SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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29–882PDF
2006
IS THERE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
ISLAM, DEMOCRACY, AND U.S.-MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA POLICY
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE MIDDLE EAST
AND CENTRAL ASIA
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
SEPTEMBER 14, 2006
Serial No. 109–210
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Printed for the use of the Committee on International Relations
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/international—relations
COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois, Chairman
JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey,
Vice Chairman
DAN BURTON, Indiana
ELTON GALLEGLY, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida
DANA ROHRABACHER, California
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California
PETER T. KING, New York
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado
RON PAUL, Texas
DARRELL ISSA, California
JEFF FLAKE, Arizona
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
MARK GREEN, Wisconsin
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JERRY WELLER, Illinois
MIKE PENCE, Indiana
THADDEUS G. McCOTTER, Michigan
KATHERINE HARRIS, Florida
JOE WILSON, South Carolina
JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas
J. GRESHAM BARRETT, South Carolina
CONNIE MACK, Florida
JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska
MICHAEL McCAUL, Texas
TED POE, Texas
TOM LANTOS, California
HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York
ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American Samoa
DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey
ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
BRAD SHERMAN, California
ROBERT WEXLER, Florida
ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts
GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
BARBARA LEE, California
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JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York
EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon
SHELLEY BERKLEY, Nevada
GRACE F. NAPOLITANO, California
ADAM B. SCHIFF, California
DIANE E. WATSON, California
ADAM SMITH, Washington
BETTY McCOLLUM, Minnesota
BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky
DENNIS A. CARDOZA, California
RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri
THOMAS E. MOONEY, SR., Staff Director/General Counsel
ROBERT R. KING, Democratic Staff Director
Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida, Chair
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio, Vice Chair
THADDEUS G. McCOTTER, Michigan
JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas
CONNIE MACK, Florida
JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
MIKE PENCE, Indiana
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KATHERINE HARRIS, Florida
DARRELL ISSA, California
GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York
HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York
SHELLEY BERKLEY, Nevada
ADAM B. SCHIFF, California
BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky
DENNIS A. CARDOZA, California
RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri
YLEEM POBLETE, Subcommittee Staff Director
YEVGENY GUREVICH, Professional Staff Member
DAVID ADAMS, Democratic Professional Staff Member
LEE COHEN, Staff Associate
C O N T E N T S
WITNESSES
Mr. Tony Blankley, Editorial Editor, ''The Washington Times''
Soner Cagaptay, Ph.D., Director, Turkish Research Program, The Washington Institute for Near East
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Mr. Steven Simon, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
Hillel Fradkin, Ph.D., Director, Center for Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World, The Hudson Institute
LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING
Mr. Tony Blankley: Prepared statement
Soner Cagaptay, Ph.D.: Prepared statement
Mr. Steven Simon: Prepared statement
Hillel Fradkin, Ph.D.: Prepared statement
IS THERE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS? ISLAM, DEMOCRACY, AND U.S.-MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA POLICY
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2006
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on the Middle East
and Central Asia,
Committee on International Relations,
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Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:37 a.m. in room 2200, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, (Chairman of the Subcommittee) presiding.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. The Subcommittee will begin. Thank you, Congressman Berman, for being here, and the President is addressing the Republican Caucus, so a lot of folks are going to come in a little bit later. Thank you to the panelists and thank you for the audience as well.
A few days ago, we commemorated a solemn anniversary—the fifth anniversary of the deplorable attacks against our nation.
Five years ago, our eyes could not accept the images being shown around the world. Our mind could not fathom the hatred that could drive these individuals to kill thousands of innocent human beings. At first, we were surprised, but we quickly turned to sorrow, to dismay, to anger and we turned that into a catalyst for action—a strategy to fight the enemy wherever it rears its head.
Central to defeating the fanatics is the realization that we are facing an enemy that has declared a full-fledged war on us and is determined to destroy Western civilization and the principles upon which it is based.
To defeat this enemy, and ensure that freedom prevails today, as a democracy prevailed over communism in the last century, we must truly understand the nature of the evolving enemy. We must understand the mindset of those radicals—their rulers, their view of the battlefield—in order for our strategies to be truly effective.
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Are we, in fact, engaged in a clash of civilizations with the Middle East and Central Asia as the central front in this struggle?
What should U.S. policy focus on in order to fight these Islamic extremist's mounting offensive against those who refuse to espouse their radical theologies?
According to Samuel Huntington, the creator of the ''class of civilization'' theory, the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War period, will be triggered by cultural and religious conflicts, rather than political and economic ones. The principal conflicts will occur between groups of ''different civilizations.'' In particular, Huntington states that the conflicts will occur between the recent emergence of radical Islam and terrorism as well as with the ''long history of confrontation between the Middle East and Europe.''
Some question the applicability of this theory to the current struggle against Islamist terrorism, given the absence of a core state. But what of state-sponsors of terrorism such as Iran and Syria? How should we view Iran's longstanding desire to export its Islamic revolution and exert itself as a regional, if not global, power? How does iran affect the ideology of destruction espoused by the jihadists?
Others who disagree with Huntington's theory argue that his analysis overly generalizes Islam, and overlooks important cultural, religious, and ethnic differences between Muslims.
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One such critic is Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and a prize-winning columnist. Pipes opposes Huntington's theory that islam is fundamentally at odds with Western civilization, and argues that the problem is rooted in radical Islam rather than Islam as a whole.
Others, such as Dr. Wafa Sulton, described the current struggle as ''a battle between modernity and barbarism.'' Dr. Wafa Sultan is a Syrian-American psychiatrist who has debated frequently on al-Jazeera and is facing constant death threats and security concerns for her criticism of radical Islam.
Mr. Tony Blankley, one of our distinguished panelists today, notes that the radical Muslim fundamentalists are ''postmodern, not pre-modern. they are designing a distinctly Western fascist version of Islam that is less and less connected to the islam of their Middle East homeland.''
But there are degrees of radicalism. Some are prepared to murder in what they feel is their religious duty. Other are supportive or protective of these jihadists. Still others do not embrace the tactics employed by the jihadists but share their convictions and perceptions of the extremists.
Thus, how can U.S. strategies be crafted to address these different levels of involvement and support?
For example, experts say that many Islamic terrorist groups pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda but are not directly linked to this terrorist entity. What is it that binds them to al-Qaeda? What is it about bin Laden, or other extremist Islamist terrorist leaders, or the ideology itself that attacks the recruits? How much of the ideology of destruction that drives these Islamofascists is rooted in faith? In politics? In personal vengeance for any socio-economic ills that may have befallen the jihadists or their relatives?
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Is one entity focused on the global strategy while other Islamist terrorist groups use that to achieve individual, or country-specific objectives?
Ultimately, according to Huntington, the reality we face is: ''A West at the peak of its power confronting non-West that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to shape the world in non-Western ways.''
But is it the West in the traditional sense that is the target or is the target the growing coalition of democracies and governments aspiring to create free, democratic societies?
In short, who and what is the enemy? What emboldens and strengthens the enemy? What can undermine and destroy the enemy in the long term?
We hope that today's discussions, taking place in the shadow of the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, will help us remember the brutal nature of these extremists and will provide us greater insight into their nature, in order to refine our policies and defeat them.
We must never, never forget. We must remain vigilant. The enemy is just waiting for us to flinch before its agents descend like vultures to prey on our weakness.
We thank the witnesses for appearing before us today and we honor all who are at the forefront of this battle of ideas. With that, I would like to turn to the Ranking Member of our Committee, my Co-Chair, Mr. Ackerman of New York.
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Mr. ACKERMAN. Thank you, Madam Chair.
The 5-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks is an appropriate point for us to pause and take stock of the war against terrorism, but I find the subject of today's hearing, is there a clash of civilizations, in itself alarming. I see two possibilities.
One, that 5 years into this conflict we need to have a hearing to help define and describe our enemy because the Bush Administration has ignored one of the most basic and obvious dictums of strategy—to know one's enemy, and without accurately understanding who and what they are fighting against they can't hope to fashion a successful response.
The second possibility is that this hearing is just another pre-election gambit to scare the public and bolt the support for the war in Iraq by engaging in enormous historic make-believe and proposing some parallel to World War III.
Actually, there is also a third possibility that both of these interpretations are correct.
I agree that there is a great struggle occurring within Islam and the outcome of that struggle will have a global impact on more than just Muslims. But it is equally clear that non-Muslims can only have a marginal effect on how that struggle evolves.
We can and should extol the universal values of peace, freedom, tolerance for all peoples. We can and should condemn acts of terrorism wherever and against whomever they occur. We can and should exhort Muslims to publicly and definitively reject these within their societies, and those in their societies who justify violence in the name of Islam.
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But in the end it is for the global Islamic community to make these determinations and reject the extremists who have hijacked their faith in the name of a mad quest to return to the 13th century.
Unfortunately, at a point in history where the United States most needs the moral authority to influence the debate, the Administration has frittered it away. The Bush Administration has turned the near universal international support we had to invade Afghanistan in response to September 11th into universal opposition to United States leadership in foreign affairs and reflexive deafness to our message.
Iraq is central to our fight against terrorism, but not for the reasons suggested by the President. We didn't invade Iraq as a response to September 11th, and we didn't invade Iraq to fight al-Qaeda. My sad conclusion is the President pushed us to go to war in order to create a whipping boy, an example to shock and awe them in order to show others what fate awaited them if they resisted our righteous demands.
Obviously, not everything has gone according to plan since the President's ''mission accomplished'' moment aboard the Abraham Lincoln, and now we actually have to fight al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq because of the catastrophic incompetence that has characterized the President's policy in Iraq that allowed the nation to slide into civil war and created precisely the unstable and chaotic conditions in which terrorists thrive.
It is not the model of American power and dominance that the President and his advisors so thoughtlessly expected. Far from it.
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Instead, Iraq has become a quagmire, hindering all other efforts to fight terrorism outside of Iraq. The war in Iraq has diverted our attention. It has drained resources from the war in Afghanistan and allowed the resurgence of the Taliban, the midwives to the September 11 attacks. It has damaged our international alliances and obliterated our international image. It has cost a fortune in borrowed money, and has put tens of thousands of brave Americans into hospitals and rehabilitation facilities, and it has sent 2,984 American service members to their final rest.
The war against terror, against the fanatical deviants who attacked us on September 11th, will be a long one. It should involve all the assets and capabilities that the United States can bring to it. It will be fought militarily on a variety of battlefields but it will not be won there because the War on Terror is chiefly about ideas, democracy, freedom, tolerance, human rights, rule of law. We all know that is what the United States stands for.
