CRISIS
OF FAITH IN THE MUSLIM
WORLD PART 2: The Islamist
response By Spengler
(For PART I: Statistical
evidence, please click here)
Note:
The following essay, whose first installment
appeared on November 1, was written in September,
prior to the uprising of Muslim youth in France.
Despair at the prospective dissolution of Muslim
society is the mother of radical Islamism, and its
path of least resistance goes toward violence.
Nowhere is that more obvious than in France, where
a spontaneous outburst of rage among disaffected
Muslim youth has, over the past 10 days, mutated
into an organized campaign of violence.
There is no evidence in the public domain
that Islamist radicals initiated the violence.
Nonetheless, generals are chosen by their
armies. The Grande Armee
did not invade Russia because it was led by
Napoleon Bonaparte; rather, Napoleon invaded
Russia because he had half a million scavengers to
lead, of whom only a tenth were French.
Albrecht von Wallenstein's army did not
mutiny against the Austrian throne because its
field marshal wished to betray his masters;
rather, Wallenstein betrayed Austria because he
could not maintain his locust-horde and be loyal
to Austria at the same time.
A vast army
of young unemployed Muslims, estimated to reach 25
million in the Arab countries alone by 2010,
stands at the disposal of the would-be Napoleons
and Wallensteins of radical Islam, and they have
no choice but to lead it. The outcome well might
be a new Algerian War fought on French soil, with
all the horrors that attended that conflict just
half a century ago.
For three years I have
argued that Europe sought to avoid conflict with
the Muslim world precisely in order to mitigate
this danger, but that Europe's appeasement would
be futile. Europe now faces a terrible reckoning
which will not be paid in full for years.
Why does population growth fade in
response to rising literacy in the Muslim world?
It might be that Muslim women stop making babies
as soon as they can read the instructions on a
packet of birth-control pills, but the matter is
not so simple.
The crisis of modernization
first of all is a crisis of faith, and the
attenuation of religious faith is the root cause
of the birth rate bust in the modern world.
Traditional society is everywhere fragile, not
only in the Islamic world; by definition it is
bounded by values and expectations handed down
from the past, to which individuals must submit.
Once the bands of tradition are broken and each
individual may choose for herself what sort of
family to raise, religious faith becomes the
decisive motivation for bringing children into the
world.
As Phillip Longman wrote in The
Empty Cradle, "Faith is increasingly necessary
as a motivation to have children." The collapse of
traditional society has brought about a collapse
of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that fail
to reproduce themselves by definition are failed
cultures, for the simple reason that they will
cease to exist before many generations have
passed.
That is why the Islamists -
Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense
of extreme urgency. They are not conservative
Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it
exists as corrupt and decadent. They are
revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of
totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of
human life. They are not throwbacks to the past,
but products of modern education. Sayyid Qutb
(1906-1966), the founder of the modern Islamist
movement, formulated his theory while earning a
master's degree in education at the Colorado State
College of Education. He wrote in 1949:
Islamic society today is not Islamic
in any sense of the word ... In our modern
society we do not judge by what Allah has
revealed; the basis of our economic life is
usury; our laws permit rather than punish
oppression ... We permit the extravagance and
the luxury that Islam prohibits; we allow the
starvation and the destitution of which the
Messenger once said: "Whenever people anywhere
allow a man to go hungry, they are outside the
protection of Allah, the Blessed and the
Exalted." [1]
The Islamists feel that
they have nothing to lose, for the fear of
cultural extinction surpasses the fear of physical
death. The Islamist dream of theocracy, for
example, Osama bin Laden's vision of a restored
caliphate, represents what might be the last stand
of an endangered culture, something like the Nazi
hallucination of Aryan empire. The Islamists have
nothing to lose, but they have much to gain: they
perceive not only weakness, but also opportunity.
Islamic life is dying, but far more slowly than
the senile civilization of Western Europe.
Education and literacy appear to threaten
traditional Muslim social relations. The
cliff-like drop in Muslim fertility sets the stage
for social crisis a generation from now. Islam
threatens to join the list of failed cultures. By
using the term "failed culture", I do not mean to
deprecate Islam as a religion or Muslims
individually. Islamist writers, starting with
Sayyid Qutb, as quoted above, say precisely the
same thing. It is not surprising that Islamist
radicals are obsessed with survival. Although some
of their behavior appears irrational, their
underlying premise is not. The Islamist revival
responds to the Muslim countries' failure to adapt
to the modern world.
Urbanization,
literacy and openness to the modern world will
suppress the Muslim womb, in the absence of
radical measures. Radical Islam is born of
existential fear. In a new volume of academic
essays on modern Islamic thought, two Islamist
academics, Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer M Nafi,
observe, "Rather than being a development within
cultural traditions that is internally generated,
20th-century Islamic thought is constitutively
responsive; it is substantially a reaction to
extrinsic challenges." [2]
The challenge
stems from the transformation of Muslim life:
In the Middle East of 1900, for
example, less than 10% of the inhabitants were
city dwellers; by 1980, 47% were urban. In 1800,
Cairo had a population of 250,000, rising to
600,000 by the beginning of the 20th century.
