The West Still Doesn’t Get Islam: We Must Be Careful Not To Succumb To Magical Thinking

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The West Still Doesn’t Get Islam:

We must be careful not to succumb to magical thinking.

The spectacular destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure by Israel and the U.S. is a long-neglected restoration of America’s deterrent power. Yet the subsequent cease-fire President Trump imposed on Israel bespeaks again the West’s long failure to understand the nature of traditional orthodox Islam–– particularly its sanctified violence in fulfillment of Allah’s command to wage religious war “Until,” as the Islamic Republic’s godfather, the Ayatollah Khomeini, announced, “the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world.”

Nor was this sentiment a modern deformation of Islam in response to Western imperial aggression. One of the most significant Islamic exegetes, the late-14th century writer Ibn Khaldun, wrote in the Muqaddimah, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”

This jihadist imperialist ambition guided Islamic conquests and occupations of lands that had been Christian for millennia, and remained a threat to the West up to Europe’s expansion into Muslim lands began to accelerate in the 18th century.

But the rise and spread of secularism in the West diminished the influence of religion, which once was the heart of our understanding of human affairs and change. By the late Thirties, Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc observed, “Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them.”

These changes over multiple decades also profoundly impacted Islam, and incited calls for reformation: “From the beginning of Western penetration in the world of Islam,” Middle Eastern historian Bernard Lewis writes, “until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original political responses to that penetration have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and the community overwhelmed by infidels.”

Moreover, historian Efraim Karsh points out, the foundational belief in Islam’s divine mandate to conquer and occupy the whole world has not succumbed to modernity’s secular solvents that Christianity has: “The last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed, and the caliphate left vacant”–––an event Osama bin Laden called a “humiliation and disgrace”––“but the imperial dream of world domination has remained very much alive in the hearts and minds of many Muslims.”

Hard upon the abandonment of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, Egyptian Hassan al Banna created the Muslim Brotherhood to restore Islam to its doctrinal purity, especially the venerable mandate of Islamic jihad in order to revive Islam’s empire usurped by Western infidels. As al Banna explained, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

His fellow Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb, al Qaeda’s “intellectual godfather,” as Lee Smith put it, and an important theorist of jihadist renewal, wrote, “It is necessary to revive the Muslim community, which is buried under the debris of man-made traditions of several generations, and which is crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not even related to the Islamic teachings.”

In this history of Islamic imperialist dreams, the most consequential development for our times has been the Iranian Islamic Revolution, whose architect, the Ayatollah Khomeini, successfully revived the dream of Islam’s regenerated imperial mission. And the successful destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure has not ended that dream for many Iranians and other Muslims, but only set it back. But we secularist Westerners, who have marginalized faith to a life-style preference or dangerous superstation, often cannot understand or take seriously the outsized role of Islam in Muslim cultures and politics. --->READ MORE HERE

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