September 17, 2001

We are not at war with the Muslim faith, or with the vastly overwhelming portion of its believers.  Considering that a tenth of the human race believes that Muhammad is the prophet of God, we had better not be - to go to war against all of them would be even more demented than flying a hijacked plane into a building full of people. 

In fact, in the long light of history it is not even primarily a war between us and the relative handful of Muslims - or self-proclaimed Muslims - who organized and perpetrated this deed.  We are far more than mere interested bystanders, to be sure, but ultimately this is a struggle among Muslims for the future of the Islamic faith. 

A disclaimer: I am no Muslim, nor especially sympathetic to Islam.  An agnostic and thoroughgoing secularist, I am not even especially sympathetic to Christianity.   I do still harbor some residual fondness for the sensible if stodgy Episcopal Church in which I was raised, but I have no truck with the fundamentalists who have expropriated the term "Christian" for themselves - and a whole lot less with the fundamentalists who have done the same to "Muslim." 

It is not even entirely easy for me to keep a cool head on the subject - especially not this week.  I grew up reading a lot of things medieval - the Crusades, all of that - and picked up vivid storybook images of "fanatical Mohammedans."  Then, scarcely had I gotten a more textured sense of history than modern times intruded, with ayatollahs and mullahs who seem fully bent on living up to the most lurid of those images. 

But back to the point.  Islamic civilization is facing a crisis within itself: the crisis of wresting its faith back from fanatical hijackers even as it continues the ongoing task of squaring that faith with the world in which Muslims now find themselves along with everyone else. 

It has been a lousy couple of hundred years for the Islamic world.  When the last millennium rolled around, Dar al-Islam was the most dynamic civilization in the world, rivalled perhaps only by China.  Baghdad, Cairo, then-Muslim Cordoba, were the Manhattans of that time, in an age when London and Paris were Tijuana without the cosmopolitan charm.  Muslim Arabs no doubt used a good many words for the Crusaders, but the Arabic word for "sophisticated" was not one of them.  Even when Europeans got up to speed, they did so relying heavily on Arabic learning. 

Every civilization in the world has had trouble dealing with what modern Europe came up with, notably including Europe itself.  (Can you say "Adolf Hitler?"   I knew you could.)  What has made it tougher for Islamic civilization is that it was - far and away - the most "modern" of the classical civilizations.   China, India, Greece and Rome, even Western Europe till pretty recently, were all basically agrarian civilizations, based on peasants and lords of the land.  Islamic civilization, though, was urban and commercial right out the gate.  Muhammad himself was a merchant.

No surprise, then, that Islam developed as the most worldly of the great religions.   It is not particularly "spiritual" in the sense of Buddha or St. Francis of Assisi.  Muslims have never had much tradition of going off into the mountains to be a mystic; the teachings of Islam are all about how to live a godly life in the world.  Except for the hajj to Mecca, the Pillars of Islam deal pretty much with everyday life: daily prayer, alms to the poor, that sort of thing.  Even the prayers are straightforward: "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God." 

Unfortunately, the very worldliness of Islam makes adjusting to a changed world trickier.  It is a standard cliche, but largely true, that Islam is not just a Sabbath religion, but bound up into the practice of everyday life.  There's also the little matter that - no way to put this more delicately - Muslims have a long history of expecting to win by virtue of their faith.  So does Christianity, needless to say - those Crusades come to mind - but it isn't written quite as directly into the Christian scripture.  Thus, when Muslims go fundamentalist they can have a really serious attitude problem - Jerry Falwell with a Kalishnikov.

Of these there are really very few - a couple of thousand, maybe - who would line up to be suicide bombers; a few tens or hundreds of thousands who sympathize.  Out of a billion people; that is the far end of the extreme, the Islamic world's Timothy McVeighs.   They have nothing more to do with Islamic values than McVeigh had to do with American values.

Most Muslims are just muddling through as the rest of us are.  A good many - millions, perhaps tens of millions - have adopted broad-minded interpretations of their faith, for which there is ample basis in Islamic tradition.  Even toward the other end of the spectrum, among the rigidly conservative - the people who really do resent American influence in the world and their society - the great majority are even more repelled at a clear perversion of Islamic teachings. 

They have good reason to be.  One thing you can count on with fanatics is that they always end up hating backsliders far more than they hate mere infidels.  Osama bin Ladin's hero and exemplar is reportedly - and unsurprisingly - the Old Man of the Mountain, founder of the original medieval Assassins.  The vast majority of the Assassins' victims were Muslims, and in a part of the world where memories are sometimes inconveniently long this will not have been forgotten. 

So ... a great many Muslims are waking up this week to discover that a monster has grown up in their midst, a monster that can wreak far more havoc upon Dar al-Islam than we could even if we were to be stupid.  Muslims themselves are going to have to wrest their faith back from this fanatic fringe of hijackers - no one else possibly can. 

This is not to say that we should say "Kismet," and pretend to go on as if nothing has happened.  We have every right, including that of plain common sense, to do all we can to hunt down terrorists and - so far as possible - eliminate them as a threat.  That means kicking some fundamentalist aspect.  In doing so, however, we also have to do our utmost to isolate this cancer from the body of Muslim believers, rather than infecting more of it. 

Americans are notoriously a people in a hurry, but I do not sense any hastiness now - what has been done is too great an enormity to permit haste and carelessness in our response.  We can, should, and will take the time to do it right and destroy our intended targets, while doing all that is humanly possible to avoid destroying the innocent, Muslim or otherwise.

But in the end there is only so much we can do.  A jihad is in the offing, drawing much nearer since September 11 - not the self-proclaimed jihad of a few self-absorbed fanatics, but the great and terrible struggle of a civilization as it regains its footing in the world.  The beginning of it could be seen in Iran, where millions turned out to vote for a reformist elected government and rebuke a dominating handful of reactionary clerics.  It could be seen in Kabul the very night of the attack against America, when the Northern Alliance struck defiantly at the Taliban.  It will gather force and strength, and it will sweep aside Osama bin Ladin and all his kind, as filth swept from the doorstep of a mosque.

Inshallah.

-- Rick Robinson

Last revised 11/07/2006 ... by RM Robinson

Email me: Lyonesse@compuserve.com

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