The Muslim Ally Within

Secretaries of State may have to learn some theology if the looming clash between the Western and Muslim civilizations is to yield to peaceful coexistence, to say nothing of fruitful collaboration. If Osama bin Laden is a spiritual leader with military designs on the United States, the first step in confronting him must be to deal with him as just that. To suppose that we can achieve security by treating him as a common criminal, and by dealing with the Muslim governments that support or harbor his movement as secular governments unconcerned with the religious dimension in his appeal, is to fight this new war as if it were the last one.

To say this is not to dignify the man but rather to suggest that containing Bin Laden’s threat may entail promoting a true alternative to him in the world where he originates. This task will require more knowledge of Islam than it takes to issue a declaration that Bin Laden does not represent true Islam. Who does represent true Islam? “Will the real Islam please stand up?” This is the kind of question that our military and diplomatic institutions are designed never to ask and never to notice that they are not asking.

At the end of World War I, as historian David Fromkin demonstrates in “A Peace to End All Peace,” Britain and France vastly overestimated the importance of Arab nationalism and correspondingly underestimated the importance of Islam as an organizing principle in the polity they sought to construct on the ruins of the Turkish Empire. The British and French were psychologically incapable of dealing with the Middle East other than through leaders manufactured to resemble their nominally religious but passionately nationalistic selves. They were at a loss when confronted with a culture whose real leaders were passionately religious and only nominally nationalist.

When the United States became the dominant power in the Middle East, it made the same mistake. It vastly overestimated Iranian nationalism as represented by the shah and correspondingly underestimated Muslim religion as represented by the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was as if the United States had to find someone like the shah to deal with because, well, how could a self-respecting secretary of State possibly do business with an ayatollah? What would they discuss? Theology?

In the current crisis, the answer to that question should be: Yes, theology is just what they would discuss. Reducing what is a jihad for the soul of Islam to an international manhunt is a battle plan guaranteed to fail. How can we make war against nations that have harbored Bin Laden’s agents when the United States itself is one of those nations? We have harbored his agents unwillingly and unwittingly. But how witting or willing have been the regimes of the relatively friendly Arab states like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to which much of the paper trail, perhaps by design, has led?

There cannot be, in the long run, an effective sorting out of good Muslim states from bad ones. It is the Muslim Umma as a whole that has harbored Bin Laden’s murderous movement within it, and it is the Muslim Umma as a whole that must somehow be persuaded to break with it. War between the West and the Umma is unthinkable. But a defensive strategy may nonetheless exist that will spare us World War III as the strategy of communist containment did in the decades after World War II.

Just as militant communism could not be militarily defeated in the last clash of civilizations, so militant Islam cannot be militarily defeated in the new one. Peace will come not when Bin Laden or any other single prophet of terrorism and his network of secret agents have been “surgically” eliminated, but when an authentic alternative vision has emerged within the House of Islam that makes such visions of victory-by-terrorism irrelevant and unwelcome.

The development of such an alternative vision, however, will require a major paradigm shift in Western diplomacy. It will no longer suffice to treat religion as a mere happenstance (“I happen to be Christian,” “I happen to be Muslim”) and, therefore, as a political irrelevancy. This method of dealing with religion politically may have served us well enough in overcoming Christianity’s own hideous wars of religion. But the old way will not meet this new challenge, for it takes off the table just the topic that militant Islam finds most compelling. By the same token, it will no longer do to use the word “theology” as shorthand for that-which-does-not-matter or, worse, that-which-gets-in-the-way. One can no more discuss religion without discussing theology than one can discuss communism without discussing ideology. Theology is the ideological element in religion, and nothing at this moment could be more tragically evidence than that we have ignored it to our peril.

Our leaders, in sum, must find a way to untie their tongues on a topic of world-historical importance. Fortunately, there are those who can help. In 1968, anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote a book called “Islam Observed,” in which he compared and contrasted what were then the western and eastern extremes of the House of Islam: Morocco and Indonesia. Since 1968, however, the western extreme has moved westward from Morocco to North America--all the way to California. No paper trail has connected the Sept. 11 terrorists to any American or Canadian mosque, and there is every reason to believe that Bin Laden’s contempt for the acculturated Muslim communities of North America is total. But in the years ahead, why may it not be the voice of Western Muslim communities like these, rather than Bin Laden’s voice, that resounds most loudly in the world Umma ? Rather than the enemy within, the Muslims of the West should be seen as the ally within.

Muslims often have reason to fear other Muslims. The bloodiest war of the latter half of the 20th century, surpassing even the genocide in Rwanda, was the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. For American and other Western Muslims who dare to claim an international role, the personal risks may be as large as the intellectual challenge. But if this community of often recent immigrants can rise to the historic challenge, the good news is that they will not be without allies elsewhere in the House of Islam. Is there a single Muslim nation in the world that aspires to the condition of Afghanistan? Is there not every reason to believe that a voice both authentically Western and authentically Muslim would find a wide audience? Time will tell, but the enemies of our enemy may yet prove to be the friends of our Muslim friends.

If American Muslims, clearly the key community, muster the necessary courage and intelligence, the question that must be asked is: Will they find correspondingly courageous or appropriately educated allies in Washington--allies for whom theology is not “theology”? To make a difference, the West’s Muslim communities must be dignified with much more than the occasional courtesy invitation to the diplomatic dinner table. They must be not just cultivated as allies of convenience but heard and honored as teachers. They must be protected and supported both materially and spiritually as they take on the enormous challenge of raising from their own ranks the theologians and religious leaders whose courage and creativity will save two worlds at once.