Olivier Roy, professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and the author of “Globalized Islam,” is one of a growing number of scholars advancing the thesis that the most dangerous breeding grounds for radicalized Islamism are Western—not, as conventional wisdom suggests, the madrassas of Pakistan or the streets of Gaza. From “Why Do They Hate Us? Not Because of Iraq,” the New York Times:
[…] if the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan – or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.
What was true for the first generation of Al Qaeda is also relevant for the present generation: even if these young men are from Middle Eastern or South Asian families, they are for the most part Westernized Muslims living or even born in Europe who turn to radical Islam. Moreover, converts are to be found in almost every Qaeda cell: they did not turn fundamentalist because of Iraq, but because they felt excluded from Western society (this is especially true of the many converts from the Caribbean islands, both in Britain and France). “Born again” or converts, they are rebels looking for a cause. They find it in the dream of a virtual, universal ummah, the same way the ultraleftists of the 1970’s (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigades) cast their terrorist actions in the name of the “world proletariat” and “Revolution” without really caring about what would happen after.
It is also interesting to note that none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. They don’t distribute leaflets or collect money for hospitals and schools. They do not have a rational strategy to push for the interests of the Iraqi or Palestinian people.
Even their calls for the withdrawal of the European troops from Iraq ring false. After all, the Spanish police have foiled terrorist attempts in Madrid even since the government withdrew its forces. Western-based radicals strike where they are living, not where they are instructed to or where it will have the greatest political effect on behalf of their nominal causes.
Similarly, American Enterprise Institute fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing in the July 25 Weekly Standard, takes Roy’s thesis, finesses it a bit, and provides his own analysis. From the “Jihad Made In Europe,”:
Roy may overstate the autonomy of Islamic radicalism in Europe from the militancy in the Middle East; he surely diminishes too much the religious ingredient in the emerging radical Muslim European identity. But my own visits to numerous radical mosques in Western Europe since 9/11 suggest that he is more right than wrong about the Europeanization of Islamic militancy. The Saudis may pay for the mosques and the visiting Saudi and Jordanian imams, but the believers are often having very European conversations in European languages. In France, Belgium, or Holland, sitting with young male believers can feel like a time-warp, a return to the European left of the 1970s and early 1980s. Europe’s radical-mosque practitioners can appear, mutatis mutandis, like a Muslim version of the hard-core intellectuals and laborers behind the aggrieved but proud Scottish National party in its salad days. These young men are often Sunni versions of the Iranian radicals who gathered around the jumbled, deeply contradictory, religious left-wing ideas of Ali Shariati, one of the intellectual fathers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s “red-mullah” revolution of 1979, and the French-educated ex-Communist Jalal Al-e Ahmad, who became in the 1960s perhaps the most famous theoretician of Muslim alienation in the Western world.
The Shiite parallel is also pertinent since it elucidates the motives of Sunni believers who see murder as a martyr’s expression of devotion to God. The thousands of Iranians who gleefully went to their deaths in suicidal missions against the Iraqis in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war did so in part, as the Franco-Iranian scholar Farhad Khosrakhavar has written, because the “liberty to die as a martyr served to maintain the phantasm of revolutionary possibilities.” Death is both the ultimate expression of a very Western idea of individual freedom and self-creation and a very Islamic conception of self-abnegation before God’s will. Talk to young radical Muslims in Europe–young men who in all probability have no desire whatsoever to kill themselves or others for any cause–and you can often nevertheless find an appreciation of the idea of martyrdom almost identical to the Iranian death-wish of yesteryear. In the last three centuries, Europe has given birth and nourishment to most of mankind’s most radical causes. It shouldn’t be that surprising to imagine that Europe could nurture Islamic militancy on its own soil.
In Europe as elsewhere, Westernization is the key to the growth and virulence of hard-core Islamic radicalism. The most frightening, certainly the most effective, adherents of bin Ladenism are those who are culturally and intellectually most like us. The process of Westernization liberates a Muslim from the customary sanctions and loyalties that normally corralled the dark side of the human soul. Respect for one’s father, an appreciation for the human need to have fun, a toleration of eccentricity and naughty personal behavior, the love of art and folk music–all are characteristics of traditional mainstream Muslim society wiped away by the arrival of modernity and the simultaneous spread of sterile, esthetically empty, angry, Saudi-financed Wahhabi thought. In this sense, bin Ladenism is the Muslim equivalent of Western totalitarianism. This cleaning of the slate, this break with the past, is probably more profound in the Muslim enclaves in Europe–what Gilles Kepel called les banlieues de l’Islam–than it is in the urban sprawl of Cairo, where traditional mores, though under siege and badly battered by modernity, nevertheless retain considerable force. Cairo gave us Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s great intellectual; it’s not unreasonable to fear that London or Paris or Berlin will give us his successor.
