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Does it matter whether or not radicals dominate Islam?

Apr 19, 2008 12:08 pm By Robert Spencer

In “Do Radicals Dominate Islam?” at Commentary’s Contentions blog (thanks to all who sent this in), Max Boot says it doesn’t, and discusses a debate held in New York recently. The debate thesis was “Islam is dominated by radicals.”

Boot begins by saying he came into the debate on the fence:

I am seldom accused of being wishy-washy or noncommittal when it comes to major issues of foreign policy. But I was decidedly undecided when I showed up last night for the Intelligence Squared debate in Manhattan on the resolution “Islam is dominated by radicals.”

The pro side was argued by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a former Islamic fundamentalist turned Christian evangelical who is now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Paul Marshall, formerly of Freedom House, now at the Hudson Institute; and Asra Normani [sic], a former Wall Street Journal reporter (and good friend of the late Daniel Pearl) who has chronicled her own battles against Muslim hardliners at her hometown mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia.

It’s Asra Nomani, not Normani. Anyway, I was originally invited to be one of the participants in this debate, but the invitation was rescinded when one of the panelists arguing that Islam is not dominated by radicals objected to my presence. They were:

On the con side were Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside; Richard Bulliet, a professor of history at Columbia; and Edina Lekovic, a Muslim of Bosnian descent who is director of communications at the Muslim Public Affairs Council (and who was wearing a head scarf).

I wasn’t able to find out who got me dropped from this debate — it could have been any or all of them, since I’ve written about the distortions of all three: Aslan here, Bulliet here, and Lekovic briefly several times, notably here and here. It doesn’t matter, but it’s interesting that the Intelligence Squared debate organizers had no problem featuring the notorious Lekovic, who, as Steve Emerson has documented, lied on national television about her editorial role in an Islamic publication that praised Osama bin Laden as a great mujahid in 1999. And here this mendacious woman is arguing that Islam is not dominated by radicals! Bravo for life’s little ironies.

But Boot, apparently as unfamiliar with Lekovic’s odious track record as were the debate organizers, doesn’t pick up on this irony, and indeed, thinks that Lekovic’s side won the debate.

Both sides threw out a lot of good arguments. Gartenstein-Ross and Aslan, in particular, engaged in some heated exchanges that entertained the audience. The problem is that neither side could really define the crucial terms in the debate”””dominated” and “radicals.”

I didn’t see this debate, but it would indeed be crucial to define those terms. The lack of agreement on the meaning of those terms and others has severely hampered our ability to mount a comprehensively effective anti-jihad resistance.

Both agreed that radicals were certainly a big problem within Islam. The pro side pointed repeatedly to the Saudi and Iranian regimes as emblematic of the problem, and said that the Saudis are spreading their hateful Wahhabi doctrines. All true. But does Wahhabism dominate global Islam? The con side could point to convincing Pew opinion surveys showing that most Muslims reject Al Qaeda and its ideology of violence. They could also point to surveys (and election results in countries like Pakistan) that show most Muslims don’t want to be governed by hard-line Islamic parties.

Of course, I was not there, but this sounds as if, not surprisingly, neither side pointed out that Wahhabism is by no means the only source of Islamic “radicalism,” but that violent jihad and the subjugation of non-Muslims are universally taught by all the orthodox sects of Islamic jurisprudence. Nor is Al-Qaeda the sole manifestation of this “radicalism.” And as for those polls, actually Islamic hardliners have made significant electoral gains wherever remotely free elections have been held — and the “moderates” elected in Iraq and Afghanistan made sure that Sharia was enshrined as the highest law of the land in the Iraqi and Afghan constitutions.

The pro side replied that the views of the majority were irrelevant: the radicals were able to dominate the institutions of Islam and intimidate the moderate majority into acquiescence. There seemed to be some truth to this. But the pro debaters were, I thought, confused: were they complaining about the dominance of theological conservatism or of violent radicalism?

Here Boot is apparently unaware, since he probably adheres to the Islam-Is-A-Religion-Of-Peace-Hijacked-By-A-Tiny-Minority-Of-Extremists Dogma, of how deeply theologically conservative the contemporary jihadist movement is. It is a revivalist movement, reasserting theological principles of jihad warfare enunciated in the Qur’an and the life of Muhammad, and codified very early on by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

Normani [sic], in particular, complained that a “patriarchy” dominated Islam: she cannot become an imam preaching to men; in more and more mosques women and men have to sit separately. That may be true, but that’s very different””and much less alarming from my infidel perspective””than saying that more and more Muslims are lining up to practice terrorism in the name of jihad. In fact, most conservative Muslims (e.g., Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq) oppose radical calls for a religious war even while preaching a version of sharia that would be intolerable to Western liberals.

In this, of course, Boot once again demonstrates his apparent unawareness of the traditionalist character of Islamic jihadism, such that the institutionalized subjugation of women about which Nomani complained stems from the same wellsprings as the calls to wage jihad against infidels and subjugate them. And as for Sistani, it has never been demonstrated that his objection to Al-Sadr’s jihad is principled rather than tactical, and his affirmation at his website of the unclean status of unbelievers (per Qur’an 9:28), on a level with pigs, blood, and feces, would be objectionable not just to Western liberals, but to anyone concerned with basic human rights and human decency.

In the end, I concluded that the pro side had not proven their case. They had certainly demonstrated that radicalism is a large and growing problem. But dominant? Not on the evidence presented last night. So I voted with the con side, notwithstanding my occasional annoyance at their leftist rhetorical tics. But I was in the decided minority. 46% of the audience voted “pro” before the debate, a figure that swelled to 73% after the debate.

While the debate was fascinating, the issue is not one that we should lose too much sleep over. Whether radicals actually dominate Islam or are simply trying to dominate it doesn’t really matter from a practical perspective. Either way, we need to do what we can do aid the forces of moderation if we are to prevail in the Long War.

And here’s Boot’s key statement: “Whether radicals actually dominate Islam or are simply trying to dominate it doesn’t really matter from a practical perspective.” Instead, “we need to do what we can do aid the forces of moderation.”

Really?

That sounds great, but consider that Boot would evidently consider Sistani among the forces of moderation, despite his Shi’ite orthodoxy that would subjugate the infidel, if in power, no less than Sunni orthodoxy would.

And it is, again, ironic to see him dismiss the importance of this issue as he watched Edina Lekovic herself arguing that the forces of radicalism do not dominate Islam. Did it ever occur to Max Boot that some people who support Islamic supremacism (not that Edina Lekovic is among them, of course!) might find it quite useful to deny that the forces of Islamic radicalism are a significant force, so that infidels will not get the idea that they need to spend too much of their time or energy investigating or trying to impede the activities of those radicals?

This in itself highlights the practical necessity of assessing realistically the provenance and popularity of Islamic supremacist notions among Muslims, so as to determine how best to resist it. In other words, it matters a great deal whether or not “radicals” dominate Islam. It also matters that the distinction on the ground between “moderates” and “radicals” — that is, the Muslims who are not waging jihad against non-Muslims in any form, and those who are or will be — is virtually impossible to determine. Whom we count as allies, what resources we devote to fighting that radicalism and in what ways — all this and more hinges on the correct understanding of these questions.

But of course, most analysts aren’t even asking this question, much less answering it correctly.

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