People around the world used to believe that, but a policy that focuses solely on capturing and killing terrorists and their leaders while ignoring the battle of ideas will not defeat the enemy and in the end will not make us safer. The Administration should be devoting its efforts and attention to understanding and undermining our true enemies. To date, the Administration has not done that. This Congress should be compelling them to do so, and to date we have not done that.
We can win this battle and we must win this battle. Our ideas are clearly superior to the murderous, oppressive caliphate advocated by the enemy, but we are not winning the battle of ideas and we will not win if we do not know how to speak to those who might be receptive, or worse, can't even identify them.
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I look forward to hearing from our very distinguished panel, and I thank you, Madam Chair, for holding the hearing.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Thank you, Mr. Ackerman. Mr. Berman of California.
Mr. BERMAN. Madam Chairwoman, I have no opening statement. I wouldn't even try to compete with the breadth and passion of the two opening statements I have heard so far.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Wise man. [Laughter.]
Thank you.
Mr. ACKERMAN. Wise guy. [Laughter.]
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. I would like to introduce our distinguished panel. Tony Blankley is a Washington newspaper columnist and television commentator. Since he left his job as press secretary to former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, he now is the editor of the editorial page of the Washington Times.
He has a substantial history in politics and journalism. A former deputy attorney general of California, Mr. Blankley came to Washington in 1980 to join the staff of President Ronald Reagan, serving as speechwriter, senior policy analyst and deputy director of planning and evaluation for 6 of the 8 years of the Reagan Administration.
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Mr. Blankley has been a weekly columnist for the Washington Times for 3 years and was editor-at-large and columnist for George magazine and a syndicated columnist for the Creators Syndicate.
Thank you for joining us.
Next we will hear from Dr. Soner Cagaptay. Dr. Cagaptay is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Washington Institute's Turkish Research Program. He has written extensively on United States-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic policy, and Turkish nationalism, and has been published in many scholarly journals.
A historian by training, Dr. Cagaptay wrote his doctoral dissertation at Yale University on Turkish nationalism. He has taught courses at Yale and Princeton on the Middle East, Mediterranean and Eastern Europe topics. His spring 2003 course of modern Turkish history was the first offered by Yale in three decades.
Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. He is currently researching the historical roots of Turkish secularism, the military as a safety valve for secular democracy, Turkey's recent experience with Islamic parties and government, and the political liberalization associated with Turkey's attempted EU accession.
We welcome you. Thank you.
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After him we will hear from Mr. Steven Simon who is a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining the Council, Dr. Simon specialized in Middle Eastern affairs at the RAND Corporation. He came to RAND from London where he was the deputy director for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and is a Senior Fellow in U.S. Security Studies. Thank you.
Before moving to Britain in 1999, Dr. Simon served at the White House for over 5 years on global issues and Senior Director for Trans-National Threats. During this period, he was involved in United States counterterrorism policy and operations as well as security policy in the Near East and South Asia.
And rounding up the panel we will hear from Hillel Fradkin. Dr. Fradkin is the Director for the Center of islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World at the Hudson Institute. Dr. Fradkin joined the Hudson Institute as a Senior Fellow in June 2004.
Prior to joining Hudson, he was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center where he directed the Islam and American Democracy Program, the Jewish Studies Program and the Foreign Policy Program. From 1998 to 2001, Dr. Fradkin was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute after a decade of service to the Lyndon Harry Bradley Foundation, serving as vice president. From 1983 to 1986, Dr. Fradkin was a program director with the John Olin Foundation.
We welcome all of the panelists. Your entire statements will be a part of the record, and we would appreciate it if you would limit your remarks to 5 minutes so we can have a round of questions.
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I will have to go to a meeting with the Speaker and other folks on some of the issues of our legislative agenda. Mr. Pence has agreed to chair part of the hearing, and I hope to come back for the rest. Thank you.
Chairman Pence, and Mr. Blankley, we will start with you.
STATEMENT OF MR. TONY BLANKLEY, EDITORIAL EDITOR, ''THE WASHINGTON TIMES''
Mr. BLANKLEY. Thank you, Madam Chair, Mr. Ackerman, and the panel. As was mentioned, I am largely a political creature and very far from scholarship, and if I have anything to contribute to the Committee, it is that, like congressmen and voters, we are generalists who are trying to extract some wisdom from the specialists and convert it into policy and politics, and I would like to address Mr. Ackerman's point because I agree with his central assertion that we don't understand after 5 years what the nature of the enemy is.
Now, we can decide who is to blame. It may be the uniqueness of the circumstance that it is not typical kind of a war that we are facing. Presidents always have responsibility, lead responsibility for leading the country, Congress has some. Those of us who are commenting have others.
It strikes me that the toxic nature of the fight that we are in in this country today, primarily on what we call the War on Terror, is to a substantial extent the product not of bad faith on either side, but on a failure to build a consensus both between Republicans and Democrats, and more generally in the public, as to the nature of the threat. And if you can't agree on the nature of the treat, then you can't agree rationally on what policies you are going to want to use to try to defeat that treat.
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I have a quote in my book from Leonard Hand that he wrote during World War II on the bench, the greatest Justice never to make it to the Supreme Court, and he was talking about when you can intrude on civil liberties, and he made the point in ruling in favor, eventually, of infringing First Amendment rights in Dennis v. United States; that the test should be whether the gravity of the evil discounted by its improbability justifies such invasion of free speech as is necessary to avoid the danger. Thus, the greater the danger, the more likely it is to occur, the more intrusions are constitutionally justifiable.
There is a ferocious debate on surveillance, on all the issues that we are familiar with. Those of us largely on the President's side of this debate have been making the point that the danger is go great that this is allowed. We can't believe that people don't see the reason of it.
On the other side, those who don't see the threat perhaps in the magnitude that we do, say you are irrational to be doing these kind of intrusions in the absence of a need for it.
So that is why I hope there will be other discussions in Congress in the future on trying to understand the nature of the threat. It is late. It is 5 years in. Yet it is at the beginning of what is probably going to be an extraordinarily long process.
As I say, all I have done over the last 5 years is read the experts, talk with experts, and try to observe the scene as a politician and try to figure out what reality is, and I have been harsh on the President, for whom I wrote the endorsement editorial for the Washington Times, and I knew slightly when he was the vice president's son. I think this is so far beyond politics and friendship and partisanship that I think we have to try our best to just be objective about it.
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Let me just mention Iraq briefly because it is the central focus today, and as I write in the book, if there is a tragedy regarding Iraq, whether one agreed with it at the beginning, still does, or never did, it has conflated—and the President's rhetoric is partially to blame, others are partially to blame—it has conflated Iraq with the essence of the War on Terror. In fact, it either is or isn't an element in the struggle.
Must as went to North Africa in 1942 at the beginning of World War II—I don't want to keep bringing up World War II, I know it is a metaphor that some people don't like on this—that wasn't the essence of World War II. The essence of World War II was going to be to go to Germany, but that was a tactic, an opening gambit. It may have been right. It may have been wrong. Iraq may have been right. It may have been wrong.
But the danger is that we have conflated Iraq with what is going to be over the next generation the essence of the war. I think the essence of our struggle is that we are experiencing a discontinuity in history. For the last 70–80 years, there has been a slowly building explosion of energy and ferment in Islam. You know, people point to the founding of Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 in Egypt. For a long time it had been festering amongst the intellectuals and small groups, and in the last generation some of these ideas have spread out dramatically into the grass roots.
The spreading out of these ideas is probably not disconnected from the rise of the Internet, and, particularly for Western Europe and perhaps for the United States Muslims living in these lands are getting more and more of their information and thoughts out of the Internet—just, by the way, as the printing press gave rise to the possibility of Protestantism. You needed to have a Bible if you weren't going to have a priest to explain it to you. It couldn't happen until you had a printing press and cheap Bibles.
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The communication of ideas today through the Internet makes possible the rise of new versions of an old and admired religion.
So this is a great historical process that we are only at the beginning part of, and those who say, well, if we just bet bin Laden and al-Qaeda we will have largely solved the problem.
I think this is an explosion of energy similar to what we saw coming out of European in the 15th century, and while it affected the world dramatically, if you weren't European—you could ask the Indians, you could ask the coastal residents of Africa, you could ask most of what we now call the third world, it wasn't about America, it wasn't about Africa—it was about what was going on in Europe.
So at the same time that this explosion of energy is having an impact—it will have a big one on us, the West, India, other parts of the world—it is also about what is going on in Islam. I think it is noteworthy, for instance, when we talk about the Iran bomb possibility, that we remember that while most of us in the West called the Pakistani bomb the Muslim bomb, Iran calls it the Pakistani bomb, the Sunni bomb, and they want a Shiite bomb.
Now, therefore, when we engage that part of the radical Islamist threat, the possibility of an Iranian bomb, we have to understand we tend to be Western centric even as we engage the forces. We have to understand that we are not the only element of the reasons for the dynamic process that is going on in Islam.
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I know my time is running out. Let me just very briefly conclude with one statistic—it is from the Guardian Newspaper from Britain in the fall of 2004—to give some suggestion that this is no longer simply small numbers of people who are being swept up in these radical ideas.
They polled the 1.5–2 million British Muslims, and the Guardian, by the way, as you know, was opposed to Blair, was opposed to Bush. So they weren't spinning numbers to help the Prime Minister or the President. And they found that a little bit more than 10 percent of their respondents in that poll were in favor of the idea of committing violent acts against the British Government. Another 30 percent were against that, but would refuse to cooperate with authorities if a co-religionist was being investigated for terrorism, and 60 percent, 60 percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under Shariah law, Muslim law, rather than under British law.
That gives one some sense. Now, there have been other polls since then that have produced results pretty much along the same lines. We are looking at a cultural phenomenon where elements of Islam are violently alienated from the West.
One last thought on the opening question of the clash of civilizations. I don't think we should get too hung up with the academic analysis of this point—the nature of Islam, the nature of the Koran. It is unknowable, of course. But for that segment of Muslims who are engaging us and are engaging the world, they are motivated by their sense, correct or incorrect, of their religion, of their culture and of their civilization, and the motive of that oppositional force is civilization, even if 80 percent of Islam is not so there, and we have to understand that that is the passion and motive and energy of the forces that we are opposing.
