Most adult Americans have an opinion about the connection between Islam and the attacks by Muslims that have been carried out against Americans in America over the last several years.
The majority opinion, among Muslim and non-Muslim Americans, is that these attacks have been carried out by criminals who all just happen to be Muslim. These Americans, including President Obama, believe that the attacks have no source in Islam and should be treated as criminal actions.
Politically active members of this group believe that the motivation for the attacks comes primarily from American foreign policy, not religious dogma. The attackers are viewed as nationalists defending their countries against invasion by America. They conclude that if America were to remove all military presence from the Middle East and stop supporting Israel, the attacks would end.
The members of this majority are often self-described as ignorant of Islamic dogma and history while fearful of Islam’s militancy and sheer size.
The minority opinion is that there is a religious element in the attacks in addition to the criminal and political elements. (The attackers generally claim religious motivation but these claims are ignored, with increasing difficulty, by the majority opinion holders.) This group sees the conflict in the context of 1400 years of conflict between Islam and Judaism and Christianity.
This group is divided into at least two sub-groups. One of these sub-groups sees Islam as implacably hostile and indivisible—monolithic and not capable of reform. These people say we are in a religious war against all of Islam.
A second sub-group sees the enemy differently and thinks there may be some way to avoid an all out religious war. These people (including me) say that the attackers are attempting to start a religious war in the name of Islam—a war most Muslims do not presently support.
We say the attackers and their supporters are composed of specific, ideologically identifiable parts of the umma (the world-wide membership of Islam) that can be separated from the majority of the umma and fought on ideological grounds. We say that not all Muslims are willing to die for the Salafist interpretation of Islamic law that the attackers cite and that we non-Muslims can create conditions that could identify the members of these two parts of the umma.
(Physical attack is not the only threat from Islam. The Islamist political threat from the Muslim Brotherhood is different in strategy, though not in goals, and calls for a political solution.)
The first step in creating this identification of our enemies within Islam is to recognize that they all subscribe to the Salafist interpretation and that actions which promote the Salafist interpretation are seditious and incitements to violence. The second step is to start prosecuting violators of these American laws, removing the sheep skins from the Muslim wolves.
We must learn how to identify our Islamic enemies before they blow things up and shoot people, not afterward. We have been playing defense against an enemy we cannot see. We must go on offense. The alternative is to live for the foreseeable future as we do now--in a defensive posture, waiting for the next attack.
We can do better.
Update: 2/1/10
The upcoming trial of Sudbury, Ma. resident and US citizen Tariq Mehanna will be the first test of the viability of prosecuting proponents of Islamic law on the charge of incitement to violence.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/02/01/web_is_now_refuge_for_man_caught_online/?s_campaign=8315
Better late than never.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Two Models of the Future
The manner we choose to describe the war we are fighting in Afghanistan depends on which view of the future we have. If we agree with Samuel Huntington that the world is becoming more and more defined by cultural, religious and ethnic differences, we define the war as part of a conflict between the Islamic and Western civilizations.
If we agree with Francis Fukuyama that liberal democracy is turning the world into one civilization, the war is just a bump in that road. The United Nations is the totem of Fukuyama’s future, the Organization of the Islamic Conference is a symbol of Huntington’s.
People tend to choose one of those frames of reference and place inside it facts that make sense within that frame. So have I. My personal preference is to keep the present regime of nation states and cultural identities and to minimize supranational governmental authority.
In American political terms, the Right agrees with Huntington more than the Left, religious people agree with Huntington more than secular people. This separation also exists among Muslims. The leaders of the global jihad see a threat to traditional Islam from the Western led global economy because it is infused with un-Islamic values. They claim that Islamic culture is the superior model for the world. Muslims who have no desire to live under present Islamic law disagree.
Those who agree with Fukuyama see the mass emigration from the second and third world nations to the first world nations as a good thing, those who agree with Huntington’s clash of civilizations model see problems ahead for Muslims in Western countries. Attempts to create a synthesis of Islamic values and the values of liberal democracy have not shown much success. The conflicts surrounding the interpretation of free speech rights in Europe are an example of this failure.
