I’ve been watching the very good documentary Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis which documents the rise of political Islam, and it occured to me no one had predicted how its decline might look or how it will come about, which leads me to ask, how will the era of Islam used as a political tool as it is now in the Muslim world come to an end, or will it?
Political Islam is a broad category encompassing many different groups with different motivations, and probably things will play out in different ways for different groups. Militant groups such al Queda and Hamas are driven primarily by a reaction against western incursions. For almost a century, western powers such as the United States, the U.S.S.R., Britain, France, and Israel have been sending troops into Arab countries, staging coups against Arab governments, and interfering in Arab affairs in many other ways. Many Muslims are justifiably angry about this, and militant Islamic groups feed off that anger. If the western powers chose simply to withdraw our troops from all Arab countries and stop interfering by means of the CIA, financial maniuplation, and so forth, it’s likely that these militant groups would lose their raison-de-etre and disintegrate quickly.
With national groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the situation is different. They have mainly succeeded because the secular governments in those countries have failed so drastically for so long. In Egypt, the people suffered through a string of failures, first under the British, then Nasser, then his successors. At all times those governments were notable cheifly for corruption and failure to produce economic growth or meet the population’s basic needs. The Muslim Brotherhood has survived and grown for generations by offering a means of protest against the Egyptian government. To cut it off, the obvious solution would be for Egypt to produce a government that actually works properly, but that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon at the moment.
That’s not true. Google for instance Egyptian/German Hamed Abdel-Samad. He is rather prominent in the German language world I think (probably not because of anything he has written, but because he has a Danish girlfriend). According to him, (I’m referring verbatim from a Danish article) Islam and the Islamic world will collapse because Islam has no answers or solutions to the problems of the modern world and because it is not compatible with it. A feeling of moral superiority blocks the Islamic worldview, wherein the idea that infidels are of inferior worth dominates. And so on.
Here’s the picture to the article. I remembered his name because the picture was so great.
That’s a pointless link as I am not fluent in German.
Of course that’s an optimistic thing to believe. I fully agree with the idea that Islam is not compatible with the modern world and offers no positive answers to the problems of the 21st century. However, it doesn’t automatically follow that Islam itself, or the radical elements thereof, will soon vanish as a result.
Many of us westerners have fallen under the spell of believing that we can’t lose. We have larger numbers, bigger and better militaries, more advanced science and technology, more learning, and better organization that radical Islam, so we’re guaranteed to win in the end. That thinking is comforting, but it can be debunked in one word: Afghanistan. The US and our allies certainly had more soldiers, better technology and equipment, and better planning and organization than the Taliban at every stage of the war. The problem is that the Taliban has the will to fight as long and hard as necessary, whereas our side eventually gets tired of the rising body count and wants to go home.
That’s a pity, because he has written a book “Der Untergang der islamischen Welt” (The Downfall of the Islamic World), which seems to have exactly the answers you are looking for. Unfortunately I think not translated to English.
I’m not an expert like Hamed Abdel-Samad, but my own opinion is that Islam, as far as it is not compatible with the modern world, will reform. Fighting modernity is like flailing at windmills and Muhammed and Fatima, just as much as Mark and Lisa, wants to enjoy all the benefits of modernity. Political Islamism is like Communism in the late 80s. Everybody thought it was going to last forever, but in reality the rot were already all around the corners and spreading to the remaining parts of the house. Political Islamism will come tumbling down sooner rather than later, not because of the US military, but because Muslims are just like everybody else, and because young people really don’t want to be told by some old gibbering fool that they should lead dreary and shitty lives. All the bullshit screaming and shouting by the Islamists is just the noise of a bunch of dudes running shit scared seeing that everything the used to know and all the platforms that used to grant them power are crumbling away. They already lost. They should just lie down and die, so the rest of the world wouldn’t have to hear their obnoxious rubbish. Afghanistan too btw. soon we’ll be able to go on river-rafting vacation in Tora Bora and go shopping for nice designer clothes in Kabul to show off at the night’s party with plenty of booze and girls with too little cloths having sex they regret the next day.
