The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
A Series of Lectures for People Who Prefer Pondering to Pandering
Lecture 2: How Great a Threat Is Islamic Terrorism?
January 10, 2013
On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen young men with foreign passports boarded four airplanes in American airports which were scheduled to fly to various points throughout the USA. As we all learned on that never-to-be-forgotten day, one of those planes slammed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, one into the North Tower, one into the Pentagon, and one, commandeered by passengers, crashed in a field outside Shanksville, PA.
Had there been no 9/11, I would not be delivering this lecture. Islamic, or more appropriately, Islamist terrorism, is not a serious problem in the United States of America. It is not a huge problem in Europe or Britain, though it a much bigger issue there than here. It is a bigger matter in countries such as Nigeria, Egypt, or Iraq, where there are fairly large communities of both Muslims and Christians. It obviously has been of grave concern in the state of Israel since its founding in 1948, but especially after the Six Day War in 1967. However, Islamist terrorism is far more lethal in countries in the Muslim world than anywhere else. Far, far, far more Muslims, hundreds of times more, have been killed or injured in Muslim countries than anywhere else.
The terms “Muslim world” or “Muslim countries” are somewhat misleading, because not everyone in those parts of the globe are Muslims anymore than everyone in “the Christian world” or in “Christian countries” are Christians. But I shall use these terms anyway, because it is too cumbersome not to do so.
My primary point in my introduction is simply to suggest in no uncertain terms that were it not for 9/11, there would be no point in delivering this lecture. We would not be all that worried about Islamist terrorism. Our government would be concerned about Al Qaeda, because of the two African embassies and the USS Cole, but we wouldn’t give it a thought. Otherwise, with the enormous exception of the 9/11 attacks, the United States has had almost no major instances of Muslim terrorism. Crime, drugs, illness, and poverty are exponentially greater problems. Sadly, however, 9/11 has propelled millions of Americans into an almost irrational fear of extremist Muslims
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The religion of Islam began in Arabia in the seventh century, and spread rapidly over much of Western Asia and North Africa following Muhammad’s death in the year 632. Eventually it evolved into two major branches, the Sunnis and the Shiites, and several smaller branches from those branches. Sunnis of various kinds represent about 85% of Muslims in the world today, and Shiites of various kinds are the remaining 15%.
For most of Muslim history, there has been a peaceful relationship between the Sunnis and the Shiites. However, from time to time, including the present, there have been violent clashes between the two groups. This factor has some bearing on the question posed by this lecture: How Great a Threat Is Islamic Terrorism? It shall subsequently be addressed.
“Islamism” is a word which has come into vogue in the past couple of decades. It refers to fanatical Muslims who believe that Islam is the only proper religion, and that it is their duty to promote Islam ahead of all other religions by nearly all possible means. Further, Islamists believe that Sharia or Quranic law should become the law of the land wherever Muslims are dominant. The huge majority of Islamists do not support violence, however, nor are they terrorists. Like virtually all other extremists of any sort, most Islamist extremists are not violent.
On the other hand, whenever Muslims engage in terrorism against Western governments, religions, or culture, that activity is, by definition, IslamIST terrorism rather than, properly speaking, IslamIC terrorism. There is no such thing as Islamic terrorism, and therefore it is not a threat. But Islamist terrorism certainly exists. Nevertheless, of Islamists, only a very small percentage would use violence against non-Muslims. It is crucial to state at the outset of this lecture that Islamic terrorism is not a threat, because most Muslims are not terrorists, nor do they support terrorism. Islamist terrorism is a threat, to the degree that a small percentage of Islamists believe that terrorism is an acceptable tactic in pursuit of the promotion of their agenda. But the numbers are minuscule, compared to as many as a billion-and-a-half Muslims.
Further, are Islamist terrorists truly Muslims? That is an important debate which goes on without and outside Islam. To try better to understand the ramifications of the issue, let us refer to an analogous situation. Are fanatical fundamentalist Christians truly Christians who bomb abortion clinics or assassinate doctors who perform abortions or stand outside the funerals of American service personnel or children killed in school shootings holding hateful placards? Most Christians would say they are not genuine followers of the one Christians call the Prince of Peace. Similarly, most Muslims feel both appalled by and ashamed of terrorists who kill in the name of Muhammad and Islam.
