The Nationalist Solution
Source: New York Times
The struggle against Islamic extremism has been crippled by a failure of historical awareness and cultural understanding. From the very beginning, we have treated the problem of terrorism through the prism of our own assumptions and our own values. We have solipsistically assumed that people turn to extremism because they can’t get what we want, and fail to realize that they don’t want what we want, but want something they think is higher.
The latest example of this is the speech President Obama gave at this week’s Summit on Countering Violent Extremism. It was a bad speech, but its badness is no reflection on President Obama, for it was the same sort of bad speech that all American presidents have been giving for the past generation.
Religious extremism exists on three levels. It grows out of economic and political dysfunction. It is fueled by perverted spiritual ardor. It is organized by theological conviction. American presidents focus almost exclusively on the economic and political level because that’s what polite people in Western capitals are comfortable talking about.
At the summit meeting, President Obama gave the conventional materialistic explanation for what turns people into terrorists. Terrorism spreads, he argued, where people lack economic opportunity and good schools. The way to fight terror, he concluded, is with better job-training programs, more shared wealth, more open political regimes, and a general message of tolerance and pluralism.
In short, the president took his secular domestic agenda and projected it as a way to prevent young men from joining ISIS and chopping off heads.
But people don’t join ISIS, or the Islamic State, because they want better jobs with more benefits. ISIS is one of a long line of anti-Enlightenment movements, led by people who have contempt for the sort of materialistic, bourgeois goals that dominate our politics. These people don’t care if their earthly standard of living improves by a few percent a year. They’re disgusted by the pleasures we value, the pluralism we prize and the emphasis on happiness in this world, which we take as public life’s ultimate end.
They’re not doing it because they are sexually repressed. They are doing it because they think it will ennoble their souls and purify creation.
On Thursday, Mona El-Naggar of The Times profiled a young Egyptian man, named Islam Yaken, who grew up in a private school but ended up fighting for the Islamic State and kneeling proudly by a beheaded corpse in Syria.
He was marginalized by society. He seems to have rejected the whole calculus of what we call self-interest for the sake of an electrifying apocalyptic worldview and what he imagines to be some illimitable heroic destiny.
People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be won only by showing strength in confrontation with death.
This heroic urge is combined, by Islamist extremists, with a vision of End Times, a culmination to history brought about by a climactic battle and the purification of the earth.
Extremism is a spiritual phenomenon, a desire for loftiness of spirit gone perverse. You can’t counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision. There will always be alienated young men fueled by spiritual ardor. Terrorism will be defeated only when they find a different fulfillment, even more bold and self-transcending.
In other times, nationalism has offered that compelling vision. We sometimes think of nationalism as a destructive force, and it can be. But nationalism tied to universal democracy has always been uplifting and ennobling. It has organized heroic lives in America, France, Britain and beyond.
Walt Whitman was inspired by the thought that his country was involved in a great project, “making a new history, a history of democracy, making old history a dwarf … inaugurating largeness, culminating time.” Lincoln committed himself to the sacred truth that his country represented the “last best hope” of mankind. Millions have been inspired by an American creed that, the late great historian Sacvan Bercovitch wrote, “has succeeded in uniting nationality and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, sacred and secular history, the country’s past and paradise to be, in a single transcendent ideal.”
Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a revived Egyptian nationalism, Lebanese nationalism, Syrian nationalism, some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.
Extremism isn’t mostly about Islam. It is about a yearning for righteousness rendered malevolent by apocalyptic theology. Muslim clerics can fix the theology. The rest of us can help redirect the spiritual ardor toward humane and productive ends.
Additional Reading
Two Hundred Verses about Compassionate Living in the Quran
Categories: Asia, Counter Terrorism, Terrorism
JazakAllah.
The reality is that there is no compulsion in the matters of faith. That is written in the Quran. During the last century, many Muslim so-called scholars (self made) have corrupted the real teachings of Islam. They have taken upon themselves, the duty to establish a government of God (hukoomat e Ilahiyah). And they had been preaching to enforce the law of Sharia where ever they could do.
That is all wrong. There is no order or teaching in the Quran to establish any form of government and no order (even no advice) to implement the law of Sharia on many people.
The ISIS and their supporters in Pakistan and Egypt (and may be in Saudia) should be confronted with all types of weapons including the real true teachings of the Quran. Even if the high up leaders of ISIS will not come to the right line, the other poor Muslims will come to know that ISIS are not acting on the true teachings of the Quran.
The ISIS has to be defeated intellectually, as well as by all means. But theoretical side must not be forgotten. There should be world wide preaching about the spiritual (non-political) nature of all religions including Islam.
بسم اللہ الرحمن الرحیم
The Extremists are sick factions of the Society or they become the prey of Religious Clergy, who has their own ex to grind and has their own political agenda and vested interest, who either put Religious teachings out of context or twist the meanings and change them to suite their needs and they flourish in such a societies whose government somehow has affected by extremism philosophy and have not reform their education system for using their mind and wisdom and living in the same environment of ignorance, rather their delicate feelings has been given a boost of falsified values, the values that has no palace to exist like blasphemy Laws, that has nothing to do with the Islam, that is the borrowed Law from the Holy Bible, likewise the burning of sacred papers are permissible as Hadhrat U(s)thman did while compiling a single Qara’at of the Holy Quran, but the Clergy of Pakistan either due to ignorance or for their own vested interest or to create disorder in the land use illiterate and ignorant people, in short the Government fails her responsibilities to properly educate people for tolerance and pluralism in the Society. Sometimes it is the reaction of colonialism people wanted freedom and became violent and sometime violent people are the agent of other agencies to destabilize the State and its Government.
The solution of this extremism is to remove illiteracy and ignorance from the Society, teaching syllabuses carefully prepared and have check on it, the society must be carefully watched for hate-speeches and must not be tolerated, the economic disparity be removed, the job opportunities be created, there should be the least rate of unemployment, about touchy thins right reaction be educated and the false notions be removed and educate them for tolerance and pluralism.
Those who do not understand the language of logic, they must be dealt with heavy handed either reformed or be removed from the face of the earth.
Zarif Ahmad
Dear Muslim Times
David Brook’s NY Times’ Solution for Extremism article is a disguised effort to mislead people in believing that ISIS and other terrorism outfits have a religious agenda.
They do not. These organisations have political agenda that is despised by almost all Muslim countries and people of the Islamic faith. Besides, calling extremis as Islamic extremism shows that he does not make a distinction or does not the mere fact that such terminologies give credential to the same people, he wants ordinary Muslims to struggle against.
Secondly, Mr. Gulam Sarwar is dead wrong to claim that ISIS has a foothold in Pakistan. It is not a multinational company with Head Office in Raqa and branches in Muslim countries. There are few braindead extremists who may sympathise with ISIS but it is not present in the country.
Kind regards