The West Still Doesn’t Get Islam We must be careful not to succumb to magical thinking. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-west-still-doesnt-get-islam/
The spectacular destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure by Israel and the U.S. is a long-neglected restoration of America’s deterrent power. Yet the subsequent cease-fire President Trump imposed on Israel bespeaks again the West’s long failure to understand the nature of traditional orthodox Islam–– particularly its sanctified violence in fulfillment of Allah’s command to wage religious war “Until,” as the Islamic Republic’s godfather, the Ayatollah Khomeini, announced, “the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world.”
Nor was this sentiment a modern deformation of Islam in response to Western imperial aggression. One of the most significant Islamic exegetes, the late-14th century writer Ibn Khaldun, wrote in the Muqaddimah, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”
This jihadist imperialist ambition guided Islamic conquests and occupations of lands that had been Christian for millennia, and remained a threat to the West up to Europe’s expansion into Muslim lands began to accelerate in the 18th century.
But the rise and spread of secularism in the West diminished the influence of religion, which once was the heart of our understanding of human affairs and change. By the late Thirties, Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc observed, “Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them.”
These changes over multiple decades also profoundly impacted Islam, and incited calls for reformation: “From the beginning of Western penetration in the world of Islam,” Middle Eastern historian Bernard Lewis writes, “until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original political responses to that penetration have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and the community overwhelmed by infidels.”
Moreover, historian Efraim Karsh points out, the foundational belief in Islam’s divine mandate to conquer and occupy the whole world has not succumbed to modernity’s secular solvents that Christianity has: “The last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed, and the caliphate left vacant”–––an event Osama bin Laden called a “humiliation and disgrace”––“but the imperial dream of world domination has remained very much alive in the hearts and minds of many Muslims.”
Hard upon the abandonment of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, Egyptian Hassan al Banna created the Muslim Brotherhood to restore Islam to its doctrinal purity, especially the venerable mandate of Islamic jihad in order to revive Islam’s empire usurped by Western infidels. As al Banna explained, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”
His fellow Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb, al Qaeda’s “intellectual godfather,” as Lee Smith put it, and an important theorist of jihadist renewal, wrote, “It is necessary to revive the Muslim community, which is buried under the debris of man-made traditions of several generations, and which is crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not even related to the Islamic teachings.”
In this history of Islamic imperialist dreams, the most consequential development for our times has been the Iranian Islamic Revolution, whose architect, the Ayatollah Khomeini, successfully revived the dream of Islam’s regenerated imperial mission. And the successful destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure has not ended that dream for many Iranians and other Muslims, but only set it back. But we secularist Westerners, who have marginalized faith to a life-style preference or dangerous superstation, often cannot understand or take seriously the outsized role of Islam in Muslim cultures and politics.
This failure of imagination has been a geopolitical mistake. For as Bernard Lewis explains, “In most Islamic countries, religion remains a major political factor, for most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian . . . [I]n no Christian country at the present time can religious leaders count on the degree of belief and participation that remains normal in the Muslim lands . . . Christian clergy do not exercise or even claim the kind of public authority that is still normal and acceptable in most Muslim countries.”
That dominating role of Islam and it imperialist dreams are the context in which we should develop our foreign policy in the Middle East. As Islam’s premier traditional enemy for millennia, Israel since its creation has been the religiously sanctioned target of violence––from full-blown wars to terrorist attacks with high explosives, guns, automobiles, and missile barrages indiscriminately fired at civilians. Israel’s war will not cease until that risk of violence is ended.
We Americans have never been exposed to such indiscriminate violence, let alone endured such mayhem for decades. Worse, many of us have become callous to the plight of Israel’s people, while left-wing political factions make heroes of Iran’s proxies like Hamas, celebrate its sadistic carnage, and protest on Hamas’ behalf while chanting antisemitic genocidal slogans redolent of Der Stürmer. The current war has been a rare opportunity for Israel to degrade definitively Iran’s stockpiles of missiles and other materiel it shares with its proxies for use against Israel.
However, President Trump’s cease-fire has stopped Israel from finishing the job of ending that long, bloody threat. As Austin Bay writes on Creators: “After a Trump F-bomb tantrum, Israel agreed to observe the ceasefire, though it meant giving up its air supremacy. With another five days Israel could have taken out scores of regime-maintenance targets — thug forces protecting ayatollahs and assets that can threaten Persian Gulf oil tankers. Sample targets: Iranian Republican Guard Corps leaders; speedboats, stored naval mines and anti-ship missiles the regime could use to close the Strait of Hormuz.”
Moreover, as highly as we may think of Trump’s calls for peace and reconciliation, the mullahs and other devout Muslim jihadists see it not as magnanimity and respect for life, but as the infidels’ weakness and spiritual poverty that for centuries allowed Islam to dominate much of the Western world. Any breathing space bestowed on the mullahs will be exploited and used to further its still potent traditional Islamic global ambitions.
Furthermore, allowing Iran to sell oil to China to keep the mullahs from attacking the Straits of Hormuz, through which 20% of oil is delivered, will eventually––like the billions Obama’s feckless “nuclear deal” handed over to Iran––provide funds for beginning the replacement of destroyed jets and other materiel, and the reconstruction of its nuclear weapons infrastructure and equipment. President Trump has publicly announced that if Iran makes such moves, the MOPS will return. But why give Iran the opportunity?
As for the threats to the Straits, we don’t need oil-sales to China to leverage Iran from attempting to shut them down. Didn’t Ronald Reagan at the end of his second term, intervene in the Iraq-Iran war to punish Iran’s wanton attacks on international shipping in the Straits? From July 1987 to September 1988, the U.S. military conducted Operation Earnest Will to protect international shipping, but also to retaliate for Iran’s attack on the USS Stark, which killed 37 sailors and injured 21.
Today, with Iran rocked back on its heels, its materiel degraded, and its air space controlled by Israel, we don’t need to seek help from our most dangerous geopolitical rival, and benefit Iran in order to keep oil flowing through the Straits.
Next, the danger from Iran’s nuclear ambitions has not been fully put to rest. Yes, contrary to CNN and other evangelical Trump-haters, the facilities have been destroyed. According to a post-attack assessment by David Albright and Spencer Faragasso of the Institute for Science and International excerpted in The Wall Street Journal, “Overall, Israel’s and U.S. attacks have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program.”
“That being said,” the authors caution, “there are residuals such as stocks of 60%, 20%, and 3-5% enriched uranium and the centrifuges manufactured but not yet installed at Natanz or Fordow. These non-destroyed parts pose a threat as they can be used in the future to produce weapon-grade uranium.” The mullahs’ friends in China, North Korea, and Russia would no doubt be available to help Iran get its nuclear weapons project back on track.
The President has promised to strike Iran again if the mullahs should make such attempts. And he’s earned credibility by ordering the most consequential military strike in decades. But we must be careful not to succumb to the magical thinking of “diplomatic engagement,” particularly with passionately intense people of faith who are motivated by the long imperialist dream to fulfill Allah’s will, which to the faithful cannot be bargained away.
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