Posted on 05/08/2003 9:52:47 AM PDT by Asclepius
George Walden reviews Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman
This is the best book I have read on Muslim fundamentalism and what to do about it. Paul Berman writes in the excellent American weekly The New Republic. His self-description as a Social Democrat suggests a European approach to the Middle East, yet his intelligence, breadth of culture, honesty and courage are a world away from the moralistic grandstanding of slithy toves like Chris Patten, Dominique de Villepin and Joschka Fischer. The clarity of his thought cuts through their evasions like a knife through butter, as Berman looks the evil of totalitarian Islam in the face.
Left-Right thinking and national stereotypes have no place in his analysis. The terrorist menace has its roots not so much in a clash as in a blend of cultures: a sinister amalgam of 20th-century European anarchism and totalitarianism with pan-Arabism and atavistic Islam. Their common goal was the annihilation of liberal societies, and their doctrines overlap. That is why Nazi theorists in post-war Egypt influenced the Muslim Brotherhood, ancestors of al-Qa'eda, why Syrian and Iraqi Ba'athists leant towards the Soviet Union, and why German ultra-leftists allied themselves with Palestinians in the Seventies to murder Jews.
Whether the aim is racial purity, class purity, or a reversion to the doctrinal rigours of seventh-century Medina, all promised a new dawn and delivered little except death. "Shoot more professors!" said Lenin. "Viva la Muerte!" cried one of Franco's generals. "Faith is propagated by counting up deaths every day, by adding up massacres and charnel houses" declared Ali Benhadj, an Algerian Islamist leader. "Utopia and the morgue had blended", Berman comments.
His most instructive chapters are on the hugely influential 20th-century Egyptian scholar, Sayyid Qutb, a kind of anti-materialist Muslim Marx, if that can be imagined, and equally prolific. The fact that Qutb was a brilliant, soulful and occasionally subtle thinker did not prevent him becoming the ideological mentor of terrorism and the cult of death. Like bin Laden and his associates, Qutb liked to mock Jews and Westerners for their desire to live.
The reason the Christian West was, for him, an abomination lay in the divorce between its material and spiritual life. This schizoid mentality, as the secularisation of Turkey by Ataturk had shown, threatened to contaminate the Muslim faith. Jihad - once a defensive strategy to preserve Islam - became for Qutb a struggle against infidels everywhere. All this proved too much for Colonel Nasser, who hanged him.
But the core of his teaching is very much alive, and as terrorism goes global the 34 tomes of his commentary on the Koran are currently being re-published in many languages. This is not comforting news, and Berman is fully aware that we would prefer to think about something else. To the bon bourgeois liberal, whose heart is replete with warm sentiments and whose mind is on his dinner, the notion of apocalyptic, death-obsessed mass movements sounds somewhat overdone.
And if the victims of such doctrines to date have been largely Third World peoples, why worry? For two decades the West has averted its eyes while Muslim despots and fanatics have exterminated millions: in the Lebanon, in the Iran-Iraq war, in Sudan, in Algeria, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. Now the killings are coming closer, whether on September 11 or in terrorism's ultimate refinement - suicide bombings where teenage "martyrs" are psyched to slaughter Jews even younger than themselves. Why wait till the infidel is older?
The reaction of the democracies, Berman suggests, was to an extent natural. Violence mesmerises, the sinister excites, and - as with the Nazis and Communists - there is a reluctance to believe that whole societies have succumbed to pathological political tendencies.
Nervous of domestic Muslim opinion, the rationalist West wants to believe that radical Islam is not definitively lost to reason. There has to be an explanation for its fanaticism and delusions, and it can only be America. Noam Chomsky and his fellow-travellers are ultimately more concerned with American guilt than with the fate of the Palestinians, the Afghans, the Iraqis, or other Middle Eastern peoples whose misery and oppression spring wholly or in part from their own failed cultures. And of course those who commit suicide and murder get high marks for sincerity from the likes of Chomsky.
Though no admirer of Sharon, Berman questions the view that a shade more flexibility by the Israelis could spare us the inconvenience of a campaign of mass slaughter and destruction whose ideological origins antedate a Jewish state. Meanwhile (he could have added) our old friend Moral Equivalence has made a post-Cold War comeback: they have their fundamentalism, it is fashionable to say, we have ours. Switch on the television and you will hear someone influential suggesting that a bit of religiosity in the White House or Number 10 represents the same threat to the world as the semi-crazed believers in a death-obsessed culture.
Our American Social Democratic author admires the social achievements of Europe, but can sound as exasperated at its shirking of responsibility as Donald Rumsfeld. Just as the cosy societies of neutrals like the Swedes or the Swiss were underwritten by those who struggled against Hitler, he suggests, so pacifist Germans and posturing Frenchmen would prefer to let the US take the heat and the flak. Since this book was written, in Iraq so it has come to pass.
Paul Berman gives Bush his due on leadership but argues that the battle cannot be won by conservatives alone. If the West is to defend itself, and democratic progress in the Middle East is to be more than a pipe dream, socialists, trade unions and intellectuals must take a principled stand against Muslim radicalism, as some did against Communism in the Cold War. Reading this book, with its echoes of Koestler and Camus - both truth-tellers about totalitarian terror - would be a good beginning.
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