Today is Eid al-Adha, culmination of the pilgrimage to Mecca, now marred by yet another tragedy that has left hundreds dead in a stampede. (Earlier, it was a crane collapse.) In a new photo gallery, I offer some commentary on the stupendous transformation of Mecca in our time. If you haven’t followed it closely, and (like me) you don’t have any plans to visit Mecca anytime soon, the images (and the numbers) may astound you. The effect on Islam? Unpredictable. Follow this link.
This letter by Martin Kramer, in response to the article by Francis Fukuyama and Nadav Samin, “Can Any Good Come of Radical Islam?” published in Commentary, September 2002, appeared in Commentary, December 2002, pp. 17-18. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.
What happens when a really big reality (like 9/11) collides head-on with a really big idea (like Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”)? Inevitably, the idea crumples to absorb the shock. Let us survey the wreckage.
In “Can Any Good Come of Radical Islam?” [September], Mr. Fukuyama and his co-author Nadav Samin concur that Islamism is a destructive force that warrants comparison with Communism and fascism. But, they write, it might also be a modernizing one—it might, despite itself, strip away the traditional constraints that have prevented Muslims from modernizing. And if Islamism, in turn, can be stripped of its ideology, then perhaps it might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.
If. And if only. In Francis Fukuyama, Hegel springs eternal, and it was Hegel who passed this judgment early in the 19th century: “Islam has long vanished from the stage of history, and has retreated into oriental ease and repose.” The persistent refusal of Islam to do just that remains one of the principal flaws of “endism,” from Hegel to this day—that is, for as long as the modern West has rubbed shoulders with Islam.
After some two centuries, the evidence is compelling. Islam has been an inexhaustible power cell for scores of movements that have defied the values of modern liberalism. From Mahdism to bin Ladenism, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Taliban, Islam continues to generate new and potent antidotes to the infection of the West. All of which suggests that the power of radical Islam (like Islam itself) is its ability to mutate—to adapt itself to ever-changing circumstances. Today it ingeniously exploits the very modernism that it seeks to thwart. Just when you think it is outmoded—as many analysts thought 30 years ago—it suddenly reappears in some completely new (and often more virulent) form.
Radical Islam, Messrs. Fukuyama and Samin speculate, “may yet help pave the way for long-overdue reform. If so, this would certainly not be the first time that the cunning of history has produced so astounding a result.” In theory, of course, Islam might be reformed into irrelevance. The late Ernest Gellner even opined that while Islam “did not engender the modern world, it may yet, of all the faiths, turn out to be the one best adapted to it.”
The problem is that in actual practice, real Muslims have treated their would-be reformers very shabbily; the space between Islamism and the authoritarian state remains a leaderless void, which neither side has an interest in filling. The reformers, who have always been a small minority, are today even worse off than they were a half-century ago: today, terrorists threaten to kill them. By all means, let us pray five times daily for an Islamic Reformation. But let us admit that there is no Luther in sight who could inspire one.
The danger of the Fukuyama-Samin argument is that it could encourage complacency. They really do not come down very far from the starry-eyed Middle East experts. One recalls in particular the Georgetown political scientist Michael Hudson, who once told a congressional committee that “whatever the ultimate intent of Islamist movements, their current function is a liberalizing one.” Messrs. Fukuyama and Samin would just switch the adjectives around: whatever the current intent of Islamist movements, their ultimate function is a liberalizing one. It is a short distance from this point to the argument that we should welcome Islamist seizures of power, so as to speed up the inevitable process of regeneration.
As for the authors’ idea that Islamist “independent action” might “lay the groundwork of a true civil society,” this sounds precisely like the argument of John Esposito and a raft of “experts” who tell us that we should weigh the good social deeds of groups like Hamas. Only in the absence of any other mediating institutions can this illusion be maintained. Islamism is a poor man’s civil society, and a poor substitute for it, since it lacks a concept of tolerance. There is no evidence it can develop further, and ample evidence suggesting that it cannot.
In any case, the Fukuyama-Samin thesis cannot be proved or disproved in any near term, and it is pointless to debate it. Its policy implications are vague at best. And it does not change the fact that at this moment in time, it is not Islamism but “endism” that (to quote Hegel) has “vanished from the stage of history”—even if it has cropped up in the pages of Commentary.
