Osama Bin Laden might be dead and gone, but his
spirit now possesses northern Mali, which has suddenly become yet another safe
haven for groups sympathetic to his goal of global genocide.
As I wrote last summer in Blood in the Water: America Wins Another Battle While
Bin Laden Wins the War, Al-Qaeda was
never as formidable a threat as it was made out to be. On Monday America put
another nail in its coffin by killing its new second-in-command, Abu Yahya
al-Libi. It is only a matter of time before Bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, meets a similar fate, but the end of Al-Qaeda will not mean the
end of the war, by a longshot. Our politicians, media pundits and military
strategists aren’t paying attention to the real war, which is a religious
struggle between two radically different visions of the global order; in fact,
they have forbidden us to even discuss it, which only guarantees that we will
slowly lose that struggle over the next few generations.
On paper, it seems that we have won, because Al-Qaeda
is clearly on its way to extinction. The goals that it fought for, however,
remain wildly popular in the Middle East, which is why Osama is now the second
most popular name for newborn males in the region behind Mohammed. This is
merely one vivid symptom of a dramatic political trend in the region, one that
is only visible when looking back over the course of decades or centuries, not
months or years as our myopic leaders are accustomed to thinking in terms of.
We have dismantled Al-Qaeda in the last ten years, sometimes thanks to the
heroics of our men in uniform. Yet in that same time frame, groups sympathetic
to that organization have gained far more ground than they have lost. At the
time of 9/11, there were only a couple of bastions of Muslim fundamentalism in
the Middle East, most notably Iran, Sudan, southern Lebanon and parts of
Israel’s Occupied Territories, as well as some unrest lingering in Algeria from
its civil war in the 1990s. Saudi Arabia might also be included in this group,
since sharia is the law of the land there, although it is technically a fickle
ally of the U.S. The fact that fundamentalist movements of various stripes gained
this much power completely confounded the predictions of all the experts, who
said in the early 1980s that it would be confined merely to Iran and
Afghanistan, where the first potent Islamic movements were established in the
mid-‘70s. Since 9/11, the experts have been confounded yet again, because
radical Islam has continued to spread throughout the region. A mildly
fundamentalist party took power in Turkey in 2002 through peaceful elections;
the Arab Spring has brought similar groups to power in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt
practically overnight, within just the last year; Yemen descended into civil
unrest and chaos, allowing Al-Qaeda affiliates to establish bases there; the
Somali civil war raging for the last two decades abruptly changed from a tribal
squabble to a religious war; Hamas also won free elections in the Occupied
Territories and seized power in the Gaza Strip. Even more ominously, our
duplicitous allies in Pakistan’s intelligence services, the ISI, were for all
intents and purposes revealed to be harboring Bin Laden – but instead of
apologizing profusely for this act of war, Pakistan has blockaded our supply
routes into Afghanistan. Worse still, the West has been proven helpless to stop
Iran’s gradual march towards acquisition of nuclear weapons. All of these portentous
developments are much more threatening to the regional balance of power, but
what occurred in the poor Saharan backwater of Mali last month is an omen of
just how quickly the tide is turning against America and the rest of the West
in their battle against Islamic fundamentalism.
Mali, Militancy and Mohammed
Alarm bells might not be going off loudly in Western
capitals over the loss of northern Mali, but it still serves as a bellwether of
where the entire region has been inexorably heading for the past three and a
half decades. Just a year ago, there seemed little chance that Islamic
fundamentalists could take power in Mali, a landlocked nation of 14 million
people spread out over 770,620 square miles of territory. That is roughly the same
size as California, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Idaho, Arizona and Nevada
combined. Only 3.77 percent of that land is arable, which is why Mauritania has
a low population and a low annual per capita income of just $1,300.[1]
For that reason, it is never going to be a big geopolitical prize in its own
right, but its sheer size has already been in a major factor in the current
crisis. Policing the porous borders of this lightly populated, sprawling
territory would be a Herculean task for any Third World government, which is
precisely why the remnants of Muslim fundamentalists groups that fought in
Algeria’s civil war have been able to use its northern deserts for transit
since the 1990s. Furthermore, Mali’s sheer size has always made it difficult
for the black majority living in the south of the country to assert influence
over the northern half, where Tuareg tribes more culturally related to the
Arabs and Berbers of North Africa predominate. The Tuaregs have long sought
autonomy from the central government in distant Bamako; although they are
geographically concentrated in the north, they make up just 10 percent of Mali’s
total population. This is the kind of typical sloppy shotgun marriage that
Western nations like Britain and France forced upon all of the peoples of
Africa when they grudgingly granted their colonies independence in the middle
of the last century; they gave no thought at all to drawing sensible borders
corresponding to the geographic distribution of Africa’s many distinct ethnic
groups. Many of the wars that have plagued Africa since independence have been
the direct result of this high-handed drawing of arbitrary borders by Western
powers a couple of generations ago.
