Subject: This Futile Fundamentalism

Ed Note: I have heard this in many forms, while this author makes
important commections he misses the
point, the end of civilization. GW



Comment
This futile fundamentalism
Champions of Islamic revolution are fooling themselves; they have
nothing to offer contemporary Muslims
William Pfaff
Sunday October 17, 2004
The Observer

The language of political hyperbole used by some alarmists to describe
the threat of Islamist radicals resembles the language of
totalitarianism. It does not describe an empirically observed reality.
It describes and exaggerates something feared and imagined. It
describes what can be called a virtual reality, more urgent, and, in
the minds of its users, more real than the 'real' reality.
Paranoid projections based on enemy declarations and ignorant slogans
have been the currency of presidential discourse in the United States.
In Britain, too, the country's role in the war was justified by the
Prime Minister with earnest moralism. Both the President and the Prime
Minister cast the Islamic enemy as 'pure evil', motivated by 'hatred
of
freedom' and envy 'of our way of life', and which must be fought
'there' before it has to be fought on the streets of London, New York
or in the placid suburbs of the United States. All this adds up to a
false and grossly ideological conception of war between civilisations.

Ed Note: I am afrid I am one of those alarmist he describes, but he
is Wrong, the empirically observed reality, is bsaed on a past that
no longer exists,this past is no ;onger "reality" GW

This language also shapes the Islamic perception of what the West is
doing. It affects the course of Islamic reform, tending to discredit
forces of moderate, secular and progressive theological change as
ineffectual.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and events in Palestine, together
with violence against Muslims elsewhere, are offering to Islamic
society convincing, although ultimately false, evidence that a war
against their civilisation is underway.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Muslims now fear that what
is going on in the Gaza refugee camps and in Iraq is what, ultimately,
may be in store for them. This already has had a ruinous effect on the
movement of ideas and political reform between Western and Islamic
societies.

The intellectual godfather of modern Islamist radicalism is generally
taken to have been the 19th-century Egyptian intellectual named Sayyid
Qutb. A review of the literature on Islamic radicalism during the past
25 years (cited by John Zimmerman in the journal Terrorism and
Political Violence ) shows Qutb routinely mentioned as one of the two
most important intellectual influences on these movements and, in
particular, as being the main (if indirect) inspiration for Osama bin
Laden.

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 to oppose the
secularising tendencies in Islamic society, influenced the Qutb
tradition of religious revival and reform towards greater militancy
and
conservatism.

Yet the most important reform movements in the Arab world before the
Second World War were secular in character. A modernising and secular
pan-Arab nationalism followed the First World War and gave rise to the
Baath movement in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Arab-Christian
intellectuals
were originally important in its development. They wanted an 'Arab
nation' that was not exclusively Muslim.

The most important effort to establish a secular pan-Arab 'nation' was
that of Gamal Nasser in Egypt in the 1950s. This and the
parallel 'Arab
Socialist' movement were in part reactions to the shock of Israel's
creation, and its defeat of the Arab armies in the 1948 war.

These secular Arab movements failed. The depressing residue today of
the Baath movement and of Arab socialism consists of hereditary
Presidents for life and military dictators.

Social and political reform has generally been more successful in
monarchies whose legitimacy is ultimately religious, as in Morocco and
Jordan. (Saudi Arabia's rulers are mere military usurpers of the
Hashemite dynasty, hereditary protectors of the Holy Places.)

The Ottoman Empire's survival until the First World War delayed the
shock of foreign conquest on the Arab Middle East. In colonial Asia, a
pattern of reaction was already evident, initially of resistance, then
of accommodation or even conversion to Western ideas, producing an
ideal - usually unattained - of synthesis with the West.

Eventually, there were new forms of armed resistance, based on
subversive ideas taken from the West: nationalism, and 20th-century
national communism. Otherwise, there was the surviving idea of return
to religion in order to find a new golden age.