In the years immediately after the year 700, a Muslim army of North Africans crossed from Morocco into southern Spain, and there they began a swift conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. They crossed the Pyrenees, and a pivotal battle was fought in 732 at a place called Tours in northwest France. There a Christian army under Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, defeated the Muslims. The Muslims retreated back into France, where they lived peacefully with the Christians for the next seven centuries. Only in 1492, the same year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue, did the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, drive the Muslims out of Spain. They also expelled the Jews. Nice folks, that duo of menacing monarchs. There is much more that could be said here about late 15th century Spain, but I shall not take time to say it.
In the early sixteenth century, however, another Muslim attempt at the conquest of Europe occurred under the Ottoman Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent. He got as far as the gates of Vienna in 1529, and was turned back. Nevertheless, Islam was firmly established thereafter in parts of the Balkans. This reality is one of the factors behind the word “Balkanization.” There also is much more to this story, but we do not have time to hear it. Suffice it to say that from that time to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1917-18, Islam was in a slow retreat in Europe and the western world. Only in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has it begun to flex its muscles again on a global scale. But it would not be a demographic stretch to say that in the early 16th century there may have been more Muslims than Christians in the world.
A few years ago an historian named David Levering Lewis wrote a very provocative book. It was called God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215. His thesis was that all Europeans would have been better off if the Muslims had conquered all of Europe in the 8th century. Lewis was not the first to suggest that, but he is the most noted scholar recently to offer this thesis. He believes the Muslims came to Europe as “the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior” to that of the backward Europeans living in relative squalor. Because the Muslims lost at Tours and elsewhere, it resulted in “an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe…that made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war.” To all that we might say one word: Wow!
What I hope you will appreciate, ladies and gentlemen, is that most Muslims think they have as illustrious a history as most Christians think they have. Both sides tend to forget or ignore the ignoble episodes hidden in the dark corners of their past. But it would not be incorrect to suggest that for many Muslims, the late 20th and early 21st centuries represent a resurgence of Islam which they are pleased to observe. The primary question is this: What shall be the primary means of that resurgence? Some Muslims, a tiny minority, want it to occur because of terror and violence against the non-Muslim world. Most Muslims are content to live in peace with non-Muslims, as they did for most of their previous history. But a few of the extremists are willing to shed blood to bring Islam back into the prominence it held in its part of the world for eight hundred years, from about 650 to about 1550.
Nevertheless, there is a huge difference in worldview between most contemporary Muslims and most contemporary Christians and Jews. The difference is spelled out in these words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The opening statement in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution is a remarkable, yea verily, a revolutionary idea. It doesn’t explicitly say that there shall be “separation of church and state,” but it certainly implies it. Up until 1787, no nation in the world subscribed to the notion that government and religion should be kept separate from one another. Now, almost no western nations are seriously attempting to maintain the unity of both government and a state religion.
That has not been the case in the so-called “Muslim world.” The first Islamic-majority nation to establish a completely secular government was Turkey. It happened under the amazing leadership of Mustapha Kemal, who assumed the appellation Ataturk, “Father of the Turks.” It was he who insisted that no manner of dress should identify anyone, male or female, as distinctively Muslim. He forbade Sharia law and instituted secular law. Since then, several other Islamic countries have flirted with secularity at various times and in various ways, such as Iran, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Nevertheless, currently the trend seems to be headed in the other direction, to the official union of mosque and state. The heated dispute over the new Egyptian constitution is a powerful illustration of the tension which the attempted imposition of Sharia represents.
There is yet another problem being faced in some Muslim nations for which there is no similar situation in non-Muslim nations. For the past quarter of a century or more, Sunnis have been militarily pitted against Shiites. From the standpoint of the Iraqis, a Sunni minority under Saddam Hussein ruled for decades over the Shiite majority. Much of the internal bloodshed in Iraq since the US arrived on the scene has involved the two kinds of Muslims in armed battles with one another. Since our troops arrived, the Shiites now control the government. The same circumstances have prevailed in Syria, but thus far without US intervention. A small Shiite offshoot, the Alawites, have ruled the Sunni majority under Hafez Assad and his son, Bashar Assad. In both Iraq and Syria, Sunni outsiders from Al Qaeda have come into the two countries deliberately to fight the Shiites, among other forces. There has been far, far more terrorism of Muslims against Muslims in Muslim nations than of Muslims against Christians in western nations. The numbers of Muslims killed by Muslims has been in the hundreds of thousands or perhaps even low millions, while people killed in the West by Muslim terrorists number in the low thousands. That any one person is killed by terrorists is very sadly one too many, but Muslims are exponentially more likely to be murdered by Muslims than are non-Muslims. It is very important to keep that in mind.
