Islam Perverted (The Islamists have got it wrong)

Western observers, both among the general public and the media, commonly make the mistake of thinking that Islamism is the same as traditional Islam. Even Western researchers describe Islamism as a resurgence of traditional Islam. In contrast, moderate Sunni Muslims are characterised as those whose faith is mitigated, influenced by syncretism, or diluted by a certain amount of secularisation and Westernisation.

But this turns reality upside-down. In fact, Islamists depart in important ways from the Islamic tradition. Indeed, some outstanding traditional Muslim scholars, such as Sheikh Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri and Sheikh Ahmad al-’Alawi, see Islamism as a symptom of secularisation and as a reshaping of their religion into a modern, ideological totalitarianism. It is this view that I myself share.

The distinction between traditional Islam and Islamism can be seen in many specifics. Tradition says that Islamic jurisprudence can today be practiced according to four legal schools, all of which are legitimate and authoritative; Islamists, by contrast, see the existence of these schools as an obstacle to their concept of lslamic unity. Tradition attributes to the ruler the right to appoint competent scholars as authorized interpreters of the Islamic law; Islamists do not recognise any authority apart from the leaders of their own groups. Tradition makes the authority of a scholar dependent on the possession of written documents of appointment (ijaza) signed by his predecessor; Islamists regularly install people bereft of any theological or legal education into positions of Islamic authority.

Another point: Sunnis do not conceive of Islam as an organisation dependent on a centralised leadership; Islamists, on the contrary, see their leading militants as the Islamic leadership, thereby cutting out the need to refer to traditional scholars for guidance. Perhaps most important of all is the Islamists’ subordination of religion to politics, our main topic here. Khalid Duran notes the distinction between traditional Islam and its political counterfeit by underlining their different understandings of the relationship between religion and politics:

"Whether Islamists like the term fundamentalist or not, their understanding of religion resembles that of fundamentalists in other religions. This is not to say that Islamists are more religious or more genuinely Islamic than other Muslims . . . Islamism is a late 20th century totalitarianism. It follows in the wake of fascism and communism, picking up from those and seeking to refine their methods of domination . . .

"Few Muslims would deny that political commitment is part of Islamic ethics, but most disagree with the Islamist insistence that there exists a clearly defined "Islamic system," different from all other political systems."

Islamists draw on modern European models that posit a scientific revolutionary movement, an elitist scheme of ruling society by means of secret cults that act behind the scenes, and a manufacture of consensus by means of propaganda. They reject those aspects of the Islamic tradition that do not fit with this political outlook.

Theirs is, in fact, an extremist ideology; they consider their organisations and militants as custodians of the projects for Islamising the world, and whoever criticizes them (be he a Muslim or a non-Muslim) is immediately accused of being anti-Islamic, "Islamophobic," and so forth. Unwilling to be ruled by non-Islamist Muslims, Islamists adopt an approach characterised by political supremacism.

Like other totalitarian ideologies, contemporary Islamism is blindly utopian. It implies a wholesale denial of history; the Islamists’ model of an ideal society is inspired by the idealised image of seventh-century Arabia and an ahistorical view of religion and human development. It is based on anachronistic thinking that rejects modern concepts of pluralism and tolerance. And it ignores a history of Islam that is rich in models of heterogeneous social organisation and adaptation to the times.

The traditional view understands the role of politics in terms of what the Qur’an teaches. It indicates that prophets were sent to humans to teach them truths about God, ethics, ways to achieve prosperity in this world, and beatitude in the hereafter, and to warn about the consequences of injustice and sinfulness. A prophet who is called to preach in a stateless milieu has to assume a role of political leadership; this mantle fell on Moses, as it did to Muhammad (peace be upon both of them). Islamic tradition teaches that when this happens, the two roles are combined by accident; political leadership is not a necessary element of the prophetic mission. By way of confirmation, note that the Qur’an uses different titles to describe the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) but none of them refers to his political function. Verses 33:45-46 say that he was sent as a witness (shahid), a bearer of glad tidings (mubashshir), one who warns (nadhir), as some one who calls to God (da ‘i ila Allah), and as a shining light (siraj munir). Nowhere does it say he was sent as a political leader or a head of state.

