As the Middle East and many other Muslim regions remain violent and volatile, the question is sometimes asked: Is Islam a threat? No, I would reply. But to the question: Is fundamentalist Islam a threat? The answer is yes.
This distinction can be explained by looking at three topics: Islam -- just Islam, not fundamentalist Islam -- and the Muslim historical experience; what fundamentalist Islam (or as it is now usually called, Islamism) actually is; and what the Western response to it should be.
Islam
Islam is the religion of about one billion people, something like one-sixth of humanity. It is a fast-growing faith, particularly in Africa, but also around the world. The adherents of Islam find their faith immensely appealing. Islam has an inner strength that is quite extraordinary. As one author puts it, "The world of men and their families has unparalleled appeal in Islam." Muslims are confident that they have the best religion. In part, this comes from Islam being the third of the three major Middle Eastern monotheisms: far from being embarrassed about following Judaism and Christianity, Muslims believe their faith has perfected the earlier ones. They see Judaism and Christianity as but imperfect variants of Islam and that Islam is God's final religion.
The loyalty of Muslims to their religion is without parallel. In part it is because of this inner sense of confidence, and in part due to the fact that apostates (those who would leave Islam for another faith) are severely punished.
Looking at Islam in history, however, not Islam as a theology, the major fact is that in the modern era, which is to say the last two centuries, the Muslim world has been in the throes of a trauma. Muslims have had a very hard time understanding why things have gone so wrong for them. Let me explain:
From the very beginning, Islam was a religion of worldly success. The Prophet Muhammad fled Mecca in 622 of the common era, a refugee. He returned in 630 as the ruler of Mecca. By the year 715 the Muslims had reached Spain in the west, India in the east.Through the mediaeval period, Muslims were the most successful of peoples in the sense that their culture was the most advanced, they lived the longest, they had the highest rates of literacy, and they were at the cutting edge of technical innovation. To be a Muslim was to be part of a winning civilization. Muslims came to assume a correlation between mundane success and Islam. The feeling developed that to be a Muslim meant to be favoured by God in a worldly way -- in addition, of course, to a spiritual way.
The modern trauma symbolically began almost exactly 200 years ago, in July, 1798, when Napoleon landed in Egypt. From that time forward, Muslims have been painfully aware that they are no longer the leaders. Of course, this change did not just suddenly happen in 1798; the makings of this crisis began some six centuries earlier. Through that long era, though, Muslims were mostly oblivious to developments in Europe. Why did Muslims now find themselves behind in terms of military prowess, economic development, health, longevity and literacy?
Two centuries later, the same question still obtains. Whatever index one looks at, one finds Muslims clustering towards the bottom. Whether one talks of political stability, Nobel Prize winners, Olympic medals, or any other easily gauged standard, Muslims are lagging. Three major responses have characterized the Muslim search for a solution -- secularism, reformism, and Islamism.
Secularism holds that the way for Muslims to advance is by learning from the West. In particular, the public dimensions of Islam are no longer valid. Islam should become a private faith and the sacred law of Islam (called the shariah) -- which governs such matters as the judicial system, the manner in which the state goes to war, and the nature of social interactions between men and women -- should be discarded in its entirety. The leading secular country is Turkey, where Kemal Ataturk in the period 1923-38 imposed extraordinary changes on the country. But secularism remains a minority position among Muslims, with very few other instances beside Turkey.
Reformism is the murky middle. If secularism represents learning from the West, reformism appropriates from the West. The reformist says something like, "Look, Islam and Western ways are compatible at base. We lost track of our own achievements, which the West exploited. We must adopt the ways of the West and can do so effortlessly because they are our own." To reach this conclusion, reformers went back to the Islamic scriptures and reread them in a Western light. Across the board, reformists engaged in this sort of reinterpretation. When it came to science they said, "No problem. Science is in fact Muslim.The word algebra comes from Arabic, al-jabr. Algebra being the essence of mathematics and mathematics being the essence of science, all of modern science and technology stems from us. So there is no reason to resist Western science; it's just a matter of reintegrating into our lives what the West took from us in the first place." As a consequence, reformism is very widespread in the Muslim world.
Islamism
The third response is Islamism -- what I shall concentrate on. This approach holds that Muslims are lagging today because they're not good Muslims and to regain the old glory means fully living up to the shariah. Were Muslims to do that, they would once again be on top of the world, just as they were a millennium ago. This is no easy task, for the sacred law contains a vast body of regulations touching every aspect of life, many of them contrary to modern practices. The shariah somewhat resembles the Jewish law, but there is nothing comparable in Christianity. For example, it forbids usury or any taking of interest, which has deep implications for economic life. The covering of women and more broadly, the separation of the sexes has vast implications for social and family life. To make things even harder, the Islamists reject Western influence -- with the major exceptions of technology, especially of the military and medical variants. Premised neither on forthrightly learning from the West nor on the pretense of taking back what was Muslim to start with, Islamism stealthily appropriates from the West while denying that it is doing so. Islamists utterly reject Western customs, philosophy, political institutions and values -- but are willing to learn specific techniques from the West. In addition, they harbour a deep antagonism to non-Muslims and to Jews and Christians especially. The rhetoric and indeed the actions of Islamists show these traits time and again.
