Interreligious
Islam is a monolith
By Rory Leishman

Hardcopy Issue Date: April 2002
Online Publication Date: Apr 20, 2002, 18:00

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 United States by Muslims apart from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 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 that Islam is not a uniform civilization, but a diverse community of believers torn between Muslim moderates and Islamist extremists. Thus in Palestine, Islamists mount terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, while moderates yearn for peaceful

coexistence with Israel. In Afghanistan, Muslim moderates have celebrated the downfall of the Taliban; and in Algeria, they are still embroiled in an internal war with Islamist extremists that has killed close to 100,000 people over the past 10 years. Likewise, in Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey, Islamists have engaged in repeated terrorist assaults on their moderate Muslim opponents.

Pipes allows that while only a few thousand Muslims radicals are active terrorists, many more cheer on Osama bin Laden and Al Qa'eda from the sidelines. Judging from election data, survey research and anecdotal evidence, he calculates that "this Islamist element constitutes some 10 to 15 percent of the total Muslim world population of roughly one billion." Altogether, in Pipes' judgment, "one-half of the world's Muslims-some 500 million persons-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."

On the other side of the Muslim divide, some of the moderates are pro American and subscribe to the democratic ideals of Western civilization. As examples, 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 had first-hand experience with Islamist oppression.

This is neither a long nor an impressive list of pro-Western Muslims. 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." He also concedes that throughout the world-wide 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 like 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 September 11 were the terrible result of an implacable clash between Islam and what remains of our Judeo Christian civilization. The world-wide menace of Islamist terrorism will not be quickly or easily defeated, but can only be curbed through much the same steadfast effort that led to the eventual containment and defeat of atheistic Communism.

Rory Leishman lives at 836 Wellington St., London, Ontario, N6A 3S7 Home/Office Phone: 519-439-2676. His column appears every other edition.