Of course, it is one thing to identify the problem, and another thing entirely to devise and institute a strategy for combatting it. Which is why it is heartening, to a certain extent, to learn that we’ve already begun the heavy lifting by dint of actively promoting democratic reform in the middle east (and indeed, across the globe).
Still, there are other strategic and tactical measures we should be taking, too—several of which Gerecht goes on to suggest:
[…] a wise U.S. counterterrorist policy would downplay the external causes of Islamic activism in Europe. We should prepare for the worst-case scenario and assume that European society itself will continue to generate the most lethal holy warriors. In doing so, American officials should be skeptical of their own ability to identify through profiling which Muslim Europeans might engage in terrorism against the United States. Stamps in passports indicating travel to Middle Eastern countries can’t tell you much, since holy-warrior pilgrimages are not required to fortify jihadist spirits and networks. Living in London, Leeds, or Manchester can be more than enough.
This means, of course, that the Bush administration ought to preempt fate and suspend the visa-waiver program established in 1986 for Western Europeans. It is true that consular officers were a poor frontline defense before 9/11 against Muslim extremists trying to enter the United States. But the United States would be safer with some screening mechanism, however imperfect, before Europeans arrive at our borders. The transatlantic crowd in Washington–the bedrock of America’s foreign-policy establishment–might rise in high dudgeon at the damage this could do to U.S.-European relations. The State Department’s European and consular-affairs bureaus might add that they no longer have the staff to handle the enormous number of applicants. Ignore them. American-European relations were just fine when we required all Europeans to obtain visas before crossing our borders. Consular officers are among the most overworked personnel in the U.S. government. So draft poorly utilized personnel from the Department of Homeland Security until the consular corps at the State Department can grow sufficiently. Issuing visas to Europeans would be an annoying inconvenience for all; it would not, however, be an insult. Given the damage one small cell of suicidally inclined radical Muslim Europeans could do in the New York City or Washington metro or on Amtrak’s wide-open trains, it’s not too much to ask.
[…] There is no satisfying, expeditious answer to Europe’s Muslim problems. If Olivier Roy is right–European Islam, for better and for worse, is now independent of the Middle East–then democracy could come to Muslims’ ancestral homelands even as a virulent form of Islamic militancy persisted for years in Western Europe. But the intellectual and family ties with the Middle East are probably still sufficient to ensure that if the Middle East changes for the better, the ripples will quickly reach Europe. The democratic discussion in the Middle East, which is often broadcast through media headquartered in Europe, is becoming ever more vibrant and powerful. If Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt begins to give way to democracy, it’s a very good bet that the discussion in every single mosque in Western Europe will be about the popular triumph and the democratic experiment beginning in the Arab world’s most important country.
Amid all the ensuing political and religious debates and arguments, in the expectant hope that other dictators would fall, al Qaeda and its allied groups might find it even harder to attract recruits who would incinerate themselves for a revolutionary ideal increasingly at odds with reality. If the Bush administration wants to help Europe, it should back as forcefully as possible the rapid expansion of democracy in the Middle East. It would be a delightful irony if the more progressive political and religious debates among the Middle East’s Muslims saved their brethren in the intellectually backward lands of the European Union.
Fortunately, many of us have already reached the conclusion that the spread of democracy in the mideast is the single greatest threat to radicalized Islam—if only as a way, in the Roy / Gerecht paradigm of a radicalized Western Islamism leading the charge of holy war, to disabuse Westernized jihadists of a number of ready made excuses for their fight—something the American people made clear when they reelected President Bush in November.
Now if we can only convince the rest of the world of the need to sign on.
Did you see this, which concludes with :
Hmmmm.
“Fortunately, many of us have already reached the conclusion that the spread of democracy in the mideast is the single greatest threat to radicalized Islam”
Actually I kinda disagree.
I don’t believe radical Islam comes from any sort of dictatorship or tyranny. The most dangerous terrorists, i.e. radical Islamicists, come from Western nations where they’re indulged with democracy. And I don’t believe it has anything to do with whether or not someone is assimilated or integrated into society at all. Look at Johnny Walker Lindh, you can’t get much more assimilated than a white American male living in California on his parents dime.
