Steven Scholl: Why Martin Amis is wrong about the triumph of Islamists
[Steven Scholl is a writer and film maker living in Ashland, Oregon. He also leads tours to the Middle East with his company Imagine Adventures.]
'In his Sept 10 op-ed piece for The Observer, Martin Amis provides what is becoming the stump speech for secularists who are sick of religion and the suffering it generates and who find Islam especially dangerous to civilization. I share some of Amis’s concerns but find his analysis of Islam and Islamism rather mixed up. Like so many other pundits Amis shifts from Islamist extremists to all Muslims without blinking an eye, sliding without hesitation or clarification from some undefined “okay Islam” to jihadist “Islamism.”
This slight of hand leaves the reader with the impression that some great titanic struggle has been taking place within the Muslim world between moderates and radicals, that recently the radical jihadists won a decisive victory, and now all Islam is under their sway. Here is a typical Amis slide:
“Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.”
This is stunning. I am sure the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world will be startled to find out that they have all converted to Wahhabism or are committed members of al-Qaeda. Amis is uttering pure nonsense. Islam remains a big tent with many competing worldviews and the internal debate for the soul of Islam will no doubt continue well into the future. This debate is reflected in a robust fashion within the Arab world, which Amis and most other secularist pundits remains deaf to for some reason.
This past summer I led a group of Americans to Morocco to learn more about Islam and to meet with Muslims. While there I watched the Arab and international media available in nearly every Morooccan home (satellite dishes appear on even the most humble shanty town homes). I watched a debate held in Doha, Qatar between Muslim liberals and fundamentalists on the role of women in society. In these debates, which are beamed throughout the Arab and Muslim world, the fundamentalists always appear as backward looking and inarticulate, and the Muslim liberals passionately advocate for serious reforms based on a more enlightened and liberal interpretation of the Koran and Islamic traditions. Liberal Muslim reformers have not won the day but neither have the fundamentalists. Fundamentalist Islam is not all that is going on in the Muslim world, and a strong case can be made that it is the radical fundamentalists who are in the minority position among Muslims.
What Amis and his mentors on Islam (Sam Harris especially) seem, astonishingly enough, to miss, is that Osama bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim brotherhood, are just not representative of the 1.2 billion Muslims on the planet. Ahmadinajad in Iran along with his mulla backers is not representative of Iranian Shi'a en masse. My experiences in the Middle East are limited (living in Egypt 1983-84 and travels in Morocco in 2005 and 2006), but I can tell you that after living and traveling among Arabs my view of the Arab world is different from the picture painted by armchair analysts like Amis. The picture that Amis and others paint of Muslim culture (wife beating, anti-intellectual, not curious about the world beyond their borders, militant and religious authoritarian in style) just doesn't jive with what I have experienced. What Amis does is not very subtle but no doubt effective for many of his readers. After asserting without any proof that radical Islamism has won the day, Amis informs us what this actually means when he provides a lengthy and often perceptive description of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual force behind radical Islam:
“. . . [Sayyid] Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyya (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia - barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals, and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to 'exterminate' Islam - and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example.”
The implications of Amis’s deceptive rhetoric is that since Islamism won the Muslim civil war and is now the guiding force behind what we now know as Islam, which means that the majority of Muslims believe that Americans are “infidels” and therefore “unworthy of life.” This is pure racial and religious prejudice of the extreme kind.
I have spent endless hours talking with Muslims on the streets of Arab towns and never felt threatened or in harms way as an American visiting a Arab country; I have never spoken with Sunnis or Shi’is who feel that it is their religious duty to kill me or all non-Muslims because we are worse than animals. ...
Read entire article at Informed Comment (Blog)
'In his Sept 10 op-ed piece for The Observer, Martin Amis provides what is becoming the stump speech for secularists who are sick of religion and the suffering it generates and who find Islam especially dangerous to civilization. I share some of Amis’s concerns but find his analysis of Islam and Islamism rather mixed up. Like so many other pundits Amis shifts from Islamist extremists to all Muslims without blinking an eye, sliding without hesitation or clarification from some undefined “okay Islam” to jihadist “Islamism.”
This slight of hand leaves the reader with the impression that some great titanic struggle has been taking place within the Muslim world between moderates and radicals, that recently the radical jihadists won a decisive victory, and now all Islam is under their sway. Here is a typical Amis slide:
“Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.”
This is stunning. I am sure the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world will be startled to find out that they have all converted to Wahhabism or are committed members of al-Qaeda. Amis is uttering pure nonsense. Islam remains a big tent with many competing worldviews and the internal debate for the soul of Islam will no doubt continue well into the future. This debate is reflected in a robust fashion within the Arab world, which Amis and most other secularist pundits remains deaf to for some reason.
This past summer I led a group of Americans to Morocco to learn more about Islam and to meet with Muslims. While there I watched the Arab and international media available in nearly every Morooccan home (satellite dishes appear on even the most humble shanty town homes). I watched a debate held in Doha, Qatar between Muslim liberals and fundamentalists on the role of women in society. In these debates, which are beamed throughout the Arab and Muslim world, the fundamentalists always appear as backward looking and inarticulate, and the Muslim liberals passionately advocate for serious reforms based on a more enlightened and liberal interpretation of the Koran and Islamic traditions. Liberal Muslim reformers have not won the day but neither have the fundamentalists. Fundamentalist Islam is not all that is going on in the Muslim world, and a strong case can be made that it is the radical fundamentalists who are in the minority position among Muslims.
What Amis and his mentors on Islam (Sam Harris especially) seem, astonishingly enough, to miss, is that Osama bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim brotherhood, are just not representative of the 1.2 billion Muslims on the planet. Ahmadinajad in Iran along with his mulla backers is not representative of Iranian Shi'a en masse. My experiences in the Middle East are limited (living in Egypt 1983-84 and travels in Morocco in 2005 and 2006), but I can tell you that after living and traveling among Arabs my view of the Arab world is different from the picture painted by armchair analysts like Amis. The picture that Amis and others paint of Muslim culture (wife beating, anti-intellectual, not curious about the world beyond their borders, militant and religious authoritarian in style) just doesn't jive with what I have experienced. What Amis does is not very subtle but no doubt effective for many of his readers. After asserting without any proof that radical Islamism has won the day, Amis informs us what this actually means when he provides a lengthy and often perceptive description of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual force behind radical Islam:
“. . . [Sayyid] Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyya (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia - barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals, and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to 'exterminate' Islam - and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example.”
The implications of Amis’s deceptive rhetoric is that since Islamism won the Muslim civil war and is now the guiding force behind what we now know as Islam, which means that the majority of Muslims believe that Americans are “infidels” and therefore “unworthy of life.” This is pure racial and religious prejudice of the extreme kind.
I have spent endless hours talking with Muslims on the streets of Arab towns and never felt threatened or in harms way as an American visiting a Arab country; I have never spoken with Sunnis or Shi’is who feel that it is their religious duty to kill me or all non-Muslims because we are worse than animals. ...