As far as I can see there are multiple problems in Islam at the moment:
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A rise in fundamentalism / “anti-modernism” in the last century - with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood that were mentioned already.
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A fairly strong belief that Islam is more than “just” a religion, and should have political power - which implies; power over non Muslims. AFAIK, that’s what Islamism means. I note that Islam is not nearly the only religion that seems to feel that way; but the Catholic Church, for example, usually isn’t as outspoken about their political ambitions.
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In the Middle East; a ready-made rallying point in the Israel/Palestine conflict. It’s always easy to get new “converts” to a more radical/activist point of view when you can point to a group of Muslims being repressed by Jewish/American forces. Personally, I think the situation is much more complex than that, but that doesn’t really matter while the conflict is still unresolved.
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In Western Europe (where I live); a lot of 2nd and 3rd generation young Muslims who don’t have the economic and social status they’d like. The growing anti-Muslim sentiments over here is probably not helping matters either. On the other hand, it’s probably worth noticing that many of the extremists who attack in the West tend to be well-educated and from relatively well-off families.
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Inter-Islamic conflicts. The different strains of Islam really seem to hate each other with a passion. Seems to be mostly a problem in the M.E, but I don’t really know enough about it.
As far as I can see, as a European, I think points 1 and 3 are the most inflammatory. At least point 3 could be resolved fairly quickly in theory, though I’m certainly not holding my breath.
By the way, I don’t think Islam or Islamism is going away anytime soon. For the same reasons that political Christianity isn’t going away either. But at least we should be able to get to a state of affairs where a more secular approach to national and international politics is seen as desirable to a larger percentage of people.
The oil will run out.
Islamism will decline when the West deems it irrelevant. I believe we play a pretty much equal role in creating Islamism, in the sense that as we define and debate it we are lending it cultural currency.
To give a quick example, in Muslim Northern Cameroon there was a trend to wear Osama Bin Laden tee shirts. Now, most people only had a hazy idea of who he was, and looked at him kind of like Rambo. Most didn’t know he was connected to 911 and some didn’t even know he was Muslim. Nobody I knew shared his beliefs. But the tee-shirts flew off the shelfs.
So where did this idea that Osama Bin Laden was somehow relevant to a remote African village come from? It comes from us. By portraying him as a meaningful force rather than a mix of Kim Jong Il and Timothy McVeigh, we have framed Al Queda as a legitimate force. Now there is a trend for the US to call any random group of Muslim bandits in the Sahara “Al Queda in the desert.” By doing that, we are in essence creating it. By reacting against it, we summon it into being.
The same goes in Europe. Every law designed to fight Islamism in fact strengthens it as it defines Islamism as a legitimate force with power. If Europe really wanted to be rid of Islamism, they’d frame them as we frame our Christian Identity racists or other wacky fundie- worth keeping an eye on if they get too many guns, but culturally irrelevant. Just like that they would lose half of their power, and no longer be attractive to disaffected youth and the like.
I tend to agree with the optimists-what we are seeing is the last dying gasp of muslim fundamentalism. Take the Iranian students-they are fed up with their government-and when they begin to ascend the rungs of power, the mullahs wil be history.
It is like the USA in the 1960’s-the grip of fundamentalist christianity was broken then. Of course, we still have these nuts (like Falwell, Tilton, etc.)-but they exist only in small areas of the country, and their appeal is (thankfully) dying out.
The problem is we fight on their turf. We are far away from home ,fighting with soldiers who have some vague idea of why they are there.
When you blow up their towns ,and kill women and children, they will not lay down and take it. Neither would you. But I have not seen any Muslim country attempt to take over America. Hell, our next war foe, Iran, has never shown a tendency to take over other countries. Yet we paint them as a huge dangerous monolith that seeks to take over the middle east. We are lying to the American people over and over.