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So I will leave it there. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Blankley follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF MR. TONY BLANKLEY, EDITORIAL EDITOR, ''THE WASHINGTON TIMES''
The nature and the origin of the threat posed by radical Islam is vastly more than al Qaeda and the stakes are much higher than most people realize. The danger is posed by the increasing rate of change and ferment amongst Islam's fifth of mankind—over a billion human souls.
One can take some measure of the rapidness of change in modern Islam by the fact that scholars are currently not able to even agree on the terms they use to describe the process. They continue to struggle over nomenclature. Terms such as fundamentalist, neo-fundamentalists, Islamists, jihadists, pietistic (or sheikist) salafism, jihadist salafism, Wahhabist, Muslim Brotherhood, radical, extremist, militant, etc. are used in overlapping and contradictory ways.
For instance, Olivier Roy, a leading Parisian scholar of contemporary Islam limits the use of the term ''Islamist'' to Muslims who seek to apply Islam comprehensively to a state—as opposed to society in general. Whereas, many western analysts use the term Islamist as a synonym for armed jihadist or radical.
But across the range of experts—from American conservative analysts who are deeply fearful of Islam to the top European scholars who are much more sympathetic to Islam's current potential for good—there is a broad area of agreement on the current state of Islam and the West.
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Most experts agree that the current ferment originated in the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna—the first modern grassroots, urban mass movement of political Islam, designed to defeat western imperialism and secularism by turning back to a supposedly pristine form of Islam as practiced by the founder, Mohammed, and the early generations that followed him.
In time the Brotherhood gave rise to both moderate reform and violent jihad. The latter was championed by Sayyid Qutb in the 1940–60's, whose book ''Signposts on the Road,'' became the seminal justification for jihad and terror as a necessary response to the predicament of Muslim conditions.
In Muslim lands of the middle east and central Asia, Islamic theories emerged to challenge the legitimacy of their local Muslim leaders—who were seen as captives of the West and opposed to bringing into being genuine Islamic rule. Islamists and jihadist became primary enemies for the Muslim governments, which executed their leaders, such as Sayyid Qutb (who was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966.)
Interlacing these developments, of course, has been the impact of wahhabism, which gained the conversion of the founder of the House of Saud in 1744. This austere, purist strain of Islam remained an inconsequential desert sect until the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia. Backed by billions of petro-dollars since the 1970's, it has been spreading an aggressive anti-Western lesson throughout the Islamic world, and is one of the key tributaries that has helped form the current raging Islamic river which threatens to wash over the West.
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One of the key shifts in modern radical Islamist thought has been the new centrality of individual jihad. Jihad had never been one of the five pillars of Islam—the five commitments that every Muslim must make to be a good Muslim: profession of faith, prayer, fasting, alms—giving and pilgrimage.
But Sayyid Qutb and those who have developed his thoughts explicitly included jihad as a permanent and individual duty (fard'ayn). As Olivier Roy observes: ''This is probably the best criterion with which to draw a line between conservative neofundamentalists and radical ones: the latter are rightly called jihadists. Among the few writings of Osama bin Laden, the definition of jihad as a permanent and personal duty holds a central place. His concept of suicide attack is not found in Islam.''
Thus these radicals who claim to be traditionalists have innovated the concept of individual jihad. And that therefore, such jihads are not from the Muslim community, but are individual decisions.
This is important because the recruitment of terrorists today tends to use appeals to individual responsibility for upholding Islam, and is ideally suited for the internet age where individuals not living in a Muslim land—perhaps sitting alone in their apartment in Hamburg or Rotterdam or Falls Church looking for meaning in their lives on the internet—make an individual decision to commit to suicidal jihad.
So long as there were few Muslims in the West and few connections between the lands of Islam and Western lands, the intricate theories of these reforming, fundamentalist, literalist, purifying strains of Islam were happily ignored by all in the West, except a handful of scholars.
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The theoretical divisions between all these different groups reminds one of the similar plethora of factional groups in the emerging left wing of Western politics in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Who, other than the hand full of doctrinaire activists, cared to learn the distinctions between the socialist workers party, the communist labor party, the communist workers party, etc.
But in the last thirty years the Muslim population in Europe expanded rapidly from a few hundred thousand to over twenty million. And the coming of a globally connected world—and particularly the emergence of the internet in the last decade—has dumped all this furious passion, theorizing and action into Europe (and to a lesser but growing extent, into the United States).
It has done far more than merely transplant Islam's internecine struggle to the West. Currently Muslims in Europe and the U.S. are not merely disputing amongst themselves how Muslim nations should be run and how Muslims in the middle east and Asia should live their lives.
For the first time in modern history, Muslims are arguing over a three sided debate regarding whether their role in Europe is to: integrate into European society; ghettoize themselves, keeping separate from their European hosts; or convert Europe to Islam—the Islamization of Europe as called for in bin Laden's declarations.
The last option has been seminally, perhaps prophetically, analyzed by Bat Ye'or in her recently published book ''Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis.''
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It is in the minds of the twenty million and growing Muslims living in Europe (and a much smaller, but growing number in the United States) that Danger is posed. Some large percentage of these people are content to be good, law abiding, culturally integrating citizens. But according to almost all estimates an increasing number feel some degree of alienation from the European culture. There are two reasons for this. Europeans tend not to greet immigrants as hospitably as Americans do—thus increasing the chance that the immigrant will resent European culture. But, importantly, because of the dynamic teaching and debate going on amongst Muslims in Europe, many Muslims are coming to believe that they have a religious duty not to integrate.
Amongst that group, some will be content to voluntarily secede from the local culture. Others will attempt to change European culture to Islamic form. And yet others will cross over into religiously justified (in their minds) violence.
Part of the analytical problem here is that both the peaceful and violent separatists derive their motivations from the same growing Salafist movement, both wings of which insist that there be no compromise with non-Islamic governments.
In trying to understand both the nature of the threat to us, and the range of options open to us to combat that threat, I need to pause here and note the emergence of the ambiguously motivated Islamic Party of Liberation (Hizh ut-Tahrir al Islamiyya.) It is, in the words of French scholar Olivier Roy, a former Islamist party that has turned neo-fundamentalist, while keeping some of its Muslim Brotherhood past, and insisting on building an Islamist state in the form of a caliphate that would rule over all the Muslim people (the ummah).
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It is organized by cells in forty countries, is virulently anti-American and is both a conveyor belt and camouflage for terrorism—and yet it does not explicitly advocate terrorism. So what are Western governments to do with such an entity.
The best recent study of this movement was by Zeyno Baran for the Nixon Center in Washington D.C., for which she is the Director for International Security and Energy Programs. She also holds Stanford University's Firestone Medal for her scholarship on Islam and Democracy.
Her study points out that the Islamic Party of Liberation shares the same political objectives as terrorists groups. It wants to replace the ''judeo-Christian dominated nation-state system'' with a borderless umma. Because it doesn't call for violence, it is both more appealing to many Muslims and harder for a western governments to characterize as an outlawed organization.
''However,'' as the Nixon Center study observes, ''upon closer analysis it is clear that [its] renunciation of violence is only superficial. Violence has been repudiated by [them], but other groups working towards the same goals that do use violence are never condemned by [them]. The groups never denounce terrorists attacks. In many ways it is part of an elegant division of labor. The group itself is active in the ideological preparation of the Muslims, while other organizations handle the planning and execution of terrorist attacks.''
In other words, while al-Qaeda is the symbol and one of the implementers of terrorism, the Islamic Party of Liberation does the ground work of delivering the message and getting into the activist debate that ultimately leads to more recruits for terrorism
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In this political communications struggle to win over the minds of European and American Muslims, as in most political communication efforts, the advocates try to manipulate and intimidate their target audience. So how do European Muslims get effected by this constant ideo-religious barrage?
The Canadian Muslim journalist and author, Irshad Manji at an Aspen Institute Berlin conference was remarkably frank in assessing both the nature and extent of Muslim extremism in Europe:
''It mostly depends on how you define extremism. If you mean ''literalism,'' then it is more than widespread—it is mainstream. If you mean the overt preaching of violence, then it percolates on the margins. The key is to recognize that because literalism is mainstream in Islam today, the thin minority of Muslims who have any intention of engaging in terror are nonetheless protected by the vast majority of moderate Muslims who don't know how to debate and dissent with that proclivity.
''Let me explain why. We Muslims, even in the West, are routinely raised to believe that because the Koran comes after the Torah and the Bible (historically and chronologically), it is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of god's will. The Koran, we are taught, does not lend itself to the inconsistencies and ambiguities and outright contradictions and, God forbid, human editing like those earlier scriptures. Mainstream Muslims believe, as an article of faith, that the Koran is not like any other scripture. It is the summit of the holy books. This is a supremacy complex, which even moderate Muslims share. And this supremacy complex is dangerous because when abuse happens under the banner of Islam, most Muslims do not yet know how to debate, dissent, revise or reform. That's because we have not yet been introduced to the possibility, let alone the virtue, of asking questions about out holy book. The same cannot be said today for moderate Christians and Jews.
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''In that sense . . . Islamic terrorism, both in the Netherlands and abroad, is able to thrive because it is embedded in a wider circle of fellow Muslims. This is the reality that most Western security experts have yet to grasp.
''. . . [Because] most Muslims have never been given the permission to interpret the Koran freely, they feel it is not their place to denounce those who ''know better.'' Islamist terrorists are expert in quoting the Koran for their purposes. To question them, it is widely felt, is to question the Koran itself, and that is off limits.''
Mr. Manji went on to explain that: ''A second reason is the sheer fear of persecution from fellow Muslims, even in open societies such as Western Europe and North America. Let me illustrate. Despite the anger, venom and death threats I receive for having written a book called ''The Trouble with Islam'' I'm much more surprised by the support, affection and even love I hear from fellow Muslims. But most of the Muslims who write to me in support, or who whisper ''thank-you'' in my ear after a public event, tell me that they can't be public about the support. Nor do they feel that they can be vocal about their own struggles with the faith today. That's because they fear ''persecution.'' I have engaged enough of the people who use this word to report that they mean more than ostracism. They mean physical reprisal against themselves and their families.''
The Muslim journalist and scholar, Manji, describes a process of the radical few intimidating into silence the non radical many. This is not a process unique to Muslim culture. A very similar process happened in Germany between 1919–1945.
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Then, Germans felt humiliated, confused and swept-up in external forces and cultural intrusions. The Nazi's, a tiny minority were both well organized, aggressive and claimed to speak for an ancient and true German culture. They particularly targeted German youth
As they alienated the youth from their parents, so they both intellectually and physically intimidated ''good'' Germans into silence, then collaboration and eventually full support.