Islamists, however, have a very different interpretation. For them, building an Islamic state is the central achievement of the prophetic mission. Conflating the role of the Muslim scholar with that of a political leader, they hold that the spread of Islam cannot be separated from the creation of what they call the Islamic state.

They argue that "Islam is both religion and government" (al-lslam din wa dawla); and this serves the basic description of their creed. They neglect to mention, however, that this expression is found in neither the Qur’an, the Hadith (sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad), or in any other of the authoritative Islamic sources.

In similar fashion, the Islamists deform the meaning of jihad. In traditional Islam, military jihad and all other forms of material jihad constitute only the external aspect of jihad, while the inner dimension of jihad is the struggle that a Muslim undertakes to purify his soul from mundane desires, defects, and egotism. Jihad is not limited to the military arena but denotes striving hard toward a worthy goal. According to some sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), "the best jihad for women is performing a valid pilgrimage,’’ while "the jihad for someone who has old parents is taking care of them.’’ According to a well-known tradition, after coming back from a military expedition, the Prophet Muhammad said, "We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad" (raja’na min jihad al-asghar ila jihad al-akbar). The Prophet was asked, "O, Messenger of Allah, what is the greater jihad?" He answered, "It is the jihad against one’s soul.’’

The traditional understanding also includes a military meaning but military jihad is strictly regulated by rules concerning its purpose, means, and resolution.

Purpose: Qur’anic verses permitting military jihad (22:39-40) indicate that it is not a vehicle to expand Islam but to defend the rights of those who are persecuted because of their religion.

"To those against whom war is made, permission is given [to defend themselves], because they are wronged. And verily God is most powerful for their aid. [They are] those who have been expelled from their homes in defiance of right [for no cause] except that they say, "Our Lord is God." Did not God check one people by means of another, there would surely have been pulled down monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, in which the name of God is commemorated in abundant measure."

Note the inclusion here of not just mosques, but "monasteries, churches, synagogues" as places where God’s name is frequently mentioned and places that must be protected, if necessary by recourse to war. These lines indicate a militant defence of the right to religious freedom.

Self-defence: The term "self-defence" means just that and must not be stretched. The Qur’an (2:190) says, "And fight in the way of God against those who fight against you, but do not exaggerate. Verily, God does not love those who exaggerate." The typical example of this is the story of Moses and the Egyptian, as narrated in the Qur’ an (28 :1 5- 1 6). To defend an Israelite being beaten by an Egyptian, Moses killed the Egyptian. No doubt, the Israelite was a member of the oppressed people, one of those who were persecuted because of their religion and enslaved, while the Egyptian was one of the oppressors. The event could even have been described as a legitimate form of jihad. The Qur’an, however, does not support this opinion, and condemns Moses’ reaction as exaggerated. Moses himself asks forgiveness for his excess.

Means: Military jihad must be waged by a regular Muslim army against another army. Terrorist acts against civilian populations are not included in the definition of jihad.

Peaceful solution: When a former enemy is ready to stop hostilities and is looking for an opportunity for peace, Muslims must stop fighting and also look for a peaceful solution. The Qur’an (8:60-61) says: "if they incline towards peace, incline thou also towards it, and put thy trust in God."

This traditional understanding of jihad as warfare to defend the weak, using armies, and open to reaching an accord has been replaced by an aggressive, guerrilla-style warfare that rejects anything less than total victory and a total defeat of the one who is perceived as the enemy (whether non-Muslim or non-Islamist Muslim). The Islamist version of jihad includes and legitimises terrorism against civilian targets such as churches, synagogues, and cemeteries and even against elderly people, women, and babies. Not withstanding the clear Islamic prohibition on suicide, it also includes suicide operations. A recent fatwa by Mufti Farit Salman, deputy president of the Council of Muftis of the European States of Russia, eloquently condemned such behaviour in the aftermath of the sacking of Joseph’s Tomb, a Jewish shrine in Nablus:

"There are many fanatics in the Holy Land who with their intelligence swayed by Satan wrecked the tomb of the Man of Allah, Joseph, peace be upon him; wrecked the tomb of the man whom the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad (blessings and peace upon him), met and conversed with in his ascension to the throne of Allah; wrecked the tomb of one of the dear prophets whom the Holy Qur’an disclosed as a model of physical and spiritual splendour and of humility . . .How could Muslims do such a thing? No! Those who gave hand to destroy a sanctuary of ours are not of us!... Woe unto those who desecrate the name of names, who demolish tombs of the prophets, synagogues, churches, mosques!"

