The Clash of Islam and Liberalism
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
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Islam is not merely a religion. It is also - and perhaps, foremost - a state ideology and a socio-political subversive revolutionary movement. Contrary to all other revolutions, it started in cities and ended empowering the Lumpenproletariat, the outcast, and the underdog. It is all-pervasive and missionary. It permeates every aspect of social cooperation and culture. It is an organizing principle, a narrative, a philosophy, a value system, and a vade mecum. In this it resembles Confucianism and, to some extent, Hinduism. Total ideologies are both prescriptive and proscriptive: by prohibiting certain kinds of activities and types of conduct, they cohere the pent-up energies (“libido”) and narcissistic needs of their adherents and channel these forces towards predetermined goals, both constructive and disruptive (or destructive).
Judaism and its offspring, Christianity - though heavily involved in political affairs throughout the ages - have kept their dignified distance from such carnal matters. These are religions of "heaven" as opposed to Islam, a practical, pragmatic, hands-on, ubiquitous, "earthly" faith.
Secular religions - Democratic Liberalism, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, Socialism and other isms - are more akin to Islam than to, let's say, Buddhism. They are universal, prescriptive, and total. They provide recipes, rules, and norms regarding every aspect of existence - individual, social, cultural, moral, economic, political, military, and philosophical.
At the end of the Cold War, Democratic Liberalism stood triumphant over the fresh graves of its ideological opponents. They have all been eradicated. This precipitated Fukuyama's premature diagnosis (the End of History). But one state ideology, one bitter rival, one implacable opponent, one contestant for world domination, one antithesis remained - Islam.
Militant Islam is, therefore, not a cancerous mutation of "true" Islam. On the contrary, it is the purest expression of its nature as an imperialistic religion which demands unmitigated obedience from its followers and regards all infidels as both inferior and as avowed enemies not only of Muslims but of humanity itself (in that they can bring the wrath of God on us all at any minute). Islam is a young religion but with no time horizon and a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Like all missionary creeds, it revolves around the idea of salvation and its pivot is enlightenment: it is all about saving the straying by converting them to the One True Faith and thus enlightening them. At a similar phase in the development of their respective religions, both Jews and Christians behaved the way Muslims do today: paranoid, hostile, murderous, suicidal, fatalistic, apocalyptic, and nihilistic. Death cults arose in all these three monotheistic faiths.
The same can be said about Democratic Liberalism. Like Islam, it does not hesitate to exercise force, is missionary, colonizing, and regards itself as a monopolist of the "truth" and of "universal values". Its antagonists are invariably portrayed as depraved, primitive, and below par.
Such mutually exclusive claims were bound to lead to an all-out conflict sooner or later. The "War on Terrorism" is only the latest round in a millennium-old war between Islam and other "world systems".
Such interpretation of recent events enrages many. They demand to know (often in harsh tones):
- Don’t you see any differences between Islam on the one hand and Judaism and Christianity on the other?
Islam is a young religion, less than 1400 years old. When Judaism and Christianity were at this phase of their development, they resembled Islam today: they were rife with militancy, obscurantism, misogyny, missionary belligerence, and all-pervading, dogmatic intolerance.
- Don't you see any difference between terrorists who murder civilians and regular armies in battle?
Both regulars and irregulars slaughter civilians as a matter of course. "Collateral damage" is the main outcome of modern, total warfare - and of low intensity conflicts alike.
There is a major difference between terrorists and soldiers, though:
Terrorists make carnage of noncombatants their main tactic - while regular armies rarely do. Such conduct is criminal and deplorable, whoever the perpetrator.
But what about the killing of combatants in battle? How should we judge the slaying of soldiers by terrorists in combat?
Modern nation-states enshrined the self-appropriated monopoly on violence in their constitutions and ordinances (and in international law). Only state organs - the army, the police - are permitted to kill, torture, and incarcerate.
Terrorists are trust-busters: they, too, want to kill, torture, and incarcerate. They seek to break the death cartel of governments by joining its ranks.
