Fareed Zakaria argues that the Islamic Fundamentalists' moment has passed--that people recognize that "Islamic fundamentalism has no real answers to the problems of the modern world; it has only fantasies." But he also thinks that "the new generation is just as angry, rebellious and bitter" as "he youth of the 1970s and 1980s, who came from villages into cities and took up Islam as a security blanket."
This, however, does not necessarily seem to me to be good news. If they are "angry, rebellious, and bitter," what do they think that they should do?
washingtonpost.comwashingtonpost.com: The Extremists Are Losing: ...Compare the landscape a decade ago. In Algeria, Islamic fundamentalists, having won an election, were poised to take control of the country. In Turkey, an Islamist political party was soon to come to power. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak's regime was terrorized by groups that had effectively shut down the country to foreign tourists. In Pakistan, the mullahs had scared Parliament into enacting blasphemy laws. Only a few years earlier, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini had issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, who was still living under armed guard in a secret location.
Throughout the Arab world, much of the talk was about political Islam -- how to set up an Islamic state, implement Islamic law and practice Islamic banking. Look at these countries now. In Iran, the mullahs still reign but are despised. The governments of Algeria, Egypt, Turkey and (to a lesser extent) Pakistan have all crushed their Islamic groups. Many feared that, as a result, the fundamentalists would become martyrs. In fact, they have had to scramble to survive. In Turkey, the Islamists are now liberals who want to move the country into the European Union. In Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere they are a diminished lot, many of them reexamining their strategy of terror. If the governments bring them into the system, they will go from being mystical figures to local politicians.
Many Islamic groups are lying low; many will still attempt terrorism. But how can a political movement achieve its goals if none dares speak its name? A revolution, especially a transnational one, needs ideologues, pamphlets and party lines to articulate its message to the world. It needs politicians willing to embrace its cause. The Islamic radicals are quiet about their cause for a simple reason. Fewer and fewer people are buying it.
Don't get me wrong. This doesn't mean that people in the Middle East are happy with their regimes or approve of American foreign policy, or that they have come to accept Israel. All these tensions remain strong. But people have stopped looking at Islamic fundamentalism as their salvation. The youth of the 1970s and 1980s, who came from villages into cities and took up Islam as a security blanket, are passing into middle age. The new generation is just as angry, rebellious and bitter. But today's youth grew up in cities and towns, watch Western television shows, buy consumer products and have relatives living in the West. The Taliban holds no allure for them. Most ordinary people have realized that Islamic fundamentalism has no real answers to the problems of the modern world; it has only fantasies...
The Extremists Are Losing
By Fareed Zakaria
Tuesday, September 3, 2002; Page A17
In one of his legendary moments of brilliance, Sherlock Holmes pointed the attention of the police to the curious behavior of a dog on the night of the murder. The baffled police inspector pointed out that the dog had been silent during the night. "That was the curious incident," explained Holmes. Looking back over the past year, I am reminded of that story because the most important event that has taken place has been a non-event. Ever since that terrible day in September 2001, we have all been watching, waiting and listening for the angry voice of Islamic fundamentalism to rip through the Arab and Islamic world. But instead there has been . . . silence. The dog has not barked.
The health of al Qaeda is a separate matter. Osama bin Laden's organization may be in trouble, but -- more likely -- it may be lying low, plotting in the shadows. In the past it has waited for several years after an operation before staging the next one. Al Qaeda, however, is a band of fanatics, numbering in the thousands. It seeks a much broader following. That, after all, was the point of the attacks of Sept. 11. Bin Laden had hoped that by these spectacular feats of terror he would energize radical movements across the Islamic world. But in the past year it has been difficult to find a major Muslim politician or party or publication that has championed his ideas. In fact, the heated protests over Israel's recent military offensives and American "unilateralism" have obscured the fact that over the past year the fundamentalists have been quiet and in retreat. Radical political Islam -- which had grown in force and fury ever since the Iranian revolution of 1979 -- has peaked.
Compare the landscape a decade ago. In Algeria, Islamic fundamentalists, having won an election, were poised to take control of the country. In Turkey, an Islamist political party was soon to come to power. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak's regime was terrorized by groups that had effectively shut down the country to foreign tourists. In Pakistan, the mullahs had scared Parliament into enacting blasphemy laws. Only a few years earlier, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini had issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, who was still living under armed guard in a secret location. Throughout the Arab world, much of the talk was about political Islam -- how to set up an Islamic state, implement Islamic law and practice Islamic banking.