The origins of modern Islamism trace back to the beginnings of the Wahhabi movement in the early eighteenth century.

Wahhabism was a puritanical uprising based on reinterpreting written Qur’anic law without the enlightened support of expertise embodied in the Qur’an and the Hadiths, known as the Sunna. Wahhabis pay lip service to adherence to the Sunna, but in reality reshape it according to their ideology. Many prophetic sayings which constitute the immediate source of Sunna are rejected by means of captious arguments, as soon as they result in tenets incompatible with Wahhabism. When Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al Wahhab (the eponym of Wahhabism) started preaching, the mufti of Medina declared Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s belief a heresy and formally excommunicated him by issuing a fatwa, the text of which said:

"This man is leading the ignoramuses of the present age to a heretical path. He is trying to extinguish Allah’s light, but Allah will not permit His light to be extinguished, in spite of the opposition of polytheists, and will enlighten every place with the light of the followers of Sunna."

Sheikh Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, describes the rise and the development of Wahhabism as follows:

"The premise of this new, narrow ideology was to reject traditional scholars, scholarship, and practices under the guise of "reviving the true tenets of Islam" and protecting the concept of monotheism."

Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab encouraged a new interpretation of Islamic law and permitted his acolytes to apply it in light of their own understanding, regardless of their level of expertise in juridical matters. Whoever did not agree with this revolutionary approach he considered outside of the fold of Islam – an apostate, disbeliever, or idolater – and thus someone whose blood could be shed, whose women could be raped, and whose wealth could be confiscated.

The dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after World War I gave the Wahhabis an opportunity to impose their beliefs and their rule on Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula, which they did not lose. The Wahhabis first conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, transforming these two sanctuaries from centres for the transmission of the Sunni heritage into places for propagating a primitive and literalist cult to Muslims coming from every part of the world. Second, the Wahhabis set up the Saudi state.

Third, expansionist Wahhabism, like other forms of totalitarian ideology, seeks not just to take possession of the whole Muslim world by replacing Sunni Islam with the so-called Salafi school but even to expand its influence beyond it. Dogmatic uniformity has since then begun to suffocate the humane and enlightened Islamic tradition. Since the 1950s, the Muslim Brethren (al-lkhwan al-Muslimun), an organisation founded in Egypt in 1929, has been the main instrument for propagating Wahhabi influence internationally.

After Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in the mid-1950s, the Saudis needed allies against his secular revolutionary policies. So the Saudi leaders supplied financial support to the Brethren. From then on, the vast majority of Muslim Brethren adopted Wahhabi doctrines.

The governments of some Muslim countries, knowing that human and civil rights, democracy, and equality between men and women could represent the end of their power, support Islamism. They work against peace between Israel and its neighbours, fearing that a pacified Middle East could create serious problems for autocratic and feudal systems. Not surprisingly, the Palestinian Hamas is one of the important Muslim Brethren-controlled organisations in the Middle East.

These problems are not limited to the Muslim world but are now also found in the West. Local branches of the radical organisations that promote terrorism in the Middle East are taking root in Western countries. They represent not more that 10 percent of the total Muslim population in those countries but they control the main Muslim organisations and most of the mosques in western Europe and North America. They are a worldwide, organised network, using acronyms, but always ensuring that the Muslim Brethren is the inner circle behind the scenes. They claim to represent all Muslims and get a respectful reception from non-Muslims, who know no better.

