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September 23, 2002, 9:00 a.m. The West and the Rest On terrorism and globalization. By Roger Scruton EDITOR'S NOTE: This begins a series of excerpts from Roger Scruton's new book The West and the Rest, published by the ISI Books.

t is thanks to Western prosperity, Western legal systems, Western forms of banking, and Western communications that human initiatives now reach so easily across frontiers to affect the lives and aspirations of people all over the globe. However, Western civilization depends on an idea of citizenship that is not global at all, but rooted in territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty. By contrast, Islam, which has been until recently remote from the Western world and without the ability to project its message, is founded on an ideal of godliness which is entirely global in its significance, and which regards territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty as compromises with no intrinsic legitimacy of their own. Although there have been attempts to manufacture nationalisms both appropriate to the Islamic temperament and conducive to a legitimate political order, they have fragmented under the impact of sectarian or tribal allegiances, usually giving way to military dictatorship or one-man, one-family, or one-party tyranny. Islam itself remains, in the hearts of those who live under these tyrannies, a permanent call to a higher life, and a reminder that power and corruption will rule in this world until the reign established by the Prophet is restored.

Terrorism has a long history in the Islamic countries, being the usual recourse of those who reject the legitimacy of the prevailing sovereign power. Until recently, however, it modeled itself on the Assassins, and took powerful or symbolic individuals as its targets. In 19th-century Russia, terrorism took a new and more destructive form, involving indiscriminate bombings and acts of destruction which, according to one estimate, claimed 17,000 victims between 1894 and 1917. The Russian methods finally led to a successful revolution, and have been adopted by the postwar nationalist movements in Western Europe, notably by the IRA and ETA, as well as by the urban revolutionaries of the 1960s in Italy, France, and Germany, by the PLO, and by the left-wing insurgents in Latin America. Those groups have formed mutually supportive networks for the exchange of training and expertise, and it is due to the globalizing process that these networks are available also to the Islamist extremists.

Nevertheless, Islamist terrorism is a distinct development in two ways. Islamism is not a nationalist movement, still less a bid to establish a new kind of secular state. It rejects the modern state and its secular law in the name of a "brotherhood" that reaches secretly to all Muslim hearts, uniting them against the infidel. And because its purpose is religious rather than political, the goal is incapable of realization. The Muslim Brotherhood failed even to change the political order of Egypt, let alone to establish itself as a model of Koranic government throughout the Muslim world. Where Islamists succeed in gaining power — as in Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan — the result is not the reign of peace and piety promised by the Prophet, but murder and persecution on a scale matched in our time only by the Nazis and the Communists. The Islamist, like the Russian nihilist, is an exile in this world; and when he succeeds in obtaining power over his fellow human beings, it is in order to punish them for being human.

Globalization does not mean merely the expansion of communications, contacts, and trade around the globe. It means the transfer of social, economic, political, and juridical power to global organizations, by which I mean organizations that are located in no particular sovereign jurisdiction, and governed by no particular territorial law. The growth of such organizations is, in my view, a regrettable by-product of our addiction to freedom. Whether in the form of multinational corporations, international courts, or transnational legislatures, these organizations pose a new kind of threat to the only form of sovereignty that has brought lasting (albeit local) peace to our planet. And when terrorism too becomes globalized, the threat is amplified a hundred-fold.

With al Qaeda, therefore, we encounter the real impact of globalization on the Islamic revival. To belong to this "base" is to accept no territory as home, and no human law as authoritative. It is to commit oneself to a state of permanent exile, while at the same time resolving to carry out God's work of punishment. But the techniques and infrastructure on which al Qaeda depends are the gifts of the new global institutions. It is Wall Street and Zurich that produced the network of international finance that enables Osama bin Laden to conceal his wealth and to deploy it anywhere in the world. It is Western enterprise with its multinational outreach that produced the technology that bin Laden has exploited so effectively against us. And it is Western science that developed the weapons of mass destruction he would dearly like to obtain. His wealth, too, would be inconceivable without the vast oil revenues brought to Saudi Arabia from the West, there to precipitate the building boom from which his father profited. And this very building boom, fueled by a population explosion that is itself the result of global trade, is a symbol of the West and its outreach. The appearance of Arabia has been permanently altered by it — and altered, in the feelings of many Muslims, for the worse. Concrete high-rises dwarf the minarets, domestic alleyways give way to pretentious boulevards or jerry-built slums, and the hideous, unfriendly style of international modernism overlays and extinguishes the delicate fabric of the Muslim city.

It may seem quixotic to emphasize the role of architecture in the present conflict. But we should remember Mohammed Atta's nostalgia for the old town of Aleppo and reflect on what has happened to the face of the Middle East under the impact of Western architectural norms, which have a symbolic significance at least equal to that of Western dress and Western manners. Architectural modernism was introduced with fanfares of globalist propaganda by the Bauhaus and by Le Corbusier, who envisaged their new style of architecture as both the symbol and the instrument of a radical break with the past. This architecture was conceived in the spirit of detachment from place and history and home. It was "the international style," a gesture against the nation-state and the homeland, an attempt to remake the surface of the earth as a single uniform habitat from which differences and boundaries would finally disappear.

