War for Civilization
The Islam of Bush, Blair, and Giuliani.

By David F. Forte, professor of law at Cleveland State University. He is the author of Studies in Islamic Law: Classical and Contemporary Applications.
Novemeber 1, 2001 8:30 a.m.

The Conversation

Daniel Pipes's courteous and trenchant response to me is, as is all his work, illuminating. He both narrows the positions between us and, at the same time, clarifies our essential differences. His central thesis is that "Islamic fundamentalists stand outside of historic Islam and are already within bin Laden's extremist ranks." Stephen Schwartz argues more specifically that Wahhabism is as heretical to Islam as I claim bin Laden is, and that there is no real fundamentalism within Islam that is not of the Wahhabist type. Amir Taheri reminds us that there are problems that go beyond the differences between extremism and fundamentalism. Taheri states, "The Muslim world today is full of bigotry, fanaticism, hypocrisy and plain ignorance — all of which create a breeding ground for criminals like bin Laden." Jonah Goldberg observes that there is a particular religious attitude in Islam that, at least for the present, impels its believers towards violence. And Diana Westcontends that Islam itself, through the Koran unsoftened by modern exegetical analysis, commands violence.

Putting aside our differences for the moment, what is striking is the degree of common agreement among many of us. There is, at bottom, no difference that I detect between Pipes, Schwartz, Goldberg, West, and me on the moral and legal unacceptability of violations of human rights committed by extreme partisans of the Sharia, particularly against women and religious minorities. Further, I believe all of us agree with the central proposition of my earlier essay, namely, that religion is not the enemy. We stand together against those who have claimed that it is the religious impulse or even monotheistic faith that is the ultimate cause of the events of September 11 — a view hostile to the role of religion in Western life as well as in Islam.

Most importantly, we concur, along with the president, that bin Laden is a direct threat to Islam. That central theme to the President's worldview and diplomacy is a ground that nearly all of us stand upon, whatever other disagreements we may have. It is the ground that supports our policy of isolating the extremists and containing their all too strong influence within the Muslim world. It underlies another significant point of agreement between my interlocutors and me: That the cause of the crimes committed by the September 11 terrorists, and others like the men who this past weekend murdered 16 worshippers in a Pakistani church lies within the Muslim world.

I add one caveat. For many years, American policy largely acquiesced when Muslim governments acceded to extremist demands within their countries. We did not adequately protest the violence perpetrated against religious minorities or the resurgence of what its perpetrators claimed to be religiously based slavery in the Sudan. We operated on a stereotype, namely, that Islam was by nature intolerant and violent. And by so doing, we assisted in the legitimization of radical extremists within the Muslim world. At the same time, we incurred the resentment of moderate Muslims who opposed both the extremists and the autocratic governments the United States was seen to be supporting.

Whatever our differences, the ground I share with my interlocutors ensures that our conversations are all designed to lead to the same place — victory over a worldwide evil.

The question is how best to achieve it. I do not believe that making war on all who consider themselves fundamentalists is practically or intellectually necessary. I do not think, as apparently Daniel Pipes does, that all fundamentalists are the same as the militant extremists who are making war on us. Perhaps the difference between us stems from differing definitions of fundamentalism. I take religious fundamentalism to include the following characteristics: a reliance on the will of God as the source of truth, typically codified in a particular source (scripture), a relative disparagement of the role of reason, a tendency towards literalism, a reaction against foreign or modern elements or accretions, and a duality in one's eschatological conception of existence (good/evil, spirit/matter, God/Satan, us/them, certainty of triumph/imminence of defeat). Fundamentalism in Islam has its own particular cast. It normally involves the claim that the sharia should be part or all of state law.

In that sense, fundamentalism has always been part of the religion since the Pietists confronted and later fused with the legalists in early Islam. True, much of modern Islamic fundamentalism transmogrified into the politicized extremism we see in bin Laden and in other parts of the Islamic world. In that, Pipes's evaluation has weight. But there is no reason to be fatalistic that all of Islamic fundamentalism will become the kind of extremism that we are at war with. Whatever its failings, traditional Islamic fundamentalism has been different from the politicized Islam that the radicals espouse. Even today, many Islamic fundamentalists seek their goals through peaceful political processes. They include groups in Turkey, Jordan, Bahrain, and Egypt. We should note that even modest democratic processes can blunt the extremist pull on Islamic fundamentalism.

