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 tanley
Kurtz recently
defended the veiling of Muslim women as a logical consequence
of cousin marriage and urbanization, and criticized the feminist
impulse to coerce gender equality on the Islamic world. This is
an appropriately Burkean impulse that our triumphalists, Right and
Left, should learn from.
But it doesn't
really matter what we think, because the veil will disappear only
when Muslims outgrow it, and generally embrace modernity. Since
the veil is just a symptom of backwardness, not a cause, the real
question, which lots of people have been asking, is: How can Islamic
societies modernize?
There's only
one realistic answer: Let the fundamentalists take over. They will
so thoroughly screw things up, so completely alienate the bulging
cohorts of young people in the Islamic world, that these societies
will turn away from Islam itself, at least as it exists today.
And this isn't
just clever punditry. However creative and tolerant Islam may have
been in pre-modern times, it is increasingly clear that Islam is
simply not compatible with modernity. This is not to say that there
aren't many individual Muslims who reconcile a deeply held faith
with contemporary circumstances, but rather that Muslim societies,
as a whole, are simply incapable of modernizing. Even Turkey, which
three generations ago use extreme brutality to create a homogenous
nation-state and suppress Islam, is deeply divided between Muslim
radicals and post-Muslim secularists and has no hope of joining
the advanced societies unless something fundamental changes.
In Iran, the
mullahs have been in power for an entire generation and, as Edward
Shirly suggests in Know
Thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran, the
Islamic faith itself has been discredited among the people. It is
no coincidence that Iran is the only civilized place (i.e., not
the Sudan or Afghanistan) where radical Islam has taken power, and
it is now seeing a growing rejection of Islam. In fact, when the
Islamic regime falls, as it eventually must, Iran is likely to become
the first country to see massive, voluntary renunciation of Islam.
Millions of people, especially young urbanites, will turn to the
Bahai faith,
since it is an indigenous Iranian religion. (Invented in the 19th
century, Bahai is to Islam what Unitarianism is to Christianity
— Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed were all prophets, all
men are brothers, "I'd like to buy the world a Coke,"
etc.). An Iran where Islam is relegated to a minority faith would
inevitably be a lot more open to modernity.
In Algeria,
where the Islamic radicals haven't taken over (yet) but have wreaked
unimaginable havoc, the indigenous Berber minority, already alienated
from the Arabized majority for ethnic reasons, is increasingly turning
to Christianity. The behavior of the fundamentalists has led many
in the Berber heartland of Kabylie to conclude, in the words of
a newspaper account translated last year in The
Middle East Quarterly, that "Christianity is life,
Islam is death."
There would
be drawbacks to the rise of radical Muslim governments in North
Africa, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.
Most obviously, radical terrorist groups might find a much warmer
welcome, raising fears of another September 11. But states sponsor
terror when they calculate they can get away with it without being
punished; the Taliban's fate should be instructive in that regard,
unless we revert to Clintonian fecklessness in our foreign policy.
Though potentially still dangerous to us, radical Islam might actually
be easier to contain if it takes power in the Middle East, because
even governments committed to revolution prefer to avoid being annihilated.
Promoting the
development of a modern, democratic Middle East must be one of our
chief foreign-policy objectives for this century. At the same time,
Islam is necessarily incompatible with modernity; there is nothing
to suggest that keeping the lid on fundamentalism will cause it
to go away and be replaced by a liberal, tolerant Islam open to
modernization — quite the opposite, as we are seeing in Turkey.
So it is in our long-term interest to permit the establishment of
Islamic regimes, and then step aside to let Islamic society destroy
itself. It's not without risk, but there is no alternative.
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