It became both dangerous to ones health and ''unGerman'' to oppose the Nazi movement. In essence in the 1920–30's in Germany, the Nazi's had both the ''winning'' ideas and the strongest fists. They seemed to have the wind of history at their back. Both by inspiration and intimidation they took over a nation adrift.
Muslims today, both those in traditionally Muslim lands and in Europe and the West are similarly situated. Radical Islam, accurately sometimes called Islamo-fascism, has all of those Nazi ''advantages.'' They find a Muslim adrift and humiliated by the dominance of foreign nations and cultures. They find a large youthful population who increasingly disdain their parents passive habits.
Just as the Nazis reached back to German mythology and their supposed Aryan racial origins, the radical Islamists are reaching back to the founding ideas and myths of their religious culture.
And, just like the Nazi's, they are fabricating a mixture of authentic founding ideas with expedient new ideas masked as authentically ancient.
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For instance, young Muslims are encouraged by the radical propagandist Mullahs to make individual decision to join jihad, and not to turn to parents for guidance on marriage mate selection. They are allowed to drink alcohol, shave their beards or take on other non-traditional Muslim life styles in order to advance the jihad.
In many ways these new radical fundamentalists are post-modern, not pre-modern. They are certainly designing a distinctly Western version of Islam, that is less and less connected to the Islam of their middle eastern homeland.
It is akin to genetically modifying an organism to make it a more effective intruder in a new host. Radical Western Islam brings with it the combative strength and deep faith of its authentic traditions, while constantly modifying itself in such ways as to maximize asymmetrical advantage over liberal, secular European (and American) institutions.
The jihad decision is a particularly critical radical innovation. Traditionally, only the doctors of Islamic law, the ulema, were authorized to declare armed jihad. It was also the Ulema's job to distinguish between jihad and fitna. According to traditional doctrine the jihad is a force that restores harmonious order to the world, while fitna is the opposite—it is a seditious activity that threatens to fragment the faithful Muslim community.
Under the tradition, only the Ulema can legally declare jihad in its extreme form—as an armed struggle. They must first make sure it is not a false jihad or fitna.
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By overturning the prerogative of the Ulema to make the final decision on armed jihad, and instead telling young Muslims that they may individually make the decision based on their own reading of the Koran, the radical neo-fundamentalists have vastly empowered themselves to organize and fight the West without the traditional collective restraints imposed by the Ulema.
In this way, they are similar to the Nazis of the 1920–30's, who successfully reduced or eliminated in the minds of German youth (and other vulnerable Germans, particularly the economically ravaged petty bourgeois), the authority of traditional German institutions such as the church, the government, parents and the professors. Instead, the Nazi's propagandized the youth to individually return to the allegedly ancient ''truths'' about their ''Aryan race'' and reject the guidance of their elders and the traditional institutions.
This Nazi mix of subverting traditional institutions and picking up useful modern methods, while urging a faux-return to ancient truths has been usefully called reactionary modernism. It is a vastly more potent and dangerous movement than mere nostalgia for the past or careful and dutiful adherence to the literal teachings of a culture or religion.
While fully exploiting young people's need to feel connected to something authentic and larger than themselves, it is free to expediently embrace such modern activities, customs or methods as their target audience of young Muslems might want to cling on to—or which might be useful in the struggle for dominance. The radical Islamists are able to rationalize concessions to modernity with ancient sounding mumbo jumbo, while still sounding like authentic fundamentalists, and the only true voice of Islam.
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The Nazi's overwhelmed German society by these methods seventy years ago. And there is building evidence that the radical Islamists are moving ever more successfully down the same path—particularly within the younger generations of Western Muslims in Europe (and to a lesser extent in United States.)
Thomas Friedman, The New York Times foreign policy columnist, reporting from Paris in January of 2005 closed his column on the mood in Paris with the following anecdote about his interview of two French Muslim 18 year old girls who were born and raised in France.
''What did I learn from them? That they got all their news from Al Jazeera TV, because they did not believe French TV, that the person they admire most in the world is Osama bin Laden, because he was defending Islam, that suicide martydom was justified because there was no greater glory than dying in defense of Islam, that they saw themselves as Muslims first and French citizens last, and that all their friends felt pretty much the same.''
As I discussed above, Muslims in Europe, and to a lesser extent in America,—particularly second and third generation Muslims—should not be considered part of a diaspora. Increasingly, they are no longer strongly connected to their family's country of origin. Nor do they intend to return. They are forming their own indigenous Muslim consciousness. Significantly, their connection to Islamic ideas come from the internet, books, video and audio tapes—all locations where radical ideas and mullahs dominate.
As the French Islamic scholar, Gilles Kepel describes it:
''On websites in every European language, whether jihadist or pietist, trendy jargon blends in with an intense polemic founded on obscure religious references to medieval scholars . . . In chat rooms, linguistic shortcuts mingle with a profusion of Islamic formulas. In the midst of an English text one finds PBUH (for Praise be upon him) in Arabic script. . . . All of this debate and intensity seems completely unrelated to the social and cultural reality of European Islam as it is lived in the worker's cities. Yet this strange language serves to express some of the tensions that pull members of these communities to one side and then the other.''
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The European internet has many radical Islamic ''experts'' and mullahs who function like Dear Abby. European Muslims pose questions—everything from whether to be polite to infidels, to how to prepare for jihad—and the ''expert'' provides an immediate answer, often a hodge podge of Koranic citations, quotes from ancient scholars and the expert's own advice.
It is in this constantly morphing digital environment that a new, increasingly radical Islam is emerging in Europe. Disconnected from their homelands, isolated from their non-Muslim neighbors and fellow workers, disconnected from their elders—a weird, disembodied globalized radical Islam is appealing to Europe's young Muslims. But not just to the Muslims.
Converts to Islam is a growing element. Olivier Roy identifies four categories of converts: politicized rebels, religious nomads, former drug addicts and petty thieves, and Blacks, Latinos and persons of mixed race.
The first category is catching European youth who a generation ago would have been swept up in Marxist movements. John Walker Lindh—the California Al Qaeda caught in Afghanistan—typifies the religious seeker. Drug addicts and thieves are seeking structure and support, while some young people of color find radical Islam a ''rebuke'' to a European or American society they feel has rejected them. Of course these converts are ''an intense focus of terrorist networks'' precisely because they do not ''look'' Muslim.
Prisons are obviously fertile recruiting grounds for terrorists. And, due to a combination of a false sense of tolerance and an almost inexplicable ignorance, prison authorities in both America and Europe are permitting radical, Wahhabist mullahs into the prisons—in much the same way as a Catholic priest or a Methodist minister might be invited in.
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A generation ago, the American Black Muslim movement, whatever else might be said about it, went into the prisons and reclaimed young criminals to a life of good manners, gainful employment, respect for women, self-respect and usually lawfulness. Today the radical Muslim recruiters are enlisting an already battle hardened legion into the ranks of Islamic terrorists.
It is hard to quantify the current attitudes of Muslims in Europe because recent polling is spotty, but the Guardian Newspaper in Britain had done some reliable polling. In March of 2004, 13% of British Muslims favored more terrorist attacks on the United States. Another Guardian poll from November 2004 found that 86% of British Muslims were against the use of violence in Britain to gain political objectives. This was cited as good news by the liberal Guardian newspaper. But in fact it is appalling that over one in ten British Muslims (the 14% that didn't oppose violence) would admit to a pollster that they were in favor of political terrorism in the country they called home.
In November of 2004, 61% of British Muslims wanted Sharia (Koranic-guided) law rather than British law applied to Muslims in Britain for civil matters—assuming it did not violate regular British law. And, in the same sample, one in four British Muslims (26%) believed that the Muslim community has already integrated too much into British society. That is up from 17% in a previous poll. Slightly more, 33% think more integrating should occur. But that number is down sharply from 41% in a previous poll.
Although those absolute numbers are fairly disturbing, the rapid movement in the numbers should be seen as even more alarming. A drop in support for becoming integrated into their society from over four in ten to barely three in ten (with almost all of that drop in support not stopping at undecided, but moving from 17% to 26% to the belief that they have already integrated too much) is an unambiguous indicator that the radical, culturally assertive argument is quickly winning the day in the already established British Muslim community. Attitudes of new immigrants is overwhelmingly likely to be even more hostile to Western culture.
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While there are few good numbers available to objectively measure the magnitude of this aggressive cultural attitude, some numbers and events are suggestive of the growing danger.
In June 2004 Ken Macdonald, British Director of Public Prosecutions reported that he might re-open criminal investigations of 117 Muslim British Women who had been murdered because they were suspected to be victims in ''honour killings,'' in which Muslim men, under Muslim traditional laws are allowed to kill their wives, daughters and sisters if they believe they are ''perceived to bring dishonor on their families.''
In January 2005 British Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed was reported by the London Times to have been monitored by that newspaper broadcasting on his internet site condoning suicide terrorist attacks and urging young British Muslims to join al-Qaeda. ''I believe the whole of Britain has become Dar ul-Harb (land of war). In such a state the kuffar (non-believer) has no sanctity for their own life or property'', he said. He went on to advise one Muslim woman that she was permitted to become a suicide bomber.
After the broadcast, Mr. Bakri told the London Times that he was not calling for violent action in the U.K. He said his definition of Britain as Dar ul-Harb was ''theoretical.''
A few days later he was monitored telling his listeners ''Al-Qaeda and all its branches and organizations of the world, that is the victorious group and they have the emir and you are obliged to join. There is no need to mess about.''
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Two nights later he broadcast that the voices of dead Mujahidin were calling young Britons to fight. ''These people are calling you and shouting to you from far distant places: al jihad, al jihad. They say to you my dear Muslim brothers, '''Where is your weapon, where is your weapon? Come on to the jihad.''
While the British authorities could detain him if he were deemed a terrorist associate under the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act, they had not yet done so after those broadcasts.
On a slightly different front, the British Advertising Standards Authority reported in January 2005 that British Muslims have stepped up a campaign of defacing or tearing down public billboards that feature adds that elements in the Muslim community consider inappropriate, such as ads for perfume, hair dye, undergarments and ads for television shows of which they disapprove.
