World Order and Islamism
I’ve been meaning to say something here about Charles Hill’s brilliant book Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism. Published in 2011, Trial is a profound meditation on one of the most pressing questions facing the world community: whether Islam can integrate itself into the secular international order of states.
There are abundant reasons to conclude that the answer is probably “No, Islam cannot integrate itself into the secular order without ceasing to be Islam.” The Egyptian author and activist Sayyid Qutb (an early and prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood, executed by Egyptian authorities in 1966) said why in a sentence: “A Muslim has no nationality except his religious beliefs.”
Is that so? It depends whom you ask. Nervous Western politicians disagree. They insist that “we are not at war with Islam.” When Cairo erupted a couple of years ago and Hosni Mubarak was deposed, James Clapper, the dunder-headed director of national intelligence, assured members of Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood was “a largely secular organization,” i.e., nothing to see here, move along.
Reality failed to live up to Mr. Clapper’s fantasy (or was it merely his mendacity?), but the question lingers: Is Islam the problem? Or is it only those bad hats who have a fondness for blowing up things, treating women as chattel, abominating anyone who is not a paid-up member of the Ummah, and generally endeavoring to impose sharia, Islamic law, on everyone everywhere?
Again, it depends whom you ask. Jacqui Smith, the former British home secretary, showed that she was a comedienne of Clapper stature when some members of the religion of peace blew up an SUV at the Glasgow airport a few years ago. Ms. Smith insisted the we not call such events instances of “Islamic terrorism,” but rather call them examples of “anti-Islamic activity.” Why? Because even if the “extremists” responsible for such outrages just happened, by some wild coincidence, to be Muslim, they were acting contrary to their faith. Right. So shouting “Allahu Akbar” and steering a jetliner into a skyscraper is not Islamic terrorism but really, deep down, essentially, anti-Islamic activity. (And I, to quote Dorothy Parker, am Marie of Roumania.)
Hopeful Westerners cherish the consoling thought that we can distinguish effectively between moderate Islam, which deserves, and which wishes to have, a place at the table of modern states, and the other sort of Islam — radical Islam, jihadist Islam, extremist Islam, etc. — which takes the Qutb line and rejects statehood as the work of the devil. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, doesn’t like such distinctions. They are, he says, “offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it.” Is he right?
There are some countervailing Muslim voices. Charles Hill cites several towards the end of his book. Indeed, he concludes on a hopeful note, which is only appropriate for a book that is part of the Hoover Institution’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order, which “seeks to engage in the task of reversing Islamic radicalism through reforming and strengthening the legitimate role of the state across the entire Muslim world.” That’s the antistrophe of his argument: to distinguish firmly between Islam — a religion like any other — and Islamism: the triumphalist ideology of Islam which might make use of modern modern liberal institutions, but only tactically, to increase its own power.
I hope that Charles Hill is right in thinking that the Islamist vision is not the only legitimate interpretation of Islam. But the strophe of his argument does not augur well. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the carnage of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, deliberately jettisoned religion from the new international system of states it inaugurated. Henceforth, the world community would subscribe to a set of procedural norms that deliberately left most substantive “value questions” to one side. Did the Holy Spirit proceed from the father and the son? Or from the father alone? The so-called filoque controversy sundered the Eastern Church from the West and was the source of much unhappiness. But after the Peace of Westphalia, such considerations — to say nothing of the divisions between Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics — were to be excluded from the negotiations of diplomatists and relegated to the seminar room. As Hill puts it, this arrangement has served as “every civilization’s other civilization, addressing a natural need, much as diverse species depend upon a common ecosystem.”
