Extremism
Let me start with a number: There are approximately 1.4 billion Muslims on this planet. The vast majority of them do not engage in or approve of extremism. For example, 93% disapproved of the September 11th attacks on the United States, according to the Gallop Poll results reported in Who Speaks for Islam?
Many Muslims experience Islam as a religion of peace and practice long-traditional forms of Islam that focus on personal piety and ethics. We hear more about the extremists, however, because they do things that make the news. Ordinary people living ordinary decent lives rarely appear on TV or in a newspaper, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist in multitudes. They just ordinarily don’t get noticed, especially not from the other side of the planet.
That said, there certainly are Muslims who interpret their religion in ways that are narrow, rigid, oppressive, and even violent.
The roots of these interpretations, I believe, are political and economic – they have everything to do with power and money, or the lack thereof.
They also have everything to do with the pace of cultural change, and with people’s all too common feelings that the world is out of control and changing in ways that are not good for them or they people they love and feel responsible for. People respond to change in many ways, but when they feel dislocated by jarring and painful changes, they often long for a past that they imagine was better. They may even try to create (recreate, they claim) that imagined past. This is human nature, and it appears in every society. The Tea Party hearkens back to the founding of the United States; the Wahhabis harken back to the foundation of Islam. The details are very different, but the basic movement is the same.
If there is any truism of history, however, it’s that time does not reverse direction. We may fantasize about life in some past era, and we may imagine that life was easier and better then than in our confusing lives, but we can neither erase the consequences of our modern experiences from our psyches nor recreate past circumstances that are irretrievably gone. And trust me – the more you learn about any imagined golden age, the more you’ll learn that people of that time found it stressful too.
So reactionary agendas are ultimately unsuccessful. Ultimately we must head towards the future, not the past. But they can cause a lot of suffering along the way.
And extremism is self-perpetuating. When children grow up in unstable and violent environments, they often become unstable and violent adults. Broken people do painful things.
If extremism is a human response to a world that feels threatening and out of control, then it cannot be eradicated by forces from the outside. Indeed, the attempt to impose our own ways, whether by military force or by more subtle means, keeps up the speed of cultural change and makes people feel like their world is out of control and threatening. And those caught in the gears of war are often broken. The Taliban, for example, started among children who grew up as refugees from war in Afghanistan. We should, of course, protect our own land, people, and computer systems. But when we act aggressively beyond our borders, we create yet more fear, and fear leads to extremism.
The best thing that outsiders can do in the face of extremism, therefore, is to stop fighting against it. This does not mean that we should simply ignore extremism and risk letting its origins fester yet longer. Instead, we need to build links of communication, understanding, and mutual respect among decent people world-wide. There are a lot of us. And if we can present an alternative way of life that is attractive, extremism will lose its appeal.
Many people have suggested that the real “clash of civilizations” is within Islam: between the extremists and the peaceful majority who are rooted in their own local religious and cultural traditions. Non-Muslims can’t contribute much to shaping the future of Islam, but we can do three things. We can refrain from talking about extremists as if they are the “real” Muslims or the majority of Muslims. We can educate ourselves about Muslim cultures and reach out with kindness and respect to individual Muslims we encounter. And we can pull our troops out of Muslim countries, so that we stop providing an enemy for the extremists to rally against. These actions won’t end extremism, but they will help tilt the balance towards the forms of Islam that are peaceful and compassionate.
The following books fall into three categories: history (presented in roughly chronological order), personal voices (memoirs and a novel), and poll results. If you want to learn about Islamism and the Islamic Brotherhood, I recommend Leila Ahmed’s A Quiet Revolution.
History
Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (2000). Armstrong shows that fundamentalism emerged in all three Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – during the same decades, roughly 1870 to 1925. The reasons for the rise of fundamentalism cannot, therefore, be found within one religion, but must reflect something larger about their shared experience. Indeed, Armstrong argues, fundamentalism is a way of responding to the spiritual crises provoked by modernity. Contrary to the claims of its adherents, fundamentalism is not at all an archaic form of religion. Instead, it is a form of anti-modernism: it is modern, innovative, and modernizing. It responds to the cruelty and confusion of the modern world – and the genuine fear and anxiety modernity creates – by attempting to turn mythos into logos and imposing it on the world. Long and sometimes overwhelmingly detailed, but well-written, The Battle for God gives equal time to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Since it was first published in 2000, it does not share the 9/11 shadowing common among books on Islam.
