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Just a few months into his presidency, before decreeing “A New Beginning” in the relationship between Islam and the West, Barack Obama took pains to choose just the right site for the occasion of his auspicious speech. He picked al-Azhar University in Cairo.
Islam is beholden neither to synods nor to any formal ecclesiastical hierarchy. This ancient seat of Sunni scholarship is thus as close as it gets to a Muslim Vatican for Sunnis, vastly the majority sect among the creed’s 1.4 billion adherents worldwide. Given that Islam also abides no metaphorical wall of separation between the spiritual and secular realms, it is unsurprising that al-Azhar’s scholastic specialty is sharia. In Conrad Black’s recent and apt description, sharia is Islam’s “totalitarian legal system” for organizing society, “directed by clerics and going far beyond what even the most pious and fervent Westerner would consider the province of religion.”
Translated as “the path,” sharia is the corpus of Allah’s law, prescribing a comprehensive legal and political framework. Though it certainly has spiritual elements, Black is correct that it would be a mistake to think of it as a “religious” code in the Western sense. It would control every aspect of life – from the sacred to the mundane, from veneration of the divine to worldly politics, economics, military operations, social relations, familial obligations, inheritance, and even gritty details of personal hygiene.
It is sharia, not terrorism, that must be our line of demarcation, dividing radical Islam (or, as it is variously known, “Islamism” or “political Islam”) from moderate Islam. That is the thesis of a recent study called Shariah: The Threat to America – An Exercise in Competitive Analysis. I am one of the study’s several authors. The group – featuring a wealth of national security experience drawn from the spheres of intelligence, law enforcement, the military, academe, and journalism – dubbed itself “Team B-II.”
The name is an homage to the original “Team B.” More than a generation ago, that array of skeptics took issue with détente – the regnant early ’70s view that the world was plenty big enough for both sides of the Iron Curtain to coexist and even cooperate in countless areas of mutual interest. That Team B profoundly influenced a certain California governor who would go on, as president, to defeat the Evil Empire and win the Cold War. Its conclusion was straightforward yet, at the time, bracing: The Soviet Union was wedded to a totalitarian ideology, Communism, that sought global hegemony and would relentlessly work – by means violent and nonviolent – to secure the defeat of the United States and its allies in order to obtain it.
It is sharia, not terrorism, that must be our line of demarcation, dividing radical Islam from moderate Islam.
Team B-II analogously concludes that there is today a global Islamist movement just as determined as were the Soviets to achieve worldwide dominion and as fully committed to use all means at its disposal – not just terrorism, not by a long shot – to destroy America and the West. By myopically focusing on jihadist violence, today’s equivalents of the détente solons repeat their predecessors’ perilous minimization of the threat to our way of life.
Preponderant in what Angelo Codevilla calls the “ruling class” (opinion elites in government, the academe, and the media), these purveyors of conventional wisdom insist that we need only concern ourselves with a fringe handful of “violent extremists.” (It is no longer de rigueur to call them “jihadists” or even “terrorists” – since “terror” is inconveniently invoked in Islamic scripture, its mention in this Orwellian construct is deemed defamatory of Muslims.) The exertions of these said extremists have nothing to do with Islam. Indeed, the story goes, they constitute “un-Islamic activity” simply by dint of their being violent. Better to see their “root causes” as poverty, Western imperialism, cartoons, Guantanamo Bay, Israel, Abu Ghraib, or whatever hobby horse strikes bien-pensant fancy that particular week – it being a boon for progressives to cast their every bête noire as a catalyst of terror.
Team B-II surmises that this narrative is not only wrong but dangerously so. It is wrong because violent jihadists are actually catalyzed by an interpretation of Islam that, however heinous it may seem to us in the West, is entirely mainstream, firmly rooted in Muslim scripture, and favored by influential Islamic commentators, institutions, and academic centers – not least the faculty at al-Azhar. It is dangerous because although terrorism is the most obvious and horrifying means of pursuing radical Islam’s hegemonic aspirations, it is neither the most prevalent nor the most effective.
To appreciate this, it is necessary to grasp what jihad is. There is, of course, raging debate between Islam’s apologists and detractors over the concept’s meaning. The former – including, significantly, President Obama’s top counter-terrorism advisers – posit the revisionist fantasy that jihad is a peaceful, internal struggle for personal betterment. To the contrary, centuries of scholarship and tradition, including the four major schools of Islamic thought, hold that the genesis of jihad – in the Koran, the hagiographic biographical accounts of Islam’s warrior-prophet, and the history of Islamic conquest – is strictly military. Bernard Lewis, the West’s docent extraordinaire of Islam, has repeatedly acknowledged as much. Indeed, the encyclopedic Dictionary of Islam, first published by the British missionary Thomas Patrick Hughes in 1886, matter-offactly defines jihad as “a religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad.” “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world,” wrote Winston Churchill about Islam, reasoning that “far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith.”
Let’s put aside these uncongenial facts and indulge the smiley-face jihad preferred by the apologists. Though framed as a struggle to become a better person, it is actually the struggle to become a better, more faithful Muslim. That is a very different thing – not to improve in some cosmic sense but to conform one’s life to the edicts of Allah’s law, to sharia.
Trapped in the Western progressive’s hedonistic infatuation with personal fulfillment, today’s opinion elites miss the essence of Islam. It is a corporatist doctrine, determined to control the individual’s life down to its granular details not for his sake but for the flourishing of the ummah, the notional Islamic Nation. In fact, as Islamists beguile Western intellectuals with odes to “freedom” and “democracy,” it is critical to remember that Islam and the West proceed from different assumptions. The Islamic concept of freedom is nearly the opposite of ours, connoting perfect submission to Allah. When Islamists laud freedom, that is what they mean. The late Sayyid Qutb, radical Islam’s most consequential modern theorist, stated the matter this way: “Islam began by freeing the human conscience from servitude to anyone except Allah, and from submission to any save Him.” (Emphasis added.) Similarly, when Islamists praise democracy, they refer not to a culture of governance for self-determining people but to a potential means of imposing sharia by popular vote.
In Islamist ideology, the ummah thrives when the state enforces sharia, the perfect, immutable system personally bequeathed by Allah for the government of all creation. Understood this way, the apologists are quite correct in maintaining that jihad need not involve improvised explosive devices and hijacked jumbo jets. Whether pursued by forcible or nonforcible methods, jihad is always and everywhere the mission to implement,