Today's militant Islamic revival has seemed a success because it is
taken so seriously in the West. Al-Qaeda's attack on the United States
have produced three years of frenzied and quasi-paranoid reaction by
the American government. The rest of the world has been pushed to
follow the American lead, convenient for many leaders with troublesome
separatist or subversive minorities easily redefined as international
terrorists.

The Islamist movement itself evolved as a form of 'franchised'
terrorism with a common ideological and inspirational base. It spread
to aggrieved Muslims in Europe, Asia, Africa and the US.

In reaction, the US, with allies, has invaded two countries (thus far)
and overturned two governments. This has served chiefly to promote the
Islamist message and recruit more militants. Iraq and Afghanistan
today are the evidence of this.

The new radical Islamism is a success in the moral and psychological
damage it has inflicted on the United States and its allies. For the
Islamic world it will inevitably prove still another failure. No great
caliphate is going to be re-established. Even if all Islam were
converted to the law of Sharia and the Taliban pattern of society,
this would produce no great revival in terms relevant to the modern
world.

The quest for the lost golden age is a fool's mission. The peasant
leader of the anti-Western T'ai P'ing uprising in 19th-century China,
which killed mil lions, preached land distribution and egalitarianism,
thought that he could produce a magical synthesis of Western and
Eastern religion. He promised his followers a universal empire, but he
was gone within a decade.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 - the 'Sepoy Mutiny' - which lasted for
nearly two years, proclaimed a revival of the Moghul Empire when it
reached Delhi. It was soon conquered, by mostly Indian forces. The
great Boxer uprising in China in 1900 made its slogan 'Cherish the
Dynasty - Exterminate the Foreigner!' The Empress indirectly
encouraged it, but Western intervention crushed it.

Osama bin Laden himself has gone from being the patron or financier of
the Taliban movement to a fugitive existence in Waziristan. His
followers may blow up Americans in the Green Zone of Baghdad. They can
reinforce an Iraqi nationalism that will eventually force the US and
its allies out of that country, to their humiliation.

But as Gilles Kepel, the French authority on Islamic society, has
already said, the Islamist movement is moribund in moral terms,
although its military and political energy is not yet exhausted. There
is no way in which it seriously threatens the Western industrial
nations, other than through sporadic acts of terrorism. And that is
the sort of thing Britain endured for many years from the IRA, Italy
and Germany during the 1970s and 1980s from their Red Brigades, and
Spain from Basque separatists. It is unpleasant, but it is not
serious. (This is the lesson the American people refuse to
understand.)

Ed Note: He is living in the past when the West could Crush an
insurgency and the 'Sepoy Mutiny',and the "Boxer uprising", IRA, Red
Brigades,& Basque separatists had no possibility of access to
Nuclear weapons. Here the screw turns, "Islamist movement is
moribund in moral terms, although its military and political energy
is not yet exhausted. There is no way in which it seriously threatens
the Western industrial nations," Nuclear weapons could chang
civilization as we know it today.
This kind of thinking is exactly what prepard France for WWII. (sic)
These islamic terrorist must be taken very seriously, and every
method used to neutralize them.
We view these terrorist as they should be viewed. William Pfaff is
missing the NUCLEAR LINK AND WMD.
Gerald Anthropologist

The Islamist movement is a desperate effort by elements in a thwarted
society to strike back at enemies. But it really wants only to expel
the West and its influence from the Muslim world. It can't even do
that. The Islamists want to conquer and convert Islamic society - not
infidel society.

Islamic fundamentalism has nothing to offer contemporary Islam. You
cannot function in the 21st century on the basis of a primitive
interpretation of Islamic law. That already is evident in Iran.
Afghanistan under the Taliban had no future. The future of the
Islamist
movement itself is irrelevance. For the Islamic people, its legacy
will
be tragedy.

William Pfaff is the author of two books on nationalism and the
Western impact on the non-Western world: The Politics of Hysteria
1964,
and The Wrath of Nations 1993.

© William Pfaff. All rights reserved William Pfaff is the author of
two books on nationalism and the Western impact on the non-Western
world: The Politics of Hysteria 1964, and The Wrath of Nations 1993.
Will Hutton is away
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004