This
spring, the Tuaregs teamed up with Islamic fundamentalist groups like Ansar
Dine, a close ally of the regional terrorist group known as Al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), to forcibly withdraw those borders. This was a direct
result of the so-called Arab Spring. Shortly before his well-deserved death,
Bin Laden worried that this sudden upheaval in North Africa would undermine
Al-Qaeda’s influence, but he didn’t live long enough to see the uprising in
Libya succeed with the support of Islamists only slightly less radical than
himself. As a result, Ansar Dine and similar groups were instantly able to get
their hands on weapons, supplies and bases that they previously never had; the
success of the Islamist revolutions in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt also
established fundamentalists in power throughout North Africa, albeit of a less
virulent bent. Furthermore, after Muammar Khadafy’s regime fell last year,
Tuareg leader Col. Mohammed ag Najim returned to Mali after serving in a
special regiment of the Libyan army designated for his ethnic kin.[2]
The big break for both factions came in March when officers of Mali’s military
overreacted to the increased challenge. Instead of fighting the rebels in a
more intelligent way, they took out their frustrations on the democratically
elected government in Bamako by overthrowing President Amadou Toumani Touré.
The more populous, black African section in southern Mali was once conspicuous
as an oasis of peace, ethnic tolerance and democracy in a troubled continent,
but it has now been thrown into chaos as well, to the point that in late May, a
mob of coup supporters beat up Dioncounda Traore, the interim president the
coup plotters had themselves installed in power. In the midst of this chaos, the
armed forces disintegrated, allowing the separatist Tuareg rebels and Ansar
Dine to sweep across northern Mali and take over Timbuktu and other key towns
like Gao. On May 26, the two factions proclaimed the independence of Azawad,
their term for the vast region under their control.
As I
have touched on briefly elsewhere, mankind’s advances in communication,
transportation, organization and the like have made possible a gradual
acceleration in the rate at which change takes place in international politics.
One important sign of this was the unprecedented speed of the collapse of the
Soviet bloc at the end of the Cold War, which had seemed completely secure just
a decade before; a more recent manifestation was the Arab Spring itself, which
changed the whole political landscape of North Africa in the twinkling of an
eye. This spring’s upheaval in Mali is yet another reminder of how fast
geopolitics now moves, because a few months ago, there seemed little chance
that a new nation state would ever gain independence in what is now called
Azawad. Almost overnight, Al-Qaeda sympathizers have gained control of a region
the size of France.
In
the long run, the same acceleration may come back to bite the Islamists and the
Tuareg separatists though, because their precarious new state could fall just
as quickly. First, the Arab Spring disrupted the efforts of North Africa
governments to control the breeding grounds of locusts, which are expected to
swarm over Mali later this year as a result, thereby potentially wrecking
Azawad’s economy. The possibility of a regional famine also looms. Second, Najim
and Ansar Dine leader Iyad ag Ghali don’t get along. Their goals are
compatible, in the sense that independence for the region can be reconciled
with Islamic law, but don’t overlap at all, which is precisely why they have
failed to agree on a unified structure of government despite several
proclamations to the contrary over the last few weeks. Furthermore, Ansar
Dine’s brand of sharia has already proven unpopular due to its bans on music
and soccer, a fault which also undermined popular support for Ansar’s allies in
distant Somalia a few years ago. The only glue holding them together is the
common threat of Mali’s armed forces, which has its work cut out for it if it
wants to reconquer the vast amount of territory it has lost. Two years ago the
tiny portion of the capital that Somalia’s Western-backed government controlled
was nearly overrun by Islamic rebels, until Western governments and their
allies apparently used disinformation tactics and spread around some cash to
sow dissension among the rebels, who have now been expelled from the capital as
a result. The same trick is likely to work in Mali.
