Almost ten years to the day after his defining speech to the Chicago Economic Club at the height of the Kosovo crisis, Tony Blair has been in Chicago once again, this time to give a speech on how best to tackle Islamic “extremism”. Blair’s apparent lack of comprehension of the huge complexities of the enemy he embarked upon fighting whilst British Prime Minister would not be such a cause for concern but for the fact that as the Quartet’s official envoy, he is supposedly our man to bring peace to the Middle East. Not only that, but a number of other world leaders appear to hold to his point of view.
One of the major problems is the methodology used by Blair and others who share his position to draw a line between “true Muslims”, whose faith is tolerant and peaceful, and “extremist Muslims” who believe it is justifiable to pursue their objectives by violent means. “They [extremists] are better organised. But they don’t represent true Islam or true Muslims”, Blair said. Similar statements are constantly being made by global statesman to the point that in 2007 this assertion was turned into an operative clause of a UN General Assembley Resolution, which expresses its “deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.” The need to make such statements is understandable. Yet the problem with this distinction between “true Muslims” and “extremists” is that it approaches the issue from completely the wrong angle, grading the legitimacy of faith according to how closely it conforms with Western values, wholly independent of what might actually constitute being faithful to Islam. In no way is this to take the position of Emperor Manuel II, whose famous dismissal of Islam as a religion of violence was recently quoted by Pope Benedict XVI, but it must be understood that the validity of a religious interpretation cannot be graded according to how closely it conforms with liberal-democratic ideals.
Those who argue that Islam does permit the use of violence often cite the law of abrogation, a concept unique to Islam that holds older teachings to be null and void when contradicted by later ones. Mohammed’s early statements whilst at Mecca are by-and-large more peaceful than the more warlike utterances pronounced once the fledgling Muslim community had consolidated itself at Medina.
Blair’s second major misunderstanding is the motivation of those Muslims who see violence as a legitimate means to an end. He dismisses as cynical manipulation the way extremists (for want of a better word) have “successfully inculcated a sense of victimhood in the Islamic world”. Yet these grievences are very real, and central to understanding and thus dealing with the problem. Furthermore, this mindset is not unique to Muslims. Down the centuries, extremism has always been a reaction to perceived injustice. It is also a common reaction of the weak to the strong. In Moorish Spain, instances of what could be termed Christian extremism were a reaction to Muslim ascendency. The terror tactics of the IRA in Northern Ireland were a consequence both of a perceived injustice and the fact that the IRA could not have hoped to beat the British Army in a straight fight. Much the same can said of militant activity in Palestine now. As Clausewitz said, “war is just politics by another means”. This is by no means to excuse such actions, merely to contextualise them.
So-called Islamic extremism is a direct response to Western ascendency and perceived encroachments upon the Islamic way of life. Blair is quite simply missing the point when he says “we have to understand we have not caused this phenomenon”. In his iconic work the “Clash of Civilisations” Samuel P. Huntington made the case very clearly: “Islam [is] a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” The gradual ascendency of the West over the Muslim world, beginning perhaps with the Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and culminating with the final Ottoman capitulation in 1918, is a phenomenon very intimately tied up with Islamic extremism today, principally because - in the eyes of the “extremists” - those defeats have yet to be reversed.
The reason this has led to such violent confrontations with the West is because of the highly orthopraxic nature of Islam, that is, the impossibility of legitimately separating church and state. Whereas such a division is made possible in Christianity by Christ’s command to “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things which are God’s”, no such provision exists in Islam. In Islam the success or failure of a human being to find favour with the Almighty very much depends on his or her actions and behaviour. Out of this has come a doctrine advocated in the Quran known as ‘Manifest Success’ which essentially links external success with the notion of being Gods people. In other words, the extent to which Muslims can know divine favour can be directly measured against the extent of their earthly success.
This idea is firmly grounded in the spectacular expansion of the Muslim geopolitical sphere under Mohammed and his immediate successors. The logic clearly follows that because Mohammed was supremely faithful to God’s commands, so he was granted unprecedented earthly success. Mohammed fought for what he believed in and did not capitulate to those who would follow their own laws as opposed to God’s laws. Muslims who wish for an uncompromising return to the laws and cultural standards of Mohammed’s 7th century world need look no further than the humiliation of the Ottoman Empire after it sought to incorporate Western practices in an effort to strenghten itself at the end of the 19th century as vindication of their position. “Extremist” Muslims look at their position today and conclude that only a radical rejection of Westernism and a return to the modus operandi as it existed under Mohammed can hope to see a revival of their fortunes.
Democracy and the nation state have two things in common. First is that they are, in their current form, fairly recent creations. Second is that they are very definitely man-made creations. Democracy rests on the idea that the people should make their own laws and determine their own future. The nation state rests on the idea that an individual’s first loyalty and duty is to his country. Neither was a tenable concept in 7th century Medina and both are anathema to a Muslim who believes in the absolute supremecy and rightness of God’s laws - which provide a clear template for the establishment of an earthly society - and whose first loyalty is to his brothers in faith, in whichever state on earth they may happen to live.
This has very far reaching implications for the way Blair and others need to understand the threat posed by “extremist” Islam. There are very firm grounds within Islam to contend that Western encroachments on perceived Muslim spheres on influence, far from helping solve the problem, are in fact the problem. Highly unfashionable though it may be to say so, the West cannot offer Muslims any kind of system that is compatible with their faith. Liberal democracy and Islam are not compatible systems. That is not to say that Muslims cannot live peacefully in Western societies, nor in fact that, as Turkey has demonstrated so successfully, a majority-Muslim state cannot rest on secular principles and largely Western inspired notions of the rule of law. What it is to say is that such systems are highly imperfect implementations of what the God of the Quran intended, if not outright rejections. Like it or not, there is much more method to “extremist” Muslims’ madness than Mr Blair and others like him appear to comprehend.
Tags: Islam