An Arab Moment of Truth
Which way the Islamist fantasy?

By David Pryce-Jones
From the October 15, 2001, issue of National Review

For the past half century and more, the Muslim world has been free and independent, with every opportunity to organize as it wishes. And this is the heart of the issue: The Muslim world is a political and social disaster for all to see. With the arguable exception of Turkey, it consists of a series of despotisms, each with an absolute ruler whose ultimate justification is his strength and will. A family or a clique gathers around the ruler under the protection of the state apparatus of secret police and military repression. To the powerful, the spoils; to the weak, submission. No rights, no freedom of expression, no loyal opposition, no rule of law, no redress except through violence, conspiracy, a coup, and ultimate civil war.

Whose fault is this? The huge majority of Muslims understand that they are responsible for themselves. They know what they have to put up with. Describing the daily corruption and injustices of despotism, they ask the aching question, "What can we do?" Muhammad Haikal was once the spokesman of Gamal Abdul Nasser, the ruler who set Egypt back for decades. Haikal was no friend of the West either, but he could write: "The Arab and Muslim world is completely naked. [None of us] can claim any more that he is independent. We have proved we are not modern. We have proved that we are not religious in the real sense of the word. We have proved that we cannot afford democracy." Today Ahmad Bishara, a prominent Kuwaiti, says that Arabs and Muslims "should engage in deep soul-searching" about their institutions and culture.

To write like that requires protection at the highest level, as well as personal courage. There are such men, and women too. It is a moving experience to sit in rooms and cafés in Cairo or Beirut, and even Gaza and Ramallah, and listen to their clear and rational analyses of the faults of their society. They are the equivalent of Soviet dissidents in the old days, and if there is hope for the Muslim and Arab world, it lies in their example. Like Soviet dissidents, they are only saying what almost everyone knows to be the truth. For most Muslims have answered the existential question for themselves the way the populations under Soviet rule did: They want what those in the Free World have.

Muslims by the millions already live in the West, wherever they can find refuge and opportunity. This in itself defies the doctrine of Islam, whereby Muslims are prohibited from living among unbelievers. Muslim publications abroad make it clear that integration is under way, bringing with it problems — all soluble — concerning dating of non-Muslims, rejection of arranged marriages, correct manners in a multicultural society. The news reaching home countries confirms that life in the West is good. With the news comes money for medicine and education. Jamia'at Ulema-e-Islam is one of the most extreme Islamic movements in Pakistan, and its leader — a ferocious old man with a white beard — is currently summoning the faithful onto the streets to overthrow the government of President Musharraf and launch a holy war. But two of his sons are studying in the United States. He says that they will be better able to understand their enemy. This humbug reveals the inner ambiguity common to his kind. He knows, and we know, that he is supplying them with a brighter future, as any father would.

In the first months of 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran. He was a Muslim equivalent of Lenin. He gave a quite different answer to the existential question of Muslim identity. Muslim society was a failure, he concurred with secular critics like Haikal, and one cause of this was the people's abandonment of their faith. Islam had made its believers great and powerful in centuries past, and it would do so again. But there was another overriding cause of the general backsliding. Over the long term, Khomeini held, the West had had the cunning and deliberate intention of destroying Islam. Why the West would have such a wanton and malign ambition he did not explain. But he crystallized a mindset with revolutionary implications: Muslims were not responsible for their plight, it was all the fault of the West, to be rectified by war.

So mosques in Iran, and then elsewhere, began to resound with cries that America was the Great Satan, and crowds burned the Stars and Stripes. The emotional logic hardened into a series of syllogisms: Islam is righteous; America is imperialist; therefore unrighteous America is uprooting Islam. Or again: Good Muslims must kill Jews; America helps Jews; therefore America is killing good Muslims. Yet again: America is arrogant; Muslims are proud; therefore suicide bombers are giving America what she deserves.

A fantasy is loose in the world, the fantasy of an Islamic supremacy destined deservedly to triumph everywhere. Like Communism before it, this Islamic fantasy aims to impose its vision on others — and call it peace. In an unexpected form, here is another totalitarian movement with the usual murderous belief that the ends justify the means. Latching on to local or regional issues everywhere, Islamic supremacy has been developing its cause: condemning Salman Rushdie to death for supposed apostasy; holding Americans hostage in Teheran; killing Marines in Beirut; sponsoring suicide bombers; threatening pro-Western rulers in Muslim countries with assassination and civil war; preparing for the genocide of Jews in Israel. The false syllogisms of the Islamist mindset have hardened into axioms supporting one outrage after another. As in the old Soviet Union, everything political becomes a metaphor for war and apocalypse. If there is no room for Muslims, the extremists declare with passion, then there is no room for anybody else either. This failure of intellect could hardly be more complete.

Except for one thing: The Left throughout the West picks it up and fans it. Demonstrations against President Bush and his response to the suicide attacks have occurred in most major cities of Europe. In the media, even in the United States, people have jumped forward to blame the suicide attacks on America and its policies, rather than on the actual terrorist perpetrators. Here comes Susan Sontag, for example, to sneer that this attack on "the world's self-proclaimed superpower" was as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions." Barbara Foley of Rutgers University believes that America's "fascist foreign policy" over many decades is to blame for the attack. Harold Pinter, playwright of the absurd, writes to the press to say that it is President Bush who is fanning the flames of intolerance.

The Taliban exemplify the Islamist fantasy. They are tribalists of a medieval brutality. They forbid women to have an education or a job, and bury a woman suspected of adultery up to her shoulders before stoning her to death. They kill suspected homosexuals by collapsing walls onto them. They have driven millions of desperate fellow Afghans into exile, and leave the remainder to face destitution and starvation. Their honored accomplice is Osama bin Laden, who for the last ten years or so has been telling everyone who can listen that the United States is the source of all wickedness and he intends to destroy it.

The Left blamed the United States for the Cold War and the division of Europe, and for unrest in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. Whatever happened, the Soviet Union was innocent and peace-loving. This same Left — in the Sontags and Pinters, these same people — follows an unbroken line in its attitude towards extremists in the Arab and Muslim world. Happy to leave millions at the mercy of Communism, they are happy to leave millions at the mercy of Islamist terror, so lining themselves up as ever on the side of oppression and lies. Their intellectual failure probably does not matter much here, where long exposure has shown that their opinions have foundations in psychopathology rather than reality. But it plays well in extremist circles, where assorted fanatics can now say, Look, the West is wicked, their intellectuals tell us so.

In the event of liberation from the general Islamist fantasy and the suicide bombers in particular, most of the Muslim world will feel a grateful relief that can only surprise and shock the Left as much as the joy of those liberated from Communism did. Should America fail to rescue them for whatever reason, though, Muslims will know that the Islamist fantasy is coming true, and they will have to endure it for a very long time to come.