The Crisis of Islam

From The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis

Page 136

Most Muslims are not fundamentalists, and most fundamentalists are not terrorists, but most present-day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such. Understandably, Muslims complain when the media speak of terrorist movements and actions as "Islamic" and ask why the media do not similarly identify Irish and Basque terrorists and terrorism as "Christian." The answer is simple and obvious ---- they do not describe themselves as such. The Muslim complaint is understandable, but it should be addressed to those who make the news, not to those who report it. Usama bin Laden and his Al-Qa'ida followers may not represent Islam, and many of their statements and their actions directly contradict basic Islamic principles and teachings, but they do arise from within Muslim civilization, just as Hitler and the Nazis arose from within Christendom, and they too must be seen in their own cultural, religious, and historical context.

Page 139

A revealing example of such deviation was the famous fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989, against the novelist Salman Rushdie because of his novel entitled The Satanic Verses. In the fatwa, the Ayatollah informed "all the zealous Muslims of the world that the blood of the author of this book..... which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur'an, as also of those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, is hereby declared forfeit. I call on all zealous Muslims to dispatch them quickly, wherever they may be found, so that no one will dare to insult Islamic sanctities again. Anyone who is himself killed in this path will be deemed a martyr." To supplement and anticipate the rewards of paradise, an Islamic charitable trust in Tehran offered a bounty to anyone who killed Salmon Rushdie consisting of 20 million tumans (at that time about $3 million at the official rate, about $170,000 at the open-market rate) for an Iranian, or $1 million for a foreigner. Some years later the bounty, still unclaimed, was increased by the trust.

Not surprisingly, many uninformed readers in the Western world got the impression that "to issue a fatwa" was the Islamic equivalent of "to put out a contract" ---- i.e., to target a victim and offer a monetary reward for murdering him. Like madrasa, the word fatwa has acquired, in common international usage, a wholly negative connotation. This is in fact a monstrous absurdity. Fatwa is a technical term in Islamic jurisprudence for a legal opinion or ruling on a point of law. It is the shari'a equivalent of the responsa prudentium of Roman law. In using a fatwa to pronounce a death sentence and recruit an assassin, the ayatollah was deviating very considerably from standard Islamic practice.

Obstacles to democracy

The following are excerpts from the best selling book, The End of History and the Last Man, by Francis Fukuyama.

Page 212

The founding of a liberal democracy is meant to be a supremely rational political act, in which the community as a whole deliberates on the nature of the constitution and set of basic laws that will govern its public life. But one is frequently struck by the weakness of both reason and politics to achieve their ends, and for human beings to "lose control" of their lives, not just on a personal but on a political level. For example, many countries in Latin America were established as liberal democracies shortly after winning independence from Spain or Portugal in the nineteenth century, with constitutions modeled on those of the United States or Republican France. And yet, not one of them has succeeded in maintaining an unbroken democratic tradition up to the present. Opposition to liberal democracy in Latin America on a theoretical level has never been strong, except for brief challenges from fascism and communism, and yet liberal democrats have faced an uphill battle winning and keeping power.

Page 216

The second cultural obstacle to democracy has to do with religion. Like nationalism, there is no inherent conflict between religion and liberal democracy, except at the point where religion ceases to be tolerant or egalitarian. We have already noted how Hegel believed that Christianity paved the way for the French Revolution by establishing the principle of the equality of all men on the basis of their capacity for moral choice. A great majority of today’s democracies have Christian religious heritages, and Samuel Huntington has pointed out that most of the new democracies since 1970 have been Catholic countries. [Samuel Huntington suggests that the large number of Catholic countries participating in the current "third wave" of democratization makes the latter in some sense a Catholic phenomenon, related to the change in Catholic consciousness in a more democratic and egalitarian direction in the 1960s. While there is clearly something to this line of argument, it would seem to beg the question of why Catholic consciousness changed when it did. Certainly, there is nothing inherent in Catholic doctrine that should predispose it toward democratic politics. The prior causes of change in Catholic consciousness would seem to be (1) the general legitimacy of democratic ideas that infected Catholic thought (2) rising levels of socio-economic development that had taken place in most Catholic countries by the 1960s; and (3) the long-term "secularization" of the Catholic Church, following in the steps of Martin Luther 400 years later.] In some ways, then, religion would appear to be not an obstacle but a spur to democracy.

But religion per se did not create free societies; Christianity in a certain sense had to abolish itself through a secularization of its goals before liberalism could emerge. The generally accepted agent for this secularization in the West was Protestantism. By making religion a private matter between the Christian and his God, Protestantism eliminated the need for a separate class of priests, and religious intervention into politics more generally. Other religions around the world have lent themselves to a similar process of secularization: Buddhism and Shinto, for example, have confined themselves to a domain of private worship centering around the family. The legacy of Hinduism and Confucianism is mixed: while they are both relatively permissive doctrines that have proven to be compatible with a wide range of secular activities, the substance of their teachings is hierarchical and inegalitarian. Orthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Islam, by contrast, are totalistic religions which seek to regulate every aspect of human life, both public and private, including the realm of politics. These religions may be compatible with democracy ---- Islam, in particular, establishes no less than Christianity the principle of universal human equality ---- but they are very hard to reconcile with liberalism and the recognition of universal rights, particularly freedom of conscience or religion. It is perhaps not surprising that the only liberal democracy in the contemporary Muslim world is Turkey, which was the only country to have stuck with an explicit rejection of its Islamic heritage in favor of a secular society early in the twentieth century.

The Kerry Doctrine

Mark Steyn writes that Kerry's speech was an appeal to voters who are worn out by the drama called "the war on terror."

Because the real distinction is not between pro- and anti-war, but between September 11 Americans and September 10 Americans. The latter group is a coalition embracing not just the hardcore Bush haters - for whom, as the opening of Fahrenheit 9/11 makes plain, it all goes back to chads in Florida - but the larger group of voters who've been a little stressed out by the epic nature of politics these last three years and would like a quieter life. That's what John Kerry's offering them: a return to September 10.

Robert Kagan writes that John Kerry foreign policy would be one of extreme isolationism.

Would it really be surprising if John Kerry, whose life and thought were so powerfully shaped by his Vietnam experience, now returned to the view of American foreign policy which that experience led him to three decades ago? There seems to be a conspiracy on both sides in this campaign not to take Kerry seriously as a man of ideas and conviction. But the fact that he has waffled so visibly on Iraq may be the best proof of his commitment to the beliefs about American foreign policy he came to hold in the 1970s.