BEWARE OF RELIGIOUS STALINISTS
Artículo de Mortimer B. Zuckerman en U.S. News &
World Report ¡22-3-1993!
Por su interés y relevancia,
he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L.
B.-B.)
The seven leaders of the Muslim
Brotherhood, meeting with a group of journalists in Amman, Jordan, seemed
reasonable at first. Then we heard the message. Their holy obligation,
they told us, is to recover all the land once under Muslim rule. The only
solution to the Palestinian problem is to destroy Israel through jihad, a holy
war. Why not then, they were asked, go further afield--to Spain and to India
where Muslim rule once prevailed? ``One step at a time,'' they responded.
Israel, it became clear, is not merely an occupier of land but a symbol of the
Western values that these religious Stalinists seek to put to the sword.
We were face to face with the fanaticism that seems the polar opposite of the
Western ideal's sanctity for individual life. Is it any wonder that we have
failed to understand the zealot's capacity for blind terror? We have
consistently failed to appreciate--even after the bombings of U.S. targets in
Lebanon--the malign power of Muslim fundamentalism. In the name of ancient
injunctions to acquire honor or wipe out shame, these radicals will condone
murder or brutality as just, honorable or manly. Innocent Americans are killed
at the World Trade Center, Jews and Palestinians are murdered by Hamas in the
West Bank. These are no mere novelties of the '90s. The vast majority of Muslims
are neither radical nor violent, but Islam's militant strain is on the verge of
replacing communism as the principal opponent of Western liberal democracy and
the values it enshrines.
The origins of this baleful force are in part religious. In the secularized
societies of the West, we separate religion and politics. In most of the Muslim
world, politics is religion and religion is politics. Militant Muslims feel that
foreign ideologies, such as liberalism, socialism and nationalism--led by Muslim
apostates and, even worse, by infidels--have caused Muslims to forsake the
God-given law of the Koran and the religious life vouchsafed to them.
Then there are the grievances of the past. A Muslim world dominant for a
thousand years was surpassed by the West, whose systems proved more powerful in
organization, science, industry and military technology. This domination bred a
deep resentment and sense of powerlessness. The leading Islamic historian,
Bernard Lewis, has pointed out that the Muslim has suffered successive stages of
defeat: first, his loss of domination of others; then, the undermining of his
authority in his own country through an invasion of foreign ideas, laws and ways
of life, sometimes even resulting in foreign rule. These changes would have been
stressful enough if Muslim governments had been wise and just; but many were
corrupt. Repression and poverty became the lot of their subjects. On top of all
this, the traditional Muslim has had to contend with the challenge to the
mastery in his own home from the emancipation of women and a rebellion of
children. For many it has been too much.
One can understand why Muslim fundamentalists should want to purify Islamic
society by returning to its origins in the hope that Muhammad's message,
unchanged by time and thought, dress and education, would provide the answers
today as it did in the golden era. One can understand why this might appeal to
people frustrated by the failure of their own systems and their leaders. But in
the Muslim world, this nostalgia has smoothed the way for something no Western
society has endured--the radicalism of ``God's fanatics'' whose doctrines
guarantee backwardness and self-destruction and a Manichaean war between the
``good'' Muslim world and the ``evil'' West.
This is what the crisis in the Middle East is fundamentally all about. Now not
only Israel but the whole West faces the menace of random violence and the
crimes that fanaticism can produce. In the Koran, Satan is the adversary,
enticing mankind away from the true faith. That is why the Ayatollah Khomeini
called America ``the Great Satan.'' We are in the front line of a struggle that
goes back hundreds of years, the principal obstacle to the extremists' desire to
drive nefarious Western values into the sea, just as they once did with the
Crusaders.
The gulf war was just one paragraph in the long conflict between the West and
radical Islam; the World Trade Center bombing, just a sentence. We are in for a
long struggle not amenable to reasoned dialogue. We will need to nurture our own
faith and resolution.