Ok december, I’m going to try one more time to explain all this to you as clearly as I can. But first I’ll deal with the (just plain silly) steps proposed in your OP:
Wow, you’re a genius. I can’t believe no one else thought of this first. So your idea is we just go ahead and eradicate al Qaeda. Well I stand in awe of your almighty genius.
What do you think the US administration and other foreign governments have been trying to do over the last year?.
If you have any other ideas that we’re not trying then please feel free to suggest them, until then I think it’s best if you keep quiet.
They do, in the main. They have a lot of sympathy for the Palestinian cause, true, but then so do many non-muslims. There’s a few extremist clerics here and there (like Northern Pakistan for example) who talk bullshit but they don’t represent mainstream Islam.
Iraq has fuck all to do with this subject.
You are aware that Iran follows a completely different branch of Islam to Iraq aren’t you? And that both are different to Saudi?
All this will do is persuade the “terrorism-minded muslims” to carry out more terrorism in order to make it clear to you that strong military action is a dead end.
Now as regards the idea of Islam and terrorism being connected in some way. This idea posits the theory of the “muslim mind” and suggests that it would be hard to eliminate the terrorist threat in the Islamic world. Basically, muslims have to follow the Koran to the word. The nature of Islam means that unlike Christianity, it cannot evolve, to adapt to the modern world, as Christianity has. Honour is the most important thing in Islam and as Westerners do not follow the Koran they are seen as dishonourable and deserve to die (hence al Qaeda, etc). Other factors such as poverty, globalisation, oil and the Arab/Israeli conflict all fan the flames of terrorism, but the over riding factor is this muslim way of thinking.
This theory is cobblers. To understand why, you need to look at the bigger picture. Don’t look at all this through the prism of religion, forget religion. You need to consider it in terms of systems and ideas.
Cultural reasons do play a part in the ascendance of Muslim fanaticism. Muslim culture is just as malleable as any other and to equate Islam as a whole with the Wahabbist tradition of the Arabian penninsular is misguided.
In the middle ages, the Muslims were the sophisticated and enlightened culture while Christian Europe was obstructionist and culturally backward, mired in superstition and rigid theocratic dogma. These features were not a product of the faiths themselves but the systems that enveloped them.
So today, the peoples of Muslim countries are ill served by their elites but this is a contingent political issue rather than a necessary doctrinal one.
In the UK, in years gone by (no longer thank God), similar things were said about “the Irish mind”, the “Irish Catholic mind” and how Irish people are “instinctively violent, anarchic, drunk and dirty.”
What, precisely, is contained in Islam which makes it impossible for a Muslim to ‘adapt’ to modernity (which means, presumably, Western science-based consumer capitalism with a sprinkling of representative democracy so long as the latter doesn’t include socialism)?
The “muslim mind” theory says far more about the people who propose it than it does about the “muslim mind.”
It’s not just about poverty, remember many of the poorest parts of the world are mostly Christian, animist, and Hindu. And the poorest parts of the Muslim world (Bangladesh, Indonesia) aren’t the most anti-western.
This is where the “ideas” part of the equation come in. More than anything else, Islamism is an IDEA. Just like neo-liberalism. And it is true that ideas flourish to differing degrees according to the cultural compost they find themselves in - for instance, neo-liberalism appeals to Americans who believe it is anti-state, anti-bullshit, anti-elitist, Thoreaun, semi-scientific and kind without being fluffy. I think that’s complete bollocks, but that’s what its defenders see in it.
And those values are much more important in America, given its own history, than they are in Europe. Similarly, different ideas flourish in France and Britain, or Sweden and Italy, etc etc It’s because the different countries have different histories and different cultural contexts - so different ideas spark off different associations, and are more or less popular accordingly.
Now the one thing that runs through Islamist discourse is the idea of power. As far as I can see, it’s pretty central. The whole thrust of Islamism, from ibn-Wahhab to the present, has been concerned with a return to the golden age of the Abbasid caliphate. Look at the history of Salafism, from its ‘scientific’ early formulation to its doctrinaire modern incarnation, and the one thing that binds the movement together is a desire to reinvigorate the Muslim world by reinvigorating its religion.
This is pretty natural in a culture which once led the world and has since fallen back relative to its neighbours. You saw the same thing in the Christian Spanish reconquistadors of the middle ages, in the Crusaders of Outremer, in the Chinese Boxer rebellion, in the Indian mutiny. Revolutionary movements are not simply attempts to throw off oppressors - they are obsessed with also with building up the free state.
So I would say that there is an Islamist idea, which takes root better in the Muslim world just as the neo-Liberal idea takes root better in America. And I would say that this idea is obsessed with the aim of improving the position of Muslim countries in the world, and that a dash of paranoia has occasionally led some Islamists to believe that the best way to achieve their aims is to kill non-Muslims and people from different Muslim groups. But to extrapolate that extreme minority view into bullshit about the ‘Muslim mind’ is simply cock.
There is no gain to be had in talking about a muslim mind, but much to be lost. Islam is a belief system which has radicals, moderates, conservatives and extremists, just like any other. This just reflects human nature and how it behaves in its environment.
This is the heart of the matter. As far as I’m concerned, if this theory doesn’t apply to “all muslims”, then it’s a nasty piece of sleight of hand to attribute it to ‘the Muslim mind’. It’s passing off a minority idea as a majority tendency.
Once this is admitted, we seem to disappear into circular arguments - “Why is Islamism so popular amongst Muslims? Because it’s building up Islam.” It’s like asking if there’s some unique part of the French mind which makes them get emotional when they hear La Marseillaise playing. Islamism is popular among Muslims, just as fundamentalist Christianity is popular among Christians. But once you realise that it’s just an idea, not a tendency, claims for its grip on the minds of all 1.2bn Muslims slip away.
I know that you are not saying “all muslims are terrorists” but I just want you to get an idea of the kind of minefield into which you are currently headed.