The Diplomats HDS ALUMNI SHAPE EFFORTS FOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY, PEACE, AND HUMAN RIGHTS
S
teven Simon’s warning in the January 4, 2000,
Simon, MTS ’77, is part of a group of Harvard Divinity
edition of The New York Times was like cold
School alumni helping to shape U.S. diplomacy and
water in the face of Americans still bleary-eyed
foreign policy at the highest levels. These graduates—
from partying like it was 1999. Simon, fresh
who also include the first female director of religion and
from a counterterrorism assignment in the Clinton
peacebuilding at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the first
White House, and his National Security Council
United States permanent representative to the United
colleague Daniel Benjamin wrote of a new combination
Nations Human Rights Council—carry with them a
of “religious motivation and the desire to inflict
deep understanding of the world’s major traditions and
catastrophic damage,” among extremists in the Middle
a commitment to ethics and justice. Together, they are
East. This movement, they predicted, would only
forging a new approach to international relations that
“grow and persist” even if its then little-known leader
acknowledges the central role of religion.
Osama bin Laden were arrested immediately. When Simon and Benjamin’s words proved prophetic on September 11, 2001, it illustrated the importance of religious knowledge—and the consequences of its absence—in national security and foreign policy circles.
CONFRONTING THE NEW FACE OF TERROR Simon came to the U.S. Department of State and then the White House at a time when modernization and secularization theory were still the dominant ways
“Social science tended to derogate or deride
of understanding the Middle East. These held that
the importance of religion,” he says. “People in
religion was obsolete and that the “new Middle Eastern
government just didn’t think in those terms.”
man”—technocratic, military, left-leaning—would lead his country to secularism and economic development. On academic leave at Oxford after the first Gulf War, Simon studied Salafist literature and considered its implications for Middle Eastern politics. The Islamic revivalism of the late twentieth century made it difficult for analysts to ignore religion as a force shaping popular consciousness throughout the region. Simon says that his HDS experience put him at the vanguard of a new group of diplomats looking to integrate an understanding of religion into U.S. foreign policy. “After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the Clinton administration decided that they needed to have somebody working full time on counterterrorism,” Simon explains. “They pulled me by the collar and put me in that job. I and certain colleagues in the CIA were very tuned in to the evolving role of religion in Middle Eastern politics. I was sensitized to
STEVEN SIMON
it precisely because of my background at HDS. That’s 100 percent the reason.”
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