A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

parties will be legitimately elected in early elections in most Muslim
countries. The good news is that Islamists will be quickly discredited in a
year or so if they cannot deliver to the public what they promised, or what
the public expects. That means treatment of urgent economic and social
problems and not empty anti-imperial rhetoric.
An early solution to the Palestinian problem must be found. It is perceived
across the Muslim world as the single most egregious case of foreign
imperialism, which has displaced local people and cast them into desperate
living conditions in refugee camps, imposed second-class citizenship upon
them in Israel, or pushed them into exile—for more than sixty years.
Palestinian suffering has grown, accompanied by a radicalization that has
spread beyond Palestine. The crisis demands a quick solution, the general
outlines of which are well known to all parties. The Israeli colonization
efforts in Palestinian territories must end and be reversed.
If only a tenth of the potentially one trillion plus dollars squandered by
Washington on Middle East wars, which have sown death and destruction
with little to show for it, could be devoted to building schools, universities,
hospitals, clinics, and training institutes, the region would be transformed,
the US image would soar, and huge regional progress could be made in
living conditions.
Enlightened US policies could soon bring an end to international and
transnational sources of violence and radicalism; domestic sources of
violence in individual countries require separate analysis and treatment in
accordance with local conditions, and, in any case, pose a lesser immediate
problem.

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Only Muslims (i.e., locals) in the end will be able to find solutions to
dealing with Islamic (i.e., local) radicalism.
But the contemporary expression of Islam, for a variety of complex historical
factors, is now often dispirited and unfocused, fighting its own demons, caught
up in its own postcolonial mess, struggling toward its own reformation and
reestablishment of its dignity and independence—all in the face of huge military,
political, and cultural onslaught from the West. Islam’s roots and vision are deep
and broad; an intellectual renaissance can emerge if it is not obstructed by brutal
international geopolitical forces contesting for power, oil, and bases in its midst.
It is a culture of profound intellectual, spiritual, cultural, and social thought.
But it is also a culture currently rubbed raw, best not gratuitously provoked at
this sensitive stage in its development and when it feels under existential threat.
Such assaults against it only heighten its most atavistic and narrow aspects,
sideline impulses for reform and moderation, and cause Muslims to circle the
wagons.
The West must rise to this challenge—but the West is, in fact, quite
schizophrenic in its own behavior. Domestically the West has the best record in
the world today for democratic process, economic well-being, education,
protection of human and minority rights, and a rich panoply of public watchdogs
and institutions to guard those rights. These qualities are admired in the Muslim
world. On the other hand, the power of the West at the international level has for
many years flagrantly abused human rights, individual liberties, and right to life
in its foreign policies and in its conduct of imperial or military campaigns—all
in the name of ideals such as anticommunism, “democratization,” preservation
of “American leadership,” and protection against terrorism. These qualities are
detested in the Muslim world. Muslims have suffered more at the receiving end
of such military campaigns than they have ever gained from US policies. The
West, and especially the all-powerful United States, has a long way to go to
bring its national ideals to bear in its conduct of policy overseas.
The abuses that have rankled the developing world have happened not
because the West is somehow evil; the West has simply possessed the power to
do all those things to others on a global scale. I would be no more happy to see
an unchecked concentration of global power in the hands of others, either:
France, the UK, Germany, China, Russia, or whoever. The fact is the United
States now does possess dominant global power. But monopolies of power are
never healthy in any context. We have domestic checks and balances in our
Constitution, antimonopoly laws to keep any corporation, however excellent,

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from crushing all competition. Similarly, we shouldn’t want to see power
monopolized on the international level either—it’s not good for anybody.
Islam and statecraft are likely to be linked in some way for some period of
time to come. For Muslims, it is a reassurance that values in politics are not
ignored in what has often been a cynical power game. Nor will religion
disappear as a force in international relations anywhere, for better or for worse.
It seems to be part of a human philosophical yearning of the heart to break free
into transcendent realms. But religion linked to statecraft tends to be a poor
combination. It is not a new revelation to note that power and any ideology tend
to corrupt each other. If there was no Islam, there would certainly be other
religions around playing similar roles under similar conditions. With no religions
at all, we would still readily find or create other ideologies to justify the same
acts. Thus, a world without Islam does not markedly change the nature of things.
If we think religion has been a negative force in modern world history,
consider the alternative. Religion couldn’t have done worse than the history of
savage secular violence and unprecedented butchery that dominated the history
of the West in the twentieth century, marked by two world wars, fascism,
Nazism, and communism—none of which had anything to do with religion.
Secular extremism has only offered us worse. The real problem lies in the nature
of human aspirations, good and bad. We in the West will be on a sounder path if
we can de-Islamize our perceptions of regional issues and view them simply as
universal human social and political problems for which we, too, share some
responsibility.

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