This is the real battle in the Islamic world. Islam already is compatible with the modern world; the immediacy that compatibility pulling the Islamic world into the world’s more global society of societies is what drives the ferocity of the battle for the path it will take. The “West”, America, Israel … all are being used as props as having an enemy “other”, or more than one, helps the cause, gives reason to circle the wagons. Unfortunately we have been very easy to bait to serve that function.
The battle is over how the Islamic world interfaces with the modern and more secular one. I am not quite as sanguine as some here that the outcome of that battle is a fait accompli, but I would bet heavily on the eventual marginalization of the insular fundamentalists as well.
You can win a war like this, and it’s been done before. In fact the British did it long ago and it was called the Boer War. Read about it. It was a very cruel way to defeat them but it works.
Basically you have to break the will of the people. We could do this in Afghanistan, but the cost is high. When WWII ended we didn’t go to the Emperor of Japan and say “Pretty please, say you’re not devine.” We said, “Do it or you’re out.”
We didn’t ask the Germans if they wanted to give up the Nazi ways they had embraced. We had de-Nazification programs.
Since Vietnam we are fighting wars on the enemy’s terms. You can’t win a war like that.
Will Islam decline? Eventually yes, but it’ll happen like it did with Christianity. The more educated people get the less religious they will become.
Even in places like Saudi Arabia and the UAE the college grads have degrees in things like Islamic studies. It’s around 90% of the college grads. This is why those countries still have to import technical workers into their nations. There’s nothing wrong with Arabs, they can learn to do this, but there is no will to do this. They are stuck in a religion of the 600s.
Times change and you have to change with them. But for most of the world it hasn’t been much of a change since the 600s. Do you realize half the population of the world has never used a telephone? In Islamic countries education is often limited to six years of memorizing the Koran.
This is what keeps them stuck in the dark ages. Yes, the countries are. All you ever hear is comparisons to how it USED to be with the West. For instance, you always hear the Mulisms say “What about the Crusades?” What about them? It was a thousand years ago. We learned and know better now. What is your excuse?
You can’t compare the world today with even a hundred years ago.
Me too. What does bother me though is that the struggle between secular, modern world views and more fundamentalist religious ones seems to be intensifying even in the West. Whether that is a consequence of a sense of “losing the battle” on the side of a smallish faction of fundamentalists, a genuine resurgence of “traditional” religious feelings, or cynical manipulation of easily lead groups by otherwise secular or even atheist political powers (for instance, Neocons), I don’t know; probably all three.
In the end, at least in the West, I suspect that a secular/modernist view will win simply because we can’t run our relatively wealthy and tolerant societies without it - even the more strident people on any side should realize that given the multitude of beliefs, the best guarantee they’ll get of freedom of (or from) religion is a strict separation of church and state; that given the diversity of interpretations, no rules should be made law on purely religious bases.
Well said.
What answers does Christianity have? Islam will adapt and evolve, but it won’t end. It will moderate itself (slowly, over time) as Muslims become more and more westernized, but the religion will not cease to exist, or likely even decline in number any time soon.
Sounds like some other major world religions I could think of
Their birthrates have dropped drastically and will slide lower still.
As others have said, the youth of the political and rich classes are often educated in western countries and their politics are going to be different.
I would add: The radicals do not care about their lives, or the life of the innocent. Our Army won’t fire a weapon if they think a civilian is in the way, that doesn’t matter to the terrorists, apparently their lives have little meaning to them?
If we fought WW2 like we do fight wars now we would still be fighting Hitler. The worse thing about wars is the cost in human lives.
I often wonder why journalists can take pictures of the terrorists in their turbans with their faces half covered and why we can’t fight them, it seems to be the uniform of the terrorist so if they can be photographed, couldn’t they be captured or shot?
I think their mistreatment of women enters into this, too. Not allowing them to be educated, etc.
To just ignore the talents & intellect of half your population has to hurt you in the long run.