Thus, when a soldier kills terrorists and ("inadvertently") civilians (as "collateral damage") - it is considered above board. But when the terrorist decimates the very same soldier - he is decried as an outlaw.
Moreover, the misbehavior of some countries - not least the United States - led to the legitimization of terrorism. Often nation-states use terrorist organizations to further their geopolitical goals. When this happens, erstwhile outcasts become "freedom fighters", pariahs become allies, murderers are recast as sensitive souls struggling for equal rights. This contributes to the blurring of ethical percepts and the blunting of moral judgment.
We must bear in mind that Islam is a relatively young religion, at a stage of its development similar to 11th century Christianity: belligerent, missionary, exclusive, and committed to Jihad (doing battle with one’s frailties, foibles, and weaknesses in order to get closer to God). In the Medieval Church, the various orders of ascetic monks reified this ideal of attaining goodness and holiness by suppressing one’s humanity and renouncing the world and its temptations. In this sense, they were a mirror image of today’s Islamic militants. Many of them indeed went on to participate in the Crusades (warrior-monks such as the Knight Templars and the Hospitaliers).
- Would you rather live under sharia law? Don't you find Liberal Democracy vastly superior to Islam?
Superior, no. Different - of course. Having been born and raised in the West, I naturally prefer its standards to Islam's. Had I been born in a Muslim country, I would have probably found the West and its principles perverted and obnoxious.
The question is meaningless because it presupposes the existence of an objective, universal, culture and period independent set of preferences. Luckily, there is no such thing.
- In this clash of civilization whose side are you on?
This is not a clash of civilizations. Western medieval culture is inextricably intertwined with Islamic knowledge, teachings, and philosophy – the direct descendants of antiquity.
Christian fundamentalists have more in common with Muslim militants than with East Coast or French intellectuals.
Muslims have always been the West's most defining Other. Islamic existence and "gaze" helped to mold the West's emerging identity as a historical construct. From Spain to India, the incessant friction and fertilizing interactions with Islam shaped Western values, beliefs, doctrines, moral tenets, political and military institutions, arts, and sciences.
This war is about world domination. Two incompatible thought and value systems compete for the hearts and minds (and purchasing power) of the denizens of the global village. Like in the Westerns, by high noon, either one of them is left standing - or both will have perished.
Where does my loyalty reside?
I am a Westerner, so I hope the West wins this confrontation. But, in the process, it would be good if it were humbled, deconstructed, and reconstructed. One beneficial outcome of this conflict is the demise of the superpower system - a relic of days bygone and best forgotten. I fully believe and trust that in militant Islam, the United States has found its match.
In other words, I regard militant Islam as a catalyst that will hasten the transformation of the global power structure from unipolar to multipolar. It may also commute the United States itself. It will definitely rejuvenate religious thought and cultural discourse. All wars do.
Aren't you overdoing it? After all, al-Qaida is just a bunch of terrorists on the run!
The West is not fighting al-Qaida. It is facing down the circumstances and ideas that gave rise to al-Qaida. Conditions - such as poverty, ignorance, disease, oppression, and xenophobic superstitions - are difficult to change or to reverse. Ideas are impossible to suppress. Already, militant Islam is far more widespread and established that any Western government would care to admit.
History shows that all terrorist groupings ultimately join the mainstream. Many countries - from Israel to Ireland and from East Timor to Nicaragua - are governed by former terrorists. Terrorism enhances social upward mobility and fosters the redistribution of wealth and resources from the haves to haves not.
Al-Qaida, despite its ominous portrayal in the Western press - is no exception. It, too, will succumb, in due time, to the twin lures of power and money. Nihilistic and decentralized as it is - its express goals are the rule of Islam and equitable economic development. It is bound to get its way in some countries.
