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America he saw was a perfectly pagan place

Jul 4, 2004 7:09 am By Robert Spencer

A few months back Dinesh D’Souza wrote an insightful column about how freedom was essential to genuine virtue, and thus the Islamic critique of American lack of morals had no force: it’s easy to be virtuous in a society where your alternative is amputation or stoning. Now he has written another about how this point should become a centerpiece of the still-neglected ideological battle against radical Islam. From SFGate:

So far, the U.S. government’s military response in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere has been reasonably effective against terrorism and its sponsors. But our intellectual response has been weak.

This matters because ultimately it is not enough to shut down the al Qaeda training camps. We must also stop the “jihad factories,” the mosques and educational institutions that are turning out tens of thousands of aspiring terrorists and suicide bombers. We cannot kill all these people. We have to change their minds.

Yet America is making few converts in the Muslim world.

The problem is that we have not effectively answered the strongest version of the Islamic critique of the United States. Usually Americans seek to defend their society by appealing to its shared principles. Thus our leaders remind us that America is a free society, or a prosperous society, or a diverse and pluralistic culture, or a nation that gives women the same rights as men. The most intelligent Islamic critics acknowledge all this, but they dismiss it as worthless triviality.

One of the leading theoreticians of Islamic fundamentalism was the Egyptian thinker, Sayyid Qutb, who has been called “the brains behind bin Laden.” Like the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center, Qutb was a man who lived in the West and knew its ways. After studying in America, he wrote a book called “The America That I Saw” in which he argued that his familiarity with the United States was his basis for rejecting it.

Qutb, who died in 1966, wrote that he was shocked by the rampant prejudice of Americans, especially toward Arabs and Muslims. He professed outrage at the materialism and sexual promiscuity of American culture. …

A second problem, Qutb wrote, is that the core principle of America is liberty — the right to determine one’s own destiny. This, he argued, is a highly defective principle because liberty can be used well or liberty can be used badly. …

Let us concede at the outset that freedom will often be used badly in a free society. Freedom by definition includes freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. Given the warped timber of humanity, freedom becomes the forum for the expression of human flaws and weaknesses. On this point, Qutb and his fundamentalist followers are quite correct.

But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best. The millions of Americans who live decent, praiseworthy lives deserve our highest admiration because they have opted for the good when the good is not the only available option. Even amid the temptations that a rich and free society offers, they have remained on the straight path. Their virtue has special luster because it is freely chosen.

By contrast, the theocratic and authoritarian society that Islamic fundamentalists advocate undermines the possibility of virtue. If the supply of virtue is insufficient in free societies, it is almost nonexistent in Islamic societies because coerced virtues are not virtues at all.

Consider the woman in Afghanistan or Iran who is required to wear the veil. There is no real modesty in this because the woman is being compelled. Compulsion cannot produce virtue. It can only produce the outward semblance of virtue.

Once the reins of coercion are released, as they were for the Sept. 11 terrorists, the worst impulses of human nature break loose. Sure enough, the deeply religious terrorists spent their last days in gambling dens, bars and strip clubs, sampling the licentious lifestyle they were about to strike out against. In theocratic societies such as Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iran today, the absence of freedom signals the absence of virtue.

This is the argument that Americans should make to people in the Islamic world. It is a mistake to presume that Muslims would be totally unreceptive to it. Islam, which has common roots with Judaism and Christianity, respects the autonomy of the individual soul. Salvation for Muslims, no less than for Jews and Christians, is based on the soul choosing freely to follow God.

We can make the case to Muslims that freedom is not a secular invention. Rather, freedom is a gift from God.

Moreover, it is not the case that Islamic fundamentalists care about virtue while we in the West care only about freedom. We, too, care about virtue. Like them, we seek the good society; but we disagree with the Islamic fundamentalists about the best means to achieve this goal.

In the Western view, freedom is the necessary precondition for virtue. Without freedom, there is no virtue.

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