[ALBSA-Info] Economist:Islam's Tensions

[Kreshnik Bejko]

"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.”


Islam's tensions

Enemies within, enemies without
Sep 20th 2001 | CAIRO
>From The Economist print edition


Reuters



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.


Reuters
More religious need not mean more violent



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.


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