If
it doesn’t, you’re likely to see France become deeply involved in a
counter-revolutionary program to oust the rebels, beginning with substantial
military aid to Mali’s armed forces and ending perhaps with direct French
intervention on the ground and from the air, if all else fails. France has
always considered this region to be its backyard and cannot afford to ignore
the crisis, even in the midst of the European Union’s austerity catastrophe; if
it doesn’t bankroll effective opposition to Ansar Dine and its allies, it is
going to pay a terrible long-term cost in terms of its own security. Algeria,
the most powerful of Mali’s neighbors, can also ill afford to ignore the
situation, given that its own moderate Islamists were popular enough to win
general elections in 1992; this was overturned by a military coup, sparking a
civil war whose embers have still not gone out. Ansar Dine’s philosophy is
unlikely to make as much headway in southern Mali or among the black African
populations in neighboring Niger, Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso,
due to significant cultural differences with the Arab, Berber and Tuareg
peoples of North Africa. Yet it is noteworthy that politics in the
once-peaceful Ivory Coast now revolves around a split between the Muslim and
Christian populations, as it does in many other nations in the regions where
the two religions previously coexisted peacefully, such as Nigeria. The
presence of ethnic Tuareg minorities throughout central North Africa, the sheer
size of Mali, the porous borders of the region and the sheer difficult of
reconquering all of this territory mean that there is significant potential for
Ansar Dine and AQIM to use Mali as a launching pad towards further subversion
of the region. Their base is Mali isn’t likely to last, but the longer it does,
the easier it will be for them to fan out across North Africa, spreading like
an infection into other power vacuums in the region. It is difficult to say
where they will strike next, since the porous borders of the region make it
possible for them to cross vast distances unimpeded. This problem is
illustrated best by the fact that the fall of northern Mali was made possible
by the Arab Spring in Libya, which doesn’t even share a border with Mali. In
essence, the fundamentalist revolution that Bin Laden hoped for acted like a
wildfire skipping over a firebreak. Crises are popping up in seemingly random
places across the Islamic world in much the same way that pustules will
continue to spread across a human body if an underlying infection of the
bloodstream is not cured. Victories like killing Bin Laden or covertly helping
Somalia’s government push Islamic rebels out of Mogadishu two years ago are
merely equivalent to popping the pustules, which are only going to multiply
unless we identify the underlying disease.
The Meaning of Islam
In the last decades since we began eradicating
Al-Qaeda, we have actually lost ground against Islamic fundamentalism in
general. In fact, the defining political trend of the last three and a half
decades among the world’s 1 billion Muslims has been a steady, unabated march
toward increasing militancy. The first signs of this trend appeared in the late
1970s, when rebels in Afghanistan began attacking the Soviet-backed government
for attempting to forcibly “modernize” their society in ways that were
incompatible with Islam. At about the same time, the popular movement to oust
the shah of Iran began demonstrating in the name of Islam and their local hero,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. No one actually believed that these movements
could attain power; when that assumption was disproved, the so-called experts
claimed that they were merely the results of local conditions and therefore
could not spread throughout the region. When various flavors of Islamic
fundamentalism began to spread to places like Sudan and Lebanon in the 1980s,
they still downplayed the problem. The entire history of the Islamic world in
this period can be summed up this way: in each nation where Muslims are a
majority or a significant minority, the linchpin of politics has slowly changed
from other issues like class or ethnic divisions to the role of religion. A few
decades ago, Arab nationalism and the Cold War split between communism and
capitalism were the major issues around which political disputes revolved, but
now it is Islam, in almost every Muslim nation. This is true in the Ivory
Coast; it is true in Turkey; it is true in Somalia, where the civil war was
once about clan divisions, but now revolves around the battle between
secularism and Islam. It is also true in Mali today, where ethnic divisions are
giving way to the issue of religion before our very eyes. We can also safely
state that secularists are swiftly retreating in disarray, in almost every
case. In countries where Islamists have not taken power, they have at least
become the leading opposition.
An
even more disturbing trend that our political scientists and pundits refuse to
admit is the development of an unspoken and quite dangerous rivalry between all
of the various Islamist groups of the Umma,
or community of Muslim believers, to prove that each is more Muslim than the
other. On its face, this seems to be a good thing, because it means that
certain fundamentalist groups are more tolerant and humane than others and
entails that the militants will squabble among each other. There is a vast
difference between the vision that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has
for his society and that of Somalia’s al-Shabaab movement or Mali’s Ansar Dine.
