Just in case you are bored and have some free time, you can spend it bungee jumping -- preferably without a rope. Or you can write an article about Islam. If you write what the evidence suggests then you are better of with the safer activity first mentioned. The frightening thing about America is the inclination to suppress what everyone knows. It amounts to pretending there is only a mouse when entering a cage filled with berserk tyrannosauruses. The mad saurian is that branch of Islam that currently defines a movement that even slaughters its own people and connives to murder “our boys.” The problem with the game of pretending myopia is that it does not make the problem go away. Even worse, the trouble becomes, due to the palliative medicine, exponentially worse.

The Islamists' agenda is, thanks to the openness of its adherents, quite clear. The quandary of the intended victim (the modern world) is that it does not believe what it hears and sees. The case reminds me of the selectively deaf British in the ‘30s and the resonating Nazi marching song about “bombs over England.” (Da wir fahren, da wir fahren, da wir fahren gegen Engeland.)

Sadly, the fact-suppressors and the fact-twisters make it their cause to distort those aspects of Islam that threaten the way of life of those “Unbelievers” who are currently living outside the boundaries of the only true faith. Here it must be admitted that all systems that are based on a faith (religious or otherwise) that purports in its extremist reading to be based on the only valid interpretation of Truth, tend to become extremist in their application. This has been the case of Christianity in its early centuries. The Renaissance and also the Reformation, also secularization, contributed to the overcoming of this malady of the movement’s infancy. The rise and decline of the “isms” of the modern era might confirm the generalization.

The insights communicated below are intended to unleash a thought process that dissects the issue of whether a globally unopposed -- and thus unconstrained -- Islam can be expected to produce the forces and ideas that are likely to mitigate its long lasting inclination to convert the faithless by the sword. The fundamental issue that confronts us is whether democracy and progress are compatible with Islam. Are the societies whose order is based on Mohammed’s teaching apt to become in time progressive politically and economically? Can they, through comparable processes overcome the growing gap that currently separates them from the modern world? (As accomplished by a number of non-European cultures.) It is a politically untainted fact that until what we call the High Middle Ages the Moslem world enjoyed not only military superiority over the West but also scored higher economically and in terms of its treasury of worldly knowledge. This would indicate that participating in progress is not antithetical to Islam-ruled societies. The break of the contact to what became “modern” occurred when “Europe” slipped out of its cultural cocoon and first tolerated, then ultimately welcomed, change. This meant the defeat of the obscurantists embedded in Occidental culture. Concurrently, and not as a reaction to what happened elsewhere, the Moslem world bestowed victory on its dogmatic forces of darkness.  The parting of the ways lasted till our own time.

This parting, accompanied by confrontation, is the product of forces that are internal to progressive Occidental and Muslim culture. Therefore, the question arises whether the divide now existing can be overcome through a conscious or accidental turn-about in the antithetical cultures and their states that now combat each other.

Regrettably for all concerned on both sides of the divide, the chances of this happening are remote. A mutation of the industrialized societies -- we used to call them “the West” until numerous states that were decidedly non-western in culture and ethnicity, joined the club of the advanced -- to conform to Islamists criteria is a most remote theoretical possibility. Backtracking on the last thousand years is, to put it mildly, more than unlikely. Therefore, a meeting of the minds and an ensuing peace on the basis of the Koran is, well, too theoretical. This leaves us with a solution involving the moderation of Islam to the point where, not only a truce but also a future, based on a common denominator in the context of convergence, would determine our mutual destiny.  Alas, such a development that would circumvent the intensifying clash of cultures that characterizes the present is rather improbable.

The realistic issue involved in coexisting revolves around whether pronouncedly Mohammedan societies can become political democracies and economically advanced on the basis of earned wealth. It this assessment’s innuendoes are correct then the immediate future looks dismal.

