A rchive Date
[ 09-02-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Arab-Muslims ]
|
[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/leishman.html
Ending Islamist terror needs steadfast effort
By RORY LEISHMAN - London Free Press
January 22, 2002
In The Roots of Muslim Rage, an article published in the Atlantic in 1990, Bernard Lewis, an eminent historian of Islam at Princeton University, reviewed numerous manifestations of hostility to the U.S. by Muslims.
He concluded: "It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations - the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the world-wide expansion of both."
Daniel Pipes disagrees. He, too, is a historian of Islam and author of the forthcoming Militant Islam Reaches America. In the current issue of Commentary magazine, he maintains that, "Americans are not involved in a battle royal between Islam and the West, or what has been called a 'clash of civilizations.' " In support of this viewpoint, Pipes notes Islam is not a uniform civilization, but a diverse community of believers torn between Muslim moderates and Islamist extremists.
Thus, in Afghanistan, the moderate majority have celebrated the downfall of the Taliban; in Algeria, Muslim moderates and Islamist extremists are embroiled in an internal war that has killed close to 100,000 over the past 10 years; likewise, in Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey, Islamist terrorists have long been engaged in persistent conflict with their moderate opponents.
Of course, only a few thousand Muslim radicals are active terrorists.
But many more cheer on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida from the sidelines. Judging from election data, survey research and anecdotal evidence, Pipes calculates, "this Islamist element constitutes some 10 to 15 per cent of the total Muslim world population of roughly one billion."
Altogether, Pipes estimates "one-half of the world's Muslims - about 500 million - sympathize more with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban than with the United States. That such a vast multitude hates the United States is sobering indeed," he concludes.
Isn't that the truth?
As examples of moderates on the other side of the Muslim divide, Pipes cites the Turkish officer corps; "several leaders of Muslim-majority states in the former Soviet Union;" democratic dissidents in Iran; and a significant number of Muslims in Afghanistan and elsewhere, who have embraced Western democratic ideals after having had first-hand experience with Islamist oppression.
This is neither a long nor an impressive list of pro-Western Muslim moderates. Pipes concedes that, "they constitute a minority."
Lewis fully agrees with this analysis.
He has never held that modern Islam is a monolith. "The movement nowadays called fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition," he wrote in 1990. "There are others, more tolerant, more open, that helped to inspire the great achievements of Islamic civilization in the past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time prevail. But before this issue is decided there will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little or nothing."
Pipes is hardly more optimistic. He, too, acknowledges there is little the West can do to help transform Muslim dictatorships into genuine democracies. "Washington can go only so far," he says. "Whether its military victories turn into political ones depends ultimately on Muslims."
Moreover, Pipes concedes throughout the worldwide Muslim community, "Anti-Islamists today are weak, divided, intimidated, and generally ineffectual. Indeed, the prospects for Muslim revitalization have rarely looked dimmer than at this moment of radicalism, jihad, extremist rhetoric, conspiratorial thinking and the cult of death."
Surely, then, Lewis is right.
While there is a significant minority of Muslim moderates such as Hamid Karzai, the admirable interim leader of Afghanistan, most Muslims, by Pipes' own account, are indeed locked in a battle royal with the West.
The atrocities of Sept. 11 were the terrible result of an implacable clash of civilizations. The worldwide menace of Islamist terrorism will not be quickly or easily defeated, but can only be curbed though much the same steadfast effort that led to the eventual containment and defeat of Communism.
Write Rory at The London Free Press, P.O. Box 2280, London, Ont. N6A 4G1 or fax 519-667-4528 or E-mail.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|