Social media and modern telecommunications have changed the dynamics, both within the Middle East, and between the Middle East and the rest of the world. Technological proliferation has enabled those extremist aspects within Islam to influence a much wider audience than ever before. These radical aspects of Islam have existed, in many cases, for centuries, but were confined to narrow alleys in the less cosmopolitan neighborhoods in the cities in the Middle East. Now those same radical elements use technology to reach millions.
A recent Hamas television broadcast to Palestinian children encouraged them to envision themselves “killing Jews” when they grew up and became adults. Blair addresses this militancy:
The threat of this radical Islam is not abating. It is growing. It is spreading across the world. It is destabilizing communities and even nations. It is undermining the possibility of peaceful co-existence in an era of globalization. And in the face of this threat we seem curiously reluctant to acknowledge it and powerless to counter it effectively.
This technological proliferation also blurs international borders. An imam named Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi made a series of statements in 2013 and 2014, encouraging Muslims to engage in a type of jihad in which “the life and property” of a non-Muslim were to be taken without hesitation. This imam studied in Saudi Arabia. Where did he make these statements? In Egypt? In Libya? In Syria? No, in Memphis, Tennessee.
For the most part, a very common sentiment is that the region may be important but it is ungovernable and therefore impossible and therefore we should let it look after itself.
Blair points out that it is tempting to abandon the Middle East as hopeless. Whether a mideast country suffers under a hardline Islamic government, or whether it suffers under a more secular dictatorship, it seems that this region of the world is doomed by its cultural and social structures to be dominated by tyrants. But, Blair warns, if we abandon the Middle East, it will continue to be an incubator for radical Islamic terrorism, which it will export to the rest of the world.
History offers reasons for hoping that a less violent and less tyrannical form of government can be found for at least some of the countries in the Middle East. The British Protectorate in Egypt, the British Mandate for Mesopotamia (Iraq), and the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon are examples of a better pattern for governing in the region.
But governing the Middle East is only part of the puzzle. Solving the problem of Islam's influence on geopolitics is another part. As long as the establishment of a caliphate remains a concrete goal, and as long as jihad remains a specified means to achieve that goal, the Middle East will continue to export violence. Blair says:
It is in the Middle East that the future of Islam will be decided. By this I mean the future of its relationship with politics. This is controversial because the world of politics is uncomfortable talking about religion; because some will say that really the problems are not religious but political; and even because – it is true – that the largest Muslim populations are to be found outside the region not inside it.
The vocabulary of mideast demography demands nuanced attention. There is a significant difference between Islamic and Islamist. The former is a general adjective, the latter is a violent political ideology. Islamofascism and Islamism are roughly synonymous. People, places, things, ideas, and events properly labeled Islamic can be, and often are, moderate and peaceful. Those which are Islamist are militant and aggressive. Blair explains:
one of the frustrating things about this debate is the inadequacy of the terminology and the tendency for any short hand to be capable of misinterpretation, so that you can appear to elide those who support the Islamist ideology with all Muslims.
While some of the largest concentrations of Muslims are located outside the Middle East - in places like India and Indonesia and Dearborn, Michigan - the ideological center of Islam remains in the Middle East. Physically, Muslims still face Mecca from any point on the globe when they pray. For this reason, Blair says, the Middle East is the key to solving the Muslim problem, even if huge numbers of Muslims live elsewhere.
The reason this matters so much is that this ideology is exported around the world. The Middle East is still the epicenter of thought and theology in Islam.
Those outside the Middle East have long spoken of, and hoped for, significant evidence of moderate Islam. To be clear: moderate Muslims exist. In the Middle East, they are scattered from the highest levels of Saudi royalty to the most humble of the poor, with a few intellectuals in between. But in the Middle East, their numbers are not enough to influence the general direction of Islam, and they do not occupy sufficient positions of influence: even Saudi royals must acknowledge the influence of radical Islamic clerics.
Outside of the Middle East, elsewhere in the world, there are pockets of moderate Muslims. In North America, they are largely middle-class, middle-age, college-educated professionals living in suburbs in the Midwest. Again, however, they do not control the overall direction taken by formally organized Islam, or by informally shaped Islamic culture. As Blair notes, many Muslims
who are probably perfectly content to live and let live, in the same way that nowadays most Catholics and Protestants do, are caught in a vicious and often literal crossfire between competing exclusivist views of the ‘true’ Islam. Where the two views align, whatever their mutual antagonism, is in the belief that those who think differently are the ‘enemy’ either within or without.
Jihadist Muslims whose clear goal is the establishment of a caliphate have several powerful instruments at hand: funding, technological proliferation, their sheet numbers, and their ability to intimidate others into silence. In January 2014, in England, an Islamist named Abu Waleed gave a speech in which he suggested the organized segregation of, and discrimination against, “infidels” in his hoped-for caliphate. He would require non-Muslims to wear marked and demeaning clothing and shave their heads.