In short, Islamists turn Islam into an ideology. The term Islamism is a very useful one, for it indicates that this is an "-ism" comparable to other "-isms" of the 20th century. Following Marxism, Leninism and fascism comes Islamism. It represents an Islamic-flavoured version of the radical utopian ideas of our time. It infuses a vast array of Western political and economic ideas within the religion of Islam.
When the Islamists do come to power, as in Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan, the result is problems. Economic contraction takes place. Iran, where Islamists have ruled for two decades, is a much poorer country than it used to be. Repression of women is an absolute requirement; one sees this most spectacularly in Aghanistan, but it is ubiquitous. Personal rights are disregarded, arms proliferation takes place, and terrorism and other forms of aggression follow. In brief, these are rogue states. Islamism is a real danger to both Muslims and non-Muslims.
It is worth noting what Islamism is not. It is not traditional Islam, but something very new. On point after point, there are enormous differences between the two: traditional Islam seeks to teach humans how to live in accordance with God's will, whereas Islamism aspires to create a just society. The faith of traditional Muslims culminates a millennium and more of debate among scholars, jurists and others. But Islamists, being autodidacts, turn directly to the Koran and nearly dismiss the entire corpus of Islamic learning. Traditional Muslims differ from Islamists. The traditionalists do not know the modern world well, have not studied European languages, studied in the West, learned its advanced secrets. But the Islamists are deeply immersed in all these matters. The Internet boasts hundreds of Islamist sites; I doubt whether there is a single one that is traditional Muslim.
Islamism is not a way backward, but forward. It deals with the problems of modern life. With few exceptions, Islamists are not people from the countryside, but city-dwellers who have to cope with the problems of modern urban life. For example, the challenges of career women figure prominently in Islamist discussions; what can a woman who must travel by very crowded public transportation do to insulate herself from groping? The Islamists have a ready reply: Cover yourself, body and face, and signal through the wearing of Islamic clothes that you are not approachable.
Still on the subject of what Islamism is not, I would argue -- against prevailing assumptions -- that it is not a response to poverty. Were Islamism a result of absolute poverty, Bangladesh would be a hotbed of Islamism, which it is not. Were it a response to impoverishment, then Iraq, whose economy now is about 10% of what it was 20 years ago, would be a hotbed of fundamentalism, which it is not.
Western Responses
So what to do about Islamism? First, a great battle is indeed underway, but it's a battle not between the West and Islam as, say, Samuel Huntington would have it. Rather, it's over the soul of Islam and the contestants are two kinds of Muslims -- the Islamists versus those who reject their radical totalitarian program. It is ultimately a fight between secularists and Islamists, between Ataturk of Turkey and Khomeini of Iran. In this battle, we who are not Muslims are mostly bystanders. We are affected by its outcome and have a role to play in helping one side or the other, but ultimately our role is secondary.
Second, we must distinguish Islam the religion and Islamism the political ideology. This means condemning Islamism, never Islam.
Third, because Islamists think us morally corrupt and politically flabby, we in the West must show that, indeed, we do have principles and will. We are not as they think we are. That means we must take strong stands and clear actions and make it clear that Islamists cannot with impunity attack and harm us.
In other words, the West should:
- Support those states, Muslim and otherwise, that resist the Islamist threat, for (in the pithy words of a Turkish general), Islamism is "public enemy number one." This is relatively easy when the states in question are models of rectitude, but it is far less pleasant when they are not, as in the case of Algeria. Given this unpleasant choice, I say we must opt for the government even as we tell the government what we don't like and push it to improve its behaviour.
- Pressure Islamist states to reduce their aggressiveness toward us. Celebrate and support those in the Muslim world who stand up to the Islamists. They are lonely people who look to the West for support and succor.
- Label the Islamist groups who engage in violence for what they are, namely terrorist organizations and battle them accordingly.
- Treat these groups for what they are -- extremist organizations that have declared war on us. Do not co-operate, encourage or engage in dialogue with them, which simply plays their game of gaining legitimacy.
- Promote civil society, not elections. Experience shows, most dramatically in Algeria, that if a government holds snap elections, Islamists do very well, for they alone have an organization already in place. Therefore, we should see elections not as the beginning of a process, but its culmination. First comes the long process of building civil society, with its voluntary institutions, rule of law, minority rights, property rights and the like. Only after the gradual development of civil society does the proper basis for elections exist.
So there you have it. Is fundamentalist Islam a threat? Yes it is, though plain Islam is not. Islamism is a deep, up-to-date phenomenon that has the power to do mischief not just in the distant valleys of Afghanistan, but right here in Canada.
Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes, and Where It Comes From.