Furthermore, Europeans are far more likely to face violence from Muslim extremists than are Americans. Since 9/11, no Americans have been killed by Muslim terrorists, except in war zones, and our national security network has successfully thwarted a number of domestic plots. But in Europe hundreds have been killed since 9/11, including major incidents in the UK and Spain. Some European nation-states are attempting to deal with the inter-religious tension by passing legal limits on free speech. French President Francois Hollande wants a law to make it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide by the Turks in 1915-16. Other nations have made it a crime to deny the Holocaust. These measures are taken, presumably, to try to defuse religious ill-will, but they may also run the risk of inflaming it. Limiting free speech is probably a poor way of combating terrorism. If anything, we need more free speech and fewer terrorist bombs.
Sharia law assumes people are born into their parents’ religion. Thus atheists in some Muslim countries, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, may be guilty of hudud crime, which is officially a crime against God, like robbery or drinking alcohol. On rare occasions, atheists are executed in severely Sharia-driven states. But moderate voices in those nations have strongly opposed such drastic actions. We see here an important debate among Muslim moderates and extremists, not unlike the kinds of discussions that went on in this country before and after the American Revolution. One of the best ways to overcome religious fanaticism is for committed religious moderates to speak out against religious fanatics. This is happening throughout the Muslim world, even though most of us are unaware of it. We may imagine it doesn’t happen often enough, but it is happening.
A growing number of Muslims have come forward to say that there are features of Islam, and especially Islamism, which need to be both challenged and changed. Irshad Manji is the author of The Trouble with Islam Today: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change. He wrote, “For too long, we Muslims have been sticking fingers in our ears and chanting ‘Islam means peace’ to drown out the negativity of our holy book.” We might say in defense of the Quran that while it does not speak with a consistently united voice against violence or jihad against non-Muslims, neither does the Bible uniformly condemn violence against others who espouse other religious ideas.
A man named Hassan Butt was for many years a member of the British Jihadi Network, but he gave it up, because he came to espouse non-violence as the only way to improve relations between religions and cultures. A week after the 7/7 terrorist attack of 2005 in London, he wrote a piece in The Times of London, in which he said, “Only when Muslims admit that 9/11 and 7/7 were the work of Muslim terrorists can we move forward to the next juncture: which is recognizing the hard truth that Islam does permit the use of violence.” But that hard truth also seems to apply to Christianity, Judaism, and other religions too, doesn’t it? There were religious Americans who strongly spoke out against the violence our government perpetrated in the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War, but they had virtually no effect in changing the course of our supposedly Christian military and foreign policy decisions regarding those conflicts. Is Islam more violent than Christianity or Judaism, or does it only seem like it, because we look at Muslims through inevitably biased western eyes?
Ed Husain is another British Muslim who grew up in an Islamist environment within England. He wrote a book called THE ISLAMIST: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left. As a college student, he went to Syria and Saudi Arabia, and he became disillusioned by the rigidity of thought he encountered there. In his book he wrote, “What has happened to the Muslims? Once producers of great thinkers, grammarians, theologians, scientists, innovators, poets, jurists and architects, today’s Muslim schools and universities are producing government-fearing sycophants or extremist zealots.” The latter part of that sounds like a gross overstatement to me, but it is he who said it, not I.
The best defense against Islamist terrorism shall not come from heightened security measures by western nations. It will come from moderate Muslims taking issue with fanatical Islamism. We cannot afford to be sanguine about security, but we ought not to delude ourselves into believing that tight security by itself shall prevail against Muslim zealots. Reasonable Muslims over the long haul will do more to defeat Islamism than droves of drones or the best technology money can buy. To coin a term, we don’t encourage --- and in fact should discourage --- “Christianist terrorists,” but do we engage instead in government-sponsored terror? That is a very sober question. How do we answer it?
