have been more different. Zainab expected spousal support and her argument for it was simple: she had given up everything to be married and feared the pain of an ineradicable stigma if sent back to Jordan. Again and again, she would ask me about her rights under the Islamic marriage contract, and repeatedly I would tell her that an Indiana court would not enforce a marriage contract based on Sharia law. Then she would exclaim, aghast, that if she could not get any rights or restitution under Islamic law, what indeed were her options under American law? My response, that all she would receive from an American court was a legally recognized divorce, no property, no spousal support, and no amount awarded for repudiating the marriage contract, was impossible for Zainab to digest. “How can this be?” she would ask. “This is America. Women are supposed to have rights here. How can a judge tell me that I deserve nothing after having been abused and abandoned?”

And so there I was, with my first Muslim client, confronting a predicament where the American legal tools at my disposal did not promise the best result for my client, a Jordanian Muslim woman. In my legal training, as well as my academic work, my focus had been almost entirely on the task of introducing women just like Zainab to the idea that the American legal system allowed them a level of equality and self-realization that was not yet available in Muslim countries. What indeed was fair in this case? The acknowledgement that Zainab had been wronged and deserved restitution, or treating her like any other American woman seeking a divorce? Should Said be treated like any other American husband whose marriage hadn’t worked and who wanted to be with another woman? Should Zainab’s unique situation as a Muslim woman whose chances of remarriage were severely affected by her divorce be considered in the case or ignored? More importantly, should Said have to pay to support a woman he had only been married to for a little over a year?

As a lawyer, I had been trained to find the fair and just result for my client, one that would make her whole and give her the best chance at rebuilding her life. And ironically, it was Zainab’s Islamic marriage contract that provided the best hope in this regard. Unlike the perfunctory and poorly drafted marriage contracts often used in my native Pakistan, Zainab’s contract had been drafted by an attorney, duly signed and witnessed, and had certified translations in English. Its clear stipulations mandated not only that Said did not have the right to contract any polygamous marriages, but that Zainab had the right to divorce him, something otherwise difficult for many Muslim women to do. The contract also imposed additional duties in the event of divorce upon Said. Not only did he have to provide spousal support for two years, but pay a pre-fixed amount, ten thousand dollars in this case, to Zainab if he chose to divorce her. The terms of the contract were indeed hopeful if they could be enforced. But in a climate where just the term Sharia evoked images of the Taliban and of amputations, I struggled to find a way to introduce the contract without allowing for a flood of negativity about Islam and Sharia that might destroy Zainab’s chances of success.

Further research provided more hope than I had expected. After a discussion with some colleagues, I found that the contract, because it had been so carefully worded, fulfilled all the requirements of an enforceable contract under U.S. law. There was no reason that I could not ask for it to be honored as a pre-nuptial agreement. It was this argument, then, that I ended up presenting in Zainab’s case. A few days after we had submitted to the court, we got word that the judge had signed the order and approved the proposed settlement, never questioning the premises of the agreement. The final order of the court asked for support to be paid for two years and the ten-thousand-dollar amount to be paid in installments to Zainab during the same time. Clutching the court’s order that summer afternoon, Zainab was happier than I had ever seen her. Her Muslim faith and American future, it seemed, had come together. Within a month, Zainab had moved out of the shelter and into an apartment and was beginning to take the first tentative steps toward a new life in the United States.

Zainab and Aunt Amina’s stories are separated by culture, time, and the vastly different worlds in which their choices and futures were determined. Together they illustrate the complexity of Muslim women’s interactions with Islamic law. In the patriarchal culture of Pakistan, Aunt Amina remaining a rejected wife was better than being a discarded one. Zainab struggled with the same issues decades later, and yet it was not Western culture or conventions that came to her rescue but the very marital contract that had been so unable to save Aunt Amina. Her story exposed to me the superficiality of the logic that, in America and under American law, justice is a guarantee for women, and that under Islamic law women would perennially be oppressed.