Look at these countries now. In Iran, the mullahs still reign but are despised. The governments of Algeria, Egypt, Turkey and (to a lesser extent) Pakistan have all crushed their Islamic groups. Many feared that, as a result, the fundamentalists would become martyrs. In fact, they have had to scramble to survive. In Turkey, the Islamists are now liberals who want to move the country into the European Union. In Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere they are a diminished lot, many of them reexamining their strategy of terror. If the governments bring them into the system, they will go from being mystical figures to local politicians.
Many Islamic groups are lying low; many will still attempt terrorism. But how can a political movement achieve its goals if none dares speak its name? A revolution, especially a transnational one, needs ideologues, pamphlets and party lines to articulate its message to the world. It needs politicians willing to embrace its cause. The Islamic radicals are quiet about their cause for a simple reason. Fewer and fewer people are buying it.
Don't get me wrong. This doesn't mean that people in the Middle East are happy with their regimes or approve of American foreign policy, or that they have come to accept Israel. All these tensions remain strong. But people have stopped looking at Islamic fundamentalism as their salvation. The youth of the 1970s and 1980s, who came from villages into cities and took up Islam as a security blanket, are passing into middle age. The new generation is just as angry, rebellious and bitter. But today's youth grew up in cities and towns, watch Western television shows, buy consumer products and have relatives living in the West. The Taliban holds no allure for them. Most ordinary people have realized that Islamic fundamentalism has no real answers to the problems of the modern world; it has only fantasies. They don't want to replace Western modernity; they want to combine it with Islam.
Alas, none of this will mean the end of our troubles. The Arab world remains a region on the boil. Its demographic, political, economic and social problems are immense and will probably bubble over. Outside the Middle East, in places like Indonesia, the fundamentalists are not yet stale. But you need a compelling ideology to turn frustration into sustained, effective action. After all, Africa has many problems. Yet it is not a mortal threat to the West.
Nor does it mean, alas, the end of terrorism. As they lose political appeal, revolutionary movements often turn more violent. The French scholar Gilles Kepel, who documents the failure of political Islam in his excellent book "Jihad," makes a comparison to communism. It was in the 1960s, after communism had lost any possible appeal to ordinary people -- after the revelations about Stalin's brutality, after the invasion of Hungary, as its economic model was decaying -- that communist radicals turned to terror. They became members of the Red Brigades, the Stern Gang, the Naxalites, the Shining Path. Having given up on winning the hearts of people, they hoped that violence would intimidate people into fearing them. That is where radical political Islam is today.
For America this means that there is no reason to be gloomy. History is not on the side of the mullahs. If the terrorists are defeated and the fundamentalists are challenged, they will wither. The West must do its part, but above all, moderate Muslims must do theirs. It also means that the cause of reforming the Arab world is not as hopeless as it looks today. We do not confront a region with a powerful alternative to Western ideas, just a place riddled with problems. If these problems are addressed -- if its regimes become less repressive, if they reform their economies -- the region will, over time, stop breeding terrorists and fanatics. The Japanese once practiced suicide bombing. Now they make computer games.
It might be difficult to see the light from where we are now, still deep in a war against terrorists, with new cells cropping up, new forms of terror multiplying and new methods to spread venomous doctrines. But at his core, the enemy is deadly ill. "This is not the end," as Winston Churchill said in 1942. "It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning."
The writer is editor of Newsweek International and a columnist for Newsweek.
I can attest to some of this anecdotally. In Europe - or at least in my little corner - Arabs and Muslims don't feel the need to swear they loyalty to the west before being critical of it. One of the people I spent the summer working with was an Iraq defector who seems to have committed some minor offense that none the less got some of his family killed and left him in western Europe making an asylum claim. He is exactly the kind of person who ought to be cheering for America's cause. He spent much of his childhood in London where his father persued a graduate degree and as a result has a nearly native knowledge of English. He is quite familiar with the west, he has advanced degrees from western countries and loaths Saddam Hussein vicerally and personally. He has a fairly dignified faith in Allah, respecting halal, abstaining from the local beer and saying daily prayers, but I never saw him do anything that would be considered radical in comparison to, say, pentecostals. This guy is pretty far from fundamentalism or sectarianism and has expressed nothing but ill-will towards fundamentalists - at least in my hearing.
Yet... He hates the US. He hates US policy towards the whole Middle East. He hates the current leadership across the Arab world. And he despises Israel. He thinks that the US got what it deserved September 11th.
I don't know how representative his opinions are - the other Arabs I know these days are all second generation Europeans or people with whom I don't share a genuinely fluent language - but I have heard similar sentiments quietly echoed here and there. If this is what lucid, well-informed, western educated, fairly secular Arabs can think, I don't think doing away with Al Qaeda or fundamentalism is going to be enough. I don't think better education or societies opener to the west will do it either.
