Ignorance about Islamic radicalism is our downfall
By: Andrew C. McCarthy
OpEd Contributor
May 25, 2010
Part two of a three-part series
Hassan al-Banna, a charismatic, Cairo-trained educator known to his acolytes as "the Guide," established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. Its solution to the problems ailing Muslims was a very particular brand of Islam: Salafism.
The term Salafiyyah refers to the "Righteous Ancestors," Mohammed and his companions. Banna, a scholar of Salafism's original 19th century theorists, reasoned that by degrading the unalloyed Islam of the first Islamic community with countless accommodations to modernity, Muslims had strayed from the prophet's teaching.
He was a student of Rashid Rida, an intensely anti-Western "reformer" who argued that the religious and political elements of Islam were inseparable. Banna echoed Rida's vigorous rejection of rationalism, seeking to steer Salafism away from modernizing Western influences.
Only by returning to the Islam of the founders could the umma -- the Muslim Nation -- reverse its political, economic and social torpor. This would require faithfully implementing the divine law, sharia.
With sharia's injunctions firmly in place, the Muslim Nation would inevitably rise to the hegemony that was Allah's due. "It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated," Banna taught. The mission of Islam is "to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet."
Today, ignorance about Islamist ideology is widespread, even after decades of attacks have made Islamic terrorism the top U.S. security challenge. Salafism, in particular, remains a mystery to most Americans, though it is the enemy's animating ideology. Islamists have used our ignorance to great effect.
Most Americans who have some passing acquaintance with the term "Salafist" assume it is a label for terrorists. Therefore, in the public mind, Salafists are the real bad guys, to be sharply distinguished from the ubiquitous Muslim "moderates" -- who are purportedly "moderate" because they allegedly "reject terrorism," not because their views are actually benign.
This is a hopelessly ill-conceived construct, but leftists -- who dominate policy circles, the academy and the media -- are delighted to have us see things this way. With Americans in the dark, Islamists freely pass themselves off as moderates. That makes it politically palatable for the left to collaborate with them in undermining the American establishment.
There's no reason, however, why the rest of us should abide an arrangement, steeped in fiction, which steadily erodes our liberty and security.
To be clear: Salafism, the original inspiration of the Muslim Brotherhood, is the guiding ideology of all Islamists, the Islamist terrorists as well as those Islamists who purport to reject terrorism. Both types of Islamists want the same thing: the Islamization of society.
Both reject Western rationalism and the Christian unity of faith and reason. Both favor Sharia determinism. Both support the development of fundamentalist Muslim enclaves and the ultimate supplanting of American constitutional democracy by Islamic law.
Nonterrorist Islamists want to overthrow the U.S. government every bit as much as the terrorists do. They are not moderates. Their differences with the terrorists are over means and methods, not goals.
True, some of these differences are intense and each side fires invective, and worse, at the other. But we should not be fooled by any of this. For all their infighting, the Islamists and the terrorists start and hope to end in the same place.
They are the flip sides of the same revolution, playing a good cop/bad cop routine -- which is really bad cop/worse cop. The differences between the two camps are overwhelmingly a matter of tactics, not goals. They have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the West -- starting with brute fact that they both see America as their enemy.
Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor and author of "The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America," from which this is adapted."
washingtonexaminer.com |