Zainab’s case does not and cannot change the fact that in the vast majority of Muslim countries, Islamic law, interpreted for centuries by men, is being used as a tool to enslave women and enable the sort of tragedies that defined Aunt Amina’s life. But it does present the argument that if things are to change, the recipe lies not in eliminating faith from the legal sphere but rather redefining it in a way that empowers women using the very tools that were used to enslave them.
Cases like Zainab’s, even when they occur in faraway America, represent for Muslim women strategic ways to take back the instruments of law that have been appropriated by male jurists and interpreters for centuries. Arguably, it is in places like Canada and the United States, which believe reform can only go in the direction of providing more rights to women, that this act of crucial taking back is possible. This, then, is the project of Islamic feminism, one defined in small, piecemeal victories that represent a taking back of a realm instead of surrendering it. Zainab was empowered by the outcome of the case not merely because she had received a monetary settlement crucial to her survival, but also because she had, in an elemental way, been able to use her faith to define her empowerment, a prospect denied to too many Muslim women, for too long.

Wolf in the Heart
Chris Lombardi interviews Evan Thomas

The historian and departing Newsweek editor on how he (like Remnick and Keller) caught war fever after 9/11, the obsession with being a man, and how his dad glowed in Navy whites.

In the October, 2001 “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker editor David Remnick called George Bush’s post-9/11 speech “reassuring.” Despite the fears of some, he explained, “taken as a policy pronouncement of sorts, it pointed in the right direction.” Even as it became clearer that the “policy pronouncement” was signaling war in two countries, many, if not most, writers and editors were as much participants in the preparations as observers. By April 2002, the New York Times’s now-notorious Judith Miller was deep in her dance with Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, reporting enthusiastically on the “important new discoveries” of weapons of mass destruction. The New Yorker again chimed in with similar reporting by then-staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg, whose 2002 stories led with graphic details of the gas poisoning of Kurds in 1988. “In five years,” Goldberg wrote in October, 2002, “I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.” So adamant was The New Republic’s plumping for war that editor Peter Beinart recently felt the need to write an entire book, The Icarus Syndrome, bemoaning American war hubris. Also caught in the fervor was Newsweek’s Evan Thomas.

Newsweek, which emblazoned “God Bless America” on its post-9/11 cover and followed that issue with articles in the coming weeks entitled “A Fight Over the Next Front” and “Blame America at Your Peril,” became perhaps the most visible of the Ernie Pyle-wannabes. By December of 2001, Thomas, an editor-at-large who announced last month he will be leaving the magazine he joined nearly twenty-five years ago, was on CBS calling Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “a great war leader,” and by March 2002 his byline was on a story about a “growing consensus” in the Bush administration that “the next target” in the war on terror was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. All this less than twelve months before the magazine’s “Shock and Awe” cover breathlessly reported the devastation that resulted.

Seven years later, all of the media outlets above have recanted some of what they published back then, even as the buzz for a new war with Iran threatens to repeat the cycle (with participation of some of the same personnel, such as Jeffrey Goldberg, now with The Atlantic). Beyond a few journalism-ethics seminars, few have tried to examine why they did it. Thomas, who now admits that he and the others were in the grip of “war fever,” has turned to history to help himself understand what that means.

History, and controversy, are familiar ground for Thomas. The grandson of an old-line pacifist who helped found the Fellowship of Reconciliation and son of a World War II vet who was a giant in the publishing industry, Thomas spent much of his early career covering intelligence during the end of the Cold War and writing books about that war’s beginnings. In 1998, he won the National Magazine Award for coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and in 2004 he oversaw similarly award-winning Newsweek coverage of the abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Among Thomas’s seven published books are many works whose subjects span all of American history. He is both a fellow of the Society of American Historians and a former trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. It may have felt more natural to him than, say, the New York Times’s Bill Keller, to wield a historian’s tools to ask why Americans love war.

The resulting book, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, is both exploratory and questioning, especially regarding the role of a single publisher, William Randolph Hearst, in cheering the government to war.

