When Islamic clerics meet 'The Great Satan' face to face

As the principal of an Islamic seminary in New Delhi, Maulvi Mohammad Mouzzam Ahmed knows there is no such thing as a free lunch.

So when he was offered an all-expenses-paid trip to the United States a few months ago, to see how religious schools operate there, he was curious, and a little skeptical. What, he wondered, would the world's greatest superpower want with a nice moderate Muslim like him?

The maulvi was not alone. He was just one of a half-dozen Indian Muslim clerics invited to the United States in September as part of the US State Department's International Visitors program, a 60-year-old institution that has brought nearly 100,000 emerging world leaders an exposure to US culture, society, and institutions.

Every year, US embassy officials choose a theme. Last year's tour group of Islamic clerics from India - the country with the world's third-largest Muslim population - focused on American religious education, and was called "the madrassah program." Smart alecks here had another name for it: "Meet the Great Satan."

Maulvi Mouzzam, a pious middle-aged man with a disarming smile, is still not entirely sure what it was all about. But he did have a good time, he says. "Americans only work on a profit and loss basis, and I'm not sure what sort of benefit they have gotten from my visit," he says, now back at his job handling admissions at the madrassah he runs at Fatehpuri Mosque in Old Delhi. "I did enjoy the American people, though. They were not as virulently anti-Muslim as their government."

Given the prevalent anti-American sentiment found in South Asia these days, such suspicion is perhaps not surprising. But US diplomats in New Delhi say they have no hidden agenda. The main point, they say, is good old fashioned interaction: to bring different people from all over the world to see the United States for themselves, and determine whether the impressions they have or the propaganda they hear matches their own experiences.

Whether such programs actually work, of course, is another question. Some Indian academics see such programs as just another product of American naiveté. "I find American foreign policy incredibly naive at times," says Dipankar Gupta, an anthropologist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. "Travel broadens the mind, but it depends on what kind of experience you have. It can actually backfire, and you can become more rigid to change."

Among Americans "there's this belief that if we show people the truth, then rationality will prevail," says Mr. Gupta. "But that's not the point. On issues such as moral values, people aren't very rational. It's what they do, it's what they've always done, and they don't change."

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