Gerecht’s wild theory of how to reform the Muslim world

A reader has been researching Reuel (though I still don’t know how to pronounce that name) Marc Gerecht and came up with an interview with him at the American Enterprise Institute website in December 2004 (Gerecht is a fellow at AEI). I’ve read very little of Gerecht in the past because I have found him to be a very poor writer. But this interview is illuminating—it turns out that Gerecht has a whole new theory about what to do about Islam. Instead of just describing it, let’s lead into it step by step. Gerecht tells the interviewer:

The Arab world has not yet tried democracy, but Muslims are beginning to see the appeal of a political system where the people may periodically check the power of an abusive state. For instance, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—mothership of Sunni fundamentalism and hardly a repository of liberal thought—has thrown its support behind greater popular participation in Egyptian government.

Gerecht is interpreting the Muslim Brotherhood’s support for greater popular participation in the Egyptian government as evidence of support for democracy in the Muslim world. But obviously the Egyptian Brotherhood supports greater popular participation because they see that as the way for them to gain power, not to advance Muslim democracy. Doesn’t Gerecht see this? Fortunately for us, the interviewer has the same question:

Q: … don’t the fundamentalists just want to take over the government and establish their own religious dictatorship?

A: They may want that. It’s impossible to know for sure until you have elections…. Elections introduce the idea of popular sovereignty and make it competitive with, if not superior to, the Holy Law. Elections thereby force fundamentalists—who are hardly a monolithic bloc—to compete against each other and against others of a more liberal and secular stripe. Intellectually, the age of dictatorship is dead in the Muslim Middle East.

So Gerecht thinks that even if Muslim radicals participate in elections solely in order to gain power for themselves and not for the sake of supporting popular rule, the mere fact of holding elections will create its own set of forces leading to intellectual and political competition, greater pluralism, and so on. This is Gerecht’s too-clever-by-half thesis that Daniel Pipes criticized yesterday at FrontPage Magazine. That is, while Pipes says that the solution to radical Islam is moderate Islam, Gerecht says that the solution to radical Islam is radical Islam.

Then there’s this exchange:

Q: Even so, wouldn’t we be better off working with pro-American, pro-democratic Muslim moderates?

A: No. Bin Ladenism grew from contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, and only the fundamentalists can defeat bin Ladenism. Muslim “moderates” can’t defeat bin Ladenism since they don’t speak to the same audience with the same language and passions. Pro-American dictators also cannot defeat bin Ladenism since they have been an important part of the equation that gave us bin Ladenism. Many American liberals and neoconservatives think that you somehow get to have Thomas Jefferson in the Middle East without first having Martin Luther. The fundamentalists—not the “moderates” who are already too evolved—will produce the Muslim Martin Luther. The “moderates” are essentially like us, which is to say they are more or less irrelevant. They are not part of the Muslim mainstream. They are not competitive in most Middle Eastern intellectual circles, which are increasingly dominated by fundamentalists.

Curiously, Gerecht is making the same criticism of Pipes’s position that I have made—that the moderate Muslims are either non-existent or politically irrelevant—and then he takes that premise in the opposite direction from me. My argument is: Since moderate Islam is not the solution to radical Islam, there is no possible solution within Islam to radical Islam. The West simply must defend itself from Islam, and not try to construct some reformed version of Islam. Gerecht’s argument is: Since moderate Islam is not the solution to radical Islam, radical Islam itself must be the solution. On the face of it, this sounds like a transparently absurd ploy to keep alive the fading hope that the West can somehow socially engineer the Muslim Mideast into a safer, freer, more peaceful condition. Yet, as nuts as Gerecht’s policy seems, we suddenly realize to our dismay that his policy is also President Bush’s policy, what with his administration’s recent appalling endorsement of Hezbollah political participation in Lebanon, its opening to Hamas, and so on. It’s quite interesting to learn that there is an intellectual theory behind the administration’s shocking turnabout.

To me, what this demonstrates at bottom is the abysmal folly of our getting involved at all in the internal politics of Muslim societies. All it accomplishes is to confuse and corrupt us more and more, to the point where, as now, our leaders are talking about helping America’s terrorist enemies become legitimate actors in Mideast politics. Gerecht’s outlandish argument seems like the last desperate effort by the neoconservatives to save their democratist dream.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 22, 2005 02:08 AM | Send