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.