Middle East Quarterly
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
This article by Martin Kramer was published at National Review Online on September 19, 2001. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.
Islam, the religion of more than a billion believers, has been hijacked. If the first week’s suspicions are confirmed, the suicide attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are the capstones of nearly twenty years of terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam. As layer upon layer of violence has accumulated, Islam itself has come to be associated in many Western minds with terrorism. It is a tragic turn — and one for which the vast majority of moderate Muslims bears some responsibility.
Islam is no more inclined to terrorism than any other monotheistic faith. Like its sisters, Christianity and Judaism, it can be both merciful and stern in practice; like them, it also teaches the love of God and the humanity of all mankind, believers and unbelievers alike. In times past, Islam has served as the bedrock of flourishing, tolerant, and peaceful orders.
But sociologists will say that a religion, at any point in time, is whatever its adherents understand it to be. If that is so, then Islam, as understood by too many Muslims, is in danger of deteriorating into a manifesto for terror. The reason: Too many Muslims have been silent in the face of horrific deeds committed by an extremist minority.
“Islamic terrorism” first entered the lexicon on a Beirut morning in 1983, when two suicide bombers destroyed the barracks of American and French peacekeepers. The American toll came to 241 dead; the planners, Shiites inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini, claimed credit in the name of Islamic Jihad. For decades, modernizing Muslim thinkers had worked to demilitarize the concept of jihad — struggle waged “in the path of God.” Secular revolutionaries had mothballed the term, employing the vocabulary of “resistance” and “liberation.” But it was an act of jihad that drove America from Lebanon, with electrifying effect.
A new era had begun — an era in which Muslim extremists interpreted their faith as a license to kill foreign “enemies of God.” Radical Muslim clerics scoured Islam’s sacred texts for justifications of violence, and found them. In the years to come, the clerics and the terrorists widened their license. At first, it included only “intruders” in Muslim lands: foreign forces, embassies, and civilians. Later it was extended to include “enemy” installations in third countries, and finally, civilians in the “lands of unbelief.” No moral red line could stop the escalation.
In a parallel process, suicide operations became a matter of routine. Suicide is forbidden in Islam. Back in 1983, only a handful of radical clerics were prepared to classify kamikaze-type acts as deeds of “self-martyrdom,” guaranteeing immediate entry to Paradise. After the first operations, an intense debate ensued over religious law, some clerics ruling in favor of the tactic and many against.
But as the years passed, “self-martyrs” became popular heroes and the resolve of the critics waned. When, last April, Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti suggested that such acts were no more than suicide, the head of Egypt’s Azhar University, supposed bastion of moderation, waffled. (It was permissible, he said, but not against civilians.) In some quarters, the “self-martyr” is hailed as the most noble of all believers; according to one particularly respected Sunni cleric, “these operations are the supreme form of jihad.”
In this climate, it is now possible to recruit “self-martyrs” not one at a time, but by the dozen. And for the first time, terrorist planners can envision what was once unthinkable: large numbers of simultaneous suicide operations, carried out by teams of “self-martyrs.”
Paradoxically, the Middle East itself is less vulnerable to extremist violence than it was a few years ago. The regimes in most countries — most notably, Egypt, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia — have suppressed their own Muslim opponents. But the regimes have opened a “safety valve” — not against themselves, but against America. As a result, the region is awash in incitement.
This has combined with a moral timidity among Muslim moderates. They have condemned and disavowed the atrocities in New York and Washington, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity. But these same people were silent in the face of similar deeds, done on a smaller scale in other places. Each small outrage undermined those very religious inhibitions that might have prevented last week’s mass murder. And in a globalized world, a red line erased in the Middle East is erased everywhere.
In recent years, some Western observers of Islam have claimed that it is moving toward an enlightened reformation. What happened last week was the opposite: a dangerous slide toward a medieval holy war. To stop the regression, the moderate majority will have to argue against the mobilization of Islamic religion for war. Individuals may rely on their faith to inspire them in adversity. Religion may be invoked at times of loss. But it is impossible to deploy religion to justify killing and self-immolation, without undermining the foundations of the religion itself.
In the pained expressions of decent Muslims, there is more than regret at America’s loss. There is a growing realization that the men who brought down the twin towers put Islam in peril. Only Muslims can redeem it.
Martin Kramer on the Middle East 
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