In the West, where democratic procedures and legal norms give power to the citizen, the impact of international modernism has here and there been controlled and limited. Although the damage has been great, many cities retain their local character, and villages hold out against the tide. The great exception — Germany — remains committed to architectural modernism as a symbol and instrument of its cultural self-repudiation. And the modern German city can be seen as part of the long sad coda of Germany's defeat — the final transformation of a nation that does not dare to show its face without the benefit of plastic surgery. Elsewhere in Europe — notably in Italy, France, and Spain — the international style has been resisted; churches dominate the skyline and streets are still bordered by humane facades. A conscious effort has been made to retain the character of both town and country, in the knowledge that they define an experience of the homeland, and that the homeland is the thing to which the citizen's loyalty is owed.

Americans have been careless of their cities, with the result that no one wants to live in them. But their suburbs radiate homeliness and comfort, and the country itself lies somewhere out there along the interstate, a still wild, open frontier that belongs to all of us, and we to it. Against the odds America has retained the aspect and the atmosphere of home.

In the Middle East, however, where land is disposed of by the governing power, and planning regulations are either non-existent or ignored, the landscape and cityscape have been mutilated beyond recognition. It was Le Corbusier who showed the way. Having failed to persuade the French authorities to adopt his plan to bulldoze Paris north of the Seine and replace it with militarized towers of glass, Le Corbusier worked on successive French governments, including the Vichy regime, to implement his insolent plan to raze the old city of Algiers, capital of Algeria, which was then a French colony. He succeeded at last, and after the war the bulldozers moved in, with catastrophic results. Thanks to the enormous profits that accrue to the modernist ways of building, Le Corbusier became a hero of the architectural establishment, and his repulsive plan for this once beautiful city is now illustrated in all the standard Western textbooks of architecture.

Le Corbusier showed the European intelligentsia how the inferior people of North Africa should be treated: such, surely, was Atta's perception. Since Le Corbusier's time, the rush of speculative building — most of it illegal and on land that is officially "publicly owned," and fueled by the demographic explosion — has entirely transformed the visual aspect and daily rhythm of the Middle Eastern cities. Whatever hope there might have been that people would come to define their loyalties in terms of territory rather than faith has been obliterated by the impact of Western technology, which seems to believe in neither. And if we wish to understand in full the resentment of Palestinians towards Israeli settlements on the West Bank, we should not neglect the visual damage that these settlements have caused, introducing modernist styles and materials, sweeping roadways, and ubiquitous light pollution into a landscape that had worn its biblical aspect for centuries, with star-spangled nights above stone-built villages and historic cities like Jenin.

As the examples of bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the September 11 terrorists demonstrate, Islamism is not a cry of distress from the "wretched of the earth." It is an implacable summons to war, issued by globetrotting middle-class Muslims, many of them extremely wealthy, and most of them sufficiently well versed in Western civilization and its benefits to be able to exploit the modern world to the full. These Muslims are products of the globalizing process, and Western civilization has so amplified their message that it travels with them around the world.

It may be hard to sympathize with these spoiled and self-indulgent advocates of violence. But it is not hard to sympathize with the feelings upon which they depend for their following. Globalization, in the eyes of its advocates, means free trade, increased prosperity, and the steady erosion of despotic regimes by the growing demand for freedom. In the eyes of its critics, however, it means the loss of sovereignty, together with large-scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption. It also means an invasion of images that evoke outrage and disgust as much as envy in the hearts of those who are exposed to them. In the United States, where pornography is protected as free speech, people are able to accept that this assault on human dignity is the price we must pay for freedoms too precious to relinquish. But if you have not known those freedoms, and believe in any case that happiness resides not in freedom but in submission to God's law, the impact of pornography is devastating. No less devastating, for pious Muslims, are what they see as the indecent clothes and behavior of young women in the West — clothes and behavior that are in no way modified when those women travel on business or as tourists to Muslim countries, there to presume on a toleration which they are willing to reciprocate but do little or nothing to earn.

People in the West live in a public space in which each person is surrounded and protected by his rights, and where all behavior that poses no obvious physical threat is permitted. But people in Muslim countries live in a space that is shared but private, where nobody is shielded by his rights from communal judgment, and where communal judgment is experienced as the judgment of God. Western habits, Western morals, Western art, music, and television are seen not as freedoms but as temptations. And the normal response to temptation is either to give in to it, or to punish those who offer it. Many Muslim muhajiroun do both. Like Atta, they drink, gamble, and fornicate in the flesh-pots of America, while secretly plotting revenge against the thing that made these indulgences possible.

Globalization, therefore, offers militant Islam the opportunity that it has lacked since the Ottoman retreat from central Europe. It both concentrates the resolve of the believer and offers him a sword with which to prosecute God's will. Muslim states do not have the loyalty of their people, who are not citizens but subjects, contemptuous (for the most part) of their rulers. Hence, Muslim states have not recently posed a threat to the West. If they seem to do so, it is only because they form the shield around some crazy tyrant, whose power reaches no further than his weapons. Globalization, however, has brought into being a true Islamic umma, which identifies itself across borders in terms of a global form of legitimacy, and which attaches itself like a parasite to global institutions and techniques that are the by-products of Western democracy. This new form of globalized Islam is undeniably threatening, since it satisfies a hunger for membership that globalization itself has created. It calls on the old nostalgia of the muhajir, and directs it not at some local usurper but at God's enemies, wherever they are.

— Roger Scruton is among the most prominent contemporary English writers. A philosopher who was a formerly a professor at Birkbeck College in London and at Boston University, he is now a freelance writer living in Wiltshire.