There is less difference between the visions of Bin Laden and the mullahs of
Iran, who differ more over who should lead the worldwide jihad they want to
bring about than what it should entail. This rivalry might prevent a dangerous
combination of forces against the West and the remaining secularists it
supports within the Umma, but it has also established an unofficial contest
between fundamentalists to prove their credentials through acts of even greater
barbarity. As a result, the trend towards fundamentalism across the region has
been accompanied by a similar trend towards even greater militancy among the
fundamentalists themselves. That is why the relatively moderate brand of Islam
espoused by the Afghans who fought against the Soviets was eclipsed by that of
the Taliban; this is why Hassan al-Turabi, the ideologue behind Sudan’s
relatively mild fundamentalism, has spent time in Sudanese prisons in recent
years; it is why the Algerian fundamentalists who were cheated out of their
1992 election victory have since been eclipsed by rebel groups like the Armed
Islamic Group (GIA), which is one of the most barbaric terrorist organizations on
the planet. Somalia’s current president also espouses a brand of Islamic
fundamentalism, but one that is simply not strict enough for Al-Shabaab. It is
also why Bin Laden rose to prominence over other less militant leaders of the
worldwide fundamentalist movement, like al-Turabi. If secularism continues to
fade away throughout the Islamic world, politics in the region is likely to
increasingly revolve around even more dangerous games of “Islamic leapfrog,”
with each seeking to prove to the other that “I am more Muslim than you are.”
What this will entail, in essence, is a reversion to the most barbaric commands
contained in the Koran, many of which would shock ordinary Americans, if they
ever bothered to actually read it.
Because
the ruling classes of North America and Europe are so overly concerned with
mistreatment of people who call themselves Muslim, they have essentially
forbidden any public criticism of the philosophy of Islam or of the behavior of
Mohammed. These issues are entirely different from the important goal of
protecting the civil rights of Muslims against persecution by rednecks, but
some of our leaders confuse them deliberately, in order to prevent legitimate
criticism of the philosophy itself. The fact that they have done this in the
name of free speech is ridiculously Orwellian, while the fact that they
simultaneously allow every possible slander against Christianity - especially
the most orthodox versions of it – is a sign of their real motivation. Whenever
I bring up what the Koran actually says, one of the first reactions that
critics resort to is to ask, “Well, what about the crimes of Christians, or the
evil commandments of the Bible?” This is a clue to the bigotry that is their
true underlying motivation, which is to use any possible stick to beat
Christianity with, including Islam. It is true that people falsely calling
themselves Christians have committed enormous crimes against humanity, but this
has been true ever since Judas betrayed Christ himself. The widespread idea
that Christianity was spread across the world by force is actually a bald-faced
lie, however, one that can easily be verified as false. The Saxons were the
only tribe in Europe converted by force, in retaliation for their continued
attacks on their Christian neighbors; even this was at the insistence of
Charlemagne, who was a secular king, not a religious authority. The
conquistadores and their descendants did not use force to convert the
indigenous peoples of Latin America, but instead used force to try to prevent
their own priests, missionaries, nuns and other religious authorities from
converting them, sometimes to the point of martyring them. In contrast, it is a
historical fact that Islam was established throughout the Middle East, North
Africa and Central Asia through force, beginning with Mohammed, who conquered
the southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula by force between 622 and 632 A.D.
The leaders of the feuding Persian and Byzantine Empires laughed when Mohammed
wrote to them, demanding that they recognize his authority, but they weren’t
laughing much longer. After his death, Mohammed’s armies swept across the
region, conquering Egypt and Syria and detaching all of the Byzantine Empire’s
up to the borders of modern-day Turkey; Persian Empire was conquered by 644
A.D. and its Zoroastrian religion was extinguished; They swept across Africa
into what is now Morocco, then northward into Spain by 711 A.D., until Charles
Martel stopped them inside the borders of modern France in 732 A.D. at the
Battle of Tours. They spread eastward as well into India and Central Asia,
until a Chinese army stopped them in 751 A.D. The caliphate established by
Mohammed fragmented and was reestablished under various dynasties over
succeeding centuries, in which Islam was spread by particularly bloody means in
the conquests of what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. At one time Afghanistan
was part Christian and part Hindu, until conquerors simply came in and
exterminated everyone who wouldn’t convert, such as Tamerlane and his famous
mountain of skulls. It is impossible to argue with the clear historical record,
which shows an unbroken sequence of battles initiated by Islamic potentates
against non-Muslim neighbors in every direction of the compass over the course
of many hundreds of years, without a single break in the hostilities. We know,
on a town-by-town basis, exactly how this long war enfolded over many
generations.
