Haqqani:
The West needs to combat Islamist ideology too.
President
Obama’s professed desire to contain the Islamic State is unlikely to succeed
without a serious effort by the West and its Muslim allies to question the
ideology and steady stream of conspiracy theories that feeds Islamist
terrorism. Given the global nature and regenerative capacity of Islamist
movements, limited action against one group will only result in the birth of
another.
The
Islamic State emerged out of al-Qaeda’s ashes just as the Obama Administration
was celebrating its successful efforts to locate and kill Osama bin Laden.
Military action against IS, though necessary, will likely result in a new mutation,
just as al-Qaeda evolved as a violent strain of political Islam preached by
groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
The
West, led by the United States, won the Cold War because it confronted
Communist beliefs in addition to restraining Soviet expansionism. But Western
leaders—including all candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination for
2016—are reluctant to acknowledge that the West might be at war with radical
Islam, out of concern for the prospect of unleashing a wave of bigotry against
all Muslims.
But the
falsified history and simplified explanations for Muslim decline that pass for
discourse among Muslims has to be debunked if the West is to deny Islamists
their raison d’être. The most practical way of denying further recruits to
extremist Islamist groups is to systematically question and marginalize the
outmoded theology of Islamic dominance at the heart of Islamist radicalism. A
campaign to reject the dogma of Islamic supremacism would find many supporters
among Muslims tired of the zealotry and self-righteousness of the Islamists.
An
ideological struggle against radical Islam does not mean treating 1.4 billion
Muslims worldwide as the West’s enemy. This huge population will not quit Islam
by listening to television pundits in Europe and North America; nor will a ban
on immigration prevent Western converts to radical Islamism from swelling the
ranks of ISIS. Rather, it requires Muslims to examine the Islamists’ core
belief that they must somehow be forcibly united, and that they have a God-given
right to lead the world.
Soon
after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda ideologue Sayf al-din al-Ansari explained that
the attacks were necessary to challenge the ascendancy of Western civilization.
According to him, the Islamic community “cannot move in an orbit set by
another.”
The
Islamic State’s statement claiming responsibility for last Friday’s attacks in
Paris declared that the attackers sought to “cast terror into the hearts” of
the West. The attacks in France, patterned on the 2008 attacks in Mumbai,
India, came within 48 hours of attacks in Beirut and Baghdad, reflecting the
jihadis’ global reach.
Islamists
target other Muslims to eliminate pluralism within Islam; causing fear and
panic in Western society is part of the jihadis’ strategy to weaken and defeat
Western civilization. The origins of al-Qaeda, IS, and other similar groups lie
in recent Muslim history and ideology, not Western foreign policy.
Unlike
Europe and North America, Muslim territories did not reach their contemporary
status gradually. The British and the French in the Arabic-speaking lands, the
Russians in Central Asia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the British in India and
Malaya brought new ideas and technology to Muslim lands as occupiers or
colonizers.
Some
Muslim leaders, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, opted to learn
from and imitate the West. Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, told a
peasant who asked him what Westernization meant: “It means being a better human
being.” Others, however, recommended “revivalism,” or a search for lost glory
through rejection of new ways and ideas.
Contemporary
jihadis use modern means, including the internet and state-of-the-art weapons,
to impose medieval beliefs in an effort to reclaim Islam’s global pre-eminence.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian founder, Hassan al-Banna, called upon Muslims
“to regain their honor and superiority” in addition to recovering “their lost
lands, their usurped regions and their occupied territories.”
While
seeking honor or securing self-determination might be valid political
objectives, the belief in the superiority of one’s community of believers only
fosters fascism. Muslim countries have nosedived into turmoil, with the rise of
those wanting to Islamize the modern world coming at the cost of those hoping
to modernize the Muslim world.
There
is a huge gap between the Islamist aspiration of dominating the world and the
reality of the relatively poor political, economic, and educational status of
Muslims in contemporary times. Muslims comprise 22 percent of the world’s
population but account for only 7 percent of its economic output.
The number
of new book titles published every year in Arabic, the language of 360 million,
is the same as those published in Romanian, the mother tongue of only 24
million people. The annual figure for new book titles in Urdu, spoken by some
325 million South Asian Muslims, is comparable to that for Danish, spoken by
some 5.6 million.
