Posted by
Jared Mummaw on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 1:44:15 AM
In an article published recently on Townhall.com, conservative author Dinesh D’Souza elaborates on a theme he ventured in his recent book The Enemy at Home, that Muslims as a whole are favorably disposed to liberal democracy, but are put off by the attendant debauchery of the same. For D’Souza, author of the excellent Illiberal Education and The End of Racism, Muslim extremism is not rooted in any great ideological rift between the Islamic world as it currently stands and the post-Enlightenment West. Rather, Muslim terrorism is a more particular and severe form of a general moral critique, one which D’Souza sees as somewhat justified.
This is not to say that D’Souza approves of terrorism; of course, he does not. D’Souza’s point is that the freedoms that we in the West enjoy appear, to Muslims, to have devolved into decadence. This, he feels, is the heart of the terrorists’ appeal; that they will restore a moral golden age and end the threat that Brittney Spears poses to the Dar al-Islam. In this sense, the avant-garde of western libertinism- the cultural left, are allies of al-Qaeda, in that they create the conditions which bin Laden points to when it is time to mobilize the faithful.
The article is somewhat confused. D’Souza writes with some anger of Victor Davis Hanson and Scott Johnson, accusing them of stereotyping Muslims, and of having no direct knowledge of the Islamic world- “Only pundits who have no exposure to Muslim countries, Muslim history and Muslim people can go on like this.” But if D’Souza himself has any direct experience of Muslim culture, he does not reference it. Rather, he speculates on general trends in popular opinion in Muslim countries after having just begun reading Dalia Mogahed and John Esposito's Who Speaks for Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think. He describes Esposito as “one of the most respected American authorities on Islam,” which may well be true, but inasmuch as D’Souza is receiving secondhand knowledge from a book he has thusfar only partially read, he could perhaps be more circumspect regarding Hanson and Johnson (“ideologues”). Nor does he bother to actually report on what the findings of the two surveys he cites, the Gallup World Poll and the World Values Survey. They tend to back up his position, the WVS more so than Gallup, but to imply as he does that he is waiting to discover his conclusions in a book when he could easily have looked up these documents on the internet is strange.
D’Souza is heartened by the fact that these polls (so he hopes) report widespread support for democracy. For him, this indicates an appreciation for the values of classical liberalism, as distinguished from its modern, left-oriented incarnation. This “liberalism is reflected in such principles as the right to vote, to assemble freely, to debate issues, to trade with others, to practice one’s religion, political and religious toleration, and so on.”
This purported eagerness to enfranchise and engage the public in good governance along Western lines is at the heart of D’Souza’s argument. Until the September 11 attacks, there was a paucity of research indicating exactly what that would mean in real terms. The argument has since generally broken down along the lines of whether or not Islam and democracy are compatible. Often left unasked, save by Aristotle, is whether or not democracy and freedom are inherently linked. That there could be one without the other is certainly posible. Democracy is after all rule by the people; it would seem necessary to enquire as to the character of the poplace in order to acertain the character of this form of government in its applied state. D'Souza writes:
Now we are in a better position to understand Islamic attitudes regarding the West. The vast majority of Muslims worldwide embrace Liberalism 1 while rejecting Liberalism 2. They are generally comfortable with classical liberalism while abhorring the tenets of modern liberalism. And by equating America with such things as blasphemy, pornography, prostitution and homosexuality, the radical Muslims appeal to ordinary Muslims to join their cause in a battle against the Great Satan.
The polls which D’Souza references do not categorically support such a rosy assesment. What is one to make of the fact that according to Gallup, 94% of Egyptians would introduce freedom of speech, but 66% believe that Sharia must be the exclusive legal system, and a further 24% percent would insist on Islamic religious law but allow some additional stipulations. Currently, Egypt is ruled by a secular regime that supresses both freedom of speech and the militant religious groups who would institute Sharia. It would seem that those Egyptians polled would prefer a revese of the status quo. It is easy to find more troubling research. Another poll, World Public Opinion, run by the University of Maryland, states catagorically that whatever Muslims may think about democracy, “large majorities approve of many of al Qaeda’s principal goals.”
The WPO states that “only” 30% of respondants have a positive view of bin Laden (more had mixed feelings), which is apparently meant to be reasuring. Perhaps the rest simply felt him a failure, given that on “average less than one in four believes al Qaeda was responsible for September 11th attacks.” Nevertheless, al Qaeda enjoys greater popularity in the Islamic world than the U.S. Congress among Americans. Their readiness to make expedient deals nonwithstanding, al Qaeda and its ideological bretheren are the resolute foes of the secular dictatorships that are the norm in Muslim countries. The call for democracy is on some level a longing for responsiveness in government, from a people whose voice is often ignored.
As D’Souza would have it if Bashar Assad and Hosni Mubarrak were gone, Muslims, given the choice, would leap to “embrace” Adam Smith and John Locke. Nothing in any of these polls indicates that. Nor, for that matter, is it at all evident that Muslims would implement religious freedom along with democracy. No Muslim country today allows anything like free exercise as it exists in the West, nor would this be compatible with the introduction of absolute Sharia law favored by majorites in many of the countries polled.
D’Souza clearly feels that those who claim that Islam is incompatible with democracy are on some level bigots. He dearly wants to see in the Islamic world evidence of a universal longing for freedom, of the type that came into being in the West as a result of the Enlightenment. But this in itself is a sort of prejudice, a type of projection that sees the world of Sharia as a waystation on the road to the Bill of Rights. For D’Souza, conservative Muslims are conservative Republicans waiting to happen. Both are disgusted by cultural decay, both are therefore natural allies.
It never seems to occur to D’Souza that those same Muslims could have a valid and comprehensive critique of Western institutions as well as Western mores. Or that bin Laden and his ilk trace our degeneracy to the fact that we “allow what Allah has forbidden” simply by being Christian. D'Souza explains:
The problem for Muslims is not Christianity or Judaism. In fact, Islam sees itself as incorporating both in much the same way that Christianity sees itself as incorporating Judaism. Moses and Christ are considered prophets in Islam. If you read the propaganda of the radical Muslims, they almost never condemn the West for being a Christian society. They typically describe the West as an atheist and immoral society. Bin Laden has called America “the leading power of the pagans and unbelievers.
In his “Declaration of War,” bin Laden specifically states that it was the fact that “the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Jewish-Christian alliance and their collaborators” which led to his Jihad. He also refers to this enemy as “Jews and Crusaders.” His enemies “wear the cross,” and their crime is their presence in Saudi Arabia, not the moral decay of their respective homelands.
It would be a far better situation if militant Islam was motivated by the same concerns that inform Western cultural conservativism. But their challenge is not moral, but ideological. Bin Laden has a very clear idea of the world he would like to live in, and so do the people who sympathize with him, in whatever degree. Wishful thinking and special pleading cannot whitewash the very real need to engage groups like al Qaeda on both a military and a philosophical level. They are the conscious enemies of liberal democracy, not its misguided advocates. They would definitely do something about Brittney Spears. But they would also do something about Dinesh D’Souza.