Hearst, the iconic newspaper mogul, zealously nudged America into its first full-fledged overseas wars in Cuba and the Philippines. The War Lovers notes that as early as 1895—not long after he bought the New York Journal, hoping to compete with Joe Pulitzer’s New York World—Hearst responded to diplomatic troubles in Venezuela with “Is This a Prelude to War?” and reported on Civil War veterans “ready to fight.” For the next three years, he kept up the pressure, and eventually sent to Cuba a notorious yellow journalist named Frederick Lawrence (a sort of proto-Judith Miller). Throughout 1896 the Journal published Lawrence’s entirely fictitious stories. At least one—an account of the Spanish using “women soldiers, known as ‘Amazons,’ who fought with machetes” against the noble Cuban insurgents—was read aloud on the floor of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

After exploiting the famous USS Maine incident, Hearst was equally enthusiastic about the subsequent invasion and occupation of the Philippines—where, as Thomas also notes in a rare reference to the present day, “the United States plunged into a counterinsurgency that cost the lives of nearly four thousand American soldiers, roughly the same number as lost in Iraq between 2003 and 2009.” Moreover, he adds, it was in that war that American soldiers “pioneered the practice known as waterboarding—one of several inhumane practices” used to garner intelligence from Filipino insurgents. Those practices now have new names, thanks to the consensus of many of the media outlets mentioned above: and it’s that kind of consensus that is Thomas’s real target in The War Lovers.

Thomas also looks at Congressmen shouting on both sides of the issue, writer William James, and the rest of the post-Civil-War former-abolitionist crowd. The latter included Civil War widow Josephine Shaw Lowell, who joined Mark Twain in the short-lived Anti-Imperialist League. The book’s vivid scenes of James, Lowell, and others agonizing about post-Civil-War militarism are followed by glimpses of Hearst as he helps escalate pro-war fervor—from popularizing the term “Remember the Maine!” to vivid newspaper covers about “Spanish butchery.” Its focus on the symbiotic relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and Hearst thus goes far beyond the moment some of us remember from Citizen Kane: “Get me the pictures, I'll get you the war!”

During our interview, Thomas admits he was inspired to write The War Lovers out of a sense of partial responsibility for the war he had unwittingly helped nurture, and that he’d done so partly by dismissing his own reporter’s instincts in the face of the seemingly inevitable war to come: “I felt like this is what the media did during World War II.”

I spoke to Thomas by phone, both from his office at Newsweek and from Martha’s Vineyard. As perhaps befits a man about to leave journalism behind to concentrate on writing books and teaching at Princeton, he alternated between genial author/professor and the wary, somewhat weary, journalist he was for thirty-plus years. Prepared to talk about his new book, he was less immediately forthcoming on other subjects. But his voice warmed significantly when asked about his father, especially as he remembered how great his dad looked in his dress whites. “He was literally glowing.”

—Chris Lombardi for Guernica

Guernica: One of the first things you said, even before The War Lovers came out, was that it was your way of trying to explain why you got swept up in the pro-war season of 2002-2003.

Evan Thomas: I was a hawk on the Iraq war. And if I’m honest with myself, I think I did feel a kind of war fever. A lot of journalists did.

Even before the war—but post-9/11—I have to confess I had almost this sense of relief. After what felt like years of superficial subjects, from Monica to Gary Condit, we were so glad to be writing about serious subjects. And after the attack, we kind of felt like editors during World War II: the time was over for that old adversarial relationship.

There’s a kind of excitement about going to war.


Guernica: Do you think you made some serious journalistic mistakes as a result?

Evan Thomas: Two things come to mind. First, when Colin Powell gave that speech at the UN [in February 2003], with “proof” of WMD and Saddam’s al Qaeda connections, right around then, Michael Isikoff was getting some cautionary signals from the CIA, which we did not pursue the way we should have.

Second, I have to admit that the very tenor and tone of Newsweek during February-March 2003 was pretty excited about war. Even when I wrote cautionary articles about What Could Go Wrong, there was a kind of energy to them. Even antiwar articles had it.

There’s a kind of excitement about going to war. And there was—it’s hard to describe now—that atavistic need for revenge many of us felt post-9/11. Especially if you were in New York or Washington. In March of 2003, a lot of other editors besides me were hawkish on Iraq: Bill Keller, David Remnick.

Guernica: And Peter Beinart, who like you felt so bad he wrote a whole book about it.

Evan Thomas: I know. I haven’t read it, but I have bought it.

Guernica: Is Richard Haass’s story, “Rethinking Afghanistan,” an effort to do things differently? To not just go along with an administration’s war plan?

