Dealing With The Islamist Threat

On the 1 year anniversary of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by Mohamed Bouyeri, Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins and chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest writes an article for the Wall Street Journal entitled "A Year of Living Dangerously: Remember Theo van Gogh, and shudder for the future":

We profoundly misunderstand contemporary Islamist ideology when we see it as an assertion of traditional Muslim values or culture. In a traditional Muslim country, your religious identity is not a matter of choice; you receive it, along with your social status, customs and habits, even your future marriage partner, from your social environment. In such a society there is no confusion as to who you are, since your identity is given to you and sanctioned by all of the society's institutions, from the family to the mosque to the state.

The same is not true for a Muslim who lives as an immigrant in a suburb of Amsterdam or Paris. All of a sudden, your identity is up for grabs; you have seemingly infinite choices in deciding how far you want to try to integrate into the surrounding, non-Muslim society. In his book "Globalized Islam" (2004), the French scholar Olivier Roy argues persuasively that contemporary radicalism is precisely the product of the "deterritorialization" of Islam, which strips Muslim identity of all of the social supports it receives in a traditional Muslim society.

I don't know how persuasive Roy is, never having read his book, but I'm not sure why the problem is with Muslims as opposed to immigrants of other nationalities that would also have issues of cultural identity in a foreign land.

Since there appears to be no shortage of mosques around the world and Muslims do tend to live together in the same area, I am not clear on how Fukuyama can claim that the Muslim identity is stripped of "all of the social supports it receives in a traditional Muslim society." Perhaps, as a Jew familiar with the kinds of social and religious support Jews are able to make available for themselves, I find Fukuyama's claim leaning towards the kind of condescension implied in the absurd compromises that are made for Muslim sensibilities.

The identity problem is particularly severe for second- and third-generation children of immigrants. They grow up outside the traditional culture of their parents, but unlike most newcomers to the United States, few feel truly accepted by the surrounding society.

Of course there are 2 sides to the issue of feeling accepted:

One the one hand, what is the surrounding society actually doing to accomodate immigrants; on the other hand, what the immigrants actually feel they are entitled to in order to feel accepted. Banning Piglet may very well make Muslem immigrants feel accepted, but if the society is not accommodating, it is absurd to claim it is out of a lack of tolerance.

In his article Defender of the Faith, David Frum quotes from “Islam in Britain,” a report of the UK Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity which "paints a vivid picture of a rapidly growing British Muslim community determined to remodel British society along Islamic lines." Frum writes:

Zaki Badawi, president of London’s Muslim College, holder of the Order of the British Empire, and the widely recognized “unofficial leader, representative, and advocate of Britain’s mainline Muslims”:

”A proselytizing religion cannot stand still. It can either expand or contract. Islam endeavors to expand in Britain. … Islam is a universal religion. It aims at bringing its message to all corners of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be one Muslim community, the Umma. As we know the history of Islam as a faith is also the history of a state and a community of believers living by divine law. The Muslims, jurists and theologians, have always expounded Islam as both Government and a faith. This reflects the historical fact that Muslims, from the start, lived under their own law. Muslim theologians naturally produced a theology with this in view – it is a theology of the majority. Being a minority was not seriously considered or even contemplated. … Muslim theology offers, up to the present, no systematic formulation of the status of being in a minority.”

The report’s authors cite similar views from authoritative spokespeople, and conclude:

”Muslims find it difficult to assume minority status in a majority non-Muslim society. More than other minority communities, they constantly, sometimes subconsciously, strive to redress the balance and assume an expanding and dominant position in their host countries.”

The report goes on to document this process, showing first how Muslim organizations in Britain have attempted to enforce Muslim custom and sharia law upon unwilling membersof their own faith community, especially women – and then how they have gone on to attempt to enforce Muslim norms on all British people, Muslim or not.

Based on this report, it seems clear that Muslims are not short of tools for reinforcing--if not coercing--the Muslim identity. And just as they are not lacking in social supports, there are no lack of attempts to help Muslims feel truly accepted. Frum continues:

The report describes how British authorities have quietly acquiesced when Muslim groups demanded the removal of symbols like the crown or the cross of St. George from police badges, have accommodated the public observance of Islam while dismantling Christian observances, have quietly accommodated polygamy and Islamic family law, and have granted honored positions in British life to anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-semitic Muslim leaders.

Efforts at accomodation have gone way beyond banning Piglet and beyond even-handedness. And contrary to Fukuyama'a claim, Muslim identity appears strong, dominant--and dominating.

Meanwhile, Fukuyama continues:

Contemporary Europeans downplay national identity in favor of an open, tolerant, "post-national" Europeanness. But the Dutch, Germans, French and others all retain a strong sense of their national identity, and, to differing degrees, it is one that is not accessible to people coming from Turkey, Morocco or Pakistan. Integration is further inhibited by the fact that rigid European labor laws have made low-skill jobs hard to find for recent immigrants or their children. A significant proportion of immigrants are on welfare, meaning that they do not have the dignity of contributing through their labor to the surrounding society. They and their children understand themselves as outsiders.

But do Muslims really want to access the national identity of their host country and integrate? Also, if this difficulty is a situation that immigrants in general are facing, then why are we seeing Muslim immigrants in particular as a source of violence and terror? Why are they special?

Fukuyama's answer:

It is in this context that someone like Osama bin Laden appears, offering young converts a universalistic, pure version of Islam that has been stripped of its local saints, customs and traditions. Radical Islamism tells them exactly who they are--respected members of a global Muslim umma to which they can belong despite their lives in lands of unbelief. Religion is no longer supported, as in a true Muslim society, through conformity to a host of external social customs and observances; rather it is more a question of inward belief. Hence Mr. Roy's comparison of modern Islamism to the Protestant Reformation, which similarly turned religion inward and stripped it of its external rituals and social supports. [emphasis added]

First of all, why are we all of a sudden speaking about "young converts"? Why is he making a distinction between non-Muslims who convert to Islam as opposed to those who are born Muslim. Are the latter really less radical? Frum has already challenged the idea that there are no Muslim societies in non-Muslim lands that support the conformity to external social customs and observances.

Fukuyama concludes:

The real challenge for democracy lies in Europe, where the problem is an internal one of integrating large numbers of angry young Muslims and doing so in a way that does not provoke an even angrier backlash from right-wing populists. Two things need to happen: First, countries like Holland and Britain need to reverse the counterproductive multiculturalist policies that sheltered radicalism, and crack down on extremists. But second, they also need to reformulate their definitions of national identity to be more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds.

A very tall order.

According to Fukuyama, "we have seen the exact same forms of alienation among those young people who in earlier generations became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Bader-Meinhof gang. The ideology changes but the underlying psychology does not." But if that is true, then why have we seen thousands killed since 9-11, outside of Europe? Why India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, Algeria, and Bangladesh?

Israel is not the cause of the Islamism.
It is the first victim.

Muslims are known for being gracious hosts.
Things would be so much simpler if they were not such difficult guests.

See The Obvious Question

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