Regardless
of whether or not these actions represented the true nature of Islam or not,
they are historical facts that cannot be argued with. The question of what
Islam actually is can only be settled by Mohammed, who is the sole authority
capable of saying what the proper interpretation of it can be. It might also be
possible to assume what his interpretations might have been from the conduct of
the earliest generations of his followers. One of the worst symptoms of the
breakdown of the modern mind is the widespread inability of anyone, from our
Supreme Court justices to our Bible scholars and back again, to understand what
the term “interpretation” means. All it entails is discerning the meaning
assigned by whatever authority was competent to assign it, not adding your own,
no matter how clever it may be. Interpretation is not a matter of creativity,
but of discerning the historical fact that a meaning has been assigned by a
competent authority in the past. For example, for 150 years the Supreme Court
has routinely usurped authority to itself by ignoring the express intentions of
the framers of the Constitution, by substituting their own judgments, citing
the opinions of foreign courts, referring to current public opinion or engaging
in a hundred other invalid lines of reasoning. Likewise, many North American
and European clergy today lie about what Catholicism means, every time they
substitute any other interpretation of it than that assigned by the only
competent authorities, the popes and church councils. The same problem also
affects Islam, for which Mohammed and his earliest followers are the only
competent authorities; all of the modern mullahs and professors of religion combined
can only recognize its essence truthfully and objectively, not change it
subjectively at will. If a person calls themselves a Muslim, it means they
accept what the Koran says; if not, then they have essentially established
their own religion. The same holds true for all other religions, for you’re not
actually a Methodist if you don’t believe in Methodism, or a Hindu if you don’t
follow Hinduism, or a Buddhist if you don’t follow the Tripitaka. The religion
a person holds has far less to do with ceremonies and cultural traditions and
far more to do with belief that certain comprehensive philosophy is actually
true, particularly when it comes to ethics, which determines how a person
behaves on a practical level on a day to day basis. Most Westerners today
believe in a purely ceremonial view of religion, precisely because the ethics
of their real religion, money, demand that they ignore the truths that their
faiths teach; what our commercial civilization and its Gospel of Greed teaches
is that all religions are equally worthless in comparison to the Almighty
Dollar. Almost every issue in Western politics, whether it is abortion,
immigration, foreign affairs or anything in between, ultimately leads back to
the root of evil, money. Almost everyone who lives in this commercial
civilization has been converted to an unofficial religion that holds money as
sacrosanct, including many millions of people who call themselves Catholics,
Muslims, Hindus, evangelical Protestants, Mormons and others, but actually aren’t.
The one type of enemy we are unprepared to face is one that can’t be bought
off, as most of us have been; the one type of truth we are unprepared to face
is the one that can’t be subjectively reinterpreted to suit our tastes, such as
the true nature of authentic Islam. It has an external, objective reality that
we cannot change, one that was assigned by Mohammed centuries ago. The best
record we have of his interpretation of it is the Koran, together with the
Hadiths, as well as the actions of his earliest followers, which are a matter
of historical fact. Whenever radical Islamists try to discern what Mohammed
wanted them to do, they consult those historical facts and writings and
conclude that because the founders of their faith went on the warpath, they
ought to do the same. Whenever Western teachers of religion try to explain what
Islam is, they rarely bother to even read the Koran or the Hadiths, or talk
about Mohammed’s actions, but substitute a lot of academic gobbledygook about how
Islam arose from the socioeconomic conditions of medieval Arabia or some such
nonsense. It is important to keep in mind that these people are being paid to
say that and I am not being paid to say the opposite; these people know full
well that they would lose their tenure and social status if they actually spoke
honestly about the issue. In fact, their convoluted interpretation of Islam is
designed to prevent Muslims from respecting their own religion, so that they
can go on acting just as badly as ordinary Americans by actually following the
Gospel of Greed; they are somewhat more insulting than my honest criticisms,
because they imply that Islam is not only historically false but a worthless cultural
relic. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, millions of people are
beginning to act on what they believe to be Mohammed’s authentic commands, in
the present. It behooves us to find out exactly what those commands are, if we
want to deal with them effectively.
Perhaps
they are wrong when they imitate Mohammed and the caliphs who succeed him by
going on the warpath, but their interpretation is backed up by more than three
dozen passages in the Koran which command Muslims to go to war for their faith.
For example, in Repentance 9:1-5, he says that “When
the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest
them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them.” In the middle of
Prohibition 66:7-9, a short chapter on a dispute between Mohammed and one of
his wives, he suddenly blurts out, “Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and
the hypocrites, and deal sternly with them. Hell shall be their home, evil is
their fate.” Other examples include Repentance 9:121-123 and Repentance 9:73.
Many of these passages lay down concrete rules for how to divide up war booty.
