10/21/11
How the Bush and Obama Administrations Inadvertantly Promoted Islamism in the United States Christopher Caldwell
IN
THE DIVISIVE, decade-old War on Terror, one certitude unites the warriors and
the conscientious objectors. It is that Islamism is not to be confused with
Islam. “Whatever it’s called,” George W. Bush said, “this ideology is very
different from the religion of Islam.” Attorney General Eric Holder described
the Islamism of the late Anwar al-Awlaki as “a version of Islam that is not
consistent with the teachings of it.” Zeyno Baran has come reluctantly to the
conclusion that the Bush/Holder view is false. Her new book describes how
Islamists have captured many Islamic religious and social institutions,
including most of the Western ones. Islamism has supplanted more traditional
tendencies and has become what most people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike,
understand as mainstream Islam. Gullible American and European policymakers have
partnered with the wrong Muslims, freezing out their friends and empowering
those who wish them ill.What do we mean by “Islamist”? Baran applies the word to those Muslims who want Islam reflected in political life, sometimes including the establishment of sharia law and the reconstruction of a world caliphate. There is a fundamentalist, theocratic current that has always run through Islam. It goes back to Hanbali fiqh (jurisprudence) in the ninth century and to Ibn Taymiyya’s thirteenth-century invocations of divine judgment to account for various Muslim misfortunes. Islamism is what happened when the master ideologists of twentieth-century Islam—al-Banna, Qutb and Maududi—yoked this ancient current to styles of rabble-rousing brought into vogue by Nazis and Communists. Egypt’s ban of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s was fateful. In their Arabian exile the Brothers merged their political savvy with the oil money of the Saudis. The result was a creed with a mighty appeal to young rebels and idealists. “Islamism shares the most fundamental aim of Islam and all religions,” Baran writes, “to bring the world closer to God.” In so saying, she removes us from the cocoon of cant that swaddles most public—and all governmental—discussion of Islam’s role in terrorism.
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