This situation has many causes, but the principal one is that while traditional Islam is multifaceted and spontaneous, Islamism is forwarded by a worldwide network of activists funded by the Saudi and some other Gulf governments. Those looking for ways to prevent Muslim minorities in Europe and North America from turning to Islamism find that the Gulf countries represent the main obstacles. Ironically, then, the structure of the Muslim Brethren is supported, in other words, mainly by those countries that are regarded as friends of the West. Muslim Brethren are often appointed as imams of important mosques, especially in democratic countries where there is no ministry of religious affairs to check their orientation, and where imams with the expected permission to teach (ijaza shar’i) are the exception.

The West is both loved and feared by Islamists. They cannot hope to defeat it militarily so instead they aim to influence it from within. In part, this means that Islamists divide their work between militants and more moderate-sounding types. Militants execrate the US government and call for its destruction, while the more moderate Islamists are honoured guests at the White House.

The danger is that radical groups could become the official representatives of Muslim immigrants in the West. Let us review the situation in the United States.

Sheikh Kabbani, of the Islamic Supreme Council of America and a disciple of Nazim ‘Adil al-Qubrusi, declared at the US State Department:

"We would like to advise our government, our congressmen, that there is something big going on and people do not understand it. You have many mosques around the United States.... So the most dangerous things are going on in these mosques that have self appointed leaders throughout the United States. The extremist ideology makes them very active.

"We can say that they took over 80 percent of the mosques in the United States….This means that the ideology of extremism has been spread to 80 percent of the Muslim population, mostly the youth and the new generation."

Sheikh Kabbani is trying to show Westerners the reality behind the deceptive facade. The great majority of all mosques in democratic countries–not only in North America, but in most of western Europe as well–are controlled by extremists.

Looking at two organisations in specific, the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim Brethren front organisation in the United States that lobbies against journalists and scholars who dare to write anything about Islam at variance with the Brethren’s Islamist agenda, such as advocating diversity in Islam. Notwithstanding CAIR’s evident connection to Hamas, it is accepted by the US government as a legitimate representative of the Muslim American community. Likewise, the American Muslim Council (AMC) is another branch of the Muslim Brethren. According to Khalid Duran, "The AMC’s most remarkable feat was to obtain the monopoly on the training of Muslim chaplains for the US Army (which is like Teheran entrusting the training of its Revolutionary Guards to the US Institute of Peace)." Thus, while non-Islamist Islamic organisations like the Association for Islamic Charitable Projects are more or less ignored by the US government, Muslim American soldiers receive spiritual assistance from Islamist chaplains.

The best means to limit the influence of Islamist factions is by supporting the teachings of traditional, moderate Islam.

In the former Soviet republics the muftis are starting to understand that Wahhabi infiltrations threaten to change the face of their society; they seem to be willing to join forces in a common project of prevention. The president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, has recently founded a new Islamic University in Tashkent which has among its main goals the education of moderate imams specially trained to refute Wahhabism and to promote dialogue between Muslims and other monotheists. In September 2000, the mufti of Russia, Sheikh Ravil Gainutdin, in cooperation with the muftis of Chechnya, Daghestan, Ingushetia, Bashkiria, and Siberia, established in Kazan the first Islamic university in Russia; the goal of this university is also to fight extremist influences coming from abroad. This can be understood as a sign that the diffusion of Wahhabism is no longer understood by Sunnis as ineluctable, and that the followers of traditional Islam are starting to realize how such a global menace necessarily calls for a coordinated self-defence.

Non-Muslims also have a role to play. They must overcome their tendency to assume that real Islam is the one propagandized by the Wahhabis and their Islamist network. They need to understand that Islamism is a menace not just for Muslims but for all humans. They should increase their dialogue and work with those traditional Muslims who join them in seeing radicalism as a disease, and who have ideas for an appropriate therapy to heal those afflicted by it.

Why do you think that following a book is what makes someone a muslim? Catholics see the bible as important only because the church says it is, and the church as possessing a teaching authority that is higher than any book. Likewise, a sunni sees the koran as important because his tradition says it is ("sunni" means "tradition" or "precedent"), and sees his tradition as higher than any book. Catholics see the "magisterium" or teaching authority as able to overrule outdated or barbaric portions of the bible (e.g. the law codes of Leviticus), and sunnis see tradition, consensus, and precedent as able to overrule outdated practices from the koran or early islam. They have an explicit principle that later rulings outweigh earlier ones, not the other way around.

