A CIVIL WAR OF IDEAS
By AMIR TAHERI
NY Post
September 11, 2003
FOR the past few weeks, Islamist circles in the Middle East, Europe and the United States have been abuzz with rumors regarding a videotape from Osama bin Laden (remember him?). A middleman from Birmingham in the English Midlands launched an advance sales campaign for the tape last March. He began by asking $250,000, but ended up cutting the price to $25,000, a sure sign that OBL's stocks are not as high as on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks against the United States.
Yesterday, indeed, a tape of bin Laden was aired by al Jazeera, but it well may have been an old tape or a fake one. The best information available shows that Osama bin Laden died on Dec. 5, 2001, in Afghanistan and was buried the same day in an unmarked grave.
OBL is the only one of the seven top leaders of al Qaeda not to be fully accounted for. The organization's No. 2, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, is in Iran. Its No. 3, and military commander, Muhammad Atef, was killed in Afghanistan during the war that ended the Taliban rule.
Three other leaders, the Palestinian Abu Zubaydah, the Yemeni Ramzi bin Al-Shibha and the Kuwaiti Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were picked up between March 2002 and March 2003. Yussuf al-Ayyeri, the terror network's theoretician, was killed in a gun battle in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, in June.
Last year this time, some sympathizers of al Qaeda were able to gather at a rented hall in central London to hear some of OBL's old tapes and compare notes on their doomed movement. This year, however, there will be no such gathering. Some of the al Qaeda stragglers are either in prison or have fled Britain. A walk up Edgware Road, London's "Arab street," reveals the end of almost two decades of al Qaeda-style terrorist presence in the British capital, once known as Londonistan.
The terrorists have suffered similar setbacks in other Western countries.
In military and police terms, the War on Terror has gone much better than anyone would have expected.
Of the dozens of bases the terrorists had in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only two or three may still be operational in the Mohand area, one of the seven mountain enclaves in Pakistan. The last place in the Muslim world where the terrorists could gather, as late as December 2002, is the dusty town of Rabat, a thieves bazaar located in the so-called "Devil's Triangle" where the borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan meet.
The liberation of Iraq has shattered the structures of two dozen terror organizations, at least one of which was directly linked to al Qaeda.
Some money is still flowing into the coffers of the radical organizations that, in turn, finance the half dozen terror groups still capable of launching sporadic attacks.
But even there, what money now flows into terror is but a trickle, compared to the flood before 9/11.
In the meantime, predictions that several Muslim countries would fall into the hands of the terrorists have proved unfounded.
Pakistan, regarded as the "ripest for a fall," is emerging from two decades of uncertainty and gaining self-confidence.
Saudi Arabia, far from inaugurating a new regime headed by terrorists, is beginning to fight them in earnest, for the first time.
Algeria, another candidate for a "fall," is arguably more stable now than two years ago. Indonesia, which was presented as the next target of the terrorists, is consolidating its newly won democracy.
Last but not least, there is Iraq, where the most brutal regime Islam had seen in more than a century collapsed like a house of cards, largely because the Iraqi people welcomed their liberation.
More important, the past two years have witnessed an unprecedented debate in the Muslim world. One weekly magazine recently ran a series based on a central question: Who are we?
For the first time, mainstream media in the Muslim world allow difficult questions to be raised, including whether Islam should remain on the sidelines of the modern world and sulk, throw bombs at it or take part in its development and improvement.
In almost every Muslim country what amounts to a civil war of ideas is shaping up. Reformists and modernizers have realized that rather than dismissing Islam as a "feudal relic," they should seek to understand it in modern terms and redefine some of its practices to reflect the existential realities of their societies.
The alienation of the modernizing elite from the largely illiterate and poor base of most Muslim societies created a vacuum that a small stratum of fanatics was able to fill with a message of hatred and terror. Many Muslim regimes, meanwhile, exploited Islam as a way of isolating and silencing their reformist critics. Those regimes have begun to realize that the monster they trained to eat their foes could also eat them.
No one can deny that the party of terror in the Muslim world has failed to attract any significant level of popular support. The liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq was largely approved by the silent majority of Muslims.
The loudest protests came from within Western societies, including the United States.
This civil war of ideas within Islam represents the most difficult, and ultimately the deciding, phase in the war against terrorism. Unless this war is won by people who wish to lead Islam out of its ghetto and into the mainstream of contemporary life, no number of military and publicity victories against terror will produce the safer world that we all want.
BUT a similar civil war is raging in the West. On one side there is a neo-Imperialist movement, which urges the Western democracies to leave the Muslim world alone to stew in its own juice of poverty, despotism and violence. The idea is that Muslims will never accept democracy and the rule of law and that the best the West can do is to ignore them in the name of cultural "alterity" (otherness) and political correctness.
On the other side there is a neo-nationalist movement, which believes the only way to deal with terror is to teach Muslims a lesson they shall not forget. This neo-nationalist movement ignores the need for a broad alliance with Muslim reformists and democrats in a joint effort to curb and ultimately defeat terror. It forgets the fact that the principal victims of terrorism are Muslims themselves. (Saddam caused the deaths of over a million Iraqis, Iranians, Kuwaitis and other Muslims. The Taliban massacred tens of thousands of Afghans.)
Two years after 9/11 it is clear that the Muslim world has rejected the deadly message now associated with the name of Osama bin Laden, although he was but a small cog in a diabolical machine constructed over more than a century. Instead of understanding that vital fact and expanding people-to-people relations, some Western democracies have erected new barriers to keep out "the Muslim hordes."
Some Muslim governments, anxious to preserve their despotic hold on power, have seized the opportunity for distancing their societies from the West and keeping out dangerous ideas, such as democracy and human rights.
EVEN though a videotape of him was aired yesterday, Osama bin Laden has nothing new or interesting to say. Binladenism has no future in the Muslim world. But this does not mean that the Muslim world is ready to emerge from almost two centuries of confusion and crisis that led parts of it into the historic impasse of terrorism. In the war against terror, we are now witnessing only the end of the beginning.
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