IN THE DIVISIVE, decade-old War on Terror, one certitude
unites the warriors and the conscientious objectors. It is
that Islamism is not to be confused with Islam. “Whatever
it’s called,” George W. Bush said, “this ideology is very
different from the religion of Islam.” Attorney General
Eric Holder described the Islamism of the late Anwar
al-Awlaki as “a version of Islam that is not consistent
with the teachings of it.” Zeyno Baran has come
reluctantly to the conclusion that the Bush/Holder view is
false. Her new book describes how Islamists have captured
many Islamic religious and social institutions, including
most of the Western ones. Islamism has supplanted more
traditional tendencies and has become what most people,
Muslim and non-Muslim alike, understand as mainstream
Islam. Gullible American and European policymakers have
partnered with the wrong Muslims, freezing out their
friends and empowering those who wish them ill.
What do we mean by “Islamist”? Baran applies the word to
those Muslims who want Islam reflected in political life,
sometimes including the establishment of sharia law and
the reconstruction of a world caliphate. There is a
fundamentalist, theocratic current that has always run
through Islam. It goes back to Hanbali fiqh
(jurisprudence) in the ninth century and to Ibn Taymiyya’s
thirteenth-century invocations of divine judgment to
account for various Muslim misfortunes. Islamism is what
happened when the master ideologists of twentieth-century
Islam—al-Banna, Qutb and Maududi—yoked this ancient
current to styles of rabble-rousing brought into vogue by
Nazis and Communists. Egypt’s ban of the Muslim
Brotherhood in the 1950s was fateful. In their Arabian
exile the Brothers merged their political savvy with the
oil money of the Saudis. The result was a creed with a
mighty appeal to young rebels and idealists. “Islamism
shares the most fundamental aim of Islam and all
religions,” Baran writes, “to bring the world closer to
God.” In so saying, she removes us from the cocoon of cant
that swaddles most public—and all governmental—discussion
of Islam’s role in terrorism.
Islamists are, by definition, politicized Muslims. They
are better at politics than their apolitical
coreligionists. European officials made a mistake in the
1980s and ’90s, when they “granted asylum to many
immigrants who presented far more of a threat to
democratic rule than the regimes they had fled.” The core
of Baran’s book is her description of the tactics by which
Islamists co-opted, infiltrated, bamboozled, and
overwhelmed Muslim institutions of long standing.
Islamists generally preferred subverting existing bodies
to setting up their own, Baran writes, because it
“required less effort and offered greater recruitment
possibilities.” Her account of such subversion will remind
readers of the history of Communists in the trade-union
movement. As Baran shows, boards of directors staffed with
doddering old-country patriarchs do not stand a chance
against young, modern, Internet- and media-savvy
“professional Muslims.” She is quite specific about how
this pattern of hostile takeovers has played out in
community after community: at the Bridgeview Mosque on the
South Side of Chicago; at the Islamic Center of New
England in Quincy, Massachusetts; at the Muslim Unity
Center in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
You can see, from this history, why the Bush-Obama effort
to render the United States more likeable in the Muslim
world has thus far failed. It was from institutions
already aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood that Bush,
Tony Blair, and other Western leaders sought advice when
they decided to “reach out” to Muslim communities after
September 11. Good examples from the United States are the
Muslim Student Association and the Islamic Society of
North America, both founded in the 1960s, and the
spin-doctors at the Council on American-Islamic Relations,
founded in 1994, whom even the FBI trusted for a time
before cutting ties. But the pattern is repeated
elsewhere. The Saudi-funded Muslim World League pays the
salaries of many Turkish imams in Germany. The Islamist
Union of Islamic Organizations of France is often the
dominant voice on the national Muslim body that Nicolas
Sarkozy set up as interior minister a decade ago. These
organizations have often played Western leaders for
chumps. The Palestinian activist Sami Al-Arian met with
top American officials, including Presidents Clinton and
Bush, while he was under investigation for ties to
Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The British government broke
with the MCB after its leader signed a declaration against
“Zionist Jewish occupiers” and their “sinful aggression”
and urged that those aiding them be “rejected and fought
by all means and ways.” But Britain wound up restoring
relations after the MCB issued a vague renunciation of
violence.
Baran is a Muslim liberal and feminist who insists that
there is a strong message of gender equality in the Koran.
She worries that the dominance of these Muslim
Brotherhood–inspired, frequently Saudi-funded groups is
obscuring the diversity of Islamic culture and religious
practice. But the problem is worse than she says. Radical,
politicized groups are not merely drowning out more
traditionally pious strains of Islam—they are wiping them
out. This process is underway in Baran’s native Turkey.
Baran is a defender of the model of moderate,
state-managed Islam, set up by Kemal Atatürk and his
successors. The former president of Turkey, Suleyman
Demirel, wrote the book’s introduction. Alas, the gifted
demagogue and Islamist Tayyip Erdogan has spent the better
part of the last decade ripping this apolitical Islam out
of Turkish society root-and-branch. It is more a museum
piece than a living, breathing alternative to Islamism.
Baran is right that certain Islamist organizations such
as Hizb ut-Tahrir can serve as a “conveyor belt” to
violence and terrorism. Although Western governments
differ on whether Hizb ut-Tahrir is a radical
organization, a small but significant percentage of its
members leave the organization in search of something more
intense and dangerous. The problem is that religion itself
is a conveyor belt to radicalism in this way. Tolerating a
religion—to say nothing of promoting it, as the Bush and
Obama administrations have done—means granting
practitioners the leeway to interpret their faith as they
will. When push comes to shove, Baran is nervous about
giving Islam that kind of leeway. She urges that American
government authorities investigate private schools that
“inculcate attitudes towards females, gays, and members of
other religions that reflect premodern norms.” Bad idea.
Such a program would mean a wholesale revocation of First
Amendment religious freedoms, and not just from Muslims.
In Baran’s view, Western governments have failed by
taking as their model for Islam only what they heard from
CAIR and ISNA. They should “shift their current focus from
countering extremist violence to preventing extremism from
taking hold in the first place.” The strategy she suggests
might indeed be a better one. But there are two reasons it
cannot be carried out. One is that Americans are too
frightened of being disciplined and punished for breaches
of political correctness to discuss honestly any aspect of
any policy touching on Islam. Even this term—“political
correctness”—does not do justice to the Zhdanovite
lockdown that the government enforces when it comes to
discussing Islam.
Consider the Fort Hood massacre in 2009. Major Nidal
Hasan allegedly had a pattern of haranguing people about
Islam, and put himself in contact with the hate-preaching
abettor of terrorists Anwar al-Awlaki, and shouted “Allahu
Akbar!” as he gunned down his victims. But as Baran notes,
fears of being accused of “Islamophobia” kept everyone
around Hasan from speaking up about his evident
instability. The Defense Department’s analysis of the
slaughter, according to Baran, “does not mention Islam,
Islamism, or Islamist radicalization anywhere in the text,
concluding that Hasan was just another disgruntled
workplace shooter.”
Secondly, Americans don’t know Islam well enough. The
distinction between “Islamists who renounce violence” (the
people we are empowering now) and the “moderate Muslims
who reject Islamism” (the people Baran would like us to
empower)—these distinctions might be meaningful for a
literary Turk with a good Koranic education. They will be
lost on a galoot congressman from the mountain West who
has never met a Muslim. And to draw such distinctions in
the first place would reveal what a big, intransigent
problem traditionalist Islam poses for Western societies.
It is a problem that already has a long record of forcing
those societies to weigh their commitment to diversity
against their commitment to freedom.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at the
Weekly Standard.
