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his stirring speech to the British on Sunday justifying the Anglo-American
bombing of Kabul and Kandahar, Prime Minister Tony Blair warned
against any tendency to blame all Muslims for the terrorist acts
of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.
"This
is not a war with Islam," he declared. "It angers me,
as it angers the vast majority of Muslims, to hear bin Laden and
his associates described as Islamic terrorists. They are terrorists
pure and simple. Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion, and
the acts of these people are contrary to the teachings of the Koran."
Mr. Blair was
here repeating what President Bush, other political leaders ,and
almost all the responsible opinion-formers in the Western world
have been saying since the 11th of September. Indeed, they have
sometimes sounded more worried about the likelihood of ordinary
Americans attacking Muslim immigrants than about Muslims supporting
the terrorist war on Americans. Our political leaders have good
diplomatic reasons for maintaining this position. They seek to avoid
even the hint of a war between the once-Christian West and the quarter
of the world that believes in Islam. They hope to prop up the pro-Western
Muslim and Arab governments in the Middle East and Asia, and to
use military bases on their territories. And, of course, they genuinely
want to prevent any harassment of Muslims in America — not
only for humanitarian reasons but also to ensure that Muslims locally
will offer no shelter or support to bin Laden's terrorist network.
Yet, however
prudent these official assertions of general Muslim benevolence
may be, they are not strictly true. Osama bin Laden's brand of radical
Islamism plainly has a very large following among Muslims, even
among Muslims in the U.S. and especially among Arab Muslims. Although
Islam has no central religious authority like the Vatican in Catholicism,
there are many mullahs who endorse his jihad against the America
and happily pronounce "fatwas" (religious decrees), sentencing
them to death, on moderate Muslim leaders like President Musharraff
of Pakistan. As
Paul Johnson demonstrated in a recent issue of National Review,
there are passages in the Koran that lend themselves very easily
to a justification of holy war against the West and Israel. And,
finally, there are undoubtedly some Islamic traditions that in the
past have promoted aggressive hostility towards non-Muslim believers
and that today underlie and justify the cultural resentment of many
Muslims towards a West that has supplanted Islam as the main world
civilization. Western governments tacitly acknowledge these realities
when they fear that pro-Western governments in the Middle East and
the Gulf will be overthrown by the "Arab street" if the
war goes wrong in some way.
At the same
time, Blair's soothing words about peaceful Islam are not wholly
false either. There are peaceful and progressive traditions in Islam
which seek to reconcile it politically and economically, if not
religiously, with science, liberalism, market capitalism, and the
modern world in general.
In recent years,
however, they have been on the defensive before the rise of radical
Islamism — the politico-religious philosophy driving bin Laden's
terrorism. This doctrine combines a desire to impose a "purified"
fundamentalist Islam on "corrupt" Muslim regimes with
a rejection of a West seen as decadent internally and greedily oppressive
externally. Because it strikes us in the West as antediluvian and
absurd, we tend to assume that it must be the creed of ignorant
and impoverished people. But it is a creed held by people with Western
Ph.Ds, advanced technical skills and vast financial resources as
well as by unemployed youths — by Muslim intellectuals as well
as by Third World proles.
And that should
awaken a sense of familiarity within ourselves. For the truth is
that radical Islamism does not derive solely from Islam. It has
Western as well as Islamic roots. Indeed, it has been well-described
by the UPI commentator, James C. Bennett, as the "bastard child"
of Islamic fundamentalism and neo-Marxist Western scholarship. Its
Islamic roots are in puritanical Wahabi sect that set out to purify
Islam two centuries ago in what is now Saudi Arabia and that is
spread today throughout the Islamic world by financial subsidies
from wealthy Saudi believers. Its Western elements rest upon the
theory (first conceived by the English Liberal economist, Hobson,
popularized by Lenin in Imperialism — The Highest Stage
of Capitalism, and refined in the 1950s and 1960s into the theories
of neo-colonialism and "comprador capitalism") that the
wealth and power of the West are based upon its robbery and exploitation
of the Third World.
No economic
historian believes in this nonsense any more — it is amply
refuted by the fact that the Western colonial powers like Britain
and France actually became much richer after giving up their colonies
— but it is preached by radical Islamist mullahs from Dearborn
to Dubai. In this context it justifies overthrowing the corrupt
client governments that help the West to rob Muslim believers, such
as the Saudi regime, in order to usher in a new age of Islamic independence
and prosperity. And that is plainly Osama bin Laden's main aim in
the terrorist war he has launched.
In short, radical
Islamism is a violent, heretical, and politicized perversion of
Islam — in exactly the same way that Communism and Nazism were
violent, heretical and politicized perversions of enlightened Christian
democratic humanism in the West. It perverts traditional religious
ideas and sentiments into new political ideologies; it derives its
energy from the resentments of those who feel economically or culturally
dispossessed; it employs the most modern techniques in the service
of essentially primitive concepts; and it sanctions unrestrained
violence and ruthlessness in pursuit of totalitarian power —
exactly as Nazism and Communism did in all these respects. Because
all three ideologies are what Burke called "armed doctrines,"
however, they have to be defeated not only intellectually and spiritually,
but also on the battlefield. Nazism and communism were both the
cause of long civil wars in the West. Once they were defeated on
the battlefield or in strategic/economic competition, however, they
soon faded away as philosophical forces — though Marxism enjoys
a lingering half-life in the corrupt literature and politics departments
of some Western universities.
Radical Islamism
is similarly waging an unacknowledged civil war within Islam. But
the signs are that Islamic civilization on its own lacks the necessary
resources to overcome this perversion of itself. Resentment of America
and the West is so strong in the Islamic world that many Muslims
feel a sympathy for almost any Islamic force that challenges it.
Before Islam is ready to confront and defeat the spiritual claims
of radical Islamism, therefore, the West must first destroy its
prestige by defeating it on the battlefield.
And the West
can and will defeat radical Islamism on the battlefield; it is just
a matter of time. The mosque can then begin to demolish its spiritual
claims. But not before then, alas.
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