Radical Islam in need for a radical rethink

There have been numberless analyses on both sides of the political divide concerning the causes of this deep cleavage between two versions of right and wrong. Here, I do not mean merely the distinction between Islam and Christendom but instead that between the secular-modernising synthesis that has been driving the advanced industrial societies, embodied by NATO and the EU, plus Japan, and most recently China and India, on the one hand, and the backward-looking apocalyptic religiosity that pervades much of the grassroots leadership in the Muslim world, on the other.

While this Samuel Huntingtonesque distinction has its fascinations, mainly I want to raise questions concerning the simple practicality of the ‘‘strategic thinking’’ which has emanated from the Islamic radicals and driven them to the measures they have taken in pursuit of their stated objectives. Virtually no one on either side has directed a critical eye towards this vitally important issue from the standpoint of the simple question: Has it worked?

What is open to examination here is the ultimate worth of the strategies which fundamentalist Islamists ranging from Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, to the lesser known leaders of the various extremist and terrorist organisations in the Middle East and Pakistan, have elected to follow in pursuit of their goal of destroying secular society and replacing it with a theocratic, socio-religious order based upon the narrowly interpreted Shariah Law that purportedly would restore Islamic civilisation to its past grandeur.

When approached from this perspective, one need not enter into questions of the rightness or the wrongness of one socio-political system over the other. It requires only judgements pertaining to the quality of the results that have been achieved given the methods that have been employed.

There has been no dearth of criticism leveled against America’s strategic choices for dealing with non-Western regions in general and the Muslim world in particular. Much of this criticism is well-deserved. The US indeed has been rightly faulted for pursuing double-standards towards the Arab-Israeli conflict, for propping up feudalistic Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia in order to keep the oil flowing, for winking at Saddam’s Stalinism as long as it served American strategic interests, and for winking at Pakistan’s state-sponsored terrorism against India as long as General Musharraf played ball in combating the variety of terrorism that America chooses to find reprehensible — i.e., Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Clearly, there has been the Devil to pay for American cultural and historical ignorance, and America’s growing tendency to unilaterally employ its massive military power in pursuit of its own political and economic agendas while trampling on those of others.

Yet, in all fairness, America has been far less a monolith than has the Islamic world when it comes to public attitudes towards the currently dominant credo for addressing the world’s problems. There has been an abundance of political dissent in the US concerning the courses the country’s neo-conservative leaders have embarked upon following 9/11. There has been much agonising, even breast-beating, over the reasons why things have so often gone wrong. There is widely held acknowledgment that the US’s seeming excessive partiality towards Israel in the Palestinian dispute has been misguided and has played a significant role in intensifying and justifying anti-Americanism throughout the Arab world. Even after 9/11, strong voices have been raised over the blanket prejudice manifested against Muslims at home and abroad. This contrasts vividly with the pervasive Nazi-style anti-Semitism and monolithic hate-mongering towards US currently afflicting Islamic societies, that is voiced not only by the Arab street but by government officials and the media in leading Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Behind this, as has been pointed out by many commentators, lies a mentality of un-self-critical denial that tends to blame the outsider for social and political ills which can be more validly assigned to oneself.

Had there been greater inner reflection, and had there been a more realistic appraisal of the adversary which Islamic radicals elected to target in their determination to rectify the evils that allegedly reduced Islamic civilisation to its present state of decline and impotence, one wonders whether men like Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and terrorist organisations like Hizbollah, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Hamas etc would have been so eager to initiate their quixotic assaults upon history’s most powerful nation.

Even in the Islamic world there are alternative precedents to the implicit assumption which the current extremists make — that religiously-driven politics must invariably involve a frenzied and violent crusade to eradicate the sum of human progress over the past two centuries and return to some mythologised, stereotypical fantasy of a past moral Golden Age.

After all, what have apocalyptic politics achieved for its architects. The Taliban and Al Qaeda were pulverised into virtual oblivion in Afghanistan by American B-52 bombers and helicopter gunships. Osama bin Laden is hiding in a cave somewhere in Pakistan, fearful of even using his cellphone. Mullah Omar has melted into the Afghan countryside. Saddam Hussein has become a mythologised non-person whose followers are reduced to hit-and-run attacks against an occupying American army.

Hizbollah and Hamas are employing idealistic young Palestinians as walking bombs whose self-detonations invite devastating retaliatory assaults on their innocent fellow citizens by President Ariel Sharon’s Israeli war machine. Pakistani-endorsed and Pakistani-based terrorist organisations have gained virtually no political results from their cloak-and-dagger war against India over Kashmir, except perhaps for contributing to the destabilisation of Pakistan itself.

It is difficult not to contrast the non-results achieved by this pattern of revivalistic, fourth-generational warfare with the proven results that Mahatma Gandhi and other advocates of non-violent political action achieved. Gandhi’s Non-Violent Revolution (Satyagraha) mobilised the energies and the aspirations of downtrodden Indians with hardly a shot being fired from the Indian side. The world’s largest colonial empire was brought to its knees by what Winston Churchill called a ‘‘half-naked fakir’’ who simply made the point that if people collectively say ‘‘No!’’ to state tyranny, and imperialism, and stick to their resolve to non-cooperate with it, then eventually its promulgators tire of beating their heads against a political wall and opt for compromise and reconciliation.

The violence perpetrated by the terrorists in all their guises made it easy in the end for the United States to justify unleashing against them an order of military power which the radicals could not even imagine, much less cope with. The radicals’ bravado notwithstanding, the truth is that their infrastructures and their resources have been decimated and they are now reduced to no more than desperate, desultory attacks on the Great Satan whose main effect is to kill and maim innocents while leaving their principal adversary smugly intact.

This should be a time for radical rethinking by the radical Islamists. The model for effectively combating great-power bullies was fashioned almost a century ago by Gandhi and his predecessors. With it, Gandhi brought down empires. Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein succeeded only in bringing their fundamentalist temple down upon their heads.

(Harold Gould is Visiting Scholar at the Center for South Asian Studies in the University of Virginia)