Twenty-five years ago, few Westerners had given any attention to the threat of militant Islam. Sure, there were the usual upheavals in the Middle East — remember the First Gulf War in 1991? — and the endless terrorist assaults on Israel, otherwise known as the First Intifada, and the odd airline and bus explosion. But the idea that a few fundamentalist zealots would pervert Islam to justify a full-fledged terrorist campaign against the West was for most far-fetched.
One of the few who didn’t think this way was the American historian Daniel Pipes. In 1995, the founder of the journal Middle East Quarterly, and the author of nearly a dozen books on Middle Eastern issues, wrote: “Unnoticed by most Westerners war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States.” The seemingly isolated terrorist attacks — the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 or the Bombay bombings that same year that killed nearly 300, for example — were part of a buildup in a worldwide anti-western jihad.
Only after the 9/11 attacks did Westerners begin to see their culture was under siege. As Pipes argued in a 2003 book, Militant Islam Reaches America, the Islamists “seek nothing less than to bring the Sharia to bear in the land of the free.” The question, of course, has always been how and why the West should respond.
Pipes was in Ottawa recently to address this issue, speaking about “Islam versus Islamism” at an event sponsored by the Free Thinking Film Society. Prior to his talk he met with the Citizen editorial board.
Pipes is careful to distinguish between the faith of Islam and the ideology of Islamism. “I’m not anti-Islam, I’m anti-Islamist ... I put Islamism on the same footing as fascism and communism, which is much more useful than comparing it to other forms of extreme religion.”
The problem, he says, is that Islamist ideology is gaining influence in European and North American societies, slowly eroding traditions and values that have been a mainstay of western culture for centuries. He points, for example, to the allowance made in Britain for the Muslim practice of polygamy and the increasing acceptance of Shariah. “There are parts of London where you can’t get alcohol. There’s something like 100 Shariah courts in Britain, completely private courts that not only do civil law but criminal law. ... There’s also a growing movement toward Muslim-only zones where not only is Shariah applied but non-Muslims are not welcome. This isn’t terrorism, but it is the gradual Islamization of Western society.”
Westerners, he says, need to recognize that the Islamist ideology is on par with fascism and communism as a threat to liberal democracy, and in order to fight it they need to know their enemy. “Just as a doctor can’t diagnose a disease without identifying it and understanding it, we can’t fight Islamism without identifying it for what it is.”
To know the enemy, it helps to know the enemy’s history. “The striking thing about Islam is its early success (in the 7th and 8th centuries). If you’d looked around the world at that time the cities of Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad were centres of commerce and technical development and literacy and medicine. This was the great period of Islamic civilization. Then things stopped roughly around 1200 A.D., partly as a consequence of the Mongol invasions and the dominance of the theocrats. There was a sudden hardening or attitudes toward things like philosophy and science that might question religious faith.”
For some six centuries Muslims were able to ignore Europe as too backward to be of concern, but this complacency about their own cultural supremacy came crashing down in the late 18th and 19th centuries as Europeans used their science and a new-found impulse for exploration to make the West preeminent. This changed things dramatically, says Pipes. “Muslims saw this and asked themselves ‘what went wrong?’”
It a question they’re still asking, wondering why given the past successes of their culture they aren’t doing as well today. “It is this legacy of their great success in the past compared to today that weighs heavy on Muslims.”
Efforts to shed this weight have differed — everything from emulating secular Europe to the pan-Arab socialism and nationalism. All have failed. And now we have the Islamist response. “The fundamentalists are saying ‘no, if you want Islam to be strong like it was 1,000 years ago, you have to live like we did 1,000 years ago.’ That means abiding by Islamic law, Shariah.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, Pipes sees the Islamist terror campaign ultimately failing. “If you looked around in 1943 you would likely have thought a 1,000 year Reich was possible. But it didn’t even last a dozen years. Islamism, I think, will be like that.” Despite outward appearances of strength, Pipes notes that Muslims are fighting each other in places like Syria and Egypt and takes encouragement from this. Much of the upheaval in Egypt is a backlash against the Islamist agenda, he suggests.
While Islamist terrorism will remain a problem, the greater concern is Islamists gaining influence in the institutions of the West. “I see terrorism as a tactic, and not a very good tactic ... If I were an Islamist I would be counselling everyone to get jobs in the media, in the law courts, in the educational system, in the political process. That’s how you gain influence and change a society your way.”
Will such change come to pass? I suspect we’ll find out over the next 25 years.