The world of the future will be truly pluralistic. The proselytizing zeal of Liberal Democracy and Capitalism has rendered them illiberal and intolerant. The West must accept the fact that a sizable chunk of humanity does not regard materialism, individualism, liberalism, progress, and democracy - at least in their Western guises - as universal or desirable.
Live and let live (and live and let die) must replace the West's malignant optimism and intellectual and spiritual arrogance.
Edward K. Thompson, the managing editor of "Life" from 1949 to 1961, once wrote:
"'Life' must be curious, alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve this without being holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all or a Peeping Tom."
The West has grossly and thoroughly violated Thompson's edict. In its oft-interrupted intercourse with these forsaken regions of the globe, it has acted, alternately, as a Peeping Tom, a cynic and a know it all. It has invariably behaved as if it were holier-than-thou. In an unmitigated and fantastic succession of blunders, miscalculations, vain promises, unkept threats and unkempt diplomats - it has driven the world to the verge of war and the regions it "adopted" to the threshold of economic and social upheaval.
Enamored with the new ideology of free marketry cum democracy, the West first assumed the role of the omniscient. It designed ingenious models, devised foolproof laws, imposed fail-safe institutions and strongly "recommended" measures. Its representatives, the tribunes of the West, ruled the plebeian East with determination rarely equaled by skill or knowledge.
Velvet hands couched in iron gloves, ignorance disguised by economic newspeak, geostrategic interests masquerading as forms of government, characterized their dealings with the natives. Preaching and beseeching from ever higher pulpits, they poured opprobrium and sweet delusions on the eagerly duped, naive, bewildered masses.
The deceit was evident to the indigenous cynics - but it was the failure that dissuaded them and others besides. The West lost its former colonies not when it lied egregiously, not when it pretended to know for sure when it surely did not know, not when it manipulated and coaxed and coerced - but when it failed.
To the peoples of these regions, the king was fully dressed. It was not a little child but an enormous debacle that exposed his nudity. In its presumptuousness and pretentiousness, feigned surety and vain clichés, imported economic models and exported cheap raw materials - the West succeeded to demolish beyond reconstruction whole economies, to ravage communities, to wreak ruination upon the centuries-old social fabric, woven diligently by generations.
It brought crime and drugs and mayhem but gave very little in return, only a horizon beclouded and thundering with vacuous eloquence. As a result, while tottering regional governments still pay lip service to the values of Capitalism, the masses are enraged and restless and rebellious and baleful and anti-Western to the core.
The disenchanted were not likely to acquiesce for long - not only with the West's neo-colonialism but also with its incompetence and inaptitude, with the nonchalant experimentation that it imposed upon them and with the abyss between its proclamations and its performance.
Throughout this time, the envoys of the West - its mediocre politicians, its insatiably ruthless media, its obese tourists, its illiterate soldiers, and its armchair economists - continue to play the role of God, wreaking greater havoc than even the original.
While confessing to omniscience (in breach of every tradition scientific and religious), they also developed a kind of world weary, unshaven cynicism interlaced with fascination at the depths plumbed by the locals' immorality and amorality.
The jet-set Peeping Toms reside in five star hotels (or luxurious apartments) overlooking the communist, or Middle-Eastern, or African shantytowns. They drive utility vehicles to the shabby offices of the native bureaucrats and dine in $100 per meal restaurants ("it's so cheap here").
In between kebab and hummus they bemoan and grieve the corruption and nepotism and cronyism ("I simply love their ethnic food, but they are so..."). They mourn the autochthonous inability to act decisively, to cut red tape, to manufacture quality, to open to the world, to be less xenophobic (said while casting a disdainful glance at the native waiter).
To them it looks like an ancient force of nature and, therefore, an inevitability - hence their cynicism. Mostly provincial people with horizons limited by consumption and by wealth, these heralds of the West adopt cynicism as shorthand for cosmopolitanism. They erroneously believe that feigned sarcasm lends them an air of ruggedness and rich experience and the virile aroma of decadent erudition. Yet all it does is make them obnoxious and even more repellent to the residents than they already were.