Frankly I think Islam itself breeds radical Islamicists. This is due partly to the cellular nature of Islamic clerics. Any Islamic cleric has virtually the same standing within his level of authority. This means that 99 out of 100 Islamic clerics could be peaceful rational people, but that last bastard could easily be out there stirring things up. It’s true that other Islamic clerics could counter this, to an extent, but I don’t believe that there is anything official that could be done. There is no excommunication or defrocking in Islam so there is no mechanism, to my knowledge, for moderate (1) Islamic clerics to police their own.
Another aspect of Islam is the truly inflammatory nature of the Koran and Islamic teachings. People like to point out that there are some inflammatory teachings in the Bible. That’s true, but I attended Sunday School in a church for a few years and I was never taught to despise people and look to kill them. Maybe that’s just my church in NH, but I think such things are fairly rare in Christianity, but not in Islam.
Frankly I think that the biggest generator of radical Islamicists is the ongoing attempt by the West to ‘reform’ Islam. People who tend to be radical seem to view that as both an affront and as an attack on Islam. So the attempt itself of mitigating the violence might be leading others to that same path.
IMHO though the amount of patience people have for these idiots is rapidly running out. If muslims cannot control themselves, or their radical fellows, then there is going to be a serious crackdown. This will probably make things worse, rather than better, and will generate even more terrorism.
At some point the patience runs out or a nuke detonates in lower Manhattan and then the gloves come off and the bodies start getting stacked 30 deep.
It’s a pity that muslims were largely left out of WWII. It would probably have done them a world of good to have had Cairo firebombed a dozen times or a few other muslims cities completely leveled by 1,000 bomber raids. I think a great deal of today’s terrorism comes from a mistaken view that the West will never go into Total War mode, a very mistaken view IMHO, and that terrorists can continue their attacks with no impact on the average muslim, who generally supports these attacks.
At some point the average muslim has to be taught that supporting terrorism is a negative survival trait. This will happen. The real question is whether or not there will be any muslims left afterwards to learn that lesson.
*shrug* that’s their problem.
(1) If there even is such a thing as a “moderate” muslim. Most of the “moderate” muslims I’ve read about were just fine with terrorism against us infidels. The only real difference was that the moderates seemed to prefer a little more discretion in the act of murdering infidels.
Well, Gerecht’s article makes the case that most of Islam is actually rejecting the radicalized version.
And the anti-assimilationist argument you make relies on a single nodal point. Sure, there are undoubtedly more Walker-Lindhs out there, but they are surely few and far between compared to the overwhelming number of Marin county hippie kids who don’t fight jihad.
Walker-Lindh, both Gerecht and Roy might argue, proves their point. Sure, he studied in Pakistan. But what brought him there to begin with? A love of Islam? Or some disaffection with the west?
The spreading of democracy, Gerecht argues, will take away the excuses for disaffected Arabs to couch what they’re doing in the garb of an Islamic holy war. And though I’m not completely sold on the thesis—and see much in Islamism that is is inherently problematic—he might be on to something. Note the part of his argument (not excerpted) where he talks about the numbers of jihadis, and where they are coming from.
Re: moderate Muslims. I heard Mansoor Ijaz make a similar argument as yours today—that beyond simply mouthing criticism for suicide bombings, moderate Muslims need to begin providing material assistance. I agree. But to be fair, Gerecht makes the point that many moderate Muslims may be silent because, like most workaday Christians, they don’t see themselves through that particular identity point—and so don’t realize that they are responsible for people who are so unlike them.
One might suppose that even moderate Christians might dissasociate themselves with other Christians who took hostages and beheaded them while giving glory to God as they did so.
But you make Gerecht’s point for him, Mac: that they have already so disassociated themselves that they don’t even recognize the need to disassociate themselves publicly.
That is to say, they aren’t all that religious to begin with.
Maybe moderate muslims are afraid to speak out because they don’t want to lose their head.
Well, he say understates the case that he actually wrong where he says:
“It is true that consular officers were a poor frontline defense before 9/11 against Muslim extremists trying to enter the United States.”
In fact, most of the 9/11 terrorists arrived via Saudi Arabia where they utilized the Visa Express program which had travel agents issuing entry visas, and the evidence abounds that most of the paperwork clearing the visas was incomplete.
It seems to me the problem with consular officers performing such duty is that they see their jobs as to help facilitate travel to the US, rather than as a front line defense against the unsavory. Sounds like it really is the type of function that should be taken away from State and given to a security service. It is a border control function, so it should be policed as such. Why is someone who flies here from overseas to be treated any different than someone driving across at Niagra Falls?
