There has been much written about the rise of Islamism over the last five years but little emphasis on what is behind it and what possibly goes on in the psyches of Islamists. We really have only heard the official version from govenment offices and it merely is based on "They hate us."
I've been reading Martin Kohut's America Against the World: How We are Different and Why We are Disliked and the book gives quite a lot of data behind the phenomenon. However, I wonder if the hatred is not based on moral corruption as we hear through the "timely" videos released by bin Laden and his cohorts but, rather, more like what Amis describes as,
The West isn't being seductive, of course; all the West is being is attractive. But the Islamist's paranoia extends to a kind of thwarted narcissism.
Most immigrant's to the "new world" did not become seduced by the temptations of freedom. Freedom became ingrained into their minds once they tasted its sweetness. It was the reason they came to the United States in the first place. This is in utter opposition to the Islamist fundamentalistic view:
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma - the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. 'Islam', as he frequently reminds us, 'isn't like that.' Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means 'submission' - the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.
In addition, fundamentalist Islamists believe that there is only one means to secure the order that they believe to be the perfect interpretation of the Qur'an
The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million.
The Muslim world is responsible for much of what we know as civilization today. As Amis points out, if it were not for the Muslims the Renaissance would never have happened. The enlightment they provided led to many new discoveries. As an example, the concept of zero in mathematics is an Islamic scholar invention. Of course, this enlightment happened through a spreading of Islam through not only immigration but also from invasions both physical and mental. Western history is full of the very same actions over the centuries.
What happened in the 20th century was a psychological shift that Amis traces back to, of all places, Greeley, Colorado. Briefly, it refers to the exact same thing happening in the U.S. today - conflict between moderates and fundamentalists.
Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.
Amis concludes two very important premises:
1.
All religions are violent; and all ideologies are violent. Even Westernism, so impeccably bland, has violence glinting within it. This is because any belief system involves a degree of illusion, and therefore cannot be defended by mind alone. When challenged, or affronted, the believer's response is hormonal; and the subsequent collision will be one between a brain and a cat's cradle of glands.
2.
For quite a time I have felt that Islamism was trying to poison the world. Here was a sign that the poison might take - might mutate, like bird flu. Islam, as I said, is a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire. But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.
we can only hope...
[Click here or on the post's title to read Martin Amis' article in its entirety.]
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