Ever the preachers, the West - both Europeans and Americans - uphold themselves as role models of virtue to be emulated, as points of reference, almost inhuman or superhuman in their taming of the vices, avarice up front.
Yet the chaos and corruption in their own homes is broadcast live, day in and day out, into the cubicles inhabited by the very people they seek to so transform. And they conspire and collaborate in all manner of venality and crime and scam and rigged elections in all the countries they put the gospel to.
In trying to put an end to history, they seem to have provoked another round of it - more vicious, more enduring, more traumatic than before. That the West is paying the price for its mistakes I have no doubt. For isn't it a part and parcel of its teachings that everything has a price and that there is always a time of reckoning?
Note: Globalization - Liberalism's Disastrous Gamble
From Venezuela to Thailand, democratic regimes are being toppled by authoritarian substitutes: the military, charismatic left-wingers, or mere populists. Even in the USA, the bastion of constitutional rule, civil and human rights are being alarmingly eroded (though not without precedent in wartime).
The prominent ideologues of liberal democracy have committed a grave error by linking themselves inextricably with the doctrine of freemarketry and the emerging new order of globalization. As Thomas Friedman correctly observes in "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", both strains of thought are strongly identified with the United States of America (USA).
Thus, liberal democracy came to be perceived by the multitudes as a ruse intended to safeguard the interests of an emerging, malignantly narcissistic empire (the USA) and of rapacious multinationals. Liberal democracy came to be identified with numbing, low-brow cultural homogeneity, encroachment on privacy and the individual, and suppression of national and other idiosyncratic sentiments.
Liberal democracy came to be confused and confuted with neo-colonial exploitation, social Darwinism, and the crumbling of social compacts and long-standing treaties, both explicit and implicit. It even came to be associated with materialism and a bewildering variety of social ills: rising crime rates, unemployment, poverty, drug addiction, prostitution, organ trafficking, monopolistic behavior, corporate malfeasance, and other antisocial forms of conduct.
The backlash was, thus, inevitable.
Exclusionary Ideas of Progress (Brussels Morning)
Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and Religious Fundamentalism are as utopian as the classical Idea of Progress, which is most strongly reified by Western science, capitalism, freemarketry, and “liberal”, “progressive” “democracy”.
All these are actually illiberal ideologies which firmly espouse a linear view of history: Man progresses by accumulating knowledge and wealth and by constructing ever-improving polities.
Similarly, the classical, all-encompassing, idea of progress is perceived to be a "Law of Nature" with human jurisprudence and institutions as both its manifestations and descriptors. Thus, all ideas of progress are pseudo-scientific.
All these are totalitarian ideologies which regard individual tragedies and sacrifices as the inevitable lubricant of the inexorable March Forward of the species.
Yet, they redefine "humanity" (who is human) to exclude certain groups of people.
Communism embraces the Working Class (Proletariat) but not the Bourgeoisie, Nazism promotes one Volk but denigrates and annihilates others, Fascism bows to the Collective but viciously persecutes dissidents, Religious Fundamentalism posits a chasm between believers and infidels. Liberal democracy is victimhood-based. It involves virtue signalling and it aggresses against countervailing speech (cf. woke movements and cancel culture).
In these intolerant ideologies, the exclusion of certain reviled groups of people is both a prerequisite for the operation of the "Natural Law of Progress" and an integral part of its motion forward.
The moral and spiritual obligation of "real" Man to future generations is to "unburden" the Law, to make it possible for it to operate smoothly and in optimal conditions, with all hindrances (read: undesirables) removed (read: murdered or at least silenced).
All these ideologies subvert modernity (in other words, Progress itself) by using its products (technology) to exclude or to kill "outsiders", all in the name of servicing "real" humanity and bettering its lot.
Liberal democracy has been intermittently guilty of some additional sins.
The same deranged logic extends to the construction and maintenance of nuclear weapons by countries like the USA, the UK, France, and Israel: they are intended to protect "good" humanity against "bad" people (e.g., Communists during the Cold war, Arabs, or failed states such as Iran).
