Via Andrew, I saw this Reuel Marc Gerecht critique of Barack Obama's vision for fighting Islamic terrorism. This part struck me as very wise -- and worrying:
To the senator's credit, he sees that Iraq and al Qaeda do not define Muslims and Islam. What he does not seem to grasp--and the Bush administration is no better--is that America is the cutting edge of a modernity that has convulsed Islam as a faith and a civilization. This collision will likely become more violent, not less, as Muslims more completely enter the ethical free fall that comes as modernity pulverizes the world of our ancestors. Barack Obama's newly devised "Mobile Development Teams," which will bring together "personnel from the State Department, the Pentagon, and USAID . . . to turn the tide against extremism" are unlikely to make America more attractive to devout Muslims who know that America is the leading force in destroying the world that they love. The senator can leave Iraq, shut down Guantánamo, apologize for Abu Ghraib, and build "secular" schools all over Pakistan, and he will not change this fact. This is the deep well from which al Qaeda draws.
This is precisely correct, in my understanding, and why nobody on the left or the right has so far come up with an effective way to counter Islamic extremism. I've written before about how Sayyid Qutb was right about the West: we really are a radical danger to all traditional Muslims hold dear. It's not that we want to overthrow Islam. It's just that that's what modernity in all its forms -- economic, informational, etc. -- does. The radical Muslims are exactly right to see us as a threat to their way of life -- and we are idiots to think that all people around the world want exactly what we do.
I wish I knew how this country could better deal with the problem of Islamic extremism, but the longer this thing goes on, the more it seems to me that it's something that simply has to be endured until Islam makes the messy transition to modernity. I'm not saying that we have to cease resisting it. By no means! What I am saying is that as we devise strategies to keep ourselves safe from the convulsions of the Muslim world, we should understand that the violent Muslim response to modernity, and hatred of America as the chief exponent of modernity, should be grappled with as a not unreasonable response to the threat modernity poses to traditional Islamic civilization. Roger Scruton was saying this five years ago, but nobody seems quite to have grasped the point.
In the end, the Islamic traditionalists will lose. But nobody knows when that day will come, and how many people they will take down with them fighting a vain resistance. The wiser Muslims will try to reach some accomodation with modernity, and try to carve out a space to live a traditional Islamic life within the modern world, like traditionalists of all religions. In the meantime, it'd do us some good to quit thinking that the Islamic world would really love us if only they knew more about us. It ain't necessarily so.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
Also, you write:
"It seems to me that the entire world is in the grips of tectonic changes that we can scarcely grasp, much less predict. It's driven by economic changes, and technological. Not all societies are going to develop along American lines; there will be local variations. But those societies that want to progress materially will have no choice but to abandon their traditions to a certain extent."
My position is that a large share of Muslims are not going to get themselves involved in these changes. Many Islamic countries have no desire to be integrated into the global economy; all they see in globalization is foreign domination. Not all Muslim countries are like that, to be sure. But Iraq has practically committed national suicide in the past few years for the sake of avoiding American domination. Iran would do about anything for the sake of resisting those changes as well. And seeing these holdouts has made the pro-globalization faction in America nervous; it wants to squash all resistance now, so there’s no alternative model to serve as an example to other countries that might want to resist globalization.
Economic change does not just happen as the globalist crowd would have us believe; it is always governed by purposeful human action of some sort. Americans are conditioned to assume that economic values will always win out. We believe we would never resist the temptation of prosperity for the sake of defending any non-economic value, even though at some point we probably would defend other values.
But as I see it, Muslims are in the midst of a long war precisely to defend their tradition against changes that would destroy them. Their resistance to American domination of Iraq is inseparable from resistance to modernity. I don't see how people can continue to argue, "No one will ever spurn modernity (in the broadest sense)," when we see it happening right before our eyes in Iraq.
With respect to your comments about the mass media, I would like to think there’s some society that would decide the changes brought about by that kind of “openness” to the Western world were unacceptable. Some society, someday, must say no. It might try to be open for a while, but find that the effects of its openness were mostly negative, and ultimately reverse its decision. I may be wrong: it may be that not even a Muslim society will ever do such a thing. In that case, the world’s last bastion of militant antimodernism will be gone, and liberalism will be unstoppable.
And setting aside any moral questions, would you, in the position of an Islamic leader, decide that education of women is a good thing? I wouldn't. I’d think that my country must not go down the slippery slope you have correctly described, leading toward women in the workforce, seeing what looks like the impending demise of Western cultures that have taken that path. As much as they may admit their societies are not as successful as they wished, Muslim leaders must think that their hated rivals from the West are on their last legs. Why risk change when one’s culture is already prepared to inherit the earth by the mere facts of demographics?
My point is that if Muslims saw where they could stop on the road to modernity, they might not be so reluctant to take their first steps in that direction. However, they see no end to the modernizing process. They see the adoption of even the most trivial liberal and capitalist elements as a grave threat to their civilization, a cancer that can grow over time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the UN (or perhaps it was UNESCO) recently complete a study on why Muslim countries, particularly in the Middle East, were falling so far behind, with the conclusion that it was the lack of availability of education for women that was the main problem? I believe this study was published in the last couple of years.
Alicia, you've hit on an intriguing paradox. From the standpoint of economic development, fertility can be way too high, and education for women would probably help to lower it. But the way things are going right now, it seems that the countries that have babies are going to outlast and even conquer the ones that don't, even if they remain far more backward economically. We're so used to assuming that the countries with the best technology are invulnerable, but right now it looks like they're being successfully invaded by people who are way behind. So from the standpoint of survival as a culture, it's better to have a fertility rate that's too high than too low. And survival as Muslims is what the Muslims care about more than anything, I'd argue.
Thanks, John. On a personal level, I've seen up close the damage done to human character when talents and abilities aren't developed, especially if that person remains in a state of childlike dependency. Believe me when I say it's not pretty.
I don't think falling birthrates are necessarily a bad thing either, as long as those are a result of free choices, and not state coercion (like in China). However, there is something very basic about affirming one's love of life by having children.
Societies such as Russia, where both life expectancy and birthrates have fallen so dramatically, seem to be in an almost irreversible slide into despair. Iran, which Rod mentioned above, may be another example of despair leading to falling birthrates (and the highest heroin addiction rate in the world). Maybe it is simple, maybe people have more children when they feel more hope about the future.
John Savage says "As you've said many times, most of us go to church on Sunday and then we live like terrible sinners the rest of the week." Maybe if we took to violence like the Muslims and had a religion which said it was ok to kill people we could equalize ourselves with the antimoderns. Maybe they'd even back off on killing us so much who knows?
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.