In April 2004 Germany's Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BFV, one of three German intelligence services) issued a major report on Islamic extremism in Germany. While it could only identify 57,300 specific individual Muslims as ''radical'' (German bureaucrats are justly renowned for their careful attention to detail supported by impeccable record-keeping), Otto Schilly, the German Interior Minister stated that the extremist Islamist groups command a much larger number of covert sympathizers and had extended its influence to a wider swathe of the Muslim population than a year before. He added that they are reaching many more people with their ''disintegrative activities'' that were ''in particular attracting a younger following.''
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Minister Schilly expressed concern that the largest Islamic organization in Germany, Milli Gorus, while still technically a legal operation under German law has developed ''a strong anti-western and anti-democratic character.'' The organization specifically tries to indoctrinate Muslims living in Germany. ''We're very critical of their youth work'', said Schilly.
In November 2004 German television broadcast the words and images of a German Turkish Imam urging his Bavarian prayer room to ''take advantage of democracy to further our cause
In Norway in December of 2004, the Norwegian Prime Minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik, expressed disappointment that ''Most of Norway's top politicians, but very few Imams participated in a torchlight protest march against violence and terrorism.'' The March was to express outrage at the murder in nearby Holland the week before of film maker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim terrorist.
This boycott by leading Muslims in Norway came just days after the spokesman for the Islamic Council in Norway, Zahid Mukhtar, had said on national television that he could ''understand that Muslims had been provoked by van Gogh's latest film, and that he could understand why someone murdered him.''
Meanwhile, in Canada the debate about whether to establish Shairah law for Canadian Muslims is heating up. Shariah is the broad collection of laws compiled over a thousand years of Muslim jurisprudence based on the Koran and its commentaries, the Sunnah or Hadith. In 2004 Ontario Attorney General Marion Boyd suggested the possibility of applying Shariah under a 1991 Canadian arbitration law. Muslims in Canada have been engaged in a heated debate which Farzana Hassan-Shahid, the President of Muslims Against Terrorism, Canada, describes as ''now being perceived as a battle between devout Muslims, and those who are Muslim in name only, whose sole objective . . . is to denigrate Islam and vilify Muslims.'' This argument, that if you are not radical you are not a good Muslim, is of a piece with the Nazi argument in the 1920's and 1930's that if you are not a Nazi, you are not a good German and not a good child of the fatherland.
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The radical Islamist's assertion that Shariah should apply in Canada or Europe is another example of how they are manipulating Islamic traditions for the modern purpose of jihad and cultural aggression. Shariah was meant to apply in Muslim lands. Europe (and, obviously North America) were not such lands. Non-Islamic lands were designated either Dar al-Harb, the land of war, or Dar al-Sulh, the land of truce. The traditional, non-jihadists have historically designated Europe the land of truce—thus neither Shariah nor jihad would be legitimate.
But radical groups such as the European Fatwa Council—which is the legal arm of the British-based Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE) has re-designated Europe as part of ''the land of Islam.'' Thus, they assert that Muslim's are entitled to be judged by Shariah law, rather than the enacted law of which ever country they happen to be living in.
Whether in Britain, where 61% of British Muslims want to live under shariah, or Canada, where the fight is just now heating up, it is almost inevitable that the side calling for a return to an alleged traditional, devout Islam are going to win these battles within the Muslim communities.
Once a Muslim in the West has accepted that first premise of returning to ''devout'' Islam, as opposed to ''Islam in name only,'' it becomes progressively harder to oppose the terrorist elements within their community. For example, in the same Guardian newspaper poll of November 2004 in Britain that found 86% opposed to the use of violence to gain their political ends, only about 70% told pollsters they would turn in a fellow Muslim if he was a terrorist.
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So in Britain by the end of 2004, already about one in ten Muslims admit to be willing to commit terrorist acts, and one in three admit to be willing to protect Muslim terrorists from lawful authorities, while six in ten want to be governed by Muslim Shariah law rather than British law. And, virtually every law enforcement organization, intelligence expert and Islamic scholar believes the trend continues to move towards such attitudes and away from traditional, law abiding and assimilating intentions. Muslim parts of Paris, Rotterdam and other European cities are already called ''no-go zones'' for ethnic Europeans, including armed policemen. As the Muslim populations expand and their level of cultural/religious assertiveness expands, more and more European geography will be ''reclaimed'' for Islam. Europe will become pock-marked with increasing numbers of ''little Fallujah's'' that will be impenetrable by anything short of military units.
Thus, as the partially ersatz westernized internet-communicated fundamentalism expands its reach in to European (and to a lesser, but probably increasing extent American) Muslim communities, not only will Islamic cultural aggression against a seemingly passive and apologetic indigenous population increase, but the zone of safety and support for the actual terrorist will expand.
For much of the West, but particularly for Europe, there is a blind denial that anything transforming in the world is really happening. For these people—which includes most of the European elites and far too many American politicians and journalists—it remains business and politics as usual. They are as sheep that cannot sense the wolf pack in the woods. Or if they see the odd wolf tail, they can't imagine that the other end of the animal could at any moment be sinking its teeth into their throats. They have never been slaughtered before; surely they won't be slaughtered now. So they go on munching.
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Even for those who recognize the magnitude of the danger, there exists an inability to consider responses other than those that flow out of current practices and mentalities.
The central shortcomings of the West's feeble response, to date, derive from the natural human instinct to forget the distant past and to assume that the more or less benign trends of the recent past will continue. In fact, human history unfolds much more by discontinuities from the past and dynamic social responses to the present. From the extraordinary explosion of Alexander the Great, to the birth of Christ, to the French Revolution to the American Civil War to the rise of Hitler, shocking discontinuities from the status quo have defined the path of history.
King Darius of Persia never imagined—even as he faced Alexander at the beginning of the Battle of Issus in 333 B.C., that within three years he would be dead, his Achaemenid Dynasty ended and the great hegemonic Persian Empire crushed and conquered as a result of that outnumbered Macedonian upstart.
American farmers in 1860 never dreamed that within months their husbands, sons and brothers would be killed in battle, and America would be transmogrified by continental war. And Londoners in the summer of 1939, my parents included, would have been disbelieving if they had been told that soon 40,000 of their fellow Londoners would lie dead in the streets from German bombing, and that within five years Great Britain would never be great again.
There is no more misleading phrase in the English language than ''if current trends continue.'' Stability is an illusion. Change is all. For both individuals and peoples, current trends never continue for very long. The better way to think is to ask when the current trends will stop, and what will follow them.
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The first discontinuity that must be recognized, as I mentioned, is that the danger is not merely Osama bin Laden and a few thousand terrorists who may kill several thousand people and knock down some buildings. Although, Bin Laden and those he has inspired, alone, are a mortal threat. Rather, we are confronted with Islam in ferment and insurgent as it has not been in at least a half a millennium—if not a millennium and a half.
A great people, a proud culture, and a powerfully faith-inducing religion—a fifth of mankind—is unleashing an expansive energy at magnitudes that cannot yet be measured. Efforts to count the ''jihaddist'' percentage is pointless, if not dangerously misleading. There is a dynamic process underway that may peter out before it touches one in a hundred Muslims. Or, it may impassion a vastly greater number. The latter is the far more likely eventuality.
A force of Muslim energy is being released that has not been seen at least since the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the 15th century. In the following two hundred years that energy overwhelmed Bulgaria, Serbia, Andrianople, Kosovo, most of the rest of the Balkan Peninsular Constantinople, Budapest, Transylvania, Walachia, Moldavia, Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Greece. Only at the gates of Vienna in 1683, was the surge finally stopped—and then only barely.
Today we face a force of human passion and exertion that may well match a similar expansion that burst out of Renaissance Europe, and came to be known in the West as the Age of Discovery—but was know everywhere else as the age of conquest, imperialism and colonialism.
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And let it be noted, the quality of the human stock that surged out of 15th century Europe was in no way superior to that which today peoples the Islamic world.
But one must be careful with historic analogies to avoid literalism. History is a guide to human potentialities, it is not necessarily a blueprint or predictor of particular strategies or tactics. The Ottoman Turks rode forth on horseback with curved swords in hand. The energy of Islam today insinuates itself through the forces of globalization and the internet.
It has long been observed by scholars that the Protestant Reformation would not have been possible without the invention of movable type by Guttenberg. The doctrinal requirement of a direct relation between the Protestant Christian and his bible without the intermediation of a church hierarchy was only possible when bibles were cheap enough to print that everyman, or at least every small village, could afford one.
The printing press made that possible. And the century-long wars of religion between Catholic and Protestant armies and peoples that ensued, killed five to eight million European Christians, including a third of all Germans.
Today, it is beginning to be noticed by astute observers, such as former senior CIA official Michael Scheuer, that the world-wide rise of Islamic ferment would not be possible without the internet. The internet uniquely creates virtual communities of interest. For actual Islamic terrorists, it constitutes a place to be trained in every aspect of the terrorist's art; and renders unnecessary physical training camps such as bin Laden set up in Afghanistan only a decade ago—and which we fought a war in 2001 to dismantle.
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Similarly, for anyone, Muslim or otherwise, who wants to intellectually engage in the passionate debates that currently roil Islam, the debate, the passion, the propaganda, even the threats and intimidation are only a keyboard away. According to one count, the number of explicitly terrorist-supporting internet sites has risen from 12 to over two thousand in only a couple of years. The number of web sites more generally engaged in Islamic ferment are too numerous to yet be counted.
Beyond that unknown, but obviously growing, number of Muslims around the world, who are committed to terrorism, perhaps as great a threat as terrorism arises from the Islamic diaspora's growing cultural and religious assertiveness. This is particularly the case in largely secular Europe, where Muslim cultural assimilation must be considered a failure even before September 11th.
Curiously, despite (or perhaps because of) America's deeper and more pervasive religious faith and practice, American Muslims have better assimilated into our culture. As a nation of immigrants, our culture has always welcomed other peoples more instinctively than have the more ethnically homogenous European nations. But even in America, the danger of Muslim cultural assertiveness, and in some unknown number, support for Islamist terrorists, is a potential danger that must be monitored and contained. At this point it is not knowable whether the still gathering worldwide Islamic ferment and insurgency may come to grip and taint our current and growing Muslim population.
And, what takes this danger beyond prior historical precedent is the high likelihood that biological, chemical, radiological or (less likely, but possibly) even nuclear weapons of mass destruction will come into the hands of radical Muslims, raising the quite plausible specter of genocidal warfare anytime in the next few years or decades.
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A big part of the problem in understanding the threat comes from not having any obvious words to describe it. As linguists explain, an important role of language is its capacity to evoke cognitive images which mold our notion of reality. The right word or phrase creates an understanding and opens in our minds concepts of things we can't see.