Nowhere is it written that only Bob Jones literalists are "really" christians, and nowhere is it written that only literalist muslims are muslims. And even if it were written somewhere, it still wouldn't be true, because truth is not something that exists in moldy books, but out in the real world of living, breathing human beings.

When someone ransacks an ancient book for all the instances of injustice and oppression he can find in it, to justify his own present day injustices and oppressions, you can be sure you are in the presence, not even a sincere but misguided literalist, but of an evil hypocrite speciously cloaking himself in outdated practices, the better to deceive some number of people who would otherwise oppose him.

When someone looks around the world for followers of the devil so he can kill them with a supposedly good conscience, instead of looking within himself for temptations to evil-doing in order to resist those temptations, you can be sure you are in the presence of someone who believes, not in the devil, but in murder.

When someone asks not whether his own deeds could be defended before a just God, but whether somebody else's opinions are supposedly approved by his own ideas about God, you can be sure you are not in the presence of someone who believes in a just God, but of a hypocrite who wishes he were omnipotent, and wants to persecute anyone who disagrees with him.

When you see someone who practices "do unto other as you would have them do unto you" i.e. good, however he understands where that saying came from and its importance, you know he can see morality itself. Whenever you see someone who instead practices "do (evil) unto others before they do (evil) unto you", you know he sees only violence, political scheming, power games.

Islam is a matter of millions of men over whole continents for centuries. In practice, there is no way it is going to fit into a soundbite. There is no way it can be reduced to one book. It is a human thing, with the faults of men in abundance. Also with the occasional understanding of some men, the occasional justice of others, etc.

Twenty five years ago, where were the determined anti-US, anti-western aspects of Islam? The PLO was terrorist certainly - and backed by the Soviets. Syria and Iraq were already armed clients of - Russia. If the supposed essence of islam makes it impossible for any of them ever to get along with us, then how come so many of them once did? As long as they hadn't picked communism, that is.

I found the article one of the most encouraging things I've read it the past year. It shows to me that some get it, see the civilizational danger we are all in, and the importance of heading off the catastrophe in the right way. If you like, call it divide and conquer. It you like, call it appealing to the better angels of their nature. But in the end, we will wind up sharing the earth with a large number of believers in this religion. Call it a heresy, as Belloc did, if you like. Call it a false religion - almost all of them are, everyone agrees (a few say all, that is the only dispute on the point). Which will be a lot easier if they learn to live with it, within their existing traditions instead of without them.

Which, incidentally, does not mean one can't preach to them to convert them further, if you think it'd help. Giving up completely on a sixth of the human race is not allowed by any doctrine, except a faithless cynicism.

Jason, I would love to join you, the Sheik, and GKC, the great RC Paradoxalist who wrote a book called "Faith is Nonsense," in furthering this proposed, and indeed ambitious miracle in establishing an open Islam. I look forward to attending an ecumenical breakfast service at the Parish of the Little Flower of the Desert in downtown Mecca very soon.

But first a dash of ice water in the face: Islam teaches that to lie to infidels to further the faith is OK. In fact, in Islam lying to infidels is a good thing. An untruth is the truth.

It is splendid that the Sheik should publish his views at all, but why in an Australian Jewish Community publication? Why not put it on TV in Riyadh, or Teheran, or Cairo? Publish a series of articles in the Amman News. To place his choice of venues in context, I suggest you research other Aussie media. The Muslim community in Australia has been behaving very badly lately, with gang rapes, etc. Maybe that's why our Sheik (Palazzi? I'm suspicious already) is publishing in Australia!

I am bored with Muslims giving us a blinding glimpse of the obvious. Western Logic tells us what we need to know about Muslims, with whom we have dealt for 14 centuries.
Allow me Jason, to suggest a bit of Western technique: the Pareto Paradigm, or the 80/20 rule, which seems to be passably accurate in describing all human interaction.
E.G., 20% of your customers give you 80% of your business. 20% of Muslims are giving us 80% of the problem. Most humans are somewhat peaceable. Muslims ARE human. Therefore most Muslims are peaceable

How many are potential terrorists? Apply the Paradigm, dude. Out of the 20% who are potentially troublesome, 80% will never do anything, except maybe put money in the basket.

