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COMMENTARY
April 26, 2006
Some questions
For about five-and-a-half years now, I’ve been trying to make sense of the strange war going on between the West and “Islamism”, for the readers of this newspaper. It is a war to which none of the rules of Western warfare, or international law, can be applied. When we try to apply such rules, we can do so only for ourselves.This column is an attempt to state the obvious. As usual, I make no apologies for trying to comprehend things at the broadest level of generality, and in the simplest terms. Some writers pursue the subtle; I am usually looking for the plain. I believe a general failure to grasp the obvious permits much false subtlety. To my mind, people who do not grasp there is a war on, and that it is a war that will determine how our children will live, and their children’s children, lack an elementary purchase on reality. How big is this war? It is the first true “world war”, in the sense that the battlefield can be anywhere at all on the planet. One might even consider it the unexpected fruit of “globalization” -- for the West (including all countries which aspire to Western standards of development), and Islam, as any other players (mainland China comes to mind), now have an interest in every location. Increasingly, the battlefronts become -- this is what I observe, hardly what I want -- wherever there is a Western presence in the Islamic world, and wherever there is an Islamic presence elsewhere. Israel is symbolic, because it is the one completely autonomous Western enclave in the Arab Muslim world. It is therefore detested as an alien lump: as if it were a cancer on the body of Islam. Though on one level, this strange war is as old as the 14-century clash between Islam and Christendom, it has taken a form that is a new thing under the sun. This “new thing” didn’t begin on Sept. 11th, 2001, but well before that; it only became visible to many on that day. There had been about 8,000 terrorist hits on Western, or Western-associated targets in the 20 years before the World Trade Centre went down. There are now more than 10,000 hits per year. Seemingly permanent battlefields have emerged in several locations, including Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Sudan, the southern Philippines, and quite arguably, urban France. Many still argue that the war is a figment of the Bush administration’s imagination. How I wish they were right. Who or what is our enemy? Not Islam, per se, but a constellation of radical Islamic factions who pursue their own “civil” conflicts inside each Muslim country -- for the purpose of ridding each of Western influences, and in the hope of imposing in each a strict Islamic order founded in the Shariah. Sometimes they fight one another. But for the most part, their violence is aimed against the common enemy: against us, and our allies. The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, are four quite different movements (and this list is far from complete). The ideals of Hezbollah are embodied in the state of Iran, those of Al Qaeda formerly in the state of Afghanistan. In countries like Syria, as in pre-invasion Iraq, an outdated quasi-socialist ideology is gradually transformed into an Islamist one. Elsewhere, Islamism grows by attempts of secular governments to appease it. All of these “political and spiritual movements” are violent, but they lay emphasis on different targets for different reasons. Each can be interpreted externally as a terrorist network, but each defines itself internally by its allegiance to Islam. While they disagree on fine points of Koranic interpretation, all agree they have a commission from Allah to Islamicize the world by force. Since all agree that the West is the ultimate, even apocalyptic enemy of Islam, they routinely cooperate in attacking our interests. It thus makes sense for us to think of them as allied. On whose side is the rest of the Muslim world? An impossible question to answer, because depending upon the angle of observation the answer is completely different. My sympathy with the difficulties of “moderate Muslims” comes from my persistent attempts to imagine what my feelings would be, were I a Muslim. One’s natural allegiance is to one’s own identity. And if Muslim fanatics succeed, as they appear to be doing, in defining Islam as what they profess, the moderate Muslim is left with an ugly choice between supporting them, and apostasy. How do we measure progress or regress in this war? The only plausible answer I can think of is, by our success in establishing secular, nominally democratic, political and economic regimes throughout the Muslim East, which rule in defiance of fanatic claims. But awkward as this answer sounds, it becomes meaningless if we in the West do not begin to recover a robust sense of what we are about. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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