This includes women, who may be raped if taken as captives in war. Passages
like Women 4:24 and Light 24:33-34 state
that men can even marry women who are currently married, as long as they are
slaves, and may sell slave girls into prostitution. These are just a few of a long string of passages that denigrate the
fairer sex, including Women 4:34, in
which Mohammed orders men to beat their wives if they won’t shut up: “Men have
authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and
because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They
guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those for whom
you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.
Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. God is high,
supreme.” It is well known that Mohammed allowed men to take four wives, which
is hardly fair to women, but not well known that he also allowed them to take
an unlimited number of slaves as concubines, i.e. sex slaves. He himself was
allowed to have up to nine, and that he used the God-given privilege to take
his nine-year-old niece as one of his brides. Likewise, many passages in the
Koran revolve around the angel Gabriel telling Mohammed’s wives and his harem
to stop gossiping or talking back to him. Likewise, there is stark contrast
between certain passages towards the beginning of the Koran in which Mohammed
speaks positively of the “People of the Book,” i.e. the Jews and Christians,
albeit while still maintaining that idolaters and pagan religions like
Zoroastrians be converted by force. Towards the end, he begins to rant in
passages like The Proof 98:1-7
that “The unbelievers among the People of the Book and the pagans shall burn
for ever in the fire of Hell. They are the vilest of all creatures.” Another
example is Women 4:46-4:56, in which Mohammed demands that the Jews and
Christians accept his new holy book “confirming your own scriptures, before We
obliterate your faces and turn them backward, or lay Our curse on you as We laid
it on the Sabbath-breakers…“Those that deny Our revelations We will burn in
fire. No sooner will their skins be consumed than We shall give them other
skins, so that they may truly taste the scourge. God is mighty and wise.” In Table
5:51 he forbids Muslims to befriend Christians and Jews and in The Table
5:31-5:34 he recommends a harsh punishment that no Christian would ever dare to
propose, for “Those that make war against God and His apostle and spread
disorder in the land shall be put to death or crucified or have their hands and
feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the country.” The Koran
openly admits that Mohammed openly participated in a massacre of Jews, which
doesn’t do much for his credentials as a far as religious tolerance goes. In
many places throughout the book, he flatly states that people can be converted
by force, or through economic pressure such as placing extra taxes on Christians
and Jews. This is precisely what his followers did for many centuries.
Perhaps
these passages should not be interpreted in this way, but if so, it is strange
that every other page of the Koran is full of such shocking statements, which
on face value seem to confirm that Mohammed was simply a violent lunatic and a pervert
to boot. I encourage everyone to read the book for themselves, because every
other page contains some startling example of a passage that could be construed
to condone brutality. Regardless of whether it is correct, this is the
interpretation that many millions of fundamentalists on the other side of the
planet accept more wholeheartedly with each passing decade. My interpretation
of the plain meaning, in light of the historical record of Mohammed’s actions,
is almost identical to theirs, with the important exception that we come to
completely different conclusions about which angel helped Mohammed author it.
So-called scholars of Islam in the West, as well as Westerners who purport to
be Muslim, have every right to defend it if they choose, but typically resort
to trying to silence critics or by appealing to their status as scholars,
rather than trying to openly meet us in debate. Whether you’re a Muslim or not, no one has no right to speak on the
matter if they’re not going to actually read the book, nor do you have any
right to invent your own interpretation of it, for the only competent authority
to decide what it actually means is Mohammed, and the only guide we have to his
interpretations are his actions. The situation we find ourselves in today is
remarkably similar to the attitude common among European leaders before World
War II, when Hitler was regarded as a chap who wasn’t so bad after all. He even
made the trains in Germany run on time. Meanwhile, no one bothered to read Mein
Kampf to see what his philosophy actually signified. There were few exceptions,
mainly the British journalist G.K. Chesterton, who is now recognized as the leading
literary defender of Catholicism in the 20th Century, and popes like
Pius XI and XII, who issued warnings about Nazism that were never heeded. I may
be accused of issuing a biased, false interpretation of the Koran, but when I
actually sat down to read it for the first time, I did so with an open mind, at
a time when I knew nothing about Catholicism and far too much about atheism,
which I was eager to get away from. I gave it a fair shot, and it scared me
much more than Mein Kampf.
The Clash of Civilizations and the
Retreat of the West
Perhaps
my interpretation of it was wrong, but if so, the frightening thing is that my
misinterpretation is now quite popular throughout the 1 billion people that
make up the Umma. Every political trend within for the last several decades has
gone in one direction: against secularism. This is not really surprising, because
much of the Koran is devoted to mandating specific laws and regulations that
governments must impose, unlike other holy books like the Bible and Upanishads
which do the same to a far lesser degree.