For example without the word ''love,'' sentences, paragraphs, sonnets, whole volumes would be needed to create and communicate the idea. While there are different kinds of love, yet the use of that one word effectively conveys a whole set of sentiments and relationships which most people immediately understand. The word is not a description, but an evocation of an idea.
And the wrong words create the wrong mental concepts. From the beginning, the phrase War on Terror has been a deeply flawed description of both the danger and our response. As I discussed, above, the danger is more than terrorist attacks. It includes, along with actual terror strikes, immigration, cultural aggression, a conflict of values, religions and life styles. Professor Samuel Huntington's ''Clash of Civilizations'' is a closer approximation of the danger.
But even the word ''clash'' evokes the linear image of a line of confrontation. And indeed, Professor Huntington, writing in 1994, described a geographic arc of danger from the middle east to Indonesia. In fact, in today's globalized and internetted world, the forces we must confront are ubiquitous. They are ahead of us, behind us and within us.
So also is the word 'war' inadequate to evoke in our minds the kind of conduct in which we are involved. WW II is what we think of as a war: millions of uniformed soldiers, thousands of ships, tanks and airplanes engaged in the activity of materially destroying the enemy's martial assets, seizing geographic locations and eventually marching into the enemy's capital and hanging or imprisoning their leaders.
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But the word war is right, if inadequate, in one crucial mental element. It correctly evokes the sense of physical danger and the need for extraordinary action and possible sacrifice. It is also partially correct, in that in the course of this struggle, there will be conventional military battles. Afghanistan and Iraq were wars as conventionally understood. There will surely be several others.
Another problem with the word war is its recent metaphoric usage: Over the last quarter century Americans have been called to wars against cancer, drugs, obesity and poverty, among other bad things we have in our lives. Thus, the war on terror seems to fall somewhere between a clichéd metaphor and a literal phrase that doesn't seem to meet the literal definition of the term. The term not only fails to describe or accurately evoke the nature of the activity we are engaged in, but it induces cynicism.
Perhaps no aspect of our response has been thrown into more disarray over this terminological confusion than our legal system. As a nation of constitutional law and precedent, the legal status of an activity is vital to determining its constitutionality.
During the various states of war over the last two hundred years, our Supreme Court has upheld government intrusions on civil liberties, including enforcement of laws of sedition, censorship, and internment of both enemy aliens and, in the case of the Japanese, American citizens. But whether such intrusions have been constitutionally permitted has depended on the actual circumstances and—importantly—whether or not Congress has authorized a state of war.
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As Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in 1998: ''When the President acts pursuant to an expressed or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate . . . If his act is held unconstitutional under these circumstances, it usually means that the Federal Government as an undivided whole lacks power.''
Currently, while we are engaged in a ''War on Terror,'' the President has not sought a full state of war status. He has merely gained authorization to fight limited actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But, of course, if he sought a declaration of war, against whom would it be declared? On December 8, 1941 Franklin Roosevelt declared war on ''The Japanese Empire.'' On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson declared war on the ''Imperial German Government.'' Against whom would President Bush and Congress declare war in the War on Terror?
Certainly there are several countries which harbor and give succor to terrorists. Conceivably, each of those countries could be the subject of war declarations. But often the terrorist support in those countries come from rogue elements. And even if they are, as governments, guilty of war terror making against the United States, such countries do not include all the terror warriors who are or may become aligned against us.
Many, if not most of those combatants making or planning war terror against us are in fact private citizens in countries like Britain, France, Germany and Holland, which governments would catch and stop them if they could. In the parlance of military strategists, the enemy are ''non-state actors.''
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Thus, because there is no government against which to declare comprehensive war, the maximum authority of the federal government to prosecute the war cannot be invoked. And yet we are at maximum peril.
The traditional constitutional war powers are fairly massive and very intrusive. President Bush has not requested such authority and thus he has not yet exercised them.
But why has President Bush not sought full constitutional war-fighting authority from Congress?
After all, even the President's most virulent opponents would concede the man is bold and assertive. And those who know the President best are convinced that he is fully seized of the existential threat that America currently faces from insurgent Islamists. Good heavens, the man has been prepared to upset the entire international order, flout the United Nations, outrage our closest European allies, de-stabilize friendly middle east governments, fight two wars and risk his presidency—so determined is he to try to protect our country.
And yet he has not sought nor exercised full war powers. I would suggest that even George the Bold has hesitated because he correctly judges that a majority of the public, the politicians and the media do not believe we are actually in a war. And that in the absence of a word, a phrase or a concept that convincingly describes this dangerous-as-war-but-different condition, the public can only assume that we are in a state of less than war.
In fact,I believe we are in a condition more than war—at least as America has understood a war threat since our founding.
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This strange war-but-not-war condition that we find ourselves in was shrewdly described by William S. Lind, former Democratic Senator Gary Hart's military advisor, and four Army and Marine Corp officers in a recent Marine Corp Gazette article describing what they call 4th generation warfare between a nation-state and non state actors:
''In broad terms, fourth generation warfare seems likely to be widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between ''civilian'' and ''military'' may disappear. Actions will occur concurrently throughout all participants' depths, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical entity.''
In an odd way, we face a similarly vexing and confusing situation to that which the American Indians faced when confronted with European explorers in the 15th,16th and early 17th centuries.
The Europeans were not exactly an army, and warfare did not exactly breakout. Indeed, often both sides seemed almost friendly and cooperative. Had the Europeans been seen as a threat, the Indians could have slaughtered them in short order. Even with their guns, there were only a few hundred Europeans, while there were hundreds of thousands of Indians.
Only gradually did the part colony, part exploration, part trading quest, part military intrusion gain in magnitude, change in intent, establish beachheads and eventually overwhelm the native population. The Indians lost despite their vast material and numerical advantage and their superior knowledge of the geography of what turned out to be a battlefield—because they had no point of reference in their history to properly judge what they were seeing before their very eyes.
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The challenge for American and the West today is to be mentally alive to the fact that what we are experiencing with the Islamist insurgency is something different from anything we have experienced before. For Europeans, it is something different even than the earlier Muslim expansions.
Because it is something new for us, our laws, traditions, ethical codes, concepts of friend and foe have not evolved to recognize and manage such a threat. As the greatest American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, ''The Life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.''
As our law and cultural institutions have not experienced this new phenomenon of a great cultural insurgency in a globalized, internetted, biological, chemical and nuclear weapon-present world, we must consider with a cool logic to what extent our self-imposed historic standards of conduct are sufficient to protect us from this new danger.
* Abstracted, abridged and modified from my book, The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?
Mr. PENCE [presiding]. Thank you, Mr. Blankley, and I thank the panel.
I will make an exception to my ordinary practice and be fairly liberal with the clock. I appreciate your sensitivity to our being caught without lights.
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So with that, I would add as acting Chair my welcome to this panel on this provocative question, and recognize Dr. Cagaptay for 5 minutes with gratitude.
STATEMENT OF SONER CAGAPTAY, PH.D., DIRECTOR, TURKISH RESEARCH PROGRAM, THE WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST
Mr. CAGAPTAY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee for the opportunity to appear before you today. I am submitting my full testimony for the record and will summarize my statements in specifically discussing the question of a clash of civilization. What I would like to do today is look at the case of Turkey and discuss the case of Turkey's recent drift away from the West and in discussing this issue I will have to split between Muslim countries and the West.
I spent a month of my summer in Turkey recently and came back with amazing and somehow shocking observations and those are some of the observations I would like to share with you.
I think in the post-September 11th world one of the things that came about Turkey is that, as a secular country with democracy rooted in Western institution, Turkey emerged as the pivotal country in debunking the argument that there exists a class of civilizations, and for a long time the country does receive a lot of credit for that.
Yet my observations from my trip lead me to believe that there is a seismic change going through Turkey right now, and in a sense the country's unique position as a country that is anchored in the Western world is being challenged, and it seems to me that the rise of the Islamist Justice and Development Party, also know as the AKP party government in Turkey in November 2002, is a milestone in this process.
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What I would like to do today is highlight some of the changes that have taken place in Turkey since 2002, since the AKP came to power.
Until November 2002, Turkish foreign policy was quite predictable. Ankara cooperated with Washington on many issues, from the Balkans to the Middle East. It aligned itself with Israel and kept arms-length from its Middle East neighbors, such as Syria and Iran, which composed various stresses to Turkey, whether in terms of regime export from Iran or support for PKK terrorism from Syria. On the European front, Turkey pursued an aggressive policy of EU accession. This was the picture back in 2002.
Today, though, it looks quite different. United States-Turkish relations are strained almost on all Middle East issues. From the views on terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah to dealing with Iran and Syria, United States and Turkey have developed vastly divergent positions since AKP's rise to power.
The question is, how did we get here? What happened in the 4 years since the AKP came to power? I think we started with the Iraq War. Right after the Iraq War, in March 2003, the AKP controlled parliament in Ankara refused to allow the creation of a Northern Front. We all know that.
After that, though, what happened was the AKP took issue with the war and sharply criticized United States policies in Iraq, and then went on to castigate other United States policies in the Middle East. This anti-American rhetoric, I think, has caused a shift in Turkish public opinion toward the United States and while the AKP at the same time pursued rapprochement with Muslim states in the Middle East, and, accordingly, I think Turkish and American views of the region now diverge significantly.
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Let me give you some examples. While, for example, the United States has aimed to isolate Syria internationally, AKP has pursued a policy of rapprochement with Damascus. Relations between Ankara and Syria improved noticeably since 2002 with the help of high-level visits. Turkey's Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul have visited Damascus numerous times. In return, the Syrian Foreign Minister and Syrian Prime Minister have appeared in Ankara, and I think the most important visit encapsulating the rapprochement was the visit of Syrian President Bashar al Assad to Turkey in January 2004.
Whereas only a few years ago, Syria would have been regarded as an enemy country because of its support for PKK terrorism, the AKP Government received Assad with praise in Ankara. Before leaving Ankara, Assad summarized the gist of the Turkish-Syrian relations and a successful trip to Turkish network CNN-Turk, and he said, ''We have moved together from an atmosphere of distrust to trust.''
It is not only Turkey's relations with Syria but also Turkey's ties with Iran that are improving noticeably since the rise of the AKP. Again, many high-level visits, in 2003, the year after the AKP came to power, for example, on the ministerial or prime ministerial level, from Turkey to Iran, from Iran to Turkey, including one by Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, who has since then also paid other visits to Ankara.