I regret that Stephen Schwartz saw me as in a "rush to exculpate Islamic extremists who would impose sharia as the exclusive form of law in every Muslim society." Whatever public-policy record I have, it has been invariably to castigate the human-rights violations of those fundamentalists who would impose the entire sharia on society, and those extremists who go beyond even the sharia in their vile objectives. Legally and rhetorically, I have campaigned against the intolerable human-rights abuses permitted or committed by the governments of Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. And I have not withheld my ire from American policymakers who have patronizingly assumed that intolerant Islam was the genuine article.

Schwartz is right to condemn the baleful influence of Wahhabism on modern Islam. He also asserts that it is as much a heresy as bin Laden's "faith" that equates Islam with wanton terrorism. But Wahhabism has a different provenance from modern Islamic radicalism. It of course has its own record of human-rights abuse, for which it is responsible.

I too long for the day when Islam discards Wahhabism. But as much as I believe Wahhabism's practices are contrary to the spiritual core of Islam, it has, nonetheless, been a prominent and influential movement in Islam for over two centuries. And so we must deal with it before abandoning its adherents to the bin Ladens of the world. We must deal with its human-rights abuses, its sponsorship of schools of hate. But let us remember that we are in a war, and the Saudis are not yet in bin Laden's trenches and that, in fact, Bin Laden wants to do the Saudis in. There is a difference between religious imperialism and intolerance, on the one hand, and flying planes into the World Trade Center and perhaps unleashing a plague upon our people on the other. And on that difference lies a sufficient basis for American policy.

Drawing Lines

I draw a line between Islam and bin Laden and his extremist allies not only to affirm the validity of traditional Islam, but to prevent him and his like-minded extremists from gaining further inroads into Islam. Pipes and Schwartz seem to think that this has already happened, and so do not distinguish bin Laden from Muslim fundamentalism. In my view, contemporary Muslim fundamentalism has its own problems both for Islam and for the exercise of human rights. But if we cede that realm of Islam to the extremists, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We shall have granted bin Laden and his ilk the alliances they seek to forge. Better to isolate the extremists and defeat them, while developing an effective strategy to confront and contain the problems of Muslim fundamentalism within Islam. I believe that this principle can best provide the grounding upon which American foreign policy can define itself and allow a context in which Islam can reclaim itself.

If we examine the West's own experience with totalitarian tyranny, we can better discern the distinctions that should be made and the appropriate policies that flow from them.

Soviet Communism was a primary source of evil and challenge to Western civilization. Its destruction of its own people, of nations and cultures, of the environment and the family, of religion and civil liberty was the antithesis of the religious, humanitarian, legal, and liberal tradition of the West. That was an evil that, to its great credit, the West confronted for half a century.

There were, however, in the West intellectuals and others who were not themselves Communists but were nonetheless allies, ideological friends, and political supporters. They were Communism's fellow travelers, and they bear the moral responsibility for their assistance and succoring of the evil.

There were, and are, in the West still others who were neither Communists nor fellow travelers. They were genuine socialists. Their policies, many of us believe, failed both economically and socially. And their policies weakened the fiber of the West. But they were not evil. They were not accessories to evil. The worst that could be said of them is that they were badly mistaken.

When President Bush refers to the terrorists as "evil doers," his expression is morally precise and politically accurate. Bin Laden and other Muslim extremists engage in a political program that is as evil as were the totalitarian rule of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. And, just as Communism was the antithesis of the West's moral and philosophical tradition, so too is contemporary Muslim radicalism the antithesis of Islam.

As in the West, there are traditions and institutions within Islam that are flawed, some seriously. But they should not be equated with the kind of evil that revealed itself in full on September 11. Anti-Semitic culture in Europe may have helped Hitler to rise, but anti-Semitic Europe was not Hitler, and Hitler did all he could to destroy European culture. Christian bigots, including some church leaders, may have created the Inquisition, but the Inquisition was not Christianity. The acts of the assassin who shot Yitzhak Rabin were not Jewish in any authentic religious sense. Likewise, the moral and cultural failings of the Muslim world are not to be equated with bin Laden's wanton terrorism. Tellingly, bin Laden's prime ally — the one leader he mentioned by name after the air attacks began in Afghanistan — is Saddam Hussein, by far the most secular, non-practicing Muslim head of a Muslim state.