Secularism is an alien idea that was implanted by Western colonialists
over the course of a few centuries in which Europe and the areas it settled
happened to wield far more military, economic and other power than they do now.
As I detail in The Retreat of the West,
a massive tome that I once intended to be my dissertation, the power wielded by
that group of nations peaked about a century ago and has been in decline ever
since, thanks to numerous interconnected trends. This long-term change in the
global balance of power between civilizations is often missed because it is the
kind of thing that takes centuries, even millennia, whereas our current leaders
can’t even think a few years back. It is overlooked, but has been directly
responsible for many of the key geopolitical events of the last century, from the
Vietnam War to the Arab Spring and back again. North America and Europe, i.e.
the West, is simply losing its grip on the rest of the world, which is
reverting back to a geopolitical balance of power similar to that which
prevailed more than five hundred years ago, when China was the world’s leading
power and Islam had the upper hand over its Christian rivals in Europe. It now
takes more arms and more money to keep the rest of the planet in check than it
once did, and it will cost even more in the future, as advances in technology,
communication and transportation speed the flow of ideas even faster around the
planet. The Pentagon has staked its entire strategy on expensive technology
like Predator drones which have their benefits, but which are doomed to fail in
the long run, because the gap between the West’s technology and that of the
Third World has been shrinking for at least a century and is only going to
dissipate faster in the future. Our commercial civilization has grown too
accustomed to simply throwing more money at problems to make them go away,
which has fueled our excessive reliance on mere technology to ensure our
security. What happens, however, when our opponents get their hands on
comparable weapons, or our money runs out? Both problems are evident today in
Afghanistan, which we are ultimately going to abandon to the Taliban because we
have run out of money to fight them, in part because Corporate America has
simply looted the war effort, by drastically overcharging taxpayers for it. The
Taliban hasn’t changed at all; they’re still bent on global genocide and will
only be emboldened when we leave. It is not as if we are fighting a somewhat
honorable enemy with limited aims, like the Vietcong; when we abandoned Saigon,
America knew it wouldn’t actually threaten our physical and economic security.
The same is not true of the Taliban, or the rebels of Mali, or of Somalia, all
of whom have a common mindset, of a kind that can’t be compromised with and
simply cannot be stopped without great self-sacrifice. Perhaps that mindset is
an incorrect interpretation of what Mohammed intended, but there can be no
doubt that these groups share roughly the same idea, which is to convert us by
the sword. This is only the beginning. If the trend towards playing “Islamic leapfrog”
continues, we can expect to see such groups resort to even more barbaric
commandments that the Koran at least appears to legitimize, such as slavery,
rape, forcible conversions and the like. Again, if you don’t think that’s the
correct interpretation, you are entitled to your opinion, as long as you’ve
actually read the Koran and have strong arguments that Mohammed himself would
have interpreted it your way. Whether they are wrong or right, the problem is
that a growing proportion of the world’s Muslims are beginning to act on a
consistent and entirely opposite interpretation.
Unfortunately,
the one thing that our commercial civilization nullifies is the idea of
self-sacrifice. Any society that makes material consumption its primary goal
and bases social status upon it is doomed to failure, because heroism is what
keeps societies alive in the long run. Renunciation of wealth and status for a
greater cause are precisely what defines a person as a hero. Right now, we’re
up against an enemy that believes in renunciation of both in favor of a
thoroughly evil cause, which is entirely alien to our materialistic mindset. It
is like a game of rock, paper, scissors; no matter how rich our commercial
civilization is, we’re doomed to lose in the long run because this type of
enemy is precisely the kind we’re not equipped to face. We can’t buy off the
militants who think like Ansar Dine, because they view money merely as a means
to further conquest; we can’t placate them, because they are obeying an
expansionist imperative; we can’t threaten them, because they want to die and
go to their materialistic version of Heaven; we can only pretend that they don’t
exist, or that they’re a much less serious problem that they really are. The
latter solution is typical of the mindset of our leaders, who believe, as most
salesmen do, that putting a happy face on a debacle can make it more palatable.
