AT WAR - Islam in Action: Extremism now, and everywhere. What later?

National Review, Dec 3, 2001 by David Pryce-Jones

President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and Pope John Paul II are among leaders repeating a mantra that Islam is peaceful and tolerant. The firmest of distinctions must be drawn between the religion and terrorism carried out in its name. There is no quarrel with Islam as such, but only a just war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime behind him.

One understands the great and the good, of course, and the worthiness of their endeavor. This war is more difficult to win without the support of states adjoining, or close to, landlocked Afghanistan. With the exception of China, these states are Muslim. It costs little to appease the Islamic susceptibilities of nervous allies, and tempt them into an Allied coalition. And haven't we all been conditioned by yesterday's multiculturalism into thinking that the world's cultures and religions are already blending into a harmonious adult-education class in perpetuity?

But everyone has been overtaken by events. Political extremism has been for some time the dominant expression of Islam. What's at stake is the place that peace and tolerance are to have in the Islam of the future.

Ayatollah Khomeini promoted the exclusive virtue of Islam, and in his native Iran he was the first to show how this assumption of superiority could be exploited to empower a regime. Self-seeking rulers were quick to follow his example, notably in Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Sudan, and it's not a coincidence that these countries are now so fragile. In imitation, revolutionary individuals and groups also fastened on Islam as the means for levering themselves into power-al- Qaeda is one of 175 such groups counted in the Middle East by R. Hrair Dekmejian, a specialist on the subject. Secular rulers tried to defend themselves by establishing Islamic credentials, mostly bogus. Anwar Sadat set up photo opportunities at prayer in the mosque (which didn't save him from being murdered by an Islamic group). In Syria, Hafiz Assad-himself from the minority Alawi sect-claimed to be a mainstream Muslim. Muammar Qaddafi painted the main square of Tripoli an Islamic green, and Saddam Hussein has placed the name of God on the Iraqi flag.

The Muslim world has long been immersed in tyranny, corruption, and poverty. Intellect and reason are the tools for analyzing and repairing this predicament, but whoever tries that approach in these dictatorships risks prison and worse. Islamic extremism fills the intellectual vacuum. It is a protest against misrule. It casts the blame for failure onto others. It offers an all-encompassing identity against everyone else, and a clean sweep too. Power is the end-result of it all.

Commentators have usually argued that Islamic extremism is irrational, and so must prove a short-lived and futile chapter in the history of messianic cults. I too plead guilty to that. But in the meantime it has inflamed the relationships of Muslims among themselves and with outsiders. The struggle to mobilize and achieve power by means of Islamic extremism has had brutal consequences. Every country of the Islamic world has had the recent experience of open or latent civil war, of coups and assassinations of rulers. In Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, Lebanon and Algeria and elsewhere, untold numbers have been killed, and millions are refugees or in exile.

Right round the boundaries of the Islamic world, Islam offers neither peace nor tolerance. The Muslim component in the territorial conflicts between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, and between the Palestinians and Israel, has so far thwarted all efforts at compromise. In Kosovo and Chechnya, Kurdistan, Lebanon and even Cyprus, in the Philippines, in Malaysia and Indonesia, Muslims are fighting on issues that ought to be susceptible to rational negotiation. But rule throughout the Muslim world is absolute-in other words, without genuine power-sharing. Whether the warfare is led by states or revolutionary groups, the net result is that Muslims are fighting as Muslims against the complete range of their neighbors: Hindus, Jews, Malays, animists, Buddhist and Communist Chinese alike, and many different Christians, in Sudan and Indonesia, Catholic Filipinos and Coptic Egyptians, Orthodox Russians and Serbs.

A Nigerian journalist, Ulanugu Eneh, has written, "The greatest threat to Nigeria as a nation as presently constituted is Islamic extremism." In Sudan, in almost two decades of war, the government has killed about 2 million Christians and animists, and introduced Sharia law, jihad-or holy war-and forced conversion to Islam. In April this year, over 50 Christians were arrested at the Episcopal All Saints Cathedral in Khartoum, and most of them, men and women, were then jailed and flogged. At Khartoum University, over 20,000 Christian books were burned or vandalized. In Algeria, conversion from Islam is forbidden. At least 100,000 Muslims have been killed in the civil war there, and in addition to these atrocities was the murder of Bishop Clavier of Oran, and the beheading of seven Trappist monks. At Hodeidah in Yemen, three nuns from Mother Teresa's order were murdered. On returning to Somalia from America, Prof. Haaji, a Christian convert, was shot dead. A bomb in a Christian bookshop in Gaziantep in Turkey killed a four- year-old boy. Gunmen have just killed Christians at worship in their church at Bahawalpur in Pakistan. Egyptian Islamic extremists regularly vandalize Coptic villages. Muslim converts to Christianity there are prosecuted under a law prohibiting the use of religion to "ignite heavenly strife." Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an outstanding Muslim academic who has campaigned in behalf of justice for Copts, is now in prison on a charge of "tarnishing Egypt's image."