All agree that the danger of Muslim extremism is real and that al Qaeda is not the only extremist faction that seeks to overwhelm Islam and make war on the West. There is Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Sudanese government, the Taliban, elements of the Iranian government and groups in other countries such as Lebanon, Pakistan and Syria.

Muslim extremists who terrorize are no less antithetical to the spiritual message of Islam than were and are those who commit similar acts in the name of Judaism or Christianity. That they come out of a religion does not make them representative of the religion. That they use religious symbols gives them no authenticity. When Daniel Pipes notes that the extremist elements in Islamic radicalism extends far beyond bin Laden and the Taliban, he is, of course, right. But that leaves the central practical question: How can we prevent them from gaining any greater legitimacy within Islam?

The task is complicated because even within the religion, the extremists' have their fellow travelers. These enablers are not directly at war with us, but they aid and abet the enemy. In many ways, the Wahhabis have been the enablers and it is good that, at long last, they are now being called to account for their material and ideological assistance to extremists like bin Laden. Such fellow travelers also include Egyptian and Pakistani leaders who made concessions to extremists within their own borders and bigoted religious leaders who have issued intolerant fatwas. Those who strengthen monsters are of course morally culpable for their assistance, but they are not themselves necessarily monsters. Here too is our practical problem: What is the best way to contain these fellow travelers? How do we prevent them from increasing or even joining the ranks of the terrorists?

Within any religion, one may accuse fundamentalists as being too literal, too unspiritual, or too intolerant. We can say that they are badly mistaken. We can even say that they have laid the ground in which extremism can grow. But that does not make them extremists themselves, nor does it necessarily make them fellow travelers with the extremists. Some think Jerry Falwell is too fundamentalist and too intolerant. But he is within the Christian tradition. Few think the Ku Klux Klan is. No matter how just it may be to criticize his ideas and words, Falwell is not the Klan, except for those who cannot make principled distinctions between a religion and a perversion of it. Similarly, we should not treat "they-had-it-coming" anti-American reactions to September 11 from the Muslim world any differently from similar reactions that took place throughout much of Europe. The latter reactions are of course indefensible and reprehensible, but we need to decide whether to going to war with all of Islam's fundamentalists makes any more sense than declaring war on Europe's Left. Similarly, we should distinguish between those jealous of America's wealth and power, and troubled by our exported culture, and those who share bin Laden's inhuman agenda.

What Is to be Done?

Defining bin Laden outside of any authentic Islamic tradition provides the principle by which Muslims can reject those within Islam whose sectarian radicalism gives birth to Islam's antithesis. It provides the very basis by which the peaceful traditions of classical Islam can reject those legalistic avatars that have, wittingly or no, produced a greater threat to Islam than Western imperialism has ever been. It gives heart to the millions of Muslims who have no place for either extremism or intolerant fundamentalism within their religion. It empowers us, even in the midst of this war, to condemn coalition members who restrict or persecute religious minorities.

We are in a war for civilization (not between civilizations). No one said, or should have said, that this would be easy. Of course Islamic extremism has deep roots in the Muslim world. Of course Islamic fundamentalism brings in its train its own problems. Yes, we are battling decades of anti-Western propaganda, the detritus from autocratic regimes, generations of ignorance, and centuries of tribalism — and we deal as well with the harsh effects of a decade's worth of appeasement of Islamist radicals and neglect and even betrayal of democratic movements. But this only means that our task is complex. It does not mean it is unwinnable. We are only at the beginning. Bin Laden does not rule one-third of the earth as the Communists did. He does not rule one-third of Islam. And we need to keep it that way, and not make it easier for him to satisfy his malevolent design to achieve influence and reign over Islam.

It is for these reason that I commend to Daniel Pipes and my other interlocutors the historic, political, and strategic wisdom of the approach taken by President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and Mayor Giuliani. They know that despite all the problematic elements in Muslim culture, it is bin Laden and the extremists who are our enemy — and Islam's as well.