There is no shortage of western intellectuals, pundits and politicians who believe that a get-tough policy is the way to go. The Muslim Brotherhood, which originated in Egypt nearly a century ago, has become anathema to many western conservatives, as have the Salafis, the Muslim group who seek to establish Sharia law everywhere in the Muslim world, and beyond if at all possible. David Aaronovitch is an editorial writer for The Times of London. In a column several years ago, after the 7/7 attacks in London, he quoted Second Coming, a poem William ButlerYeats wrote in 1919:
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
If it appears that way to Americans, it does so relatively from afar. Almost none of our citizens encounter radical Islamists personally anywhere on these shores. But on the other side of the herring pond, in Britain and elsewhere, Britons and other Europeans are confronted by Islamist extremists on a regular basis. Far more failed plots are foiled there than here, and not surprisingly more voices, even liberal voices, are heard demanding a crackdown on radical Muslims.
David Aaronovitch wrote, “Few aspects of human society have struck me so forcefully in the past decade as the capacity for small groups of the worst to overwhelm the best, and everyone else, with their intensity. In much of the world a group of men with guns, beards, religious belief, a willingness to die and an incapacity even to consider that there may be another way of looking at the world, hold huge advantages over ordinary, muddling-through people.” In another editorial he noted that some western intellectuals believe that Muslim anger is fueled by Muslims being humiliated for decades. But Mr. Aaronovitch asks, “Who bombed the Sydney Muslims who fought the Aussie police…? What drones threatened the Tunisian Islamists who attacked a school? What Americans deprived a Libyan militiaman of dignity? How did poverty force the Qataris to protest against a video?”
Americans need to understand that others who live closer to the terrorists are understandably more upset by them than are most of us. But there is no consensus in Britain and Europe, nor in the United States, on what should be done about Islamist terrorists. Anyone surprised by that has not been thinking very hard about this huge problem.
Jonathan Sacks has been the chief rabbi of Britain for years. His voice has been a consistent one for attempting to integrate different kinds of people into the fabric of British culture. However, he is a fierce opponent of what has been called “multiculturalism.” He believes Britain should continue to try to construct what he calls “a national culture,” rather than to promote multiculturalism per se in the larger culture.
Rabbi Sacks wants greater integration of everyone in Britain, but without trying to assimilate everyone. He has just published a new book, called The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society. In an interview about the book, he said, “How do we create integration without assimilation? How can you be part of a larger entity, without losing your identity?” It is not surprising that a British Jew would be particularly concerned about that. He wants to be British, but he also wants to be Jewish, and he does not want the latter to be swallowed up by the former. He strongly feels intentional multiculturalism rewards victimhood. “We have a culture in which the quickest route to public sympathy is to be a victim…And I think to be a victim is to be part of the culture that is the absolute opposite of the culture of responsibility.”
By no means is Jonathan Sacks a reactionary or a social conservative. But he is saying that there are limits beyond which we cannot go. Without directly saying it, he implies we cannot accept radical, violent Islamism, either in the West or in the Muslim countries. We should try to integrate Muslims without trying to assimilate them into “Christian culture,” whatever that might mean. But we must do whatever we can to deflect Islamists who insist on attempting to destroy western culture. I disagree with some of what he says, and agree with other parts of it. But the fine lines he uses to draw his distinctions are illustrative of how terribly complex is the whole issue of Islamist terrorism.
Here is how Minette Marrin of the London Times would deal with the question. “Monitor all mosques; refuse visas to imams who speak poor or no English…Control and monitor imams visiting prisons…Segregate Islamist prisoners in jail…Isolate radical Islamist prisoners…Stop them having internet access…Stop the creation of religious schools.” Do we currently monitor all churches and synagogues? Do we control all clergy who visit prisons? Do we prevent evangelical or fundamentalist Christians from creating their own schools? Do we forbid access to the internet to anyone? Parents and others might be delighted if we did that, but do we do it? Can we do it? Is it not a serious threat to civil liberties to take such draconian measures solely for Islamist radicals? Is it only the ACLU who should be concerned about these issues, or should we all be concerned?
Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist who teaches at Stanford. He has written many thought-provoking and even provocative books and articles, the best know of which is his book The End of History. In an article in Prospect magazine, he wrote the following: “(W)hile modern liberalism clearly established the principle that state power should not be used to impose religious beliefs on individuals, it left unanswered the question of whether individual freedom could conflict with the rights of people to uphold a certain religious tradition.” He went on to say, “Liberalism cannot be based on group rights because not all groups uphold liberal values. The civilization of the European enlightenment…cannot be culturally neutral since liberal societies have their own values regarding the equal worth and dignity of individuals. Cultures that do not accept these premises do not deserve equal protection in a liberal society. Members of immigrant communities and their offspring deserve to be treated equally as individuals, not as members of cultural communities.”