Reza Aslan, No god But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005). In this insightful history of Islam from its earliest days to modern times, Aslan argues that the Muslim world is currently undergoing a reformation that is in some ways analogous to the Protestant Reformation in Europe. This reformation was triggered by the mass expansion of literacy and education, translation of the Qur’an into vernaculars, widespread access to non-local knowledge and ideas, the growth of nationalism and individualism, and a resulting deep conflict over who has the authority to define faith: the individual or the institution. “I use reformation deliberately,” he writes, “not only to emphasize that the violence and bloodshed we are witnessing in large parts of the Islamic world are chiefly the result on an internal struggle between Muslims (rather than of a war between Islam and the West), but also to stress that the current conflicts within Islam are those with which all great religions grapple as they face the challenges of modernity.”
Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (2005). The rise of extremism informs every book about Islam published since 9/11, but in The Great Theft it is the central question. Abou El Fadl is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and a specialist in Islamic law, also known as shari’a. He argues that the Muslim world is divided between puritans and moderates, each of whom find their own world-view compelling and accuses the other of having changed Islam almost beyond recognition. Abou El Fadl finds the puritans deeply frightening, and he argues they have gained power because of the destruction of Muslim intellectual traditions and the impoverishment of Muslim culture. To give one small but significant example, several universities used to have endowments that dated back to the ninth or tenth centuries. Both colonial and post-colonial rulers confiscated those endowments, thus depriving the universities of the economic independence that underpins intellectual independence and depriving Muslim societies of knowledge of their history and a power center separate from the state. The Great Theft starts with a history of the rise of puritanism, and then charts the moderate and puritan divide in terms of each group’s approaches to God and the purposes of creation, law and morality, history and modernity, democracy and human rights, interactions with non-Muslims and salvation, jihad, warfare, and terrorism, and the nature and role of women. I found Abou El Fadl’s discussion of women, gender, and the Qur’an particularly helpful.
Noah Feldman, The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State (2008). What is shari’a and why do so many Muslims call for its establishment in their own countries? Feldman, a professor at the Harvard Law School, looks at the role of shari’a in the classical Muslim world, where shari’a and the scholars who interpreted it, the ulama, created a center of authority that limited the power of the state and individual rulers. This balance of power broke down in the Ottoman era and under the influence of European colonialism and systems of law. For the last century or more, most Muslims have lived under unlimited executive power that easily tends towards dictatorship. When they call for the rule of shari’a, therefore, most Muslims imagine a constitutional order that would establish the rule of law, limit the power of rulers, and secure basic political and legal justice for everyone. One doesn’t have to believe that shari’a actually accomplished these goals in the past to understand why the image is appealing to Muslims today.
Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America (2011). This valuable book is far broader than its title suggests. I recommend it highly for anyone who is interested in women in Islam or Islamism, and is willing to read a well-written scholarly book. Ahmed grew up in Egypt and now teaches at the Harvard Divinity School, and she started with the question of why more women are wearing hijab now than a generation ago, in the United States and around the world. Answering this question led her not only to exploring the multiple reasons individual women offer for wearing and not wearing different forms of veils, but also to writing an extremely helpful history of Islamism in Egypt, where the Islamic Brotherhood was founded in the 1920s, and the United States, where Islamism-influenced women are now at the forefront of challenging gender hierarchies and misogyny. Islamism, according to Ahmed, defines the quest for social justice as near the core of Islam and Muslim practice. Traditional forms of Islam, in contrast, tend to have a more personal, spiritual, and ethical focus. Because Islamism urges its members towards organization and activism, and because of financial support from Saudi Arabia, Islamism has grown rapidly and is increasingly able to define itself as “true” Islam. Islamism has changed the symbolic meaning of hijab, and for many Islamist women, wearing hijab now signifies their commitment to social justice. In the 1970s the leadership of the Islamic Brotherhood repudiated violence as a means for achieving their goals, but not all Islamists agreed with them and some broke away to create militant groups, which are a small minority but more likely to make the news than the peaceful Islamist mainstream. Most American Muslim institutions have Islamist roots, but most American Muslims are not Islamist. 9/11 has had a huge effect on American Muslim organizations, making them more open to diverse opinions and challenges to hierarchical leadership. In the US, the Islamic call to justice has extended to gender justice among many, but probably not a majority, of American Islamists. Such a brief summary does not do justice to the depth and texture of Ahmed’s work, but suggests the breadth and importance of her story.
Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (2002). Any book on the United States’ relationship with the Middle East will be incomplete and have its flaws. American Orientalism offers, however, a decent introduction to the goals and actions of American corporations and American governments during the critical era from the end of the second world war to September 11, 2001. This book is more academic in tone than most of the others I’ve recommended, but a certain level of detail and rigor is necessary when dealing with such complicated and politically loaded topics. And Little has a good sense of the motivations and ironies of American attempts to promote our own security by wielding power in the Middle East.