The unprecedented influx of immigrants from
rural areas brought the population of Cairo to
almost 8 million by 1980. Massive urbanization
altered patterns of living, of housing and
architecture, of the human relation with space
and land, of marketing, employment and
consumption, and the very structure of family
and social hierarchy. [3]
The sharp
fall in the Muslim population growth rate
expresses the extreme fragility of traditional
society. Again citing Taji-Farouki and Nafi, this
means"
A Muslim sense of vulnerability and
outrage is further exacerbated by the seemingly
unstoppable encroachment of American popular
culture and modes of consumerism, and the
transparent hypocrisy of the American rhetoric
of universal rights and liberties. It is also
stoked by Western ambivalence towards economic
disparities in the world. [4]
The
remarkable fact about Taji-Farouki's and Nafi's
book is not the professorial observations quoted
above. What is most remarkable, rather, is the
alleged participation of one of the scholarly
authors in terrorist enterprise.
Professor
Nafi, who teaches history and Islamic studies at
Birkbeck College, University of London, also
happens to be under indictment in Florida for
"conspiracy to murder, maim or injure persons
outside the United States". He was deported from
the US for visa violations in 1996, and was one of
eight men, including three professors, indicted by
a US District Court in Florida in 2003 for
providing material aid to the terrorist
organization Islamic Jihad. Nafi was indicted
along with Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, an adjunct
professor of Middle East Studies at the University
of South Florida (USF). Reported Middle East
analyst Daniel Pipes:
Even after the indictment, Arthur
Lowrie, formerly vice chairman of USF's
committee for Middle Eastern Studies, praises
Shallah for his "good scholarly work". And Gwen
Griffith-Dickson, director of Islamic studies at
Birkbeck, describes Nafi as "highly respected",
lauding him for his efforts "with energy and
commitment, to encourage critical thinking about
religious issues and academic balance in his
students, and thus to encourage social
responsibility". [5]
Basheer M Nafi
is not the only Muslim intellectual to support
violence in the cause of Islamic theocracy. Time
magazine five years ago hailed the Geneva-based
Professor Tariq Ramadan as one of the world's
"spiritual innovators", for "creating a new kind
of European Islam that bridges his Islamic values
and Western culture". [6] "Ramadan's chosen task
is to invent an independent European Islam ...
With 15 million Muslims on the continent, Ramadan
believes it's time to abandon the dichotomy in
Muslim thought that has defined Islam in
opposition to the West," Time enthused.
Ramadan's reputation grew such that Notre
Dame University offered him its Henry R Luce
professorship of "Religion, Conflict and
Peacebuilding" in 2004. Before Ramadan could
assume his position, however, the US Department of
Homeland Security revoked his work visa on the
grounds of alleged terrorist association.
Precise reasons were not given, but it
turns out that the Department of Homeland Security
was not alone in its evaluation of the Swiss
Islamist. France had refused entry to Ramadan in
1996 because of alleged links to an Algerian
terrorist then engaged in bombing attacks. [7]
Ramadan since took up an appointment at Oxford,
and in August this year was appointed to a panel
advising British Prime Minister Tony Blair on
Islamic matters.
A disturbing sort of
observer effect is at work in the field of Islamic
studies; it is hard to find coherent formulations
of the Islamist position without finding that the
formulator has already chosen involvement in
terrorism. Westerners should not be too shocked at
this turn of affairs, for stranger things have
happened in the West. During the years before and
after World War II, respectable academics who
apologized for Soviet aggression often supported
it covertly. Thanks to the Venona wiretap
transcripts, we now are aware that prominent
Americans who apologized for the violent actions
of the defunct Soviet empire also were agents of
Soviet espionage. [8] But the fact that prominent
Islamist academics offer more than moral support
for Islamist terrorism is a leading indicator of
cultural despair.
We typically call
terrorism "senseless". A Google search for the
term "senseless and terrorism" yields more than
half a million hits. But sense and rationality
have an existential component, that is, we presume
that we will continue to exist in order to be
sensible and rational. If we know with near
certainty that we shall cease to exist, or at
least cease to exist in a recognizable way, the
term "rationality" loses meaning. At this point we
feel that we have nothing to lose, like Adolf
Hitler in 1939. That is why the violent
proclivities of Ramadan and Nafi must be explained
existentially, rather than rationally.
Most of the world's cultures will go into
oblivion without a fight, either because they
cannot or do not wish to fight for survival. Of
the world's endangered cultures, only one can and
will fight to perpetuate itself, and that is
Islam. Militancy is not unique to Islam.
Twice during the 20th century the nations
of Europe fought each other for pre-eminence, with
the result of their common ruin. Yet Islam's
decline was not an accident, nor is the fearsome
response to that decline offered by the Islamist
radicals. Born in militancy, Islam among the
world's religions offers a unique justification
for conquest. The war that Islam will offer the
West in its final throes will be a tragic,
terrible, and prolonged war that cannot be
avoided, but only fought to exhaustion.
Islam has one generation in which to turn
its foothold in Western Europe into a governing
power, before the effects of slowing population
growth set in. Although the Muslim birth rate
today is the world's second highest (after
sub-Saharan Africa), it is falling faster than the
birth rate of any other culture. By 2050,
according to the latest United Nations
projections, the population growth rate of the
Muslim world will converge on that of the US
(although it will be higher than Europe's or
China's).
Islam has enough young men - the
pool of unemployed Arabs is expected to reach 25
million by 2010 - to make its stand during the
next 30 years. Because of mass migration to
western Europe, the worst of the war might be
fought on European soil.
Twenty million
Muslims now live in western Europe; the dean of
Islamic scholars, Bernard Lewis, predicts that
Europe will be Islamic by no later than the end of
this century. The numbers suggest otherwise; the
end of the century will be too late.
Notes [1] Social
Justice in Islam, by Sayyid Qutb, translators
John B Hardie and Hamid Algar (Islamic
Publications International; Oneonta 2004)
[2] Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer M Nafi,
Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century
(Tauris: London 2004), page 9