These are very profound, and some might even say incendiary, words. Do they suggest we should attempt to quash American or western Muslim communities which do not accept the values of the larger culture, while still guaranteeing individual rights to those who are part of such communities? What about the fundamentalist Mormons, or the Hopi Indians, or a vegan commune? When Dr. Fukuyama says, “(S)ome contemporary Muslim communities (and those of other religions) are making demands for group rights that simply cannot be squared with liberal principles of individual equality,” what, exactly, does he mean? Is it legally and ethically acceptable for liberal western societies to abolish radical Muslim mosques if they can? Would it be proper legally to force such communities to close? What is Dr. Fukuyama really saying?
Fouad Ajami appears frequently on television news programs which focus on Islamist violence and outrage. In a U.S. News and World Report editorial several years ago, he said, “We should be done with the search for ‘explanations’ that dignify the hatred, that attribute them to western deeds and policies. We should see the new hatred dressed in religious garb for what it is: a war against the very order of contemporary life.”
Steve Coll is an editorial writer for The New Yorker. He referred to the amateurish video that went viral a few months ago called Innocence of Muslims. In response to it, Newsweek launched what he called “a Twitter hash tag.” I don’t even really understand what Twitter is, let alone a Twitter hash tag. This – I presume – website was called #MuslimRage, giving a voice to Muslims regarding the offending video. But Steve Coll said many Muslims from around the world were put off by the very concept set forth by the establishment of the Twitter hash tag. They were not angry at anyone, and wanted everyone to know it. In response, someone tweeted that he lamented a shortage of “Sharia Garcia” ice cream. A woman in a head scarf wrote, “I’m having a good hair day. No one even knows.” Another imagined tweeting a friend, “Lost your kid Jihad at the airport. Can’t yell for him.” Can’t you just imagine the scene it in a crowded airport? “Jihad! Jihad!” Pow, pow, pow!
Most Muslims, like almost everyone else, has at least some sense of humor. Very few Muslims are ferociously angry jihadists, bent on burying western culture. But, said Steve Coll, “There is no honor in relativism when radicals of any faith exploit religion to justify murder.” What reasonable person could possibly disagree with that?
However, can we honestly say there is no connection between three major wars launched primarily by the USA and the UK in Muslim lands in the past twenty years and the sharp rise of Islamist terrorism? Does anyone truly believe drone attacks that have killed hundreds or thousands of innocent civilians have not created scores or hundreds of violent Islamist terrorists, young men who otherwise might simply have gone about their lives had there been no such attacks? Do Abu Graib and Guantanamo have no influence at all on suicide bombers blowing themselves and others to bits here and there throughout the Middle East and Europe, but thankfully since 9/11 not in the USA? “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” as John Philpot Curran said two centuries ago. But what kind of vigilance should it be, and what does “eternal” really mean? These issues must be debated before anything is enacted, lest we over-react to over-reactors.
Without question, for our own safety we must address Islamist terrorism. The real question, however is this: How shall we do that? Shall we use repression, or intimidation, or coercion? And in any case, are we, Americans or other westerners, the proper or most effective ones to lead a jihad against jihad?
After the 7/7 bombings in the London tubes and busses, the almost-always reasonable Thomas Friedman wrote, “Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really retrain, inhibit and denounce its own terrorists – if it turns out they are behind the London bombings – or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way – by simply shutting them out, denying them their visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent. And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst…Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult.”
Kathleen Parker is a considerably more conservative writer than Tom Friedman, but she is by no means a hidebound reactionary. A few years ago Oriana Fallaci, the very conservative and cantankerous Italian intellectual and writer, was tried in an Italian court on charges of “outrage to religion.” In her book The Force of Reason, Ms. Fallaci said many things that incensed both moderate and radical Muslims, and she faced the Italian judicial system for having done so. Kathleen Parker wrote, “You may agree or disagree. You may criticize her writing style or impugn a rhetorical approach that may result in few converts. But there’s no defensible reason why she shouldn’t be permitted her say.”
