Posted on 10/10/2001 7:07:30 AM PDT by veronica
Radical Islamism: 'bastard child' of Marxism
John O'Sullivan National Post
In his stirring speech to the British on Sunday justifying the Anglo-American bombing of Kabul and Kandahar, Prime Minister Tony Blair warned against any tendency to blame all Muslims for the terrorist acts of Osama bin Laden and the Taleban.
"This is not a war with Islam," he declared. "It angers me, as it angers the vast majority of Muslims, to hear bin Laden and his associates described as Islamic terrorists. They are terrorists pure and simple. Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion, and the acts of these people are contrary to the teachings of the Qur'an."
Mr. Blair was here repeating what President Bush, other political leaders and almost all the responsible opinion-formers in the Western world have been saying since the 11th of September. Indeed, they have sometimes sounded more worried about the likelihood of ordinary Americans attacking Muslim immigrants than about Muslims supporting the terrorist war on Americans.
Our political leaders have good diplomatic reasons for maintaining this position. They seek to avoid even the hint of a war between the once-Christian West and the quarter of the world that believes in Islam. They hope to prop up the pro-Western Muslim and Arab governments in the Middle East and Asia, and to use military bases on their territories. And, of course, they genuinely want to prevent any harassment of Muslims in America -- not only for humanitarian reasons but also to ensure Muslims locally will offer no shelter or support to bin Laden's terrorist network.
Yet, however prudent these official assertions of general Muslim benevolence may be, they are not strictly true. Osama bin Laden's brand of radical Islamism plainly has a very large following among Muslims, even among Muslims in the United States and especially among Arab Muslims. Although Islam has no central religious authority like the Vatican in Catholicism, there are many mullahs who endorse his jihad against America and happily pronounce fatwas (religious sentences of death) on moderate Muslim leaders like President Musharraff of Pakistan. As Paul Johnson recently demonstrated in these pages, there are passages in the Qur'an that lend themselves very easily to a justification of holy war against the West and Israel.
And, finally, there are undoubtedly some Islamic traditions that in the past have promoted aggressive hostility towards non-Muslim believers and that today underlie and justify the cultural resentment of many Muslims towards a West that has supplanted Islam as the main world civilization.
Western governments tacitly acknowledge these realities when they fear that pro-Western governments in the Middle East and the Gulf will be overthrown by the "Arab street" if the war goes wrong in some way.
At the same time, Blair's soothing words about peaceful Islam are not wholly false either. There are peaceful and progressive traditions in Islam which seek to reconcile it politically and economically, if not religiously, with science, liberalism, market capitalism and the modern world in general. In recent years, however, they have been on the defensive before the rise of radical Islamism -- the politico-religious philosophy driving bin Laden's terrorism. This doctrine combines a desire to impose a "purified" fundamentalist Islam on "corrupt" Muslim regimes with a rejection of a West seen as decadent internally and greedily oppressive externally. Because it strikes us in the West as antediluvian and absurd, we tend to assume that it must be the creed of ignorant and impoverished people.
But it is a creed held by people with Western PhDs, advanced technical skills and vast financial resources as well as by unemployed youths -- by Muslim intellectuals as well as by Third World proles.
And that should awaken a sense of familiarity within ourselves. For the truth is that radical Islamism does not derive solely from Islam. It has Western as well as Islamic roots. Indeed, it has been well-described by one commentator as the "bastard child" of Islamic fundamentalism and neo-Marxist Western scholarship. Its Islamic roots are in the puritanical Wahabi sect that set out to purify Islam more than a century ago in what is now Saudi Arabia and that is spread today throughout the Islamic world by financial subsidies from wealthy Saudi believers.
Its Western elements rest upon the theory ( first conceived by the English Liberal economist, Hobson, popularized by Lenin in Imperialism-the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and refined in the 1950s and 1960s into the theories of neo-colonialism and "comprador capitalism") that the wealth and power of the West are based upon its robbery and exploitation of the Third World.
No economic historian believes in this nonsense any more -- it is amply refuted by the fact that the Western colonial powers such as Britain and France actually became much richer after giving up their colonies -- but it is preached by radical Islamist mullahs from Dearborn to Dubai. In this context it justifies overthrowing the corrupt client governments that help the West to rob Muslim believers, such as the Saudi regime, in order to usher in a new age of Islamic independence and prosperity. And that is plainly Osama bin Laden's main aim in the terrorist war he has launched.
In short, radical Islamism is a violent, heretical and politicized perversion of Islam -- in exactly the same way that Communism and Nazism were violent, heretical and politicized perversions of enlightened Christian democratic humanism in the West. It perverts traditional religious ideas and sentiments into new political ideologies; it derives its energy from the resentments of those who feel economically or culturally dispossessed; it employs the most modern techniques in the service of essentially primitive concepts; and it sanctions unrestrained violence and ruthlessness in pursuit of totalitarian power -- exactly as Nazism and Communism did in all these respects.
Because all three ideologies are what Burke called "armed doctrines," however, they have to be defeated not only intellectually and spiritually, but also on the battlefield. Nazism and communism were both the cause of long civil wars in the West. Once they were defeated on the battlefield or in strategic/economic competition, however, they soon faded away as philosophical forces -- though Marxism enjoys a lingering half-life in the corrupt literature and politics departments of some Western universities.
Radical Islamism is similarly waging an unacknowledged civil war within Islam. But the signs are that Islamic civilization on its own lacks the necessary resources to overcome this perversion of itself. Resentment of America and the West is so strong in the Islamic world that many Muslims feel a sympathy for almost any Islamic force that challenges them. Before Islam is ready to confront and defeat the spiritual claims of radical Islamism, therefore, the West must first destroy its prestige by defeating it on the battlefield.
And the West can and will defeat radical Islamism on the battlefield; it is just a matter of time. The mosque can then begin to demolish its spiritual claims. But not before then, alas.
Your analysis seems to point towards a conclusion that radical moslem culture is distinct from Marxist ideology.
This pertains more to several other threads here that have been arguing whether radical moslem culture was "Marxist", or not.
It will be interesting to see whether a trend towards de-secularizaton (de-Marxism) develops in Islmic nations with "secular" regimes -- in the wake of current events.
My view is that radical moslem culture is not a perversion of Islam, nor is it heretical. There is a historical component to Islam -- its imperialistic, jihad aspects -- that will have to be discounted to insignificance by the "moderate" leadership of Islam if Islam is to become truly "peaceful". A difficult task.
Thank you for your insights.
Kindest Regards
Except whenever its principles are put into practice.
2001 thread on Islamic marxism
I don't like the title of this thread and I am not going to read it.
Was Marx Muslim??
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