Regardless
of whether we choose to believe it, we are now in the midst of the Clash of
Civilizations, a term invented by Samuel P. Huntington two decades ago to
describe where he believed, the post-Cold War world was heading. He didn’t take
into account two other important long-terms trends of the past couple of
millennia, such as the Retreat of the West and the Falling Away of much of the
West from orthodox Christianity over the last five centuries, as part of our
slow conversion to the religion of money. As a result, the actual list of
competitors in this clash comes down to just a handful of remaining forces
active on the world stage today. One is the rise of China, which accounts for
more than a sixth of the world’s population and is now resuming its ancient
position as the preeminent power in the world. Another is Islam, which accounts
for another sixth of the world’s population. Both are opposed by the West’s “post-Christian”
commercial civilization. Thanks to the apostasy of most of North America and
Europe over the last few centuries, Catholicism and the most traditional
branches of Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy appear to be doomed, but as I
discuss in The Falling Away,
Catholicism is actually expanding at an unprecedented speed – which has only
gone unrecognized because it is rapidly converting the invisible millions at
the margins of the planet, like the poorest of the poor in Africa and
Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism are
negligible players in this drama, since they have both been steadily
marginalized for centuries. Evangelical Protestantism, particularly its Pentecostal
movements, also accounts for a billion people, but they overlap the commercial
civilization of the West, which they support with their doctrines. It is also
important to keep in mind that another billion people have been snuffed out in
the womb by abortions in just the last four decades, a number equivalent to
another sixth of the planet’s population.
Out
of all these remaining players, the West and its commercial civilization
currently seem to hold all the cards. As the Retreat of the West demonstrates,
however, those cards are slowly being snatched away by our few remaining
rivals. Furthermore, we’re guaranteed to lose the rest of them unless we
rebuild our entire civilization on a different foundation, one that is
currently alien to us. At present, the fundamentalists multiplying throughout
the Umma in the Eastern Hemisphere really don’t represent a threat to the
territorial security of Westerners, particularly those living it our
Hemisphere; they’re just a handful of fanatics scurrying around the wastelands
of the world. Yet we have no way to confront their interpretation of Mohammed
on the battlefields that really determine where wars are won and lost, the
human heart and mind. We have a vast lead in military technology and money, but
this dynamic dictates that we will continue to lose the war even while winning
all of the battles, as we have for the past three decades against Islamic
fundamentalism. The Clash of Civilizations is only getting started and is bound
to last many more decades; it may even determine the political crises that our
grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have to react to generations from
now. Unless we change course, at that point we may find ourselves incapable of
preventing Bin Laden’s true dream, which was not merely to knock down a few
buildings, but to put together a vast coalition capable of knocking them all down. Little by little, we are
losing the ability to manipulate Third World politics in a way that would
prevent such a nightmarish outcome, thanks to the dissipation of our military
and economic power. Our power can go on evaporating in dribs and drabs for a
long time to come before Bin Laden’s descendants can actually become a real
military threat to Europe, but that is what they are aiming for; they
consciously want to reestablish a single caliphate, to go out and convert the
world through the same means that Mohammed did. At the time he lived, a
decadent generation of Christians lived in the Byzantine Empire, which laughed
off the threat he posed, until it was too late and they lost their riches and territory
in one unexpected fell swoop. The rest of Europe was only saved by the
emergence of Charles Martel, a man who was motivated by a Catholic ideology
completely alien to our modern materialistic mind. The Crusades that began a
few centuries hence were sometimes corrupted, but were originally initiated by
the papacy to prevent a new Muslim threat from overrunning Europe and forcibly
indoctrinating in our children in a religion their parents didn’t like. What
most Westerners don’t understand is that this millennium-long war was largely a
defensive one, against invaders who presumed the right to do things like snatch
our children, convert them and make them serve as shock troops, as the Ottoman
Turks did with their feared Janissary forces. The Ottoman Turks remained an
omnipresent threat to the inferior military forces of Europe until the Battle
of Lepanto in 1571, which marked the beginning of their decline. As late as
1683, the Polish leader John Sobieski had to rescue all of Europe by stopping
the Turkish forces that were then at the gates of Vienna. He was one of the
great unsung heroes of European history and a devout Catholic, like Martel, the
Crusaders and the men who fought and died at Lepanto. They died so that you
could have freedom of religion. These heroes are not esteemed today, nor is the
religion they belonged to. Judging from our abject failure to stop the
fundamentalists like Ansar Dine from multiplying across North Africa, the
Middle East and Central Asia, our descendants may one day need a John Sobieski,
as well as the faith he wholeheartedly believed in.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
[1]
These current figures were taken from the CIA Factbook webpage on Mali,
which is available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ml.html
.
[2]
Cody, Edward, 2012, “In Mali, an Islamic Extremist Haven Takes Shape,” in the
June 7, 2012 online edition of The Washington Post. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/in-mali-an-islamic-extremist-haven-takes-shape/2012/06/06/gJQAIKNlKV_story.html
.