We cannot overcome radical Islam with radical attacks on radical Islam. But we also must allow all our fellow citizens to say what they want, as odious as it may be, so long as it does not overtly or covertly promote violence against the violent. Individual assaults only result in individual assaults in response. If force is going to be used, it must be the force of governments, not of armed and alarmed individual citizens. However, western governments should be more careful than has been our recent tendency in how we choose to confront Islamist terrorism.
Most of the writers and thinkers I have quoted in this lecture are westerners looking at Islamists from a western point of view. But how do moderate Muslims perceive Islamists?
Maajid Nawaz is the co-founder of a think tank called Quilliam, which was established to counter Muslim extremism. He also is the founder of the Khudi movement, which promotes a democratic culture in Pakistan. He makes a distinction between Islam and Islamism by clearly stating, “Islamism is not Islam.” He goes on to say, “Islam is a faith. Like all other faiths it has a vibrant array of progressives, conservatives and everything in between fighting over which interpretation suits current times….Islamism, on the other hand, is the desire to impose any one of these interpretations over everyone else through state law.”
He goes on to make a statement which we should thoughtfully ponder, whether or not we agree with it. “For the past 20 years, whether seeking power through the gun or the ballot-box, Islamists have failed. Fortunately Islamists do not speak on behalf of Islam.” He concludes, “If there is a clash of civilizations, it is, as election results show, between those who to forcibly impose their ideas in the quest to construct an artificial model of social perfection that only exists in their minds. This clash is not religion-based, but ideological.”
That last point cannot be over-emphasized. To support it, let us hear from a Muslim woman named Dalia Mogahed. She is the executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. Prof. John Esposito is an American-born scholar who specializes in Islam studies at Georgetown University. Ms. Mogahed and Dr. Esposito collaborated on a book called Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. They conducted a poll of 50,000 Muslims in 35 countries, asking questions about gender, race, terrorism, the separation of mosque and state, and the prospects of peace with the US. Even in the most anti-western nations, such as Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, a sizeable percentage of people admired certain aspects of the western world. But when Americans were asked what they admired in the Muslim world, the most frequent response was “nothing.” That is a very dismal and dismaying statistic.
In an interview for U.S. News and World Report, Dalia Mogahed said, “Compared with the entire population of Muslims, those who don’t condemn the 9/11 attacks are no more likely to say they are religious. But they are much more likely to say the United States is not serious about promoting democracy in their part of the world and that the United States will not allow them to fashion their own political future. When we asked their greatest fear, while the general population will talk about personal safety, this radicalized group most fears political domination and occupation.”
These findings suggest that radical Islamists do not fear that Christians are opposing them bur rather that western governments, especially that of the United States, oppose them. No one’s mentality is like that characterized by the Crusades. But why do radical Islamists think that western governments oppose Muslim governments? Consider our foreign policy with respect to the Muslim world over the past 25 years, and three wars launched in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, plus other brief military skirmishes elsewhere, and even if the concern of the radicals is somewhat misplaced or borderline-irrational, it should at least be understandable to us how they feel the way they do.
Ms. Mogahed further explained their poll results. “We asked how many people condone the 9/11 attacks and found that the vast majority condemn the attacks; only 7 percent thought it was completely justified….We asked those 7 percent why they felt the attacks were justified and, surprisingly, not a single one offered a religious justification. Instead, their responses sounded like revolutionaries; they talked about American imperialism. Instead of piety motivating their responses, it was politics.”
I cannot take time to speak to the contents of any of the following book titles by moderate Muslims, but I hope you will absorb into your consciousness that all these books have been published in the last several years: Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism; American Muslims: Bridging Faith and Freedom; What’s Right with Islam: a New Vision for Islam and the West; The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform of Her Faith; The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West; Western Muslims and the Future of Islam; The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists; Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy; Wahhabism: A Critical Essay; Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating The Future of Sharia.
I cite these book titles simply to refute the oft-heard claim that Muslims are not addressing Islamist terrorism. They are! In chapter and verse they are. Is it a deliberate calumny when many Westerners trumpet that Muslims have said nothing about this issue, when in fact they have said volumes about it? If we are unaware of what moderate Muslims are saying, does that mean they are silent, or that we are merely ignorant?
It is absolutely necessary that we at least pay close attention to what these moderate Muslims are saying about Muslim extremists, even if we don’t agree with all of it. In effect, they are telling us that “Islamist terrorism” is not Islamic at all, nor is it of necessity even Islamist. The grievances of the terrorists are not based in religion, either in the sense they think we have offended Islam or that Christianity is opposed to Islam. Rather their actions are almost entirely political. They think that western governments are out to destroy Muslim countries.
