Out of Bali: cybercaliphate rising

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by David Martin Jones

That barrier stood firm for a long time, but Gibbon's analysis has broken down in our own time. We have no impermeable barrier against the contemporary Islamist equivalent of the Tartar horse. By a little analyzed or understood process, the Islamist warriors of our day have managed to circumvent the "civilizing" process to which Gibbon (and, subsequently, Fukuyama) pointed: they use Western technology against us, being adept with our tools, but without having imbibed the values of the society that produced them.

How could such a thing happen? Ernest Gellner, a pioneer of what one can fairly call a clash theory of Western versus Islamic civilizations, proposed an answer years before Huntington began asking the question. (5)

As anthropologist and sociologist, Gellner was acutely aware of the main economistic tenets and tendencies of Western thinking about modernization. But he was also acutely sensitive to the fact that these tenets could not explain the modern Muslim world. In his view, coming at the subject from cultural anthropology, Western civil society differed from traditional societies in that it required what he called modularity: a distinctive capacity to combine in effective associations with others, but without any one of these associations subsuming or defining the rest. Traditional society was stable, but also immobile, because external strictures fixed people's definitions of their own identity, and then, for lack of any alternative point of reference, those definitions were internalized. Western man, however, could adopt a variety of roles in society (religious, ethnic, political, occupational), and these could define his identity instead of ascriptive characteristics assigned at birth.

While observing that a vast chasm separated modern flexibility from traditional immobility--rather along the lines of Karl Popper's "open" and "closed" societies--Gellner recognized, contra Gibbon and most American political scientists, that modernization--what he called "the deadly angel who spells death to economic inefficiency"--was "not always at the service of liberty." Gellner observed that Islam's encounter with modernity had led it to grow both stronger and purer in the last century. (6) Islamic societies seemed to be secularization-resistant; they side-stepped the development of modularity even as they assimilated many modern modes of behavior. This defied the essence of Western modernization theory, and Gellner's struggle to understand why led him to develop a sociology of Islamic neo-orthodoxy, which describes precisely what we see developing today in Southeast Asia.

Gellner observed the macro-social realities of the 20th-century Muslim world, and saw a massive movement from the illiterate folk Islam of the countryside to the "high" literate Islam of the city. Urbanization and increased literacy led from a mimetic form of learning to an analogic process available only to those who could reason through symbols--i.e., those who could read. Gellner saw that neo-orthodox Muslims associated greater piety with upward mobility. This involved a process in which the authority defining Islamic piety passed from the clan elder to the literate cleric at the school or the urban mosque, and in which standards of conduct were learned from the printed page rather than through oral instruction. In their own cultural framework, this was advancement--indeed, it was modernization--and it applied with special power to the role and status of women. (7) If, in the post-modern, post-colonial world, identification with scripturalist high culture becomes the hallmark of Islamic urban sophisticati on, then it follows that the bourgeois Muslim woman in Jakarta--or in London, Karachi or Sydney, for that matter--wears the veil or the headscarf not because her mother did so, but precisely because she did not. The way "up" for women is within a newly mobile traditionalism, not outside it.