Victoria Clark, Yemen: Dancing on the Head of Snakes (2010). Born in Aden when it was still a British colony, Clark drew on her personal experiences, extensive historical research, and multiple visits and interviews to create a compelling book about the Arab world’s poorest country. The first half offers an accessible history of how Yemen came to be the place it is today. The second half explores the implications of diminishing oil production, water shortages, tribal political systems, repeated civil wars, al-Qaeda and other militants, and a quickly growing population with few economic resources.
Memoirs
Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation (2007). Patel is an American Muslim (Ismaili) of Indian birth and the founder and director of the Interfaith Youth Core, which organizes youth of many faiths for conferences and service projects. The reason totalitarian religion is expanding, he argues, is that totalitarian religious institutions are doing much more than pluralist religious institutions to reach out to youth and young adults, answer their questions, help them form their identities, and give them things to do and ways to be of service to the world. Who we become, he argues, is to a large degree a result of the influences we encounter. Many youth are uncertain and questioning and somewhat disaffected, wanting to explore questions of ultimate meaning, and eager to make a difference in the world but not sure how. Patel tells the personal stories of many young people – Muslim, Christian, and Jewish — who became terrorists. He also tells his own story, which led to a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University and interfaith youth organizing, but so easily could have turned out differently. His memoir is inspiring and thought-provoking.
Tamim Ansary, West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story (2002). Born to an Afghan father and an American mother, Ansary grew up in a stable and loving Afghanistan and emigrated to the United States when he was a teenager. As a young adult he traveled the Islamic world (coincidentally, right after Iranian students took the American embassy hostage) and then settled into an American life of work, family, friends, and home-ownership. He gave little attention to Afghanistan until the reports became too disturbing. On September 12, 2001, he sent a passionate email to twenty friends, discussing the attacks of the day before from his perspective as an Afghan American. That experience led to this memoir. Ansary’s description of his changing perceptions of the Taliban, in a final chapter titled “Hanging On,” is especially compelling. “Growing up bicultural is like straddling a crack in the earth,” Ansary says. The Taliban grew up in a world disrupted by war, many of them in refugee camps. They could not absorb the full richness of Afghan culture as their parents had, but instead grabbed onto a thinned-down version that was stark and harsh and made them feel less small and powerless.
Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999). Ahmed’s memoir is lyrically written and very personal, but it also has a larger vision than most memoirs. It describes her 1940s childhood in a privileged Egyptian family, her father’s fall from favor because he opposed Nasser’s Aswan Dam project on environmental grounds, her studies in the “harem” of Girton College, her encounter with modern feminism, and her move to the United States, where she is now a professor at the Harvard Divinity School. Along the way Ahmed reflects on women’s traditions and men’s traditions within Islam, language and literacy, colonialism and nationalism, Arab identity, the breakdown of Egypt’s multi-religious society, her discovery that many Egyptians in the early 20th century supported Zionism, and how some interpretations and experiences of Islam overtake others. This is one of the most illuminating books I’ve read and I recommend it highly.
Novel
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). This unusual and powerful novel portrays a one-sided conversation in which a Pakistani man, Changez, tells his life story to an American whom he meets in a cafe in Lahore. Changez experienced youthful success as an immigrant to the United States: he graduated from Princeton, landed a job with an elite firm in New York City, and fell in love with an American woman. September 11 and its aftermath, however, changed his understanding of himself, the United States, and his place in the world. Tightly written and compelling, The Reluctant Fundamentalist explores the depths of love and fear.
Poll Results
John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (2007). This important book is based on the results of a world-wide poll conducted by the Gallop Poll organization in 2003. It examines how Muslims around the world think about Islam, the United States, democracy and theocracy, women’s roles, sharia, radicalism, violence, the possibility of co-existence, and what they want for their countries and their lives. The vast majority of Muslims, the Gallop Poll organization found, admire certain aspects of the United States (unlike the 57% of Americans who told Gallop that they could find nothing to admire about Muslim societies). Most Muslims believe, however, that the United States has not lived up to its ideals in its dealings with the Muslim world, but instead has pursued its own national interests. 68% of respondents described the United States as “ruthless.” Only 7% of Muslims are radicals, as defined by believing that the 9/11 attacks were justified. The radicals are more educated and affluent than moderates, more dedicated towards democracy and more disapproving of the United States’ actions. They are not, however, more religious than moderates. For anyone who cares about having a fact-based understanding of what ordinary Muslims around the world think, believe, and value, this book is essential.