True and False Faces - "The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror" - Book Review

National Review, Dec 23, 2002 by Alex Alexiev

The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror, by Stephen Schwartz (Doubleday, 288 pp., $25)

More than a year after the tragic events of 9/11, the debate about the causes of Islamic terrorism continues unabated. On one side of this debate, the blame-America-first crowd -- consisting of the usual loony- Left suspects, along with assorted moral relativists and postmodernist progressives -- sees American foreign policy and, more specifically, U.S. support for Israel as the root cause of the problem. They argue that being pro-Israel, coupled with the alleged legacy of Western exploitation of the Muslim masses and the "new imperialism" of globalization, explains the unfortunate, but understandable, violent reaction of the downtrodden against their American oppressors. Curiously, in propounding this theory the progressives find themselves in bed with some very non-progressive fellows, including Saudi princes and various other Arab potentates. The other extreme is an increasingly vocal group that proclaims that terrorist violence is simply a Koran- sanctioned war against infidels, mandated by the reactionary nature of Islam itself. In this view, it is the intolerant, obscurantist, and warlike nature of Islam as a religion that is the problem. The only difference between moderate and radical Islam, opines journalist Oriana Fallaci, is the "length of their beards."

Neither of these theories can hold much water even under the most cursory of examinations. Proponents of the former, for instance, would find it hard to explain the fact that Islamic terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and ideologues of extremism like Hassan al- Banna and Abul Ala Mawdudi plied their trade long before Israel and the Palestinian conflict existed, or the fact that the vast majority of the over 100,000 recent victims of Islamic terrorism have been fellow Muslims. Similarly, advocates of the Islam-is-evil-and-ignorant theory will have difficulty rationalizing away the documented religious tolerance of Islamic rulers in the past, as well as the achievements of Muslims in philosophy and the arts. It is a matter of historical record that in Muslim societies, both Jewish and Christian communities -- their nominal second-class status notwithstanding -- not only survived but prospered for centuries. The Ottoman Empire frequently offered sanctuary to religious groups persecuted in Christendom; its capital, Istanbul, remains the headquarters of Orthodox Christianity to this day. Most historians would agree that until the Reformation, Muslims were more tolerant than the Christian Church.

Between these extremes is the administration's position that we're at war not with Islam but with Islamic extremism. This is fine as far as it goes, but unfortunately, like the other two explanations, it throws little light on key questions: What drives the violent jihad movement ideologically? Who supports it and finances it? How was it able to organize itself into a fanatical worldwide terrorist network in just over a decade?

Into this analytical void steps author Stephen Schwartz with his timely new book, The Two Faces of Islam. It is based on the simple proposition that there have always been two Islams, which have coexisted uneasily through the centuries. One is the mainstream, traditional Islam practiced by the vast majority of Muslims and characterized, for the most part, by moderation and tolerance toward other monotheistic religions; the other an extremist and fascist-like creed that has been preaching and often practicing violence in the name of religion. The author does an excellent job of tracing the coexistence of these two tendencies up to our times, and he does so with undisguised sympathy for Islam as a religion (which sympathy occasionally, as in the discussion of Sufism, veers into adulation).

The real relevance of this book concerning the subject of terrorism resides in its analysis of Wahhabism (a term the Saudis resent and never use themselves) and its influence as the present incarnation of the ugly face of Islam, about which, as Schwartz correctly notes, no history for a general audience had been written.

The author comes to his main argument early and forcefully. "The real source of our problem," he writes in the preface, "is the perversion of Islamic teachings by the fascistic Wahhabi cult that resides at the heart of the Saudi establishment." Schwartz documents this in his narrative; much of the evidence he presents is fairly well known -- though seldom discussed in such detail -- in the West. Schwartz considers Wahhabism a "death cult" that is "un-" and even anti-Islamic; he details a number of its "innovations" that stood many of Islam's tenets on their head. To name just one of the most flagrant falsifications of traditional teaching, Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, ordained that Muslims who did not subscribe to his views were apostates and infidels and deserved to be put to death. This is quite an astounding innovation in a religion that preaches that one's faith should be taken at face value, and that the believer's sincerity is for God to determine on Judgment Day.