Modernisation is not a synonym for westernisation, and westernisation is not a synonym for pacification. Just because people wear love Michael Jordan and ogle Pamela Anderson does not mean they won't go to war with you.
Posted by: Scott Martens on September 3, 2002 12:52 PMAnecdotally, this moderate 'Islamist' is proof of the lie emanating from the John Ashcroft view of the world: they hate our way of life, so they want to destroy us.
If 'they go to war with us' despite Jordan and Anderson, it is because they disagree with you on some fundamental point: such as the right of Palestinians to a homeland.
If we don't push a plan that eventually allows Palestine and Israel to co-exist (in much the same fashion India and Pakistan co-exist today) we will never deplete the ranks of suicide bombers.
Posted by: Suresh Krishnamoorthy on September 3, 2002 01:44 PMI think Zakaria's employing a little wishful thinking in his choice of examples of 'busted flush' fundamentalism, particularly with respect to Turkey. Since the current government is as wobbly as the health of the Prime Minister, and elections due in November, expect 'regime change' in Ankara. The AK, formed from elements of the suppressed Virtue Party, is leading the polls, and its 'pro-Islamist' tendency could become more evident if military action got underway around the time of the elections. Bush certainly would not want to have to deal with Recep Tayyip if it came to requesting use of Incirlik airbase; and I hardly want to speculate on what that might do to the situation in the Kurdish region bordering Iraq.
Posted by: nick sweeney on September 3, 2002 07:09 PMThe sheer irrationality of Arab anti-Americanism as described in Scott Martens post suggests that there is nothing we can do to make ourselves liked in that part of the world. As for pushing a plan that allows Palestine and Israel to live in peace, in December 2000 Bill Clinton talked the Israelis into agreeing to most of the Palestinians' demands. The Palestinian negotiating team wanted to accept, but Yasser Arafat turned it down.
Since the US will never be liked in that part of the world, we should concentrate on making ourselves feared and respected. A good start would be to give Iraq an ultimatum: Submit to the arms inspections you agreed or we will send in the tanks.
Posted by: Joe Willingham on September 3, 2002 07:29 PM>>The sheer irrationality of Arab anti-Americanism as described in Scott Martens post
I don't see what's irrational about it. An Arab believes that the USA hates Arabs, and so he hates the USA. One might disagree reasonably on the subject of whether or not the USA does hate Arabs, and indeed on whether the evidence supports the proposition. But I don't think you can argue that it's an example of "sheer irrationality"; that would be to claim that there is *absolutely no reason* why Arabs might believe the USA hates them.
Posted by: Daniel Davies on September 4, 2002 01:23 AMIt seems to me that it's not so much that the fundies are ebbing in power so much as the moderates are gaining in power. What we're seeing is a rise in Islam in general, masking the fringe elements while at the same time giving them a bigger stage on which to vent their spleen. It's harder to hate the US when your cousin is happily living in Chicago; yet easier for radical views to find an audience with a Nielson rating.
I fear upswelling of religious fundamentalism (not just Islam) was the real fallout of Y2K. Witness the popularity of the Left Behind books...
Posted by: Dave Romm on September 4, 2002 08:25 AMI don't think Americans hate Arabs. Except for a few idiots everybody from President Bush on down has been falling all over him or her self to disinguish between Arabs in general and Arab political extremists. I don't think this is just a matter of political correctness, I think it is quite sincere.
Many Arabs are still eager to come to this country to live and to study. If Americans really hated Arabs I don't think that would be the case.
There *are* some unfortunate features of Arab culture that keep the Middle East a mostly poor and backward region ruled by corrupt and tyrannical regimes. To point that out has nothing to do with hatred, it's just a fact. A clear statement of the problem is contained in a report to the United Nations by a group of Arab intellectuals.
Even war is not necessarily about hatred. In World War II we fought Germany and Italy not because we hated Germans and Italians - we didn't hate them. We fought them because fascist aggression was a threat to our freedom and to the entire civilized world.
Joe: I don't think Americans hate Arabs either. I'm just saying that it's not a totally *irrational* belief. If, say, an Irishman were to make the speech Scott quoted above, we'd think that was much more irrational than an Arab.
Posted by: DD on September 4, 2002 12:14 PMDo Americans hate Arabs? Which Americans? I work in a room full of Americans who think about international issues every day, for professional reasons. It is not really a stretch to expect them to hold better thought out, less knee-jerk views of Arabs (and non-Arabs, like Iranians and Afghanistanis) than "Americans" in general. What do you know? Some really awful things pop out of their mouths on a pretty regular basis.