The potential terrorist attack which evokes the greatest dread among western intelligence officials is a nuclear bomb detonated sometime somewhere in a western city. That is an extremely sober and sobering possibility. However, it also is very unlikely, both because it would be extremely difficult for even the cleverest terrorists to create a nuclear weapon in a warehouse somewhere or to acquire one without government authorities knowing that such a theft or sale had occurred. There is no point in any of us worrying about such a dreaded outcome, because we ourselves are completely unable to prevent it. But you may be certain all western governments, and indeed all governments everywhere, are constantly collaborating to insure that such an event never happens.
There can be no doubt that some benighted individual Americans would like to crush Muslim nation-states into oblivion. You may know some people like that; sadly, I do as well. But any objective person would be hard pressed to affirm the destruction of the Muslim world as the official US or Western foreign policy. Radicals are radicals, whether they are radically anti-Muslim or radically anti-Western.
The word “fanatic” comes from a Latin root, fanum, which means firebrand. A firebrand is literally a dry stick in a bonfire. As long as it is in the fire, it will burn itself into oblivion, but if it is taken away from the fire, it will soon burn itself out. Fanatics can’t maintain their fanaticism forever, apart from the available fuel of more fanaticism. Sooner or later they are either killed or they grow too old to maintain the necessary inner fire to carry on the fight.
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker made an exceedingly cogent observation about this phenomenon from an historical perspective. He asked, “Will this epoch, which began on 9/11 and had a new chapter written on 7/7, end only with the apocalyptic defeat of one side or another, or will it end, as all previous terrorisms have, with unspoken concession and quiet remedy and pointed police action and the workings of time and politics?”
If we had lived in the 16th, 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries, no one would ever think it important to address to the subject of this lecture. But we have lived at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st centuries, and it is now when radicals from Muslim countries have taken it upon themselves to attack what they believe is the oppression and injustice of the western world against them. It behooves us continuously to ask ourselves why they believe that. In these tense times, we need a very wise foreign policy, always recognizing that every choice in foreign policy poses risks. We need to act against terrorist attacks, not merely to react, to anticipate, and not simply to retaliate.
Throughout world history, terrorism has succeeded many times in bringing about changes in the policies of many different governments. The British discovered that in Afghanistan in the 19th century, and in Ireland (North and South), Kenya, India and Pakistan in the 20th century. In one sense they also discovered it in the American colonies in the 18th century, because George III and his government probably considered the Americans terrorists of sorts. Usually terrorism simply fizzles out, but sometimes it succeeds. O say, can you see that otherwise we would still be singing “God Save the Queen”?
It is untenable for any government or coalition of allies obsequiously to surrender to terrorists and their terrorism, because it always sends absolutely the wrong message to the wrong people at the wrong time. In our struggle with the terrorists we need to be very careful, but perhaps not too cautious, observant but not obnoxious, watchful but not warlike.
It is a major philosophical, philological, and political mistake to characterize our current struggle as “The War on Terrorism.” Wars are fought only between nations and their governments, but the terrorists represent no government, nor shall they ever. And, as I hope we have seen by now, there is no such thing as Islamic terrorism, nor is Islamist terrorism necessarily even the enemy. For the most part, the enemy consists of combatants who represent no states, who have no motives or objectives universally agreed on among themselves, and whose methods are rejected by an enormous majority of the Muslims of the world.
The best hope for defeating Islamist terror comes from Muslims themselves demanding its abolition, not from increased and increasingly draconian security measures put in place by western governments. We have no choice other than to be vigilant, but it is Muslims, not western governments, who are more likely to thwart the prevalence of terrorism. Furthermore, in light of the far greater incidence of terrorism in Muslim countries than in western countries, it is much more to the benefit of Muslims to eradicate terrorist groups than it is for westerners.
On the other hand, it is a delusion for anyone to suppose that all terrorism can be permanently eradicated, because it can’t. However, it can be mitigated. Don’t forget: That is happening on a constant basis. Terrorism IS being mitigated. We all need patience, a virtue which has tended to be lacking among human beings of the American persuasion for as long as there have been pale-skinned people living in America. We don’t do patience very well.
A final word of advice to any of you who are still edgy Americans: Cheer up, folks; things could be much worse! And they have been!