Evan Thomas: I’m not sure. Haass makes good arguments. The problem is that the kind of limited effort he wants doesn’t work. I went to Afghanistan a year ago, and talked to the people around McChrystal. They too had some pretty convincing arguments. Any anti-terror war, they said, you can’t do it without intelligence. But you can’t depend on your intelligence without the support of the local people. I found it very convincing.

There’s no question that an embedded reporter gets seduced. They end up writing from within “their” units.

Guernica: Except when the people you thought were allies turn out to not tell the truth, or shift sides too quickly. A lot of those WikiLeaks docs seem to point to that. And then there’s the inherent tendency of people not to want foreigners running things.

Evan Thomas: Look. When I was thinking about this a year ago, one thing came clear: There is no actual winning scenario. Just ways that are worse than others.

Guernica: A lot of what we’re learning right now did not come from embedded reporting, which you and the major dailies participate in. Even before WikiLeaks, we had the Rolling Stone story by a “rogue” reporter. Do you think embedding hurts your ability to get the story right?

Evan Thomas: Look. There’s no question that an embedded reporter gets seduced. They end up writing from within “their” units. The good side of it: our military gets represented correctly, as hardworking, brave kids. And as armies in wars go—with exceptions we all know about—the American military does pretty well in avoiding war crimes.

Guernica: You’ve looked at this in a number of your histories. But I want to ask you about a military veteran in your own life: your father, Evan Thomas II, who was in World War II before becoming a sort of giant in New York publishing. What, if anything, did he share about the war when you were growing up?

Evan Thomas: My dad kinda got into the war sideways. Before Pearl Harbor, he was an interventionist, and signed up with American Field Service as a noncombatant. He was an ambulance driver.

Guernica: Very Ernest Hemingway of him.

Evan Thomas: Yes, exactly. Then after the war started he switched to the the U.S. Navy, so he got to experience both the sands and heat of North Africa and the raging seas of the naval war.

So I heard about World War II, but in a sort of complex moral context, since my grandfather was a pacifist—though not really, since he wasn’t against World War II. So dad’s war stories came in this very complicated moral dimension of how to have it both ways.

I’ve always felt a little guilty, because it was kids without the privilege I had going to war.

Guernica: Did you ever hear stories about your great-uncle Ralph, who fought in World War I?

Evan Thomas: Not much. I heard a lot more about his younger brother, my great-uncle Evan, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for being on a hunger strike, because he refused to go to war. A life sentence for not wanting to fight! I knew my great-uncle Evan, so I heard about the war from that perspective. But my great-uncle Ralph was long since gone. All I know about him was that he was in the Army, and that he was an engineer.

Guernica: I’ve actually seen a few of the clippings about Evan and your family back then. And I thought that the climax of that story—when your great-grandmother marches into Fort Riley to talk her grandson into eating—was something for the movies.

Evan Thomas: My daughter is writing a book about it, called Conscience. It’ll be out next year.

Guernica: Speaking of war and conscience, how did your own ideas about war develop?

Evan Thomas: Well, I’m Vietnam generation—but not really. By the time I turned eighteen and graduated from high school it was 1973, and nobody my age was going to war. Not anyone middle-class, anyway. I’ve always felt a little guilty, because it was kids without the privilege I had going to war.

Guernica: So you don’t go to Vietnam; you go to Harvard instead. In those days, did you just assume you’d be a wordsmith like your dad?

Evan Thomas: They left me alone to do what I was gonna do. Students today are thinking about their careers constantly. I don’t remember thinking much about my career until I graduated and didn’t have a job. I went to law school, and eventually became a journalist.

Guernica: Once you were doing that, was history a natural next step?

Evan Thomas: In retrospect, it was an obvious choice. But actually, I didn’t think about writing a book of any kind until Walter Isaacson suggested I write a book with him. After The Wise Men [about the birth of cold-war liberalism] I obviously got the bug, because I’ve been writing books ever since since.

Guernica: One of your early books was The Very Best Men, about the OSS, which became the CIA. It came out in 1986, when some ugly truths about the Agency were coming to life. Were you thinking about the contemporary stuff when you were writing about its origins? Had you done any reporting about it?