That leaves a mere 20% of the 20% who MAY have the potential to strap on the dynamite, pick up the AK, and go on active Jihad. That's 4% of all Muslims, or .04 X 1.5 Billion People.
So, all we (and apparently Sheik Palazzi) have to do is keep surveillance on those 60 Million Muslims, and their supporters, world wide. Piece of Cake.

Jason, Western Logic tells us that we should be prepared to deal with 60 Million terrorists in the available pool, with 300 Million more who are supporting the effort, some more, some less. Assume the other 80% of Islam, let's call it "Peaceable Islam," does nothing. Hey, they're human, maybe their just as terrified of terrorists as we of the Christian West. (Somehow I doubt it, religiously bigotted dog that I am.)

It makes no sense to allow any Muslim into the country, because despite what they say, we have no way of knowing what's on their minds. We have no way of knowing what side of the Paradigm they are on. Are we therefore, going to be excluding some wonderful people, who would make excellent, Allah-fearing US citizens and be worthwhile contributors to this great land? You bet, Pal. Not a Christian's job to sort good Islam from bad Islam. We could do it, but no Muslim would like the results. There wouldn't be a whole hell of a lot of them left to complain, either.

Islam is a militaristic movement without a Renaissance, without an Enlightenment, Without an Age of Reason, without a Reformation, without a Counter Reformation, with no art, no music, no literature, and no science. Oh yes, they flowered briefly on the spoils of the Byzantine, Roman and Persian Empires, but look where it took them. This is a civilization in the saddle that has been at war with the Christian West for 14 centuries.

What Sheik Palazzi really wants is a corps of "Good Muslims" living in the West. These "Good Muslims" will then presumably lead their benighted brothers toward a new, improved, reformed, sanitized Islam that draws on what he calls the "real beliefs of Islam."

Hold that thought, Sheik. I say Islam needs another 1,000 years in the desert before it is ready for life in open societies based on the Christian Civilization of the West.

You guys all apparently got the same memo, and don't seem to realize how hackneyed it all gets.

On lying, the same was said by Protestants of Cardinal Newman. Somehow it has not foreclosed absolutely all dialogue, and papists are not routinely executed in England.

Riyadh is the capital of Wahhabism, and the man is of course saying they are the problem. It is like asking why Barry Goldwater didn't run for election in Moscow instead of the US. As for Iran, the students are revolting as usual. Some of them are declaring openly, in Teheran, that their so-called leaders are trying to force Stalinism upon them in the name of Islam. As for Cairo, there is greater diversity of opinion there, with some managing to say the same sort of thing as this fellow does, others wanting to kill them for it, the government throwing many of the latter in jail, but also tolerating a lot of their hateful crap on the air, etc.

Yes, most muslims are peaceable because they are human. And if those peaceable people have their hands on governments, then a lot of the unpeaceable ones can rot in jail. That is of course the whole idea. If you haven't noticed, the supposed furiously brave diehards as a general rule run away from policemen with sticks from Cairo to Karachi. That "20% of muslims give us 80% of the problem" I quite agree with; it is an accurate depiction of the scale of the problem, in terms of the number of fellow travelers or the degree of support for islamist opinion. I propose we get a little help from the other 4/5ths against them, which to me is the plainest common sense.

As for the number out of that pool of fellow travelers willing to fight, it is decidely smaller than your 4%. Perhaps under favorable conditions, openly supported by governments, equipped and organized and officered and trained, by own popular caliphate from Morroco to Timor. But they have nothing like those conditions. Indeed, we see millions in arms only where tyrannies require it of them at the barrel of a gun, and they surrender or run at the drop of a hat because their hearts are not in the quarrel.

