The Nonterrorist Advance of Islam
Marc Steyn wrote a piece in the OC Register on Friday criticizing President Obama’s speech in Cairo this past week as “a message of weakness.” Here’s an excerpt that particularly jumped out at me.
The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including the wish to expand the boundaries of “the Muslim world” and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.
There seem to be several ways to interpret this. Steyn can be referring to Islamic political advance through regime/state expansion or cultural advance through demographics. The challenge can be the seeming contradiction that is Islamic law and western secularism or simply the increased likelihood of civilizational clash the more Muslim states develop means to engage the world, both economically and militarily. But Steyn raises an issue that is not only little discussed in the mainstream, but seems to come close to cutting against the President’s “we are not at war with Islam” position. For if the mere advance of Islam is a significant challenge to the West, the premise that the US is at war with Islam becomes more credible.
Certainly, the US is not at war with Islam per se. But history suggests that US policy has been, at the very least, geared towards an implicit war against conservative/fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Whether it’s an offensive pro-democracy policy or a simple policy of containment, the US has sought to keep the Muslim world in check for decades. The broader civilizational conflict between Islam and the West extends even further into history – nearly to the founding of Islam itself. While economic motivations have often caused the US to take contradictory stances (e.g., supporting a fundamentalist Islamic monarchy in Saudi Arabia), I think that the US would much rather secure democratic regimes than oil contracts in the Middle East.
The differences between Western constitutionalism and fundamentalist Islamic ideology are not only stark, but also wholly incompatible. Shar’ia law and western constitutionalism cannot coexist under one governing umbrella. Thus, as a policy matter, the challenge for the West is to promote its ideas and ensure that regimes like Iran and Saudi Arabia do not sprout in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan – all of this without offending Islamic sensibilities and exacerbating a deep, cultural divide. To this end, President Obama has ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan to combat Taliban forces seeking to reimpose in both Pakistan and Afghanistan the harsh code that ruled Afghanistan throughout the 90s. But, importantly, the policy of combating the Taliban is not a mere exercise in fighting “terrorists,” but is largely about the broader civilizational battle between the West and Muslim world.
I guess one of my points here is that words are one thing and actions are another. The President’s words might stress that the US is not at war with Islam, but his actions demonstrate that the spread of Islamist orthodoxy as a form of government is undesirable for the US. Thus, so long as the US is either offensively trying to influence the democratization of the Islamic world or striving to contain theocratic regimes, it will always be, to a certain degree, at war with Islam.
