We should learn from Islam’s advance
David Selbourne surveys the West’s setbacks in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan and warns that we are underestimating the coherence of the war against the infidel With the US heading towards a painful defeat in Iraq, the Taleban reconstituted, Iran proceeding on its nuclear path, the ‘democratisation’ of Islamic states a nohoper, and the liberties taken by Muslims of the diaspora on the increase, Islam nevertheless continues to be misperceived.
In this battle of arms, ideals and ideas, Islam is sustained by faith in its own divinely inspired righteousness and truth. However, non-Muslims are not up against a ‘religion’ narrowly understood but a thisworldly political cause; even the wearing of the veil in the Muslim diaspora is a political gesture. Indeed, Islam’s ambition enjoined throughout the Koran — is to establish its political and ethical dominion over the globe. In this respect, as in others, it has much in common with Marxism.
The latter taught that capitalism and the ‘class state’ would be overthrown by means of the ‘class struggle’ in socialism’s name, under whose auspices a moral Golden Age would dawn. Islam similarly teaches that by means of jihad — also ‘struggle’ — the world of the ‘infidel’, including the world of Western civil society, can be brought down by a variety of means both violent and pacific, and Islam will reign in its stead, to the benefit of humanity as a whole. Moreover, it teaches this lesson to Muslim ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ alike. Osama bin Laden, in the light of the Koranic canon, is as good a Muslim as any and better than most.
As was the case with Marxists and the communist movement, Islam has its sects and sub-sects, its bloody internecine conflicts, and its variant notions as to the ‘correct’ path to be taken in its ‘struggle’. Yet the over-arching purpose of the ummah, or world community of Muslims, is no more in doubt for its adherents than was the ultimate ‘victory of socialism’ for communists, whatever their sectarian divisions. In communism’s case, the object was to create a ‘classless’ society purged of the ‘bourgeoisie’; in Islam’s, it is to vanquish the kufr and purge the world of his unclean works. Moreover, Islam’s promise is to redeem the humble of the earth from thraldom; communism’s was to free the ‘workers of the world’ from ‘wage-slavery’ and other forms of oppression. In this respect, Islam is the socialism of our times, a main source of its appeal to the ‘Left’.
However, there is one large difference between them. Islam, unlike the communist system, cannot ‘collapse’. On the contrary, credit should be paid to it, even if unwillingly, for the speed of its progress during the decades of its revival and advance. The intransigence, tenacity, courage and cunning of Muslims have, thus far, run rings around their leaden-footed and small-brained opponents in this manysided combat. US, Nato and Israeli forces, despite their superior firepower, have been unable to vanquish their Muslim opponents; the Russians in Chechnya likewise.
Where the challenge posed by the Muslim presence is principally demographic and cultural, the reconciliation of opposed value systems has also proved difficult or impossible to achieve. This is in large part due to the fact that in the last few years, and on all the home fronts of the non-Muslim world, a great network of mosques, madrassas and preachers most of them, despite sectarian differences, singing from the same hymn-sheet (so to speak) — has been installed in the service of Islam’s political advance.
Simultaneously, the problems posed to the world by the Islamic resurgence have come to dominate the news, day in and day out. This itself represents a great victory for the Islamic cause. Indeed, the Western media have done much of Islam’s propaganda work for it, and in double-quick time. Furthermore, this has been achieved despite the recoil created in Western hearts and minds by the crueller features of Muslim and Arab methods of warfare: the hostage-taking, the decapitations of innocents, the suicide-bombings in places of civilian resort and the rest.
But Islam’s swift progress is easily explained. For the West — but not China or India — is as politically and ideologically weak as the world of Islam is strong. The West is handicapped by many factors: its over-benign liberalism, the lost moral status of the Christian faith, the vacillations of judiciaries and the incoherence of their judgments, political and military hesitations over strategy and tactics, poor intelligence (in both senses), and the complicities of the ‘Left’.
All of these have been skilfully exploited. Moreover, despite differences in the Muslim world over how the revived jihad against the ‘infidel’ should be pursued, Islam’s strengths have grown in the last few decades. Our illusions about the minoritarian nature of the jihadist ethic can therefore no longer be afforded. Or, as Sheikh Saleh bin Humaid — not the embodiment of Enlightenment reason expressed it during a sermon in Mecca’s Grand Mosque last week to mark the feast of Eid, Islam has ‘spread beyond all borders and obstacles’. He was right; and no Catholic prelate or Anglican bishop can now say the same of the progress of his own faith.
In addition, most Western governments appear to have forgotten simple political truths which the Islamic challenge should have reinforced. Among these truths is that the principles of the free society require toleration of the tolerant, but demand that intolerance be shown towards those who not only reject such free society’s values but look forward to the day when they are brought down. If civil society is to be upheld and protected from pluralist dissolution, the obligations of the citizen, whether indigenous or incomer, must also be accorded parity of status with claims of rights and be enforced, in the interests of all.
Whether it is now too late to remedy the situation (before varieties of neofascism take greater hold of the Western body politic) is an open question. But it is certainly time to recognise, salute and learn from the political and moral strengths of Islam, which has been a force in the world for more than a thousand years longer than has the United States. And without regard to party, liberal democracies must repair their internal defences so that the lives of such societies may be prolonged.
For it is clear that, despite the calls of the American hard Right to turn Muslim cities into ‘parking lots’ or to ‘glass’, this war will primarily have to be fought politically, with more brain than brawn, against what is now the world’s most powerful, and advancing, ideological movement.
David Selbourne’s The Losing Battle with Islam was published in the United States in November 2005.
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