Ahem:
Well, he so understates the case that he’s actually wrong where he says:
“must”! Must remember to use preview!
OK, I’ll bite… Gerecht says:
and likens these urbane secularist Muslims to intellectual left progenitors.
So their dissasociation is something like “We rub shoulders with them, we sit as congregants together, and bow on the same mats together. If I happen to get some terrorist victim’s blood on me as I bow – it’s of no matter to me. Religion is the opiate of the masses and my participation is simply to further the idea that ‘death is both the ultimate expression of a very Western idea of individual freedom and self-creation and a very Islamic conception of self-abnegation before God’s will’. I want to kill you and it is your fault because you post-modern Europeans have destroyed my traditions and corrupted me.
I’m sorry, but Gerecht is just one more example of saying that Muslim extremism is the fault of the West – so we all deserve to die.
I don’t think he’s saying it’s the fault of the west at all—rather, that it thrives on western soil.
If you mean “thrive” in the sense that Islamofascism and cultural Marxism have become bedfellows then I’m on board with that – killing in the name of God and killing in the name of the state is still klling. But I don’t see Gerecht as making what is essentially the Horowitz argument when he says:
He doesn’t seem to be linking Islamic militancy with cultural Marxism – textually, that is. Sounds more like the shame pandering that we hear from our left.
I’m really willing to grok this guy but I’m having a hard time getting through the wind.
Well, I think you are conflating descriptions with causes—or, if you prefer, imbuing accidental cause and effect with culpability where I don’t think any exists, outside the actual ways in which Western society does, in fact, aid the cause of terrorism (liberal democracies lend themselves to the kind of privacy and “tolerance” that leaves fringe ideologies free to gestate)—but perhaps I’m wrong.
In Europe as elsewhere, Westernization is the key to the growth and virulence of hard-core Islamic radicalism.
I’d agree in part – the rapid spread and virulence (if we define that as “likelyhood to cause death and destruction”) is the key. A true hard-core Islamist, properly subservient to Allah’s will and educated primarily in the religous works and thought of fundamentalist Islam, would reject the very western-supplied tools that make the spread so fast and increase the danger of me getting blowed up randomly exponentially. It takes the assimilated ones to do the dirty work.
Not that it’s a serious individual danger yet, statistically speaking, but that could change. Nukes start popping, it’s likely to get real ugly real fast, for everybody.
With all due respect to you guys, and everyone here is very smart and makes good arguments, I think that the answer is much simpler, as I’ve said here before.
The core of islam is the spread of Dar-al-islam across the world. And the koran and the hadiths make it crystal-clear that ANYTHING employed in the service of that is acceptable. The problem is islam itself, and not anything else.
SW, “arms.”
Jeff, I appreciate the fact that you’ve created a place where discussion isn’t about “rightness” – I’m thankful that you search out the content and I know I learn a great deal from engaging with it. Thanks for the great forum at PW …
Hmmmm.
So how does this explain the British muslim terrorists who have been involved in attacks in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and now London?
So how does this explain why 1/4 of British muslims support the terrorism in London?
What? Is there a deficit of democracy in Britain? Does the US need to require democratic reforms in Britain?
Sorry Jeff but nonsense dressed up in prose is still nonsense.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here, ed. Gerecht’s piece specifically suggests that, because radicalism is so rampant in Western states that you’d expect to find British muslims terrorists in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now London.
Can you provide a link to the poll you cite about 25% of British muslims supporting the terrorism in London? Because again, that number seems to support the theory that radicalization is more of problem in Westernized countries like England than it is in some traditionally Muslim countries.
As to the democracy bit, Gerecht says, as I’ve excerpted above:
In short, democratization in the middle east would take away the scapegoats for Islamism that is being radicalized in western countries who, because of their respect for civil liberties, privacy, and the rule fo law, have a harder time cracking down on fanatics.
I’m not sure how this is nonsense, or how it doesn’t address specifically the points you raise.
I think this is what ed was referring to (from RedState.org):
“On the one hand a clear majority of 77% said that the attacks were completely unjustified. Another 11% said that the attacks were unjustified “on balance.” Only 6% said that the attacks actually were justified. However, the UK noted that 6% figure represents about 100,000 Britons. Moreover, some 24% said they sympathized with the feelings and motives of the terrorists.”
This poll can be found here.
Sympathizing isn’t the same as supporting, but I believe this is consistent with your post in that it does hit pretty close to home in addressing our perception of Islam, or more correctly our concern over the apparent lack of interest in fighting back.