That’s a neat analogy. Hill is right about the advantages of the Westphalian system. It is a leitmotif of his earlier masterpiece Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order. And he is right, too, that “every major war of the modern age has been an ideologically driven attempt — no two alike — to overthrow and replace the Westphalian international state system.” The French Revolution. Communism. That variant of Communism that Hitler peddled under the name National Socialism. All endeavored to replace the procedural Westphalian system with a world order based on a substantive ideology. Islamism endeavors to do the same. The roots of this ambition date at least from the dissolution of the Caliphate in 1924. But it moved definitively into the realm of practical politics in 1979 with the ascension of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. The overthrow of the shah and institution of an Islamic theocracy was, as Hill argues, “a world-historical event possessing the ideological potential of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 — each one a fundamental challenge to the established international order.” Here, for the first time in history, the Ayatollah Khomeini brought to power “an Islamist regime in full control of a state with the international state system and with a theologically grounded agenda which rejected every core principle of international order.”
And here’s the rub: Islamists might “reject every core principle of international order.” But they are perfectly happy to take advantage of the privileges and immunities which that order affords when it is to their benefit. They use and abuse Western freedoms in order, ultimately, to abolish those freedoms. Part of the Westphalian bargain is that states abide by the laws and procedures they subscribe to. Terrorism makes a mockery of that obedience. Western states struggle to obey the rule of law. Terrorists flout the law even as they demand its protections. Hence the elaborate concessions made to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: kid-glove treatment of the Quran, punctilious respect for the trappings of Islam, fastidious adherence to legal niceties. The terrorists observe no such decorum. The result is, as Hill observes, that “the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions, enhanced by procedural safeguards, and deepening moral concerns for civilized conduct were in effect ‘weaponized’ by insurgents.”
What’s next? No one knows. But the stakes could hardly be higher:
If the Islamists can defeat the Middle Eastern states that seek to reforms and work within the international system, we will be faced with another world war. Like the cold war, it will be a war launched by a revolutionary ideology that aims to destroy the international state system and replace it with one of its own.
Like what? This is where the Islamic “sharia state” comes in. “It is the opposite of the procedural Westphalian state; it is an idea of the sacred in political form. Pluralism is anathema to the Islamist state; its logical consequence would be a single al Nizam al-Islami, a single Islamist governing system for the world.”
Alarmist overstatement? Or sober description of the facts? I think the latter. But then I am one of those right-wing neanderthals who believe that “Islamophobia” is a stupid and meaningless coinage. A “phobia” is an unwarranted or irrational fear. What could be more rational, more deeply warranted, than to fear the intrusion of Islam into liberal Western society? Ask the journalist Daniel Pearl what he thinks about “Islamophobia.” Or the three thousand people who didn’t make it home from the World Trade Center on Septemeber 11, 2001. Or . . . the list could go on and on.
Charles Hill discerns “many profound voices” within Islam that have challenged the theocratic interpretation of Islam and asked whether Islam (not Islamism) “can be compatible and comfortable within the larger international state system for world order.” He senses a “slowly growing recognition that the authentic teachings of the Quran and Hadith have had to be manipulated by radical interpretations in order to provide a spurious theological cover for practices that are no more divinely decreed than was the practice of foot binding in pre-modern China.” I hope he is right. So far, I regret to say, the record has not been encouraging.
P.S. My friend Andrew Bostom writes to ask what we should call the “the 88% of ordinary Egyptian Muslims who favor killing ‘apostates’ from Islam? Are we to call them all ‘Islamists,’ whose ‘ideology’ is ‘Islamism’? Or simply pious, traditional Muslims abiding the normative, mainstream Sharia of Islam?” (See his post on why deposing Morsi won’t end the rejection of secularism in Egypt.) He suggests that we simply dispense with the “fig leaf” of the Islam/Islamism dichotomy — is there, he asks, really a difference? As I acknowledged above, the record is not encouraging, yet alongside that 88% in Egypt there are millions upon millions of Muslims outside the Mideast who have made their peace with modernity. Charles Hill provides some scraps, some intimations, of hope. ”A new mentality,” he says, “is emerging which begins to dissolve the conventional wisdom that a secular versus sacred confrontation is inevitable.” I hope he is right about that. But I know that he is right that “the first step is to recognize the problem and then try to develop ways to deal with the exploitation of asymmetries by the enemies of world order.”







