More propaganda....

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=788362


Enemies within, enemies without

Sep 20th 2001 | CAIRO
The Economist


Islam remains a tolerant faith, despite its apparent new ferocity


LIKE every great religion, Islam is, and has been for all but the first of its 1,400 years, a varied and fractious faith. Muslims do not differ on essentials such as the oneness of God, the literalness of his word as voiced by Muhammad, or the duty to perform prayer, charity, fasting, pilgrimage and jihad, which means something like “struggle”. There is not much debate over the first four of these duties, though quite a few Muslims choose to ignore them. But the last, which embraces everything from resisting temptation to attacking Islam's perceived enemies, is a much more contentious term.

Nearly all Muslims, almost all the time, lean to the softer meaning. They think of jihad as striving to perfect oneself, or to give hope to others by good example. In short, they get on with their lives much like anyone else. When the faith is under threat, however, some may be inspired to go further—to fight to expel crusaders from Palestine, say, as Muslims did in the 13th century, or to kick Russians out of Afghanistan, as they did in the 1980s. A few may go to greater extremes. Some, for example, follow the teachings of a 14th-century firebrand, Ibn Taymiyya, who stated unequivocally, “jihad against the disbelievers is the most noble of actions.” And some of these, a tiny radical minority, may go so far as to plot carefully, and execute fearlessly, a suicidal slaughter of thousands of innocents in the name of Allah.

Yet such a calamitous misdirection of energy can occur only under certain conditions. The sense that the faith is under threat must be strong enough, and widely enough perceived, to provoke real fear and anger. Leaders—men with the charisma and credibility to warp the words of Islam's founding texts to suit their own convictions—are needed to channel noble thoughts into ghastly deeds. There must be a pool of recruits who are so frustrated by, or so blinded to, the other options of this world that their minds remain concentrated on the next. And there must be proper logistical underpinnings: easy access to transport, communications and information, and skill at using them.

Tragically for America, and just as tragically for Islam, the modern age has generated all these conditions at once. A modicum of money and education can now provide anyone with the means of rapid movement, organisation and proselytising, as well as the capacity to cause immense destruction. A sense of being under threat is now shared, to some degree, by many sects in many religions. From Buddhist monks to Jewish Hasidim to left-wing Luddites, there is no shortage of voices decrying such alleged ills as materialism, secularisation, sexual permissiveness, or the drowning of cultural variety in the tide of globalisation.

Because most such groups are marginal, their Utopian yearnings are diluted. In the case of Muslims, however, history and numbers combine to magnify the grudge many hold against their present fate. The judgment of Samuel Huntington, the Harvard scholar who ignited controversy with a 1993 article entitled “The Clash of Civilisations”, was cruel and sweeping, but nonetheless acute. Today, he wrote, the world's billion or so Muslims are “convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”


Post-colonial wounds

European colonialism was not entirely a bad thing. It created nations where there were none before, in America and Africa. It shocked the resilient old cultures of Asia into modernity, and ended up freeing India's Hindus from centuries of Muslim overlordship. But colonialism and its aftermath fractured the Islamic world both horizontally and vertically. Rival states replaced its congenially porous old empires. Impatient, western-minded governments dropped Islamic law in favour of imported systems. This brought genuine progress, yet it also cut the chain of rich tradition that linked present to past, and ruptured the old Islamic notion of unity between religion and state which, in theory at least, tied the temporal to the eternal. To the pious, Islam seemed to have been cast adrift from its own history.

Modern Islamism, a term that describes a broad range of political movements, most of them peaceable, some aggressive, is a product of this sensibility. From Egypt's venerable Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, to the brutal maquisards of present-day Algeria, what unites these groups is a determination to save Islam, to recapture the reins of its history. Like the religious right in the United States, or for that matter in Israel, Islamists seek to return religion to centrality, to make faith the determining component of identity and behaviour.

The past three decades have provided fertile ground for these ideas. Nearly every Muslim country has experienced the kind of social stress that generates severe doubt, discontent and despair. Populations have exploded. Cities, once the abode of the privileged, have been overrun by impoverished, disoriented provincials. The authoritarian nature of many post-colonial governments, the frequent failure of their great plans, and their continued dependence on western money, arms and science have discredited their brand of secularism. The intrusion of increasingly liberal western ways, brought by radio, films, television, the Internet and tourism, has engendered schism by seducing some and alienating others. Growing gaps in wealth, both within Muslim societies and between the poor nations of the Islamic world and the oil-rich Arabian Gulf, have spawned resentment, too.

Islam has also suffered external stresses. Although the post-colonial fires troubling much of the globe have now subsided, the Muslim world's wounds continue to fester. In the past decade alone a score of conflicts have simmered on its borders. These range from ethnic war in the Balkans, to militant insurgency in the Philippines, to what sometimes looks like anti-colonial revolts in Chechnya, Kashmir and the Palestinian territories.

The Palestinian struggle, in particular, has stoked rage against not only Israel and its backers, pre-eminently the United States, but also the feebleness of Arab and Muslim governments in the face of them. Even conflicts that did not at first involve religious adversaries have, in the minds of many, taken on religious overtones. America's continuing strikes against Iraq and, in particular, the persistence of sanctions, have aroused widespread anger.

This sudden accumulation of woes has reinforced the notion that Islam itself is somehow in danger. For the first time in the modern world, a sense of Islam as a whole, as a nation or a polity, has marched back upon the stage.