Muslim
leaders and intellectuals have created a narrative of victimhood to explain
Muslim debility, which in turn enables extremist groups to offer extreme
strategies to change the circumstances. “We are weak and poor because we were
colonized by the West” is a common refrain, whereas in reality colonization
became possible because Muslim empires had already been weakened by failing to
adopt new technologies and modes of production.
The
jihadi plan for regaining Muslim pride is to challenge Western dominance by
striking fear and terror in the hearts of Westerners. They are aided in their
endeavor by the absence of discussion among Muslims of why all major ideas that
define the contemporary world—from the joint stock company, banking, and
insurance to freedom of speech—emerged in the West, or how these ideas, not
just conspiracies and superior military technology, made the West ascendant in
the past several centuries.
While
the jihadis want a clash of civilizations, most ordinary Muslims are hesitant
to examine their history or analyze their community’s prospects. Universities
in most of the Muslim world focus on producing doctors, engineers, and people
proficient in technical disciplines. As a result, even highly educated
professionals embrace conspiracy theories about al-Qaeda and ISIS being Western
puppets bent on dividing Muslims. Some who do not support the extremists still
see value in their ability to at least challenge the arrogant West.
Military
defeat alone will not rid the Muslim world of this intellectual malaise.
Islamist movements use the humiliation of fellow believers as an opportunity
for the mobilization and recruitment of dedicated followers. The resort to
asymmetric warfare—the idea that a suicide bomber is a poor man’s F-16—has
followed recent Muslim military defeats.
Yasser
Arafat and his al-Fatah captured the
imagination of young Palestinians only after the Arab defeat and loss of the
West Bank in 1967. Islamic militancy in Kashmir can be traced to India’s
military victory over Pakistan in the 1971 Bangladesh War. Revenge, rather than
willingness to compromise or submit to the victors, is the traditional response
of Islamists to the defeat of their armies.
Islamists
represent a strain of revivalist thought that perceives a battle without a
specific frontline and not limited in span to a few years or even decades. They
think in terms of conflict spread over generations. A call for jihad against
British rule in India, for example, resulted in an underground movement that
began in 1830 and lasted until the 1870s, with remnants periodically surfacing
well into the 20th century.
Western
nations, together with Muslim allies, need a winning strategy for that
generational conflict. They could encourage Muslims to recognize that success
in the 21st century will not come from seeking restoration of the medieval
order.
Jihadists
are incubated in the anti-Western and anti-Semitic conversations and conspiracy
theories that pervade the Muslim world. Islamists murder secularists and force
many of them to leave their countries because they fear the seductive power of
liberal ideas. In the first half of the 20th century, secular nationalism
served as the antidote to Islamism.
But
nationalist autocrats bred conspiracy theories themselves while strangulating
freedom of thought. Instead of ushering in a Muslim enlightenment,
authoritarian secularism only strengthened anti-Semitism and the search for the
hidden hand manipulating Muslim nations and depriving them of their manifest
destiny. Western nations and their Muslim allies embraced Islamists, who were
rather weak at the time, in the context of their efforts to contain communism.
Now may
be the time to reignite debate in Muslim countries about the real causes of
Muslim debility. Western governments and even private organizations and
individuals could help with wider circulation in native languages of material
produced by Muslims who question the narrative that aids the Islamists.
Books
and movies could be produced reflecting the ways that Muslim decline is caused
not by Westernization but by poverty and ignorance, which cannot be over-turned
by recreating the 7th century or sporadic attacks on Western cities. Support
could be given to anti-Islamist political parties, just as non-communist groups
were helped in several vulnerable countries during the Cold War. An
international network of Muslim critics of radical Islam could reiterate and
refine their message.
Some
Muslim governments, notably the United Arab Emirates, have initiated efforts to
debate and dispute the radical Islamist worldview. That effort needs to expand
to include Western countries with substantial Muslim populations, as well as
Muslim countries, which tend to produce disproportionately larger number of
Jihadi recruits.
In
countries like Pakistan (deemed a Western ally) the Jihadi narrative is
sustained by the government and media to help groups that advance regional
strategic objectives. But it inadvertently also advances the cause of jihadis
that are out of the state’s control.
By
refusing to identify radical Islam (not all Muslims) as the problem, Western
leaders end up reinforcing the Islamist view that they are succeeding in
rattling or confusing the West. A concerted ideological campaign, like the one
that discredited and contained communism, run by Muslim allies would be the
Islamists’ worst nightmare. It would augment military action and
counter-terrorist operations against jihadi safe havens and would prevent the
breeding of future jihadis.