Even climate change is a symptom of such exclusionary thinking: the rich feel that they have the right to tax the "lesser" poor by polluting our common planet and by disproportionately exhausting its resources.
The fact is that, at least since the 1920s, the very existence of Mankind is being recurrently threatened by exclusionary ideas of progress. Even Colonialism, which predated modern ideologies, was inclusive and sought to "improve" the Natives" and "bring them to the White Man's level" by assimilating or incorporating them in the culture and society of the colonial power. This was the celebrated (and then decried) "White Man's Burden".
That we no longer accept our common fate and the need to collaborate to improve our lot is nothing short of suicidal.
Note: The West’s Perennial Error of Picking Sides
Rather than letting rabid militant Islamists slaughter each other to oblivion, the West keeps choosing sides and getting itself entangled in the internecine quagmire that is the Middle East. A policy of “live and let die” which would allow for the mutually-assured decimation of the fractious factions of these nether-lands would have had numerous advantages:
1. Weakened by the attritive infighting, whichever the winner is, it would be compelled to collaborate with the West in order to survive. There is no substitute to the depth, innovativeness, and stability of the West’s capital, its markets, and its technology;
2. The West would have conserved its resources while its ostensible and professed adversaries bled themselves to literal death;
3. The neutrality of the West would have preserved its powerful and lucrative position as an arbiter and mediator of last resort;
4. The denizens of the West would be spared the onslaught of all-pervasive terrorism that they are now forced to endure.
Islamist murderous and obscurantist thugs are not the first to benefit from the West’s curious habit of siding with one deranged assassin against another. Consider Hitler, for example.
Hitler and Nazism are often portrayed as an apocalyptic and seismic break with European history. Yet the truth is that they were the culmination and reification of European (and American) history in the 19th century. Europe's (and the United States') annals of colonialism have prepared it for the range of phenomena associated with the Nazi regime: from industrial-scale murder to racial theories, from slave labour to the forcible annexation of territory.
Germany was a colonial power no different to murderous Belgium or Britain or the United States. What set it apart is that it directed its colonial attentions at the heartland of Europe - rather than at Africa or Asia or Latin and Central America. Both World Wars were colonial wars fought on European soil.
Moreover, Nazi Germany innovated by applying prevailing racial theories (usually reserved to non-whites) to the white race itself. It started with the Jews - a non-controversial proposition - but then expanded them to include "east European" whites, such as the Poles and the Russians.
Still, Hitler was right to have been shocked by the failure of his wager: that the British Empire will side with him against the equally murderous Bolshevik Stalin. Hitler and Stalin were two of a kind: mass murderers, bent on an expansionist-imperialist agenda, promoters of ideologies that placed the state way ahead of individual life and freedoms. It made eminent sense for the Western powers to leverage Germany to get rid of Communism and prevent the rise of a lamentable and vile Stalinist Empire at the very heart of Europe. The peoples of Central and Eastern Europe have paid with four lost decades for the West's erroneous choice of Stalin over Hitler. In hindsight, allowing Hitler and Stalin to decimate each other would have been far preferable.
Even more so since Germany was not alone in its malignant nationalism. The far right in France was as pernicious. Nazism - and Fascism - were world ideologies, adopted enthusiastically in places as diverse as Iraq, Egypt, Norway, Latin America, and Britain. At the end of the 1930's, liberal capitalism, communism, and fascism (and its mutations) were locked in mortal battle of ideologies. Hitler's mistake was to delusionally believe in the affinity between capitalism and Nazism - an affinity enhanced, to his mind, by Germany's corporatism and by the existence of a common enemy: global communism.
Qur’an Burning: The Limits of Free Speech (Brussels Morning)
Both Freud and Marx maintained the view that all religions are mass psychegenic illnesses: socially sublimated delusional disorders. But many people hold dearer than life various artefacts associated with these beliefs, counterfactual as they may be.