Huntington’s model has been quite accurate since its appearance in 1993 at predicting events, Fukuyama’s is less so. While the success of Barack Obama fits Fukuyama’s predictions, larger events are overwhelming that trend. The culture-flattening effects of the global economy push us toward one civilization, but in ways that Huntington described as relevant but shallow. He agreed that the Davos Culture is important, but asked how many people share it. It is an elite culture with shallow roots--one tenth of one percent to maybe one percent of the world population outside the West.
The fact that Americans now eat falafel and Arabs drink Cokes is sometimes offered as an example of the emergence of one civilization. Huntington described this as an irrelevant and insignificant fact because it does not change any conflicting cultural values. Where conflicting religious values collide, interfaith efforts show little success.
If Huntington’s predictions continue to come true, the more extreme versions of multicultural coexistence, and especially the idea of cultural relativism, will not succeed. Nations will preserve a distinct cultural identity provided by the dominant or majority culture of each nation and some inter-civilizational conflicts will be accepted as irreconcilable.
I believe the conflict between our Western civilization and the Islamic civilization is one of these and separation is the answer. Those who prefer to live under Islamic law should live in Islamic countries because Western liberal democracies cannot accommodate them. Muslims who choose to live in the West and American citizens who choose Islam will have to accept the implications of this fact. Being Muslim in America does not include the option to bring Islamic law to America because the Constitution and Islamic law are irreconcilable.
President Obama was wrong when he said America is now an Islamic nation. It never can be.
If we agree with Francis Fukuyama that liberal democracy is turning the world into one civilization, the war is just a bump in that road. The United Nations is the totem of Fukuyama’s future, the Organization of the Islamic Conference is a symbol of Huntington’s.
People tend to choose one of those frames of reference and place inside it facts that make sense within that frame. So have I. My personal preference is to keep the present regime of nation states and cultural identities and to minimize supranational governmental authority.
In American political terms, the Right agrees with Huntington more than the Left, religious people agree with Huntington more than secular people. This separation also exists among Muslims. The leaders of the global jihad see a threat to traditional Islam from the Western led global economy because it is infused with un-Islamic values. They claim that Islamic culture is the superior model for the world. Muslims who have no desire to live under present Islamic law disagree.
Those who agree with Fukuyama see the mass emigration from the second and third world nations to the first world nations as a good thing, those who agree with Huntington’s clash of civilizations model see problems ahead for Muslims in Western countries. Attempts to create a synthesis of Islamic values and the values of liberal democracy have not shown much success. The conflicts surrounding the interpretation of free speech rights in Europe are an example of this failure.
Huntington’s model has been quite accurate since its appearance in 1993 at predicting events, Fukuyama’s is less so. While the success of Barack Obama fits Fukuyama’s predictions, larger events are overwhelming that trend. The culture-flattening effects of the global economy push us toward one civilization, but in ways that Huntington described as relevant but shallow. He agreed that the Davos Culture is important, but asked how many people share it. It is an elite culture with shallow roots--one tenth of one percent to maybe one percent of the world population outside the West.
The fact that Americans now eat falafel and Arabs drink Cokes is sometimes offered as an example of the emergence of one civilization. Huntington described this as an irrelevant and insignificant fact because it does not change any conflicting cultural values. Where conflicting religious values collide, interfaith efforts show little success.
If Huntington’s predictions continue to come true, the more extreme versions of multicultural coexistence, and especially the idea of cultural relativism, will not succeed. Nations will preserve a distinct cultural identity provided by the dominant or majority culture of each nation and some inter-civilizational conflicts will be accepted as irreconcilable.
I believe the conflict between our Western civilization and the Islamic civilization is one of these and separation is the answer. Those who prefer to live under Islamic law should live in Islamic countries because Western liberal democracies cannot accommodate them. Muslims who choose to live in the West and American citizens who choose Islam will have to accept the implications of this fact. Being Muslim in America does not include the option to bring Islamic law to America because the Constitution and Islamic law are irreconcilable.
President Obama was wrong when he said America is now an Islamic nation. It never can be.
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