Evan Thomas: Only sort of. I’d done a little writing on intelligence. I had covered the Hill at TIME Magazine for a while and at Newsweek. Certainly those misadventures were on my mind at least somewhat.

Guernica: You went on to what I think of as a naval series, starting with the John Paul Jones biography.

Evan Thomas: A series? Nothing that intentional. [Laughs] I guess the nice thing about being a journalist and author is that you can do what you want. But if all biography is really autobiography, I guess it’s true that I’d always been reverential about the Navy. I remember that my mother used to keep on their dresser, for years, a photograph of my father in his dress whites from 1943. He glowed.

Guernica: A man in a uniform—there’s an undeniable pull to that.

Evan Thomas: Absolutely. He was literally glowing. He had a deep tan; it was the spring of 1943, he was the picture of health—radiant. It definitely led me to romanticize the Navy, and that’s probably what led me to John Paul Jones and the books after.

Guernica: You got to your father’s war with a battle I never knew about until recently. What drew you to the engagement in the Battle for Leyte Gulf, which drew in the entire Japanese Navy and most of ours?

Evan Thomas: It’s definitely in the realm of battles people have never heard of. People asked me: Why are you writing about this battle? It was a complex battle. I was drawn to it partly because it was a fuckup, and journalists love writing about disasters. It had embedded in it a lot of stories—of loyalty, heroism, a lot of drama. It was complex, but it was a pretty compelling story.

Guernica: Does The War Lovers feel like an extension of that series or something very different?

Evan Thomas: It’s an extension, I think. By the early two thousands I was writing a lot about the government, and terrorism, and the misdirection that got us into the Iraq War. It got me thinking about the whole notion of war fever

Guernica: So you didn’t start with Teddy Roosevelt.

Evan Thomas: No. I started with William James, actually. I was reading Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, and James is one of the characters. There’s a section where he quotes James on the heroism of Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the Massachusetts 54th regiment of black soldiers, and what that kind of heroism stood for thirty years later.

So I wanted to look at that period, when war was brewing, as a way of looking at our own. And the instant you start thinking about 1898, bing! Teddy Roosevelt pops up. It wasn’t easy. He’s been written about a lot, so it’s tricky to bring out something people haven’t seen.

In explaining war, the gender studies people talk about this obsession with being a man, what Roosevelt called “the wolf rising in the heart.”


Guernica: I love your evocation of Massachusetts back then—especially the recounting of James at the Shaw memorial, and the ping-pong of emotions after Civil War. And thank you for introducing me to Josephine Shaw Lowell, sister of Col. Robert Gould Shaw and ancestor to poet Robert Lowell, who went from celebrated Civil War widow in 1865 to anti-war activist in 1905.

Evan Thomas: You know, I wanted to make her a major figure, but I didn’t have enough of a paper trail to flesh her out enough for that.

Guernica: You illustrate well the effects of the 1893 economic crash. Do you think it played into the war fever then, the same way George W. Bush saw war as a way to boost the economy?

Evan Thomas: You know, I tend to veer away from economic explanations for war. There’s been a predominance of that kind of thinking, in the histories of the time. If anyone in academia gets it right, I think that the gender studies people are closer to the truth here. They talk about this obsession with being a man, what Roosevelt called “the wolf rising in the heart.”

Guernica: You also write about the Anti-Imperialist League, which James co-founded and which once had as vice president Mark Twain (whose antiwar views are in the news with the upcoming publication of his long-suppressed memoir). What’s your overall impression of the group, which allied Civil War vets with plutocrats like Andrew Carnegie?

Evan Thomas: One word: feckless. But you know? They represented something, a real trend. Everyone thinks of this period as some historic Beginning of American Imperialism. But it wasn’t! By 1900, even though the anti-interventionists lost, McKinley wasn’t a big fan of the occupation either, and Americans had gotten sick of the whole thing. In 1902 Roosevelt declared victory and got out, and the country very quickly became isolationist. Same after World War I.

Americans are very ambivalent about this stuff. To this day, the issue bugs us. People ask: what are we doing there? Now it’s what are we doing in Afghanistan? I wonder why we haven’t heard more of that. Maybe we will now.

Guernica: Do you think public sentiment is turning against this war, as with Iraq?