In colloquial parlance, it's called "playing both ends against the middle".
This is why president mom-jeans and all the devout lefties embrace and seek alliance with the muslims. The muslims think the lefties are insane, not realizing that the lefties will be subject to beheading, same an ANY infidel and the lefties think they are funding a war against the right.
Either way it's pretty much a suicidal pact and is tantamount to using a hand grenade as a hammer. But it also fits in well with evil human behavior throughout history. The lefties KNOW they cannot expect peace from terrorists and, in fact count on it while blathering to the contrary. The muslims know they can't trust the lefties and are counting on that and are wondering how long the gravy train will run while simultaneously taking every UD tax dollar they can get their hands on to fund jeee-haad.
Rome allied itself with various factions and often found themselves on the short end of the stick, repeatedly having to build additional armies to defeat the army they just allied themselves with.
Proof that humans seem to be generally incapable of learning.
Enter the modern day liberal citizen who believes that islam is just like any other religion. I see the black women at the local walmart wearing their ridiculous getup in 100 degree heat and then I see them get in the car and drive away. I see them talking on their cellphones. I see them talking to men who aren't family or husband. Hmmmm.
So what part of islam is that? Or is it more accurate to assume they have NO IDEA what the Kuran says, what it really means and who wrote it? Wearing the entire "kill-infidels" ensemble while ignoring the basic tenets of islam seems to be some form of the religion that I am unfamiliar with.
'Course in the US, people are afforded the right to practice religion as they see fit, provided it doesn't conflict with local/state/federal law. But it befuddles me that so called muslims here behave in ways that their religion clearly do NOT permit.
I watched one day as one of these shawl-clad women grabbed a case of Busch Light out of the cooler. Okie dokie then. Please, then, when I laugh at you to your face, say I'm "intolerant" of your "religion" which, I think is a smokescreen to avoid something else in your life.
In any case...I agree that we're headed for another crusade. The muslims are like bugs and they will not go voluntarily. They'll decry that their rights are being violated while they splash acid on some teenage girl who rejected a male suitor. Etc., etc.
But as long as the national socialists use them to foment unrest in Europe and here at home, we've got a real problem, Houston.
The question is, do we want 2 billion Judeo-Christians to be at war with 1 billion Muslims? Do we fight in North Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia, along with the 'Stans?
That is an awful big war, and if I look at western Civilization these days I think we were better prepared for a global war on December 6, 1941. Or even, to pick a random date, March 24, 1937. Not because we had a powerful military, which is simply a matter of producing stuff, but because if we were attacked, we would all come together for the duration.
If the Boston Marathon bombing was a battle in the global war with Islam, what does it say about our side when we have people hoping that it was perpetrated by one of our own, not Muslims? December 8, 1941 we could count on San Francisco. Today, I'm not so sure.
In the early days of Islam, the conquering armies gave the defeated population a choice:
Convert (change) or Die!
That is the choice that we should give today's Muslim World:
Change, or Die!
Islam is the millstone. If your plan doesn't include constraining, undermining, or eradicating Islam, you don't have a plan. WHat you have is a hope.
Islamism runs court systems that provide for the death penalty and lesser physical punishments on a universal jurisdiction basis and not under the meaningful control of a recognized national government. You can count that. The meaningful questions for our elites is whether they recognize their duty to protect us from courts who want to kill us, and are they keeping an eye on such courts?
If the percentage of such courts are massively dominant, then Islamism *is* Islam. If such courts are a fringe in either numbers or influence, then the distinction between Islam and Islamism is useful. In either case, this is a matter of fact and measurement. So what are the facts? Our State and Defense departments should measure this for foreign jurisdictions and DHS/Justice should do the same domestically. Are they doing so?
After a decade of wrestling with the problem of extremists trying to kill us, we have no excuse not to have in the public sphere at least a census of how many of these courts exist and what is their nature. So where is it?