Pipes admits that militant Islam is the traditional majority position

An e-mail I sent to Daniel Pipes:

Dear Mr Pipes,

In the article about you at Harvard Magazine, you are quoted giving your familiar view that militant Islam is only a very recent phenomenon and only represents 10 to 15 percent of Muslims, and, of course, that moderate Islam, which represents the majority of Islam, is the solution to militant Islam:

It’s a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution.

You are then quoted talking about the student commencement speaker at Harvard and the Harvard professors who have sought to portray “jihad” as meaning only an interior spiritual struggle:

“But of course,” Pipes erupted in his article, “it is precisely bin Laden, Islamic Jihad, and the jihadists worldwide who define the term [jihad], not a covey of academic apologists. More importantly, the way the jihadists understand the term is in keeping with its usage through fourteen centuries of Islamic history.” [emphasis added.]

And that definition, he continued, to the majority of Muslims meant, and means, “the legal, compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories ruled by Muslims (known in Arabic as dar al-Islam) at the expense of territories ruled by non-Muslims (dar al-harb).” Khaleel Mohammed agrees. “The normative meaning has become war—whether expansionist or defensive,” he writes.

Now, if “the way jihadists understand the term is in keeping with its usage through fourteen centuries of Islamic history,” then jihadism, i.e., militant Islam, has been the norm of Islam for 1400 years, and your notion that militant Islam is a very recent, minority movement within Islam is decisively refuted.

Driving the point home, you discuss the “reformists” who adopted the more moderate, “spiritual,” understanding of jihad:

The reformist assumption that Islam includes or anticipates all that is attractive in Western civilization facilitates the borrowing of new ideas; in a sense, the whole reformist enterprise is designed to disguise the adoption of Western principles. Not acknowledging this source makes [the new ideas] that much more palatable. But dissimulation has a price; by portraying the Qu’ran, the Shari’a [Muslim sacred law], and the Islamic heritage as liberal, violence is done to them. The falseness of this argument dooms it to sterility.

In other words, it’s the moderates, whose project consists of inventing a human, liberal Islam that never was, who are the recent, minority voice within Islam, while the jihadists represent the historic, majoritarian norm of Islam.

However, there is a confusion in the above that needs to be straightened out. It is true that Islamism is a modern movement, as you say, influenced by modern totalitarian ideologies. Traditional Islam has nothing to do with such influences. But at the same time, as Ron Lewenberg writes to me in an e-mail:

Traditional Islam supports Jihad and has a violent messianic strain. Islamists get support from traditional Muslims in fighting the West. There are schools in Islam that are compatible with Islamism, most noticeably the Salafi, Wahabbi, and certain Shia schools. “Moderate Islam” is not traditional Islam. It is Islamized liberalism.

So, to sum up: You right that Islamism is modern and atypical of traditional Islam. But the traditional Islam you hopefully point to as the source of moderation is not moderate but jihadist. The choice therefore is between modern, totalitarianism-influenced Islamism, and traditional, jihadist Islam. There is no moderate Islam in this mix. There are moderate individuals, who suffer in the hells of Islamic societies. But they are not seeking to reform Islam. They are seeking to escape Islam.

Regards,
Lawrence Auster

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 21, 2004 10:29 AM | Send