It has taken four years for the dust in lower Manhattan to clear, and now it appears we can see that it was not so much an Axis of Evil but an Axis of Islam we are facing — a worldwide force with a millenium of warfare behind it. Whether we choose to see ourselves at war with Islam is in a sense irrelevant, since Islam sees itself at war with us. Efraim Karsh of the University of London gives us 1400 years of history in a wonderful WSJ piece (as well as in Commentary). Let’s begin at the beginning:

[T]he Islamists are perfectly serious, and know what they are doing. Their rhetoric has a millennial warrant, both in doctrine and in fact, and taps into a deep undercurrent that has characterized the political culture of Islam from the beginning. Though tempered and qualified in different places and at different times, the Islamic longing for unfettered suzerainty has never disappeared, and has resurfaced in our own day with a vengeance. It goes by the name of empire.

“I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’ ” With these farewell words, the prophet Muhammad summed up the international vision of the faith he brought to the world. As a universal religion, Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal, it is incumbent on all free, male, adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising “struggle in the path of Allah,” or jihad. As the 14th-century historian and philosopher Abdel Rahman ