The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Islamic "Enlightenment" and winning the Long War UPDATED
Ed Morrissey had some great insights today about the contention that a "Muslim Reformation" is needed before the majority of Islamic adherents will willfully speak out against political Islam. In response to a Dana Muir article in today's Washington Post--in which she argues that modern-day Wahabbism has much in common with 16th century Calvinists and Lutherans, in that the Christian "Reformation also had violent after-effects--the good Captain observed:
In a sense, though, even had a Caliphate been somehow preserved in the 1920's, and a Caliph with a "moderate" pro-Western viewpoint been installed (e.g. with a leader like the Pope who urges the masses to "render unto Ceasar..." etc.); while that might have been a more effective near-term deterrent to Islamic extremism in one sense, that arrangement would still have been vulnerable to a more radicalized fundamentalist Caliph someday assuming office--and that result would have been possibly even worse than the current situation. So maybe Churchill was not so far off base after all. In any case, you can't take back the past.
Regardless, in the long term there really is no choice for Western Civilization other than insisting on the defeat and the outlawing of Political Islam (much as in the US, the prohibition of governmental imposition of a State religion is an key part of our Constitution...), while still allowing room for a more tolerant Personal Islam to evolve. The goal must be for Islam to become--in practice as well as theory--a less threatening and less fundamentalist world view; a faith which pays far less attention to the literal denotation of texts such as the Koran and the Hadith, and pays much more attention to their connotation--especially in regard to their similarities with other world religions--in order to coexist peacefully with other people of other faiths and non-Islamic societies. And in order to integrate into this "Core"--as Thomas P.M. Barnett calls it--Muslims must come to accept that barbarism such as stoning non-believers, honor killings of women who engage in sex outside of marriage, restricting dress, suicide bombings for religious gain, etc., is going to have to go the way of Salem Witch trials and the Spanish Inquisition, i.e. into the dustbin of history. Anything short of this result (or of the West's defeat and subjugation to a barbaric Islamic nightmare of dhimmitude) must be grounds for fighting this War with all of our collective might to save our civilized world.
Unfortunately, there is nothing to suggest that this fundamental conflict between a secular, moral "good" and a fundamentalist, barbaric "evil" is unlikely to be resolved in my lifetime. And until this great struggle of our lifetimes is finally won, it will be important for the West to continue to convey to the Islamic world that our prosecution of this War is not to stamp out their religion, as much as it is to ensure that tolerance and respect for others (meaning even for those not sharing your faith...) must be protected by law; and to also convey that anything short of official State tolerance of all faiths and secular differences--is unacceptable. Until a large majority of the world's Muslims can feel comfortable in getting behind this concept--and in standing up for it--there can and will be no peace. The sooner we realize this in the West--and unite behind it--the better.
UPDATE: This is not the way to win the War.
The major revolution in that period was the rejection of the Church's absolute authority on religious interpretation of Christianity. Luther's challenge led to the inevitable conclusion that each Christian could determine for himself the meaning of Christianity. If each man could interpret the Scriptures as validly as a Church, then each man could become his own Church. So thousands of sects sprang into being, each with its own interpretation, and the extremes being as violent as Muslim jihadists today.How true this is--and from all appearances this reconciliation of fundamentalist Islam and Western thought does not appear likely to happen anytime soon...
Muslims stopped having a central authority analog to Rome with the fall of the Caliphate, formally in 1920. As a result, Muslims increasingly relied on personal interpretations of the Qur'an and the Hadiths. Imams had no central authority or oversight and could teach their own personal brand of Islam. It's no accident that the Muslim Brotherhood, the grandfather of jihadi groups, sprang into being at this point and produced thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, who argues for the Muslim version of sola scriptura. As Muir notes, Qutb could be seen as a Calvinist in temperament, but one that argues for the reinstatement of the Caliphate, based on his own interpretation of the holy books of Islam.
Churchill can get some of the blame for this. He argued for an end to the tottering Ottoman Empire in the early days of the First World War, and his Dardanelles campaign was designed to bring it to a speedy collapse. The elimination of the Caliphate in the final settlement of the war had far-reaching consequences that the short-sighted Western powers could hardly calculate.
We're in the middle of the Islamic Reformation. What we need is an Islamic Enlightenment, where Islam gets relegated to the personal and not the political. Few Muslims outside of the West appear interested in arguing for that, unfortunately.
In a sense, though, even had a Caliphate been somehow preserved in the 1920's, and a Caliph with a "moderate" pro-Western viewpoint been installed (e.g. with a leader like the Pope who urges the masses to "render unto Ceasar..." etc.); while that might have been a more effective near-term deterrent to Islamic extremism in one sense, that arrangement would still have been vulnerable to a more radicalized fundamentalist Caliph someday assuming office--and that result would have been possibly even worse than the current situation. So maybe Churchill was not so far off base after all. In any case, you can't take back the past.
Regardless, in the long term there really is no choice for Western Civilization other than insisting on the defeat and the outlawing of Political Islam (much as in the US, the prohibition of governmental imposition of a State religion is an key part of our Constitution...), while still allowing room for a more tolerant Personal Islam to evolve. The goal must be for Islam to become--in practice as well as theory--a less threatening and less fundamentalist world view; a faith which pays far less attention to the literal denotation of texts such as the Koran and the Hadith, and pays much more attention to their connotation--especially in regard to their similarities with other world religions--in order to coexist peacefully with other people of other faiths and non-Islamic societies. And in order to integrate into this "Core"--as Thomas P.M. Barnett calls it--Muslims must come to accept that barbarism such as stoning non-believers, honor killings of women who engage in sex outside of marriage, restricting dress, suicide bombings for religious gain, etc., is going to have to go the way of Salem Witch trials and the Spanish Inquisition, i.e. into the dustbin of history. Anything short of this result (or of the West's defeat and subjugation to a barbaric Islamic nightmare of dhimmitude) must be grounds for fighting this War with all of our collective might to save our civilized world.
Unfortunately, there is nothing to suggest that this fundamental conflict between a secular, moral "good" and a fundamentalist, barbaric "evil" is unlikely to be resolved in my lifetime. And until this great struggle of our lifetimes is finally won, it will be important for the West to continue to convey to the Islamic world that our prosecution of this War is not to stamp out their religion, as much as it is to ensure that tolerance and respect for others (meaning even for those not sharing your faith...) must be protected by law; and to also convey that anything short of official State tolerance of all faiths and secular differences--is unacceptable. Until a large majority of the world's Muslims can feel comfortable in getting behind this concept--and in standing up for it--there can and will be no peace. The sooner we realize this in the West--and unite behind it--the better.
UPDATE: This is not the way to win the War.
Labels: Christianity, Dhimmitude, Islam, Islamic Fascism, The Long War