Evan Thomas: The elites this summer are starting to turn against it, for sure. Americans overall aren’t paying attention to it, at all.

Guernica: Unless you have a family member in uniform.

Evan Thomas: I think about this a lot. We fought this nine-year war, Americans didn’t feel it. No war bonds, our taxes never went up. The nature of these wars is a cruel aspect of how we’ve constructed our society. One tenth gets all the pain. It was bad during Vietnam, as I said before. Now it’s grotesque.

Guernica: About that earlier movement: I was surprised not to see mention of some of the League’s Civil War veterans, especially Carl Schurz and Charles Francis Adams.

Evan Thomas: There have been very good books about the Anti-Imperialist League. And I had to pick and choose: I kind of have a rule not to have more than about six characters that people have to remember.

Guernica: And Roosevelt and Hearst are so outsized, they make up about four right there!

Evan Thomas: It is an issue, because you run the risk of skewing your story. But if you don’t, you end up with what we used to call at Newsweek “the Russian novel problem.”

But here’s the real problem: Life is a Russian novel. It has too many characters and too many plots. When you narrow it down, you run the risk of distorting history.

Guernica: I’m still going to ask you about one more stream you didn’t include: Lewis Douglass, Frederick’s son, who fought with the 54th and was very vocal in opposition to that war, and on the other side Booker T. Washington, who appeared at rallies for McKinley to promote black enlistment as a way of illustrating black patriotism.

Evan Thomas: Again, you make choices. I was only tangentially aware of Lewis Douglass’s involvement; I touch on the black-soldier issue a little, because of some statements Roosevelt made about their capabilities. But there can be whole books—are whole books—about black soldiers in that war. It wasn’t a choice I made.

Guernica: When you write about historical disputes over other wars, do you ever feel echoes of those divisions in your family? I’m thinking of your grandfather’s generation again, your uncle Ralph going to war while Evan starved for peace and the rest of your family worried—including your grandfather Norman, who helped form the iconic antiwar group the Fellowship of Reconciliation. When you wonder why sentiment against the Afghan war isn’t stronger, do you hear those ghosts in the back of your mind?

Evan Thomas: I don’t think that much about it. Not that way.

Guernica: How about when you’re writing about politics, since ours has moved so far from that postwar consensus your father lived in? When an offhand comment where you said “Obama is God” was talked about for weeks, and lives on on the Internet?

Evan Thomas: [Laughs] Oh my word, the headlines! “Newsweek thinks Obama is God—Proof that the Media are a Left-Wing Conspiracy.”

Guernica: And some mention the fact that your grandfather, Norman, ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket. Does that make things difficult for you?

Evan Thomas: I’m proud of my grandfather, though I think socialism doesn’t work at all. Norman’s socialist identity was all bound up in specifics, not ideology: He got involved helping poor people in tenements. And if you wanted to organize against World War I, they were the only game in town.

Guernica: How would he have reacted to the fact that, when asked in a survey, 55 percent of Americans consider “socialist” an accurate label for President Obama?

Evan Thomas: [Laughs] What would he have thought? He’d have snorted at it.

But he also knew—even back then—that the word was mostly meant as an insult. It’s a convenient label. He certainly wouldn’t think of Obama as a socialist. Neither do I, by the way.

Overall, I do think Obama is a pretty good president, given the crap he had to deal with when he took office.

Guernica: He also keeps Doris Kearns Goodwin on his bookshelf. Do you think he knows enough history to steer free of war fever?

Evan Thomas: My guess: he’s tied in knots about Afghanistan. He set a trap for himself during the campaign in 2008, by talking about Afghanistan as “the good war.” Then he gets in and sees what’s actually going on. He went along with McChrystal’s request for extra troops with, I think, great reluctance. And if he looks at history—my god, there’s a sense of we screwed up then, what do we do now?

Guernica: I just read Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, and he really illustrates the kind of funhouse-mirror effect of the players there and our role in it.

Evan Thomas: I haven’t read Dexter’s book, but “forever war” sounds about right. For Obama, that gives it all a tragic sense: We’re screwed if we stay, we’re screwed if we leave.

All presidencies kind of end with a tragic sense—so much left unfinished, so you do the best you can. But this war, especially, has a kind of lost cause feel to it.