Why? I can think of at least one reason. Few of us have the opportunity of first hand knowledge of the people in the Arab world, in their cultures, their countries, rather than ours. We know what we know from the press. The press doesn't report on good deeds very often, or on mundane "birth, copulation and death" sorts of things. When Americans are exposed to news about Arab world, it is usually bad news, and very often bad news that is bad for Americans. That's just the way one makes money in the news business. Same holds true in the rest of the world. Arabs read mostly things they don't like when they read about the US. Why does Saddam keep sacrificing mobile radar units to US attacks? Because he knows it will end up in the press - "US attacks Iraq". The Pentagon then confirms it - matter of fact, no big deal, we bombed a Muslim country Tuesday. The result is that when we think about them ("we" being Americans in general, not "we" who stop by DeLong's website), we mostly think about bad things. Same it true the other way. Yeah, some of them hate us. Some of us hate them. I am pleased to report that there are exceptions on both sides.
KH
Posted by: K Harris on September 4, 2002 02:23 PMThe Arab media seem to be a major cause of anti-American sentiment among Arabs. No Arab country has a free press. Mainstream Arab newspapers print stories about how the Jews make Matzoh out of Arab children's blood, and about how guess who backs the Jews. All the troubles of the Arab world are ascribed to the nefarious machinations of the Jews and the Americans. Sound familiar? *Mein Kampf and *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion* are bestsellers in some Arab countries. Something like fascism is as taken for granted in that part of the world as the idea of democracy is over here.
When you get down to the question is not much about liking or disliking people as about totally different values, totally different views of the world.
As one of the terrorists was quoted as saying, "We love death as much as Americans love life".
Posted by: Joe Willingham on September 4, 2002 03:10 PMJoe: Mein Kampf did not arise out of a vacuum in Germany; why do you think its popularity in Arab states (which is far from an established fact, btw, unless we are prepared to take things on trust from our own newspapers) arose out of a vacum?
Posted by: Daniel Davies on September 5, 2002 01:43 AMCertaintly not a vacuum, Daniel. In both cases a long tradition of anti-Semitism. In Germany there were liberal counter currents to that, which are now in the ascendency.
I don't doubt that there are liberals in the Arab world too. I'm hoping that we will advance their cause when we invade Iraq and topple the regime there.
Posted by: Joe Willingham on September 5, 2002 08:36 AM'As for pushing a plan that allows Palestine and Israel to live in peace, in December 2000 Bill Clinton talked the Israelis into agreeing to most of the Palestinians' demands. The Palestinian negotiating team wanted to accept, but Yasser Arafat turned it down.'
Have you actually looked at the plan they offered? I'm tend to side with Israel, but the 2000 plan was a ludicrous joke.
I can't find a link to it, unfortunately.
Posted by: Jason McCullough on September 6, 2002 03:39 PMDennis Ross, who participated in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for twelve years under Bush the Elder and Bill Clinton, has told the story in articles and on TV. Mr. Ross knows whereof he speaks - he was sitting right there in the room in December 2000. Here is the URL to a short piece by Mr. Ross.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_julyaug_2002/ross.html
The reason you can't find the agreement on the web is that it was never written down. Mr. Clinton and Mr. Ross didn't want the parties to have something written to take home and start picking apart. After all those years of talk, it was time to act.
There were first the July 2000 and September 2000 proposals, which the Palestinians considered unfair. So President Clinton and his team leaned on Prime Minister Barak to concede part of Jerusalem, 93% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and part of Israel equivalent in area to four percent of the West Bank. According to Dennis Ross, the Palestinian negotiators wanted to go for it, but Chairman Arafat refused.
Islam teaches moderation and most certainly does not advocate violence, period. It does however teach justice. I believe that the "extremists" have distorted justice into meaning revenge, by any means necessary, and this notion is clearly rejected by Islam. Justice can only be provided in a framework of Islamic jurisprudence. This notion is far more accepted by intellectual Muslims as opposed to uneducated ones. Therefore the only way that Muslims can shed the extremists amongst them is through education.
Posted by: catherine halls on March 22, 2003 11:46 PMIslam teaches moderation and most certainly does not advocate violence, period. It does however teach justice. I believe that the "extremists" have distorted justice into meaning revenge, by any means necessary, and this notion is clearly rejected by Islam. Justice can only be provided in a framework of Islamic jurisprudence. This notion is far more accepted by intellectual Muslims as opposed to uneducated ones. Therefore the only way that Muslims can shed the extremists amongst them is through education.
Posted by: catherine halls on March 22, 2003 11:47 PM