A stiffening orthodoxy

In response to all these pressures, the outward nature of the faith has changed. A religion that once included diverse strands of mysticism, and even of mild paganism—especially in countries like Indonesia, whither Islam was borne by traders, not conquerors—has begun to harden around a very rigid textualism. Money, migrant labour and the pilgrimage to Mecca have spread far and wide the Saudis' bleak desert version of Islam. To the dismay of many Muslims, this doctrine, one stripped of subtlety, nuance and compromise, is being presented as a new orthodoxy.

This hard-edged modern Islam has produced a new kind of preacher. As the clerics of the Ottoman empire foresaw five centuries ago when they banned printing, the spread of literacy has ended the professional scholars' monopoly on interpreting religion. Their hold, already undermined by their association with unpopular regimes, is further weakened by the dispersion of Muslims in small communities around the globe, communities that are often isolated among non-believers. Amid the general dislocation, staid supporters of the older tolerant ways are often shouted down. The increasingly dominant voice is an angry one that sees Islam as a beleaguered faith, surrounded by enemies without and within.

And yet the emotionally charged, electronically amplified tone of today's mosque sermons still has only limited influence. Islam remains a diverse and broadly tolerant faith. A growing number of Muslims, better educated than their forebears and far more exposed to alternative ways of life through television and the Internet, rather like much that is on offer. They want a chance, naturally, to have a bigger share in the modern world's material comforts. More important, many of them are attracted by the idea of individual responsibility, the notion that each person has the right to think his or her own way through life's problems. The Muslim world, in short, may be starting to grope its way towards its own Reformation.

At the same time, the painful experience of countries such as Iran, Algeria and Egypt has convinced many that excessive zeal is misguided. The Taliban's blinkered atavism, for example, is abhorrent to nearly everyone else. Its destruction of ancient Buddhist monuments earlier this year was condemned by virtually every Muslim authority in the rest of the world.

In Arab countries generally, the ultra-radical fringe has seemed to be shrinking. Most Arab governments have long since recognised the threat it poses. Concerted and often brutal policing has decapitated most of the extreme groups. Some organisations that were once considered dangerously radical, such as Lebanon's Shia militia, Hizbullah, have moved into the mainstream. Even Egypt's Gamaa Islamiya, an organisation that wrought havoc in the early 1990s, has renounced violence, although its jailed leader has since wavered. To most Muslims, the contention of Osama bin Laden and his followers that God has ordered Muslims to kill Americans is not only silly, but presumption bordering on heresy.

In all but a few cases, the inroads made by Islamism are reflected not in violent extremism, but in an increased religious consciousness. Muslims today are in general more knowledgeable about their faith, more attuned to its demands, and more assertive about their identity.

But which direction does this assertiveness take? Does it tend to inward jihad, or offensive jihad? This is a question that must be settled, in the long run, by the people of the Muslim world themselves, and by their success or failure at making their societies better ones to live in. If they succeed, there will be no place for the bin Ladens of this world. Historically, Islam has reserved its greatest wrath not for outsiders, but for heretics.

 

Here's my viewpoint:

I think that Islam as practiced throughout the world is for the vast majority a peaceful faith.

BUT, I feel that the more fundamentalist movement within Islam is a tad bit more widespread than is being reported in the American press....as are the terrorist connections to that movement.

As for Huntington, if you have a critique of his article that you would be willing to share, I would definitely appreciate it.

One can look at the IRA and not see a connection to a broad movement within the Catholic Church....but can the same be said for al Qaeda and Islam?

I don't know.

I really hope that the terrorists are as advertised and that there is not a broader movement within Islam that is allied against the West.

 

Thanks for your response. I will check it out later today.

 

While Huntington's division of the world, as you have pointed out in detail, has its flaws, could his characterization of the Middle East and Muslim nations in general still be accurate?

To make clear my interest, I am not "anti-Muslim"...but, the prevailing view in this nation is that the terrorists are a few and their sentiments are not shared by many. Yet news reports of demonstrations in the ME and elsewhere seem to run counter to that, in addition to material that I have read, not just cites of Huntington.

I haven't really paid much attention to the Israel-Palestine troubles outside of the usual nightly reports on the killings of the day there....and I don't have a background in cultural studies.

As for the articles that I have posted, I posted them because they do seem to challenge the idea that the sentiments behind the attacks on America are not that widespread throughout Muslim nations.

Yes, when you are discussing the feelings of 1+ billion individuals in however many nations things are probably not that easily simplified.

I think it far better to look at the threat that faces the US rationally and discuss "uncomfortable" possibilities instead of the standard knee-jerk "that's just Israeli" or "that's just Arab" responses.

 

Here are some of the articles I've come across that run counter to the prevailing view in the media or at least cover topics not generally discussed:

"The Roots of Muslim Rage" by Bernard Lewis in The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990

"The bishop and the imam ask, Do we really have to fight?" The Economist, Dec. 20, 1990

"Survey: Islam and the West"The Economist, Aug 4,1994

"Civilization Envy" by Jonah Goldberg in National Review, Sep.28, 2001

"Will they fool us twice?"by Cal Thomas, sydicated column, Oct.8, 2001


Granted, the latter 2 are from conservative columnists/publications, but they do raise some interesting points.