The Cost of Underestimating Radical Islam

The emergence of a seemingly endless parade of radical Islamist groups, whose immediate goals vary to the point of confrontation but whose general long-term objective would appear to be the disruption and eventual destruction of Western civilization as we know it, often seems to have materialized overnight. But the fact is that this ostensible optical illusion is the result of widespread Western ignorance about Islam in general and about “radical Islam” in particular.

I should hasten to say that one has little to do with the other. The first is one of the major monotheist religions, with many similar teachings to those of Judaism and Christianity, which formed part of its origin, including, most notably, its messages prescribing peace, love, forgiveness and the brotherhood of humankind. The second is a multi-faceted, worldwide, extremist movement, which—although utilizing religion as its pseudo-philosophical base, drawing card, and justification for acts that are unjustifiable and inexcusable in its own or any other major religion—is bent on spreading war, terror and destruction as a means of gaining strength, territory and clout, with the ultimate aim of becoming one of the world’s dominant political powers.

Prior to 2001, the West paid little attention to the conflicts brewing in the Muslim world, except as they affected the direct commercial and strategic interests of the major Western powers or the security of the West’s common Middle East ally, Israel. Nor was there any profound interest, except among a handful of erudite intellectuals, in the internal feuds taking place in the Middle East. They were largely taken as domestic or limited regional or tribal disputes that had little or nothing to do with the artificial boundaries sketched on the world map by the Western victors of World War I and World War II, and as such, it was considered useless to try and comprehend what was going on in any detail. Such power conflicts were mostly left to work themselves out except as they affected Western or Russian interests, in which case both poles of world power intervened through their respective proxies—further fueling the fires of radicalized Islam.

But the attitude of general surprise at the “swift emergence” of Islamist extremism ever since the nine-eleven Twin Towers attack in 2001, and the continuing rise of radical Islam by the hand of such groups as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIL, Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab, among a host of others, is at least ingenuous if not dangerously cynical and dismissive of both the threat itself and the need to fully understand it and the reasons behind it.

Already in 1956, in an essay written for and published in “Valeurs Actuelles”, French novelist, art theorist and government minister André Malraux (1901-1976) wrote: “The great phenomenon of our time is the violence of the Islamic thrust. Underestimated by the majority of our contemporaries, the rise of Islam is analogically comparable to the early days of communism in the times of Lenin.”

A tireless world traveler, student of universal culture and world politics, and Cultural Affairs Minister under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle (1959-1969), Malraux had a privileged view of world political movements since he observed them less as a mere plank in a diplomatic or defense strategy and more within the holistic framework of their social and cultural context and significance. In other words, he was able to see the human and cultural motivations behind emerging world trends rather than simply their surface causes and effects.

In that same essay, Malraux opines: “The nature of civilization is what is added around a religion. Our religion is incapable of building a temple or a tomb. It will end up being obliged to find its own fundamental value, or it will decompose.”

While Malraux may well have been talking about religion as such, his words can also be interpreted as a warning to at least rediscover essential values in Western democratic culture, beyond the empty rhetoric and hollow patriotic posturing too often brandished today en lieu of adherence to the West’s founding principles. It is this lack of philosophical substance mentioned by Malraux that has, for instance, led the West in general and its leader, the United States, in particular to forego essential protection of its founders’ most cherished principles (human and civil rights, proper rules of engagement, the rule of law, etc.) in prosecuting its “war on terror”.

In doing so, the West has already, if gradually and unwittingly perhaps, granted a measure of victory to the Islamist terrorists who have caught it unaware, by permitting fear of their advances to undermine Western principles and democratic cultural mores. By this token, if in fighting radical Islam the West breaks down and becomes even marginally what it is combatting, then it will have helped these extremists to have reached an important part of their goal: the destruction of Western civilization.

In writing almost sixty years ago of the advance of Islamist extremism, Malraux continues: “The consequences of this phenomenon remain unpredictable. At the start of the Marxist revolution,” he says, by way of comparison, “it was believed that partial solutions would be enough to halt the wave…Perhaps partial solutions would have been sufficient to stop the wave of Islam had they been implemented with enough time. Today it is already too late!”

Justifying this last statement, Malraux concludes: “The impoverished have little to lose. They prefer to maintain their poverty within the Muslim community. Their lot will most likely remain unchanged. We have too Western a conception of them. Faced with the benefits that we believe ourselves to be capable of providing them, they prefer the future of their race. Black Africa will not long remain indifferent to this process.  All we can do is be aware of the gravity of the problem and try to hold off its advance.”

Malraux’s words come back to haunt us today, since this is precisely where the world currently stands. And yet, it is only now that the West is making its first faltering attempts to understand what Islamist extremism is about. The fact that major world figures still refer to ISIL (the Islamic State) as a kind of “minor branch” of Al-Qaeda—to say nothing of their stunning ignorance of Boko Haram in Africa—is proof enough that the West still doesn’t realize what it is up against.

While Al-Qaeda was founded and has been operated as a cell-based guerrilla organization whose main objective is to spread terror and chaos, ISIL, all too often dismissed as a relatively small band of psychopaths with little more than mass murder on their minds, is organized as a shadow State in the countries whose territory it has partially conquered, and its purpose is to be just that, an alternative, rigorously Islamic State, bent on ruling Arab nations currently governed under Western influence and eventually establishing an Islamic caliphate to rule the Arab world as a whole.

In a sense, their ultimate goal is to win back the power accumulated by the Ottoman Empire, a Sunni State founded in what is today Turkey, which conquered and ruled vast parts of the world for six centuries. It wasn’t until World War I, when it threw in its lot with Germany, that the already shaky Ottoman Empire was defeated and collapsed, with the Western victors in that world confrontation redrawing the map of the Balkans and the Middle East in the process of partitioning the long-standing realm. This often arbitrary and less than informed re-sketching of the Islamic world following both World Wars has long been at the root of feuds and violence in the region, exacerbated most recently by the illegal and injudicious invasions sponsored by Washington following the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and on the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001.

Fortunately for the West, until now Islamist terrorist groups have remained so individually radicalized as to appear incapable of uniting. But as each of them reaches its immediate goals, all of that could change, and the many violent Islamist splinters just now being identified and only partially assessed by the West could end up united as one with the single-minded goal of immersing Western democracy in terror and chaos while establishing a major authoritarian power in whose conquered territories individual rights and freedoms would be a thing of the past and in which imperial expansion would be a prime goal.

Until the West understands this fully, it will continue to have underestimated this threat to world peace and democracy and to have miscalculated its potential dimensions.