Osama’s Gift to Moderates
The Osama bin Laden videotape that captivated world attention last week, with its mix of Koranic scripture and self-congratulation for the events of Sept. 11, isn’t just a chilling spectacle. It’s a moment of reckoning for moderate Muslims around the world.
The jocular, boasting conversation is filled with references to prophetic dreams and divine support for heroic deeds, the sorts of images that can be found throughout the world’s great religious literature. But there’s no mistaking the ends of this perversion, that the glory of religion lies not in a life well lived but in death for innocents and foot soldiers. Bin Laden tells of someone who dreamed of pilots in a soccer game against Americans. A man off camera describes a vision of a plane crashing into a tall building. A sheik sees the guiding hand of Allah in mass murder.
Inevitably, even this tape has not changed the minds of some Islamic radicals who believe that the West is responsible for their backward societies, poverty, lack of education and despair. But it ought to marginalize them. Those who don’t believe this tape won’t believe anything and cannot be taken seriously. Moderates like the editor of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Havat recoiled in horror at the lack of remorse they found in the tape.
From the day of its release, the credibility of moderates in American mosques, of Muslims seeking rational solutions in the Mideast and trying to advance democratic ideals, has been greatly and irreversibly enhanced. It is up to them to take advantage of the opportunity.
Moderates throughout the Muslim world should speak out confidently to draw the sharpest distinctions between the good and gentle religion of the Koran and the abomination of Bin Laden’s sycophantic crew. Hereafter, there can be no explaining away a failure to do so.
The diminishment of Bin Laden and the fall of the Taliban also leave the United States and other democracies an open door to advocate change and encourage reform even within an Islamic system, as has been happening in Iran. Moderates may not prevail soon in some of the countries where militants either hold sway or pose a threat, such as Saudi Arabia or Turkmenistan. However, neither can Bin Laden-style rhetoric be dismissed any longer as a nuisance, accommodated or disregarded as a price of preserving the status quo. The terrorists, it is clear, will sentence governments or movements that support them to the likelihood of endless conflict, carnage and military defeat.