The fact that this Muslim voiced such ideas is, by itself, not cause for concern. There will always be someone somewhere voicing odd ideas - that is freedom of speech. But there is cause for concern in the fact that his speaking is funded, and proliferates with technology. He no longer represents only himself as a odd individual with bizarre ideas. He is the voice of a movement - and merely one of many such voices. Militant Islam's voice is loud. Moderate Islam is numerically small, and does not command funding and electronic media. Blair argues that militant Islam is more than merely bigoted or chauvinistic - it is dangerous:
For the last 40/50 years, there has been a steady stream of funding, proselytizing, organizing and promulgating coming out of the Middle East, pushing views of religion that are narrow minded and dangerous. Unfortunately we seem blind to the enormous global impact such teaching has had and is having.
Ibrahim Hooper is a public spokesman for CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Hooper has endorsed and promoted books written by Muhammad Asad, books which state that it is the right of a married Muslim husband to beat his wife. Hooper has likewise publicized a book by Jamal Badawi which endorses domestic violence against women, and a book by Paul Findley which explains polygamy as within the rights of a Muslim man.
Given the nature of such Islamist thought, and famous examples like the “Girl in the Blue Bra” who was publicly beaten in Cairo in December 2011, Muslims in the Middle East may attempt to throw off secular tyrants only to find themselves oppressed by Islamist tyrants - this phenomenon was expressed as the 'Arab Spring' turning into the Arab Winter. Blair phrases it thus:
Within the Middle East itself, the result has been horrible, with people often facing a choice between authoritarian Government that is at least religiously tolerant; and the risk that in throwing off the Government they don't like, they end up with a religiously intolerant quasi-theocracy.
In concrete and specific terms, when a shipment of arms, originally bound for the forces of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, were diverted to anti-Gadhafi groups including al-Qaida elements, the U.S. Department of State allowed the diversion, hoping to topple the secular dictator. Gadhafi was indeed toppled, but into the ensuing power vacuum stepped the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaida, who used those arms to attack and kill U.S. diplomats in Benghazi in September 2012.
Take a step back and analyse the world today: with the possible exception of Latin America (leaving aside Hezbollah in the tri-border area in South America), there is not a region of the world not adversely affected by Islamism and the ideology is growing. The problems of the Mid East and North Africa are obvious. But look at the terror being inflicted in countries – Nigeria, Mali, Central African Republic, Chad and many others – across Sub Saharan Africa.
The Middle East is hamstrung by its extremists. While Islamists leverage technological proliferation, they do not encourage invention or entrepreneurship. The Middle East lags behind other areas of the world in terms of number of technological patents filed and new technology developed and brought to market. They lag in terms of technical education. Those who do receive a technological education often emigrate, if they can, causing a "brain-drain" as talent leaves that part of the world.
Extremism is possibly the single biggest threat to their ability to overcome the massive challenges of development today.
It would be a mistake to take a strictly Euro-American view of concerns about the Middle East. A more global perspective reveals the pattern. Islamist terrorists killed over 350 people, mostly children, at the Russian school in Beslan in 2004. Bali experienced terrorist bombings in 2002 and 2005; Islamist groups claimed responsibility. China has experienced violence at the hands of radical Muslims. Dozens and scores of further examples can be easily found.
In Central Asia, terrorist attacks are regular occurrences in Russia, whose Muslim population is now over 15%, and radical influences are stretching across the whole of the central part of Northern Asia, reaching even the Western province of Xinjiang in China.
To repeat the obvious truisms, not all Muslims are Arabs, and not all Arabs are Muslims. Yet CAIR persists in acting and speaking as if 'Muslim' and 'Arab' are synonyms. In the Middle East, there are large non-Muslim populations of Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians, Iraqis, Egyptians, and others. In North America, where Michigan has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in any U.S. state according to the Arab American Institute, more than half of the state's Arabs identify as non-Muslim.
While some non-Muslims have risen to prominence in the Middle East, Islam is still a decisive factor in the region's culture, society, and geo-politics.
Islamic unrest had overshadowed both Europe and the British Isles since 2000. The Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri in 2004; the murder was indisputably motivated by Islamofascist ideology, and Bouyeri was indisputably identified as a member of an Islamist terror cell. The publication of a few cartoons was taken as a pretext for rioting and violence; the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was the victim of an exaggerated and disproportionate response. Germany, France, and England have similarly seen Islamic elements which use any occasion as a pretext for outbursts, and which finally begin instigating violence without even bothering to find any alleged instigating event as a flimsy excuse for their rioting.
The Muslim population in Europe is now over 40m and growing. The Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations are increasingly active and they operate without much investigation or constraint. Recent controversy over schools in Birmingham (and similar allegations in France) show heightened levels of concern about Islamist penetration of our own societies.
The irony, of course, is that Europe, and especially Britain, fostered the notions of freedom, the very notions which these Islamic elements are exploiting in their quest to end such freedom. In short, the Islamofascists are using the dynamics of free societies to bring an end to free societies.
The long list of incidents, of which only a few are mentioned here as examples - Nidal Malik Hasan killing unarmed victims in Fort Hood; Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad killing civilians in the Washington area; Hesham Mohamed Hadayet killing people in the Los Angeles airport in 2002; the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 - are linked by Islamist ideology. Islam is the lens through which one sees and understands the unifying thread behind these killings. Yet, as Tony Blair points out, there exists
the absolutely rooted desire on the part of Western commentators to analyze these issues as disparate rather than united by common elements. They go to extraordinary lengths to say why, in every individual case, there are multiple reasons for understanding that this is not really about Islam, it is not really about religion; there are local or historic reasons which explain what is happening. There is a wish to eliminate the obvious common factor in a way that is almost willful. Now of course as I have said, there is always a context that is unique to each situation. There will naturally be a host of local factors that play a part in creating the issue. But it is bizarre to ignore the fact the principal actors in all situations, express themselves through the medium of religious identity or that in ideological terms, there is a powerful unifying factor based on a particular world view of religion and its place in politics and society.
Among the many factors which complicate any attempt to understand the role of Islam in the Middle East are the question of nomenclature and the question of categories.
Tony Blair already alluded, above, to the complexities of defining the words we use to discuss this region and its belief systems. Consider this bewildering set of words: Islam, Islamic, Islamist, Islamofascist. Try as we might to define them carefully and precisely, different people will still understand them in different ways. The same is true for the word 'Muslim' and its plural form.
One way to attempt more nuance is to avoid these words altogether, or to use these words with refining adjectives. This requires the use of cumbersome circumlocutions, but may achieve a bit more clarity.
One might, perhaps, therefore speak on the one hand of 'moderate, peaceful, nominal, cultural' Muslims - i.e., those whose connection with Islam consists largely of some external observances, holidays, foods, occasional or ceremonial participations and attendance, framed and conditioned by the culture of a time and of a place.
On the other hand, one could speak of 'orthodox, literal' Muslims, who adhere to the deeper conceptual structure of Islam itself, of the prophet Muhammad, and of the texts - Qur'an, Hadith, Sunnah, Sira, etc. To those, individual subdivisions within Islam would add their own texts, peculiar to Wahabi, Sufi, Sunni, Shiite, etc.
By clarifying vocabulary, we can clarify thought. While sorting through the complex social and political dynamics of the Middle East, Tony Blair notes, we cannot artificially isolate one phenomenon from another; many of them are closely connected:
There is a deep desire to separate the political ideology represented by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood from the actions of extremists including acts of terrorism. This stems from a completely laudable sense that we must always distinguish between those who violate the law and those we simply disagree with.But laudable though the motives are, which lead us to this distinction, if we're not careful, they also blind us to the fact that the ideology itself is nonetheless dangerous and corrosive; and cannot and should not be treated as a conventional political debate between two opposing views of how society should be governed.
We cannot simply dismiss the violent elements and hope to conduct constructive dialogue with the less radical elements. The former is an organic outgrowth of the latter. Blair is telling us that this is a different type of discussion. A conversation about culture and politics in the Middle East is not like a conversation about tariff rates between Canada and Brazil, or a conversation about setting bus fares on a city-owned transit system.
The central issues of the Middle East are not "mere" politics to be settled by negotiation or compromise, nor are they dispassionate discussions about one's worldview and one's conception of human nature. What an outsider may fail to perceive about the Middle East is that factions not engaged in violence are still nonetheless Islamist in the sense that they have as a concrete goal the establishment of a caliphate. That goal, held in common with other groups which are violent, blurs the lines which the outsider may wish to draw between peaceful and jihadist elements. Blair put it this way:
But their overall ideology is one which inevitably creates the soil in which such extremism can take root. In many cases, it is clear that they regard themselves as part of a spectrum, with a difference of view as to how to achieve the goals of Islamism, not a difference as to what those goals are; and in certain cases, they will support the use of violence.
Terminology is one obstacle to understanding Islam in the Middle East; as mentioned above, another obstacle is what a philosopher might call a "category mistake" - as embodied in the organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
First, a linguistic examination of the name of this group reveals a confusion of national and religious issues. The term "American-Islamic Relations" is odd, in this way: normally, such a phrase would include nationalities - "American-French Relations" or "Canadian-Brazilian Relations" or "Sino-Soviet Relations" or "Swedish-Vietnamese Relations" etc.
Or, possibly, such a phrase would name two religions: "Hindu-Christian Relations" or "Jewish-Buddhist Relations" or "Sikh-Mormon Relations" etc.
But CAIR has, in the words of the old proverb, mixed apples and oranges. Parallel coinages revealed the oddity: imagine a "Council on Swedish-Hindu Relations" or a "Council on Brazilian-Sikh Relations" or a "Council on Mexican-Buddhist Relations" etc.
The name of CAIR, is, then, a malformed formula. Subsequently, its activities are an attempt to effectuate an oxymoron. By way of analogy, image a "Council on Square Circles" or a "Council on Four-Sided Triangles."
In addition to this category mistake, which renders the name of CAIR to be senseless or nonsense, there is a second set of categories involved: sincere and insincere.
Taking CAIR's published statements prima facie, one might deduce from them a certain set of goals or values; looking, however, at the organization's funding patterns and ties to other organizations, a different set of goals or values would be revealed. What are those goals? Tony Blair explains:
The ultimate goal is not a society which someone else can change after winning an election. It is a society of a fixed polity, governed by religious doctrines that are not changeable but which are, of their essence, unchangeable.Because the West is so completely unfamiliar with such an ideology – though actually the experience of revolutionary communism or fascism should resonate with older generations – we can't really see the danger properly. We feel almost that if we identify it in these terms, we're being anti-Muslim, a sentiment on which the Islamists cleverly play.
Certainly, the fair-mindedness of Western Civilization demands that we respect the belief systems of other cultures. The spiritual tradition of European culture demands that we place "the best possible construction" on the actions of others. But this desire to honor other societies can be exploited by those cynical enough to take advantage of it.
Right now in the Middle East, this is the battle being waged. Of course in each country, it arises in a different form. But in each case, take out the extremist views around religion, and each conflict or challenge becomes infinitely more manageable. This is where, even though at one level the ideology coming out of Shia Iran and that of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood may seem to be different, in reality they amount to the same thing with the same effect – the holding back of the proper political, social and economic advance of the country.
What is the rest of the world to do? From China to Brazil, from Canada to Zimbabwe, almost every nation on earth will be impacted, for good or for ill, by the direction which the Middle East takes. Tony Blair explains what it means for the collected countries of the world to make a meaningful contribution to the future of the Middle East:
It means supporting the principles of religious freedom and open, rule-based economies. It means helping those countries whose people wish to embrace those principles to achieve them. Where there has been revolution, we should be on the side of those who support those principles and opposed to those who would thwart them.
A contradiction lies beneath the surface of the world's policies toward the Middle East: on the one hand, we work to defend ourselves from the military and terrorist threats emerging from that part of the world; on the other hand, we seek to be friendly and supportive to the governments and societies there. Yet those governments and societies are part of a larger system which supports the violent jihad from which we work to protect ourselves.
All over the world the challenge of defeating this ideology requires active and sustained engagement. Consider this absurdity: that we spend billions of $ on security arrangements and on defense to protect ourselves against the consequences of an ideology that is being advocated in the formal and informal school systems and in civic institutions of the very countries with whom we have intimate security and defense relationships. Some of those countries of course wish to escape from the grip of this ideology. But often it is hard for them to do so within their own political constraints. They need to have this issue out in the open where it then becomes harder for the promotion of this ideology to happen underneath the radar. In other words they need us to make this a core part of the international dialogue in order to force the necessary change within their own societies.
The human cost of Islamofascism is staggering: people are dying in large numbers; others are wounded or maimed, physically or psychologically; women live in a humiliating subjugation because of Islamist ideology; property is destroyed or confiscated; economic burdens ripple around the globe; millions live with peril of Islamic terrorism hovering overhead. A large amount of painful detail is available for those who care to inform themselves - especially about dehumanizing treatment inflicted upon women.
Add up the deaths around the world now – and even leave out the theatre of the Middle East – and the toll on human life is deplorable. In Nigeria recently and Pakistan alone thousands are now dying in religiously inspired conflict. And quite apart from the actual loss of life, there is the loss of life opportunities for parts of the population mired in backward thinking and reactionary attitudes especially towards girls.
Freedom by itself is not the answer to the problems of the Middle East. It is part of the answer, but merely instituting a voting process will not remove the dangers to the rest of the world, or provide dignity to the residents of the region. Freedom must be combined with understanding - a worldview which allows for civil debate, a worldview which values human life, a worldview which promotes personal liberty and political freedom, not for themselves, but because they emerge organically from a concept of the vocation of the humanity.
Freedom by itself is not the answer. The answer includes freedom seen as the innate property of humans, because every human life should be honored and seen as valuable, and freedom seen as the instrument by which humans can fulfill, not their own desires, but rather their function to honor and help each other.