Burning the Qur’an is an act intended to provoke pain and indignation in these faithful. It is nothing short of cruel and sadistic. Taunting the mentally ill should invariably be outlawed. There ought to be limits to free speech and this should be one of them.
This week, in Sweden, an Iraqi national, a temporary resident in that Scandinavian country, far right activist Salwan Momika, set fire to the holy book outside the central mosque in Stockholm, on June 28, just before Eid al-Adkha, a holy day in the Muslim calendar.
Equally shocking is the fact that he was allowed by the domestic courts to proceed with this barbarity unimpeded. The Swedish police could do nothing even when faced with the prospects of mass – and justified - civil unrest.
The Swedish government distanced itself from this uncivil public sacrilegious protest, criticizing it but making clear its impotence owing to the ill-conceived intervention of the judiciary.
The Swedish authorities called the demonstration “polarizing and offensive, disrespectful, a clear provocation, legal but not appropriate”. They opened an investigation on a charge of agitation against a national or ethnic group involving the 37 years old man who stamped on the book and tore it before he incinerated it gleefully.
In retaliation, Muslims the world over burned Swedish flags and the 57-members Organization for Islamic Cooperation called for collective action to prevent a recurrence of the desecration of the Qur’an.
The Swedish court’s decision is odd, to use an understatement. Burning the Qur’an is indisputably a form of hate speech directed at a religion, an instance of Islamophobia. International law prohibits it unequivocally.
The event has broader implications: Islamic Turkey is leveraging the incident to further delay the accession to NATO of Sweden in this month’s summit. Sweden’s Border controls have been enhanced.
Putin reminded the world that such an act in Russia would be criminal because Russia respects “religious feelings”.
In their tome, “How Democracies Die”, the authors Steven Levitsky and Danial Ziblatt, expound on the gatekeeping function of political parties and courts. Extreme speech which challenges democracy and tolerance should be sidelined, they say.
This doesn’t go far enough. Such discourse should be outlawed. Some speech acts are illegitimate. The costs of free speech should always be a prohibitive and inhibiting consideration: who gets hurt or put at risk, what scarce resources are squandered, which collective interests are jeopardized, compromised, or sacrificed.
The sociologists Bradley Campbell and Roger Manning sounded the alarm about the rise of victimhood culture. Coupled with political correctness and woke tyranny, we have gone too far with moral relativism and anomie.
We need to re-establish firm guardrails and agree on a set of minimal immutable values. We then must apply them rigorously and ban words which have the overwhelming potential to turn into sticks and stones. We should not recoil in the face of naming and shaming, guilt-tripping and blame-shifting by self-styled victims. Whoever is unhappy with the West’s creed and its institutions can seek Putin’s brand of freedom in the Russian Federation, in the footsteps of Edward Snowden.
“Those who burn books will ultimately burn people”, quipped Heinrich Heine, memorably. A Jew, he had a premonition. The Qur’an is a book. The resurgence of the far right across Europe now seems to culminate in the cremation of books in public.
Have we learned nothing from history? This should have never been allowed to happen. Shame on the feeble-minded spineless judges who let this atrocity take place. Let this toxin be a tocsin, a wakeup call.
Also Read
Renaissance and Nazism as Ideas of Progress
Hitler - The Inverted Saint
Dialog about anti-Semitism
The Crescent and the Cross - Introduction
The Crescent and the Cross - A First Encounter
The Crescent and the Cross - The Communities of God
Terrorism as a Psychodynamic Phenomenon
Narcissists, Group Behavior, and Terrorism
The Semi-failed State
The Second Civil War
The Reluctant Empire
To Give with Grace
In God We Trust
The Sergeant and the Girl
Containing the United States
Democracy and New Colonialism
The American Hostel
Add Me to the List, Mr. Blair
Narcissism, Group Behavior, and Terrorism
The Iraqi and the Madman
The Roots of Anti-Americanism
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