Since 2003, Iran has been claiming to be cracking down on PKK terrorism within its borders, which is Ankara's most pressing concern vis-a-vis the country. Lately, there have been some signs that Turkey—the AKP Government—may be supporting the European initiative to block Iran's nuclearization, but even then, given the nature of enhanced ties between Anakara and Tehran, it is very hard to believe that, for example, the AKP Government would ever, for instance, join international sanctions against Tehran if they were to be implemented, let alone take part in any kind of aggressive action to challenge Iran's nuclearization.
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So on the one hand, while the AKP has pursued its policy of rapprochement with Iran and Syria, Turkish attitudes toward the United States have soured significantly, and I think this has got to do with 4 years of extremely harsh criticism of American foreign policy in the Middle East by the AKP Government.
The military incursions into Fallujah, for example, were called ''genocide'' by AKP deputies in the parliament using official parlance, and I think this attitude has created what could be a permanent dent in Turkish public opinion, whereas in the pre-AKP period, before 2002, more than half of Turks typically expressed favorable views of the United States. Today, according to a June Pew Center report, only 12 percent view American positively. In that study, what is interesting is that the United States is favored less in Turkey than in Egypt or Jordon. Now, that is definitely an accomplishment, though a negative one, I think, as far as AKP's performance is concerned.
Now, clearly some of the blame, I think, in this issue lies here in Washington. Americans' unwillingness to take action against the PKK presence in northern Iraq from where the group is attacking Turkey is a source of frustration in Turkey, and I saw that during the summer.
Turkish casualties resulting from PKK terrorist attacks have been mounting lately at a rate close to that experienced by United States forces in Iraq. In fact, yesterday there was a bomb in a Turkish town killing 10 people, all children, planted by the PKK. So this is aggravating public opinion toward the U.S. and it is a tool with which the AKP is facilitating that process.
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Another tool with which the AKP is facilitating the process is that the civilian carnage in Iran, footage of that on Turkish networks, has added to the frustration inside the country. Yet there is something peculiar about anti-Americanism in Turkey under the AKP.
As I said earlier, whereas in the pre-AKP period a majority of the Turks viewed America positively and the Turks were America's best friends in the Muslim world for decades, today they seem to have the least favorable opinion of the U.S. anywhere in the Muslim world.
It seems to me, Mr. Chairman, that the AKP's alternative is the Muslim Middle East. The party has demonstrated what I would call an intensive and almost bizarre interest in all Muslim causes. For example, at the onset of the Israeli/Hezbollah war in July Prime Minister Erdogan criticized Israel for trying to wipe out the Palestinians in Lebanon, bringing together the Palestinian question and the Hezbollah question in a very murky way.
On the same day he made this argument, a PKK terror attack killed five Turkish soldiers. Erdogan not only failed to mention the attack, but also totally omitted the parallels between Hezbollah violating Israel's borders and PKK violating Turkey's borders and how these are actually two terror groups on internationally-recognized borders. Its foreign policy gives me the impression that Muslim causes are more important than Turkish ones.
The change of tone on Turkey's Middle East policy has not been without consequences. The Turkish media have run very lengthy anti-Semitic articles. It is a shocking development in a country that has always prided itself on helping Jews and saving Jews, from those who fled from the Spanish Inquisition to those who fled the Nazis. A recent anti-Israeli demonstration which took place while I was in Turkey attracted 100,000 people in Istanbul, again a shocking development given that in the pre-AKP period such demonstrations would have attracted a few hundred die-hard jihadists.
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As I mentioned earlier, Mr. Chairman, it seems to me that the AKP challenges Turkey's Western orientation not only through its foreign policy initiatives, but also through its words, the way it spins public opinion, the way it shapes public opinion. The party leadership, for example, almost always describes Middle East issues as religious conflicts, bringing in the clash of civilizations, and shaping Turkish public opinion on such issues through the prism of the clash of civilizations.
For instance, AKP leader Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has more than once characterized the Israeli-Hezbollah war as a religious conflict, stating that ''mothers and sons are being martyred in Lebanon.'' For me, such rhetoric suits more the year 1099 and the crusades than Turkey, which is negotiating for entry into EU.
Another incident in 2005——
Mr. PENCE. If the witness could summarize, we are a few minutes late.
Mr. CAGAPTAY. I will. At the Arab League summit in Sudan's capital, he said, ''The West uses terrorism to sell us weapons,'' and this is an Arab League summit, so I think in his mind this shows where he thinks Turkey belongs—not in the West but, ironically, in the Arab world.
So why is the party pursuing such policies? I think if Islamist ideology is one part of it, the other part of it is that there are some domestic aspirations. The AKP's conundrum is that it is not supported by a majority of Turks, and the party has used populous foreign policy that bashes the West to boost its domestic standing.
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In a way, the party is not only spoiling Turkish attitudes toward the United States, but also drawing from this attitude in terms of support for its domestic policy. If Turks think of themselves as Muslims first in the foreign policy arena, which is what they are doing now, then inevitably one day they will think of themselves as Muslims first in the domestic arena, providing more support for the AKP.
In finishing, Mr. Chairman, I would like to highlight that some realists will suggest that Turkey's ongoing drift away from the West is an internal matter, and what is more important is to promote a short-term AKP commitment to Washington's policy objectives in the region, such as encountering Iran's nuclearization. This does not seem viable. Here is why.
In the recent discussion on sending Turkish peacekeepers to Lebanon, there was fierce debate in the parliament and the Prime Minister encountered these rejections or these objections to sending peacekeepers to Lebanon, saying that Turkey would neither disarm or harm Hezbollah, and then the idea of peacekeepers was approved.
If Turkey, AKP's Turkey needs to be convinced to take part in peacekeeping operations in Lebanon only on the condition that Hezbollah will not be confronted, how will the same government ever join any action against Iran?
I can continue, but I think I would like to finish by highlighting that the AKP experience in Turkey shows that once in government, Islamist parties bring forth change in unexpected ways, even in the most secular and democratic of those societies. The AKP's foreign policy is scratching away the Turks' sense of Turkishness or national identity, infusing instead a strong sense of Muslim identity.
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In the rift between the West and the Muslim world, I think Turkey is fast approaching the tipping point at which the cat will not walk back. Whether this transformation continues will depend on whether the United States takes the right steps to disarm the chief facilitator of anti-Americanism in Turkey, PKK terror. As a good step, lately we have seen the appointment of a special envoy to discuss the issue of combatting PKK terror.
A second factor that will determine Turkey's future are the elections in the country in 2002. Will secular, Western-minded Turks—long unable to provide a captivating political message—successfully challenge the AKP and will the U.S. back up such a message? If not, I am afraid that a second AKP Government might well turn Turkey into an unrecognizable country—somehow democratic, superficially secular, and definitely not Western.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cagaptay follows:]
[Note: Image(s) not available in this format. See PDF version of this file.]
Mr. PENCE. Thank you, Dr. Cagaptay. And Dr. Simon is recognized with the Council on Foreign Relations, and very welcome. We are grateful that you are here.
STATEMENT OF MR. STEVEN SIMON, SENIOR FELLOW FOR MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
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Mr. SIMON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before this Committee. My observations are personal. They don't reflect the views of the Council on Foreign Relations which, in any case, doesn't have a corporate position on these matters.
I would just like to say in a preambular fashion, probably unnecessary, that it is quite awkward to generalize about things relating to Islam. It makes more sense—especially given the fact that there are 1.4 billion Muslims, give or take, on the face of the planet on just about every continent and who differ by nationality, sect, temperament, profession, class, gender—that generalizations are suspect or ought to be suspect.
So when we talk about Islam, we should be talking about the way in which Muslims interpret their faith and how they live it. It is very difficult to generalize about Islam per se.
Having said that, I would like to concentrate on seven conditions that I think are relevant to the Committee's concerns today as I understood my instructions, and these are seven things that give the jihad legs, that make it a robust and durable phenomenon.
The first is the deep roots of the revival movement in which the jihad is embedded. The second is the connection between contemporary salafism or what we might call a hard Islam or fundamentalist Islam and jihadism. The third relates to the changing nature of clerical authority within the Islamic world. The fourth factor is the globalization of Muslim identity. The fifth is the evolution of anti-Americanism among Muslims. The sixth are the linkages between jihadism and persisting patterns of social organization, particularly in the Arab world. That sound very social sciencey; it is much simpler than that. And finally, the continuing debate over killing civilians within Islamic jurisprudence; that is, killing civilians in the defense of Muslim interests.
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Now, the reason I go through this laundry list—and one could add to it, of course—is simply to say that the jihad is the result, is surviving, on the basis of a host of interlocking factors that are mutually reenforcing, and that even if the U.S. were to knock down one or another or three of these contributing factors, it would still be complex and durable.
On origins, you know, all I will say is that they are deep. They go back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is part of a revival movement that came about during the colonial period when Muslim thinkers thought, well, you know, what is going on here, we are subordinated. We are poor. We don't control our destinies. How do we retain our destinies? Well, return to scripture. Recover this kind of vitality that lies in sacred scripture and in the experience and lessons of the first generations of Muslims.
Now, in the course of a century, it was transmuted by increasingly bitter experiences into something with a much harder edge. It is also conflated with this thing that I referred to as salafism. The early companions, the first three generations of Mohammed are the generations to which these Muslim revivalists look back. They are the most authentic, and they are referred to as the ancestors, the salaf, and those who take this point of view very seriously are called salafists.
Now, most of them are pietistic. They focus on the reform of society. Teaching and preaching are their tools. There are politically-engaged salafists that do mix it up, but not violently. You can think of them as lobbyists in a way, but there is a hard edge to salafism and those are the jihadists, and they are informed or shaped by a particular element of salafism which emphasizes sectarian differences and emphasizes the battle that ought to be taking place or certainly the separation that should be made between Muslims and other religions, particularly Christians and Jews and Shiia for that matter.
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So this is a deeply-rooted phenomenon and salafism at this point seems to be burgeoning and it is burgeoning because it is a relatively uncomplicated doctrine. It draws clear distinctions between right and wrong, and us and them. It promises a secure personal identity, a stable role in a community, and it disregards local customary variations of Islamic practice which have divided Muslims. So it tends to bring Muslims together, give them more of an essential shared identity, so deep roots.
Clerical authority, well, this is a theme that has been treated many times. I won't go into a lot of detail about it except to say that there seems to be a breakdown of clerical authority which has contributed to this easy slide from salafism to jihadism, and as a result of this breakdown of clerical authority there is no universally credible or authoritative institutional break on the current tendency to justify violence in religious terms, particularly against civilians.
