The Ideology of Terror or the Peace of Islam?

Is Islamic terrorism better understood as a return to Islam at its core or as an ideological version of Islam, a culture politicized? I would contend that ideology is a rationalistic distortion of reality and the product of literacy and Western thought.

Yale University Press has published a new book by Ali Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. Judging from the reviews, Awawi the political route followed by the Islamofacists is untrue to Islam and Islam must reach into its own resources to deal wit the challenge of modernity.

The Economist writes: "Mr Allawi calls his new book an 'attempt to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam'. He locates this decay not in the personal piety of the world’s Muslims—which remains vibrant—but in the collective failure of Muslims, over the past 200 years, to come up with an adequate and effective response to Western modernity. The problem is not that Islam is incapable of finding its own path to modernity. Mr Allawi wholly rejects the popular notion that Islam is inherently incompatible with tolerance, democracy, women’s rights—in short, all that the West holds dear.

"The difficulty, he says, is that the predominant Muslim response to the Western challenge has been narrowly political instead of being rooted in the inherited ethos of Islamic civilisation. Seen in this light, the Islamist movements which have received so much attention since the Islamic revival in the 1970s are shallow and passionate. For all their pretence of offering an 'Islamic alternative', they represent, or so he argues, nothing more than Western modernity in Islamic garb."

Mr. Allawi is an experience politician in the post-Sadam government and worldwide bestselling author.

The War Within Islam

Benedict is meeting with Mohammad Khatami, president of Iran from 1997 to 2005. Three Presbyterians are murdered in Turkey for the crime of printing Christian bibles. The slaughter of fellow Muslims in Iraq continues. The American people believes our effort to establish a tolerant and democratic state in Iraq is failing despite the contrary evidence from those on the spot. Recently the Taliban kidnapped Italian reporter Daniele Mastrogiacomo and his young Afghan interpreter, Adjmal Nashqbandi, and their Afghani driver. The Italian was eventually released. The two Muslims were assinated.

The odd thing is that Jihadists kill primarily Muslims.

Is all this confusing?

Let me recommend an article by Sandro Magister, my favorite vaticanologist, who argues the real war is between those whose Islam is mystical and those whose Islam is political. He reproduces and Matthew Sherry translates an insightful analysis by Khaled Fouad Allam. Allam is an Algerian Muslim academic. He was the first to respond in the spirit of reason from the Muslim world to Benedict's Regensberg challenge.

He argues that the Jihadists (not his word) have adopted a form of totalitarianism. He contrasts that with the opposing form of Islam whose "followers profess a Sufi, and therefore mystical, form of Islam, sometimes referred to as esoteric or parallel, a peaceful and tolerant Islam, in complete antithesis to the Islam professed and imposed by the Taliban. The Taliban has produced a subversive form of Wahhabism, which in my view does not fall within the definition of 'Islamic fascism,' but rather embodies a third generation form of totalitarianism. "

Allam used the abduction of the three to exemplify that "[t]he neural center of the war within Islam is located precisely upon that boundary line between an open and liberal form of Islam and a totalitarian Islam. "

I suspect that ideology is a necessary condition for totalitarianism.

Allam focuses on Afghanistan. He tells us that "[n]ot far from Herat is the tomb of Abdullah Ansari, one of the greatest Afghan mystics, who wrote in the eleventh century: 'O my God! What have you done here for your friends? Whoever seeks You finds You, but until he sees You, he does not recognize them.' "

At our Readers of First Things discussion yesterday we discussed John Paul the Great's dictum that "Men and women of [learning] will truly aid humanity only if they preserve the sense of the transcendence of the human person over the world and of God over the human person." (Fr. Neuhaus quoted Ex Corde Ecclesiae in his talk to Valparaiso.) We speculated which denominations, which religions, and which non-religions are anchored in that "transcendence of the human person."

As the story of St. Martin so beautifully illustrates, the Hebrew scriptures teach us that each human person is made in the image and likeness of God and the Christian scriptures teach us that what we do to the least of our brethren we do to Him.

Does Islam have that same understanding?

Thirty Eight Mulims respond to Benedict/Benedikt XVI

Pope Benedikt challenged both Muslims and secularists in address to the faculties at Regensburg on "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections." The initial reaction from the Islamic world seemed negative and violent. A more reflective response came from a group of thirty eight moslem thought leaders from a variety of countries and including some very prominent names. As Sandro Magister puts it: "A Sprig of Dialogue Has Sprouted in Regensburg." Should a hymn of that tittle be set to Palistrina?