We see committed cadres in the tens of thousands only where great rewards are offered by state organizations; they are serving not out of ideological belief but for worldly advancement. We see only a score at a time willing to die for their cause on their own initiative, and perhaps hundreds assisting them but rather more eager for self-preservation. On 9-11, they could not recruit 19 hijackers from among the 3 million domestic Muslims but had to bring them in from abroad. Since then, in over a year of hype and supposed burning eagerness for similar attacks, less than a dozen men have followed Bin Laden's orders in direct attacks in the US. Our openness to scores of terrorist tactics is extreme, as I doubt I need to relate publicly (why give them ideas?) They are not being exploited more often because there aren't men to exploit them. Only in Israel have larger numbers been involved in direct terrorist actions, a situation that predates Bin Laden's edicts and recent successes.

As for not knowing what is on someone's mind, I have no way of knowing what is in yours either, also regardless of what you say. I consider the stated maxims of many around me barely superior to those of the Ladenists; they generally defer to their state organization, which is more inclined to listen to me than to them, is the most I can say to differentiate some here from our enemies. Of course it is our job to sort good islam from bad islam, and of course if done with even a smidgen of justice many muslims will like the result. It is also our duty to sort a proper method of waging the war from improper ones.

As for islam being a militaristic movement, it is not half as militaristic as I am myself. I wonder at those who demand pacifism as a moral credential, who have only to look around them to see that pacifism is a moral failing, often a whitewash of cowardice and sometimes of treason. Quakers don't believe in war, but I do, and so does the US government, and even the catholic church come to that. As for being without a reformation or an enlightenment, they had one but turned their backs on it. Their enlightenment did not go far enough; neither did ours until quite recently, and only in portions of the west.

What reformation am I talking about? I am talking about the reform movements in islamic theology associated with the move of the caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad, and the shift from the Omayyad to the Abassid dynasty. They addressed free will, the problem of evil, government being under the law. They went to school with christian theologians of the east, learning from hellenism and the Alexandrians. They incorporated Persia and learned from it and points east as well. A score of islamic schools of thought differentiated themselves from one another. Some of the enlighteners went overboard themselves, persecuting for more reasonable doctrines where they should have tolerated, and course corrections followed.

It was later that the slide into literalism began. It is not something that has been there unchallenged from the begining. The Wahhabis date from the 18th century, and refer back to Ibn Tayymia, who was an opposition figure toward the end of their high middle ages. The whole spectrum of muslim opinion from the qadarites and mutazilites of the early Abassids, to al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun in their late middle ages, we could live with as a civilization, let alone the possible modern developments off of that relatively reasonable base. We don't need to smuggle in western thought anew, in other words, since they only rose as high as they did once by digesting large portions of earlier western thought. The needed hellenist and christian theological foundations are already there, in their own past.

As for being at war "for 14 centuries", the west has been at war with itself at least as long. War, you see, is a normal and endemic thing. To say something has been at war for 14 centuries is merely to say it has been around for 14 centuries, because you cannot find a century without war anywhere in recorded history. Islam has had periods of unity and of fragmentation, and the present is clearly one of the latter. It has had periods of military ascendency over the west, and periods of military backwardness, and the present is clearly one of the latter. The relative power of the muslim world today is vastly less than it was 300 years ago. We survived far worse, and will again.

The writer of the article, far from wanting lots of good muslims living in the west, wants good muslims ruling in the east, throughout the majority muslim lands of historical islam. And so do I. There is no reason whatever to oppose a word of what he has said, and every reason to wish him success. His enemies within islam are our enemies within islam. His doctrines about islam are the ones we will seek to empower from Baghdad to Kabul. You cannot rule people by ignoring the reform of their doctrines, you know. And we have no choice but to rule a lot of muslims, directly or indirectly, for the intermediate future.

Indeed, what I detect throughout your comments is a certain defeatist lack of ambition, as though we weren't about to reorder the governments of half the lands of islam, but instead were in some isolated castle under seige, barely able to keep out our most determined enemies. Quite the reverse is the case. They can't keep us out of downtown Kabul.

They can't even keep most of their people from preferring our presence in downtown Kabul, to that of their own hardliners - not that we leave it up to them, incidentally. I am getting on with the difficult but necessary business of running a successful imperial occupation, and figuring out its intellectual groundwork beforehand, while you seem to think we've already lost. Hatred of our own conquered subjects gets us precisely nowhere.

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