Muslims now account for almost a quarter of humankind. Given their global spread and the obsessive attention they have aroused over the last thirty years or so, one might have supposed that Islam and Muslims were, by now, well understood. Instead the general level of understanding – among politicians and journalists as well as the public – is astonishingly low.
A BBC colleague remarked, long before 9/11, ‘The West is ill at ease with Islam. Even communism was more familiar.’ Communism, after all, came from within the Western tradition; Islam, in contrast, is seen as alien as well as threatening.
One of the West’s most basic mistakes is to regard Islam as monolithic. For example, the Saudi form of Sunni Islam – Wahhabism – is often taken as the norm. But even though Saudi petrodollars have exported Wahhabism far and wide, it remains a minority trend within the broad spectrum of Islamic belief. Islam in, say, Tunisia or Turkey or Indonesia is dramatically different from the austere puritanism of Saudi Arabia. One of the most striking characteristics of the world of Islam is its cultural diversity. After travelling in Muslim countries for some thirty years, I am still constantly amazed at how many ways there are of being a Muslim in the modern world.
Similarly, at the political level, there is not one form of Islamism but a large extended family of Islamisms – Sunni and Shi’a, violent and non-violent, some intent on implanting Islamism in one country, others pursuing a utopian pan-Islamism whose goal is the revival of a worldwide Islamic caliphate. The tendency – by, among others, George W. Bush – to lump them all together into an Islamist ‘axis of evil’ has been distinctly unhelpful.
There are some who argue – as Farid Zakaria has done recently in the pages of Newsweek – that the radical Islamists have been discredited and have lost the ‘war of ideas’. This is wishful thinking. It is true that the use of indiscriminate violence by groups of the Al-Qaeda type – which has led to the killing of Muslims as well as non-Muslims – has provoked a backlash. But it is premature to conclude that the jihadist ‘narrative’ has lost its force. Indeed the underlying factors behind its broad appeal – which extends well beyond the narrow circle of committed militants – are still potent.
Islamism feeds off failure – the failure of autocratic regimes to meet the needs of their people, or to take effective action to defend the Muslims of Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and countless other conflict zones. The West’s role in such conflicts is deemed to be one of either direct culpability or cynical indifference. Its ‘war on terror’ is seen as a war on Islam. Central to the jihadist ‘narrative of humiliation’ is the Palestinian problem which – far from being peripheral to the global jihad, as is sometimes argued – is central to it. Bin Laden is not alone in seeing the protection of Islam’s three holiest places – Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem – as a sacred duty for all Muslims, and hence the core objective of the global jihad.
Much talk in the West of winning Muslim ‘hearts and minds’ has been shallow and misguided. This is not a public-relations problem that can be solved using the techniques of Madison Avenue. As one of America’s most prominent public figures, Admiral Mike Mullen, noted recently, it is about policy and policy execution, not just about communication. By invading Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, Western powers unwittingly reinforced the jihadist narrative. By the same token, the controversies surrounding the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and the photographs of abuse in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, gave Al-Qaeda the kind of propaganda that money can’t buy.
Without a surer grasp of Islamism and its discontents, the Muslim revolt will continue for generations to come.
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