Death rattle?

Sept. 11 may have been the last gasp of militant Islam -- but while it's dying, it could strike again and again.

By Laura Miller

May 13, 2002 | Is the kind of militant Islamism that inspired the attacks of Sept. 11 a grotesque aberration of an otherwise peaceable faith or the logical extension of the religion's warlike undercurrents? Do Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists speak for any significant percentage of Muslims? What do they want? How big a threat are they to the West?

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, these questions and others sent flocks of Americans to college classes and public lectures, promoted cable channel documentaries to the status of appointment viewing, and landed once-obscure university press books on national bestseller lists. Yet what answers we got were often vague, unsatisfying and driven by agendas that ranged from the obvious to the covert. Some authorities seemed more intent on quelling an anticipated tidal wave of virulent anti-Muslim sentiment than on explaining how the religion came to be used to justify such horrible acts; others seized on the attacks as a confirmation of their dire scenarios about a "clash of civilizations" (after Samuel P. Huntington) and the irredeemably savage nature of Islamic culture. Paranoid dispatches from the shadowy realms of the spook-watchers got equal play with the abstract pronouncements of eminences grises.It just didn't add up.

Although some of the hunger for information has subsided, the books keep on coming, with Bernard Lewis' "What Went Wrong" currently leading the pack at No. 15 on the New York Times bestseller list. Lewis is a professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, an esteemed but polarizing historian (he is more supportive of Israel and less sympathetic to the Palestinians than many of his colleagues) who is said to have been frequently consulted by the White House and Pentagon since Sept. 11. "What Went Wrong" was written before the attacks and doesn't specifically address them, but its survey of 300 years of the decline of Muslim civilization (relative to the West) is meant to offer some broad cultural and historical explanations for the angry faces and Osama bin Laden T-shirts we see in footage from Middle Eastern and Asian streets.

Lewis' book, the major portion of which consists of three lectures given in 1999, describes Islam's ascendance over the West in the early medieval era and its subsequent long decline. He ties Islam's failure to embrace the concept of secularism to its eclipse by the West. Still, there isn't much in "What Went Wrong" that shows how the humiliation of dar-al-Islam (the house or world of Islam, which is how the faithful envision the part of the world occupied and governed by Muslims) led 19 Arab men to make a suicidal assault on two mammoth symbols of American power. And it doesn't provide a sense of how prevalent or deeply felt this kind of Islamic militancy now is in the Middle East and other Muslim regions.

Early jitters about the instability of Gen. Musharraf's hold on power and the threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan and its store of nuclear arms seem to have subsided, notwithstanding this week's terrorist blast in Karachi that killed 14 people, including 11 French citizens. How serious was the danger to begin with -- in Pakistan, in the Philippines (where the U.S. has sent troops and counter-terrorist advisors), and in places like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Algeria, where so many of the al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan originally came from?

Gilles Kepel's "Jihad" answers more of those questions than Lewis' book does; it makes an ideal companion to morning newspapers filled with frustratingly context-free briefs from the war on terrorism. Kepel is French, a professor of political studies who has traveled extensively in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, observing first-hand the evolution of Islamism as a political force and interviewing many of the participants in its various struggles. His "Jihad" is a far cry from the lofty assessments of cultural differences delivered by Lewis and Huntington. This is a decidedly grounded book; it's political in the most elemental sense of the word. Although Kepel clearly believes in the Western ideal of civil society, he puts himself in the place of ordinary Muslims in the nations he writes about, rather than viewing their problems from a Western perspective.

Kepel (who does address the Sept. 11 attacks in "Jihad") makes the provocative argument that militant Islam is in serious decline, a decline that's been going on for 10 years, despite a record that "might at first glance give the appearance that the power of political Islam was growing in all areas." This may seem like good news to everyone who'd prefer not to see big segments of the population in Muslim nations enlisting in repressive Islamist movements. But if you read between the lines in Kepel's book, the bad news is that the failure of political Islam doesn't mean that anti-American terrorism is dwindling as well. In fact, it's quite likely to get worse.

Kepel's approach to his subject -- a remarkably detailed but never tedious 25-year history of the political fortunes of Islamism in such nations as Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Iran, Israel, Turkey and others -- allows Western readers to see that the terrorism used against us is more a byproduct of power struggles within those nations than it is a reaction against "our way of life." The West, and specifically the U.S., often resembles a cop trying to break up a bitter private fight who winds up being attacked by whichever combatant seems to be getting the worst of the contest. (We don't always take the right side, either.) Of course, Muslim antipathy toward Israel -- and, by extension, the U.S. -- has become a constant, but the real roots of Islamist extremism lie in fury directed at other Muslims.

What "Jihad" illustrates (and what often gets lost or glossed over in other books on the subject) is how foolish it is to generalize about Islam. Beyond the familiar schism between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the faith is spectacularly diverse, from the mystical brotherhoods of the Sufis, to the puritanical Wahabbites, to (what remains of) the relatively secularized cosmopolitan elites of more developed countries like Egypt. It makes as much sense to draw conclusions about all Muslims on the basis of the beliefs of the Taliban or bin Laden as it does to expect a Quaker to light candles to Santa Barbara or a Unitarian minister to plant bombs in abortion clinics simply because other people who call themselves Christians do so.

Militant political Islam was born in the early part of the 20th century; its intellectual fathers are Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian, and Mawlana Mawdudi, a Pakistani (which makes it an Asian movement as well as an Arab one). Although some Western writers have gotten it into their heads that Qutb's radicalism was inspired primarily by two years he spent in the U.S. and his disgust at the bare female arms and Elvis Presley recordings he encountered here, in fact, his quarrel was always with Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalist regime.

Qutb, and the Muslim Brotherhood -- an organization of which he was a founding member and which exists in varying forms of varying degrees of politicization in many Muslim nations -- wanted to establish a strictly Islamic government based on the original community of the faithful founded by the Prophet and ruled by Islamic law, or sharia. Qutb advocated a clean, revolutionary break with the "impious" establishment (and wound up imprisoned and hung for it), while Mawdudi preferred a more moderate approach and founded the Jamaat-e-Islami political party, still a force in Pakistan today.

The third and most successful Islamic ideologue, as Kepel sees it, was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the Iranian revolution in 1979. Kepel depicts Khomeini as a political genius of sorts, the only Islamist leader ever able to successfully and lastingly unite the crazily disparate groups that tend to be drawn to such movements. The essential -- and to Kepel's mind usually unconquerable -- challenge facing any Islamist group is to get the poor, young, urban have-nots to work with what Kepel calls the "devout bourgeoisie," modest, traditional members of the middle class who are shut out of real political power and offended by secularized elites and the Westernized behavior they often adopt.

Next page: Islamism feeds on the desperation of masses betrayed by corrupt leaders