Angel Jaramillo.
Between 1989 and 2023, Islamic radicalism has been exacerbated. Four thinkers have offered different explanations for the causes of this phenomenon.
Three dates are significant in understanding the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7. First, Ayatollah Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie on February 14, 1989. Second, the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC. Thirdly, on October 7, 2023 itself. It is a mistake to conceive of the atrocities committed by the terrorist group located in Gaza only in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The broader scenario has to consider the rise of Islamic radicalism over the last fifty years.
Between 1989 and 2023, what has happened is the exacerbation of an anti-liberal interpretation of the teachings of Islam. Now, what is the cause of this?
To understand it, perhaps we need to review the arguments of four scholars – though not necessarily specialists in the subject – of this political phenomenon. I am referring to the interpretations of Paul Berman, Mark Lilla, Bernard Lewis, and Samuel P. Huntington.
For Paul Berman, the aggressive Islamism that proposes a jihad against the liberal West cannot be understood if we ignore its totalitarian character, whose roots go back to the first decades of the twentieth century. Suggestively, Berman has assembled agate lines in which he attempts to demonstrate – often successfully – that the defeat of Nazism, Bolshevism, and Fascism in Europe did not mean their demise. On the contrary, these three totalitarian movements migrated in the 1930s and 1940s to the Middle East, the determining geopolitical center of Islam, where they captured the imagination of intellectuals and men of action. Perhaps the most conspicuous example cited by Berman is that of the so-called “Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,” Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni. An anti-Semite and anti-liberal, the Mufti went so far as to ally himself with Hitler, whom he tried to convince to extend the Holocaust – the slaughter of Jews – to North Africa and also proposed that the Luftwaffe bombed Tel Aviv.
If Berman is anything to go by, the expression for movements such as the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Hamas, or even the Baath party in Syria can only be Islamo-fascism.
Unlike Berman, political philosopher Mark Lilla believes that, ultimately, the problem of Islamism is not so much a strictly modern phenomenon – be it fascist, national-socialist, or communist – as a structural problem that has accompanied humanity for as long as there has been civilization. According to Lilla, the modernity that procreated secular societies in the West, which had Thomas Hobbes as one of its founders, has deluded itself into believing that theological thought has been overcome. If, for Berman, European totalitarianism migrated to the Middle East in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, for Lilla, political theology played a predominant role in the genesis and rise of the Third Reich.
In his book The Stillborn God, Lilla shows how Christian theologians, primarily in Germany, promoted an authoritarian reading of politics, which led them to support Hitlerism, as did, from political philosophy, Martin Heidegger. Although Lilla does not refer in his book to Islamism, from the reading of several of his articles, it can be deduced that the revival of Islamic radicalism is nothing more than one of the most recent manifestations of theological thought and its application to politics.
A different reading to that of Berman and Lilla is that of Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis. The British-Israeli Orientalist, a former professor at Princeton University, died in 2018, but not before giving us in several books and articles his explanation of the rise of Islamic radicalism. This can be found, above all, in a couple of his books: What went wrong? The impact of the West and the response of the Middle East, and, The Crisis of Islam: Holy war and unholy terror.
In an interpretation reminiscent of Nietzsche, Lewis focuses on a psychological argument to understand the powder keg in the Middle East. According to him, a religion that began as imperial – unlike Christianity – could not digest the fact that the West surpassed it in economic, scientific, and technological terms, even colonizing territories where Islam had reigned. This defeat has not been assimilated, and, as a result, powerful passions such as resentment, humiliation, and frustration have produced responses that are both extravagant and dangerous, with new interpretations of the Koran that promote aggression and holy war.
Finally, Samuel P. Huntington understands the rise of Islamism based on the model he unveiled in his famous treatise, The Clash of Civilizations and the Reshaping of World Order. For him, the resurgence of radical Islamist movements is nothing more than the natural confrontation between Islamic civilization and other civilizations, especially the West, after the collapse of the Soviet Orb and the hegemony of the Cold War paradigm. According to him, there can be no real peace between civilizations at the cosmetic level of international law or within the framework of international organizations such as the UN. Only an agreement that considers differences at the deep level of religion and culture could culminate in the cessation of hostilities. Nothing suggests that this can happen in the short term.
Although each of these four thinkers has different explanations for the causes that have given rise to Islamic radicalism, there is no doubt that they have put their finger on the fundamental problem in the Middle East. ~
This was published in Spanish today by Letras Libres.
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