Globalized identity is something I mentioned as important. You know, in the 18th and 19th century, increasing literacy made the nation state possible. It made national identities possible. Well, something is happening in like terms with global Muslim identity. In this case it is not literacy so much as it is mass communications. I will just illustrate this with one factoid.
There was a Pew poll in June 2003 in which large majorities in eight of nine Muslim survey groups either ''completely agreed'' or ''somewhat agreed'' with the statement, ''I feel more solidarity these days with Islamic people living around the world,'' and this was true in eight or nine of these countries, and you see it now, as well, in polling in the United States and in Europe, which was not a part of the Pew polling.
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So as this imagined community grows, you get more and more Muslims in one place who are taking very seriously the travails of Muslims elsewhere, which is why you can get Muslims in London and Madrid responding with such alacrity to what they believe is happening to their co-religionists in Iraq.
Anti-Americanism, it really is growing. It is based on so many motifs that it is difficult to chip away at any one of them, let alone the whole thing. There is a letter by bin Laden which is quite interesting, and it illustrates this kind of grab bag approach to anti-American rhetoric. It lashes the U.S. for capitalist rapacity, neo-colonial pretensions, propensity for violence, self-righteous hypocrisy, cultural depravity, degradation of women, and, incidently, for having the wrong religion.
So, you know, this is a very complex web of anti-American beliefs. It is very difficult to chip away at, and it is spreading.
I mentioned the social sciencey thing. You have got, in the Middle East especially, these sort of parallel societies because political activities have been criminalized, and just the very business of daily life is extremely complicated by intrusive and feckless bureaucracies, and so it is very difficult just to live one's life.
So informal networks have achieved a great deal in just getting some of these things done, whether you want to borrow money, whether you want to send your kid to school, whether you want to send money abroad if you are an entrepreneur and you don't want to deal with onerous regulatory and tax burdens, you just deal with your friends, and this parallel society, this kind of subterranean society, which is so necessary to the continuation of daily life, is a world in which radicalism and militancy can easily piggyback onto, and this way of living life is now very thoroughly proliferated and it has created a very durable home for militants.
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Rules of war, let us just say that there is a debate among salafists now about who among the enemy it is legitimate to kill. At root, this is an argument about where the line lies between combatant and non-combatant. This is an important argument, and I raise it because the consensus that emerges will either put mass killers in the category of heretic, which would be good, or, if the consensus goes in the other direction, justify their actions and create a permissive environment for others who wish to join the fight on brutal terms. So we need to keep our eye on this, although we are not legitimate participants in the debate.
Now, the Committee staff asked for an assessment of jihadist objectives. As colleagues have pointed out, there are millions of people who are sympathetic to this cause and perhaps tens of thousands of jihadists around the world—we really don't know. It seems, on that basis, improbable that they have one shared war aim. But you can say that they want to raise the cause, to America and its allies, of maintaining a presence in the Muslim lands. They want to undermine regional governments whose cooperation makes American domination possible. They want to reform Muslim society to strengthen its powers of resistance, and they want to push America to do awful things that will incite greater hatred against it.
There is little room in this picture for a drive to conquest. Indeed, the jihadists describe themselves as ''murabitoun'' which are soldiers that go to the ramparts on the frontiers of Islam to defend it against others.
Mr. PENCE. If the witness could conclude.
Mr. SIMON. Yes, absolutely.
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Mr. PENCE. Thank you.
Mr. SIMON. So what do we do? Well, first, we need to recognize that our presence in Iraq will seriously impede our efforts to influence hearts and minds. This may change if things work out better in Iraq. At the moment that doesn't seem likely and that is going to be a problem.
But we can affect perceptions of the United States, and America's generous response to the 2004 tsunami that killed 100,000 people in Indonesia had a sharply positive effect on public opinion there, and the key factor appeared to be that the perception of the aid was that it was unconditional, so there is a lesson there.
We could also lower the temperature of anti-Americanism by engaging more energetically with the Israeli-Palestinian critics. I understand there are a lot of disincentives to that, but it is out there and it is important.
Finally, we could engage more energetically in diplomatic terms in local conflicts where Muslims are coming into conflict with the governments that rule them, and help those governments accommodate Muslim concerns before the jihadists co-op those conflicts and cause the people involved in them to come after us.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Sorry it took so long.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Simon follows:]
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PREPARED STATEMENT OF MR. STEVEN SIMON, SENIOR FELLOW FOR MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
I would like to thank the members of the committee for the opportunity to speak on this vital topic.
I will concentrate on some of the key questions posed by the Committee: the nature and origin of Islamist extremism; factors contributing to its rise and those that could contribute to its demise; cohesion between groups, messages, and fatwas; and objectives—domestic or foreign; global, regional, or local.
My observations on these issues are personal. They do not reflect the view of the Council on Foreign Relations, which takes no position on these matters. They are also personal in that other analysts will probably have different answers to these questions, which is as it should be. The topic is complicated. And any discussion of Islam must acknowledge that in an important practical sense, there is no such thing. Rather, there is the complex issue of how Muslims interpret and live their faith. The fact that there are 1.4 billion Muslims settled on nearly every continent and which differ on the basis of ethnicity, race, nationality, sect, temperament, profession, class, and gender should suggest that all generalizations about ''Islam'' are suspect, or ought to be.
I will concentrate on seven of the conditions that I believe are relevant to the Committee's concerns today: first, the deep roots of the revival movement in which the jihad is embedded; second, the connection between contemporary salafism, what one might call hard Islam, and jihadism; third, the changing nature of clerical authority within the Islamic world; fourth, the globalization of Muslim identity; fifth, evolution of anti-Americanism among Muslims; sixth, the linkages between jihadism and persisting patterns of social organization, particularly in the Arab world; and seventh, the continuing debate over killing civilians in defense of Muslim interests. The point I wish to make here is that the jihad is mobilized and sustained by a wide range of interlocking conditions. Even if one or two of these conditions could be ameliorated, the remaining drivers would continue to propel it in our direction.
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Other important factors, including the demographic and socio-economic determinants related to this global movement, the role of democratization, or the precise impact of the new media on Muslim opinion, as well as other significant drivers of militancy, I will leave to colleagues to discuss.
I will close by assessing the objectives of this movement and describing some response options available to us as a society and government.
Origins. The jihad can be traced back most clearly to the Arab reform movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The intellectual leaders of this broad initiative were dismayed by the parlous state of affairs in the region. The population was largely poor, educational and scientific achievements were few, and colonial administrations dominated government in those areas that an exhausted Ottoman empire no longer held sway. The evident decline of a once great civilization demanded both explanation and a strategy for renewal. Some prominent reformers laid the blame for decline on Muslims' estrangement from the roots of their religion. A combination of centuries of clerical obfuscation on the one hand and infatuation with the West on the other had cut Muslims off from their spiritual roots. The sources of cultural vitality and confidence were lost. They could be regained, however, through direct access to scripture and the inspiration offered by the actions and experiences of Muhammad and his followers at the very dawn of the Islamic era. These were the salaf al-salih, the righteous ancestors. Fortified by renewed and strengthened faith, Muslims could take what they needed from the vast Western inventory of scientific and technological advances to improve the material condition of Muslim society and ultimately gain independence from foreign powers.
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This brand of salafism evolved significantly since it emerged over a century ago in the Middle East. A pivotal figure in this transformation was an Egyptian intellectual and Qur'an commentator named Sayyid Qutb. Qutb, who was executed in Egypt in 1966, was the Solzhenitsyn of that time and place. An impassioned advocate of justice, he came to see the West as fundamentally corrupt and antithetical to Islamic values. He argued that the two worlds were irreconcilable. A reversion to the values of the salaf, the righteous ancestors, and reliance on the classic expressions of God's revelation would have to be accompanied by a rejection of the West. The devolution of earlier forms of salafism into more inward looking and rejectionist readings did not take place in a vacuum. During this period, the high expectations created by the difficult process of decolonization were unmet, while economic policies based on socialism failed to improve the standard of living, particularly in Egypt. At the same, post colonial Arab governments lost Palestine to the Jews, raising popular doubts about their legitimacy and competence. The salafism of Egyptian radicals cross-bred with the fundamentalism and xenophobia of Wahhabism at this time, as the Saudis provided sanctuary for the Muslim Brotherhood opposition then being persecuted by the Nasser regime in Egypt. A special reverence for the medieval scholar Taqi al-Din ibn Taymiyya was a feature of radical thinking, in part because of his insistence that without truly Islamic governance there could be no Muslim society and in part because of his apparent endorsement of rebellion against Muslim rulers who failed to enforce Islamic law in their domains. This was the reasoning that animated the assassins of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. (It was Ibn Taymiyya who urged that jihad be included among the canonical ''pillars of Islam.'')
The Salafist Revival. Contemporary salafism forms the milieu in which jihadism thrives. It is not, however, the same thing as jihadism. Most salafists are pietistic, focusing on the reform of society through the reform of individual mores and pattern of behavior. Teaching and preaching are their tools. There are political engaged salafists, some of which are establishment clerics, while others are ''privatized'' preachers or social and political commentators committed to salafi goals. They will present governments with so-called memoranda of advice that urge reform, or build organizations that can lobby, or win new adherents by providing social, medical and educational services. Jihadists, who believe that Islam must be defended through armed struggle, are the minority of salafists, but they are obviously highly committed. The links between salafism and jihadism lie in salafi sectarian hostility to Christians, Jews and Shi'a and a literalist reading of the Qur'an, which contains a scattering of verses that valorize warfare against unbelievers. Whereas a mainstream cleric might contextualize these passages within the overall Qur'anic narrative and perhaps cast them as ideals appropriate to a very limited set of conditions, salafists, especially those who are self-educated, will read these verses in an unmediated way. The hardest edge to this part of the salafi spectrum is made up of the so-called takfiris, who believe it is permissible to kill Muslims whom they view as collaborators. The debate over the appropriateness of takfir is an old one. Some modern scholars in Saudi Arabia have tried to resuscitate the opposing concept of irja, which relegates the determination of apostasy to God, who alone is capable of knowing what is in a Muslim's heart. By and large such efforts have been unsuccessful.
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Salafism seems to be burgeoning. It is a relatively uncomplicated doctrine and draws clear distinctions between right and wrong and us and them. It promises a secure personal identity and a role in the community. It eschews local, customary variations