Let us begin with the issue of democracy. On this level societies that grow increasingly democratic as they industrialize present us -- except for the issue of armaments -- with a greater problem than the defunct USSR created. With them we quarrelled “only” about what true democracy is. The Islamic fundamentalists oppose our ideal with two arguments. For one, democracy is, not surprisingly, not in the Koran that was formulated in the 7th century. Therefore, being theologically objectionable, democracy is more than an invalid worldly goal. (Western secular goals can coexist with our religious postulates.) So, democracy is unnecessary and false at best, a heresy at its worse. 

This gets us to matters involving “state, man, society and religion.” Here, too, the differences out of which the details issue are fundamental while also being immense. Progressive societies, certainly the Western Tradition of political theory, place all these concepts in separate containers. In doing so it gives precedence to the individual. For instance, a good man, that is an individual, can oppose the public order in which he lives. Thus society and politics can be -- actually should be -- separated from organized religion.

Islam has an irreconcilably different view of this matter. First of all, state, society and religion are not divisible. Intentionally the list left out the “individual.” The person gains significance only through his membership in a community: a further way to negate the intellectual premise of democracy. Western praxis and theory asserts that religion and politics are the contents of two different baskets. Islamists see them as a central matter and as inseparably intertwined. This way the state and the social order are not man-made but ordained by God. The individual, therefore the people as the real “sovereign,” do not fit into this concept. A ruler, who is thus only responsible to Deity, but not to the “people,” is an assumption that only heretics -- to be annihilated -- might challenge. Here are the intellectual roots of dictatorship and of the fundamental opposition not only to political democracy but also to laissez-faire and individualism. Kemal Atatürk, one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, realized this when, after the defeat in WWI, he abolished the Caliphate in order to make Turkey a modern state.  Whether his attempt will be rewarded with ultimate success is a yet undecided matter.

The attraction that Islamic traditionalists feel for the progressive world is superficial. They might like the material product of the equalitarian society fused by Adam Smith’s hidden hand into a entity made out of “selfish” individuals. For themselves, however, Moslem radicals resolutely reject the mechanisms that make modern societies successful and providers for ever increasing welfare for all. Once confronted with the value system that proved to be effective in the material and political realm, Islamists are wont to reject it. It is likely to be found too individualistic -- call it self-centered -- and too alien. Wherever and whenever you happen to be, new ideas are likely to be alien. They either come your way from another person or from another culture. By detecting an enemy to be combated in everything that originates from the exterior, Moslems become bad cultural learners. While they covet the material achievements of the advanced world they see the values and modus operandi of the West as challenges to be fought. Well, if you refuse to pluck the animal’s feathers, you can not have BBQ-ed chicken meat!

Through this process that irrationally combines a demand for and a resolute rejection of, everything alien: the average person limited to an existence of an Islam-determined society is destined to remain frustrated between his aspiration for a product and his rejection of the tool that presuppose the desired end result.

This means frustration and that the road to the garden of desire will continue to remain blocked. Unlikely to be able to join, Jihadists are condemned to combat what they really yearn for. Rejecting the wanted foreign cultural product as evil, the road to deal with the desire to indulge in it implies that the carriers of unachievable temptation must be destroyed in combat. Regarding this struggle that developed societies cannot avoid, the menacing nature of the challenge should not be given the silent-treatment. If Jihadists get control of a partially modernized Moslem country (backward looking social structures and official values but a modicum of modern weaponry) the confrontation that is denied by the West in the name of PC will become hazardous. Orthodox and therefore radical Muslims might reject the modern world and its products. Nevertheless, their inclination to use in their war the means created by the world of Satan is unimpaired. Making eventually use of shock weapons of mass destruction need not overcome the general resistance to modern ways shown in other areas. At the same time, the preventive height of the threshold standing in the way of the application of low-tech nuclear, chemical, biological weapons is extremely low. Therefore, the early phase of the clash of civilization we witness at this moment might appear to have been, in the eyes of the future observer, to be decidedly tame.

George Handlery is an historian. He has lived and taught in Europe since 1976.

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