Mick Hartley

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The Power of the Extremist Ideologies

Here’s Paul Berman in the NYT:

Five years ago, anyone who took an interest in Middle Eastern affairs would easily have recalled that, over the course of a century, the intellectuals of the region have gone through any number of phases — liberal, Marxist, secularist, pious, traditionalist, nationalist, anti-imperialist and so forth, just like intellectuals everywhere else in the world.

Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern background would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein — the Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society.

But that was then. In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.

Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.

A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the extremist ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises.

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One response to “The Power of the Extremist Ideologies”

  1. steveaz Avatar
    steveaz

    Hi Mick,
    What about the meddlesome B’hai ladies down the street who applauded 9/11 and openly despise America? They live in rural Arizona and love NPR. They also await the coming of the Twelfth Mahdi (Baha U’Allah), are voting for Obama in ’08, and call themselves “Liberal.” (Interestingly, one comes from Barack’s haunts, Chicago, and the other hales from Pakistan.)
    But, somehow, I think that’s not the type of “Liberal Muslim” that you had in mind.
    One curl that complicates our desire to see more “Liberal” Muslims out and about is the Koranic religious command, al-Taqqiya. This dictate commands Muslims living in non-Muslim countries to “blend-into” the foreign nation’s populace by using an array of deceptions. One of the most common deceptions is to pretend to be a “Liberal” (hence the seemingly-comfortable, feigned, coalescence of Islam with global Leftism.).
    The result is hosts of “Muslim-Lite” pretenders are plying the highways and bi-ways of our nation, masked usually as anti-war Democrats or as urban “Liberation Theoologists” and in their private channels they regularly parrot divisive anti-American propaganda.
    The trouble is, the “Liberal” mask can be the means to an explicit end: ever-deeper shades of Sharia in the West. And those practicing al-Taqqiya while today they teach in our Universities and drive our school-buses, tomorrow when Sharia arrives, they expect to escape the Dhimmi’s fate.
    My point is I guess, simply calling for more “Liberalism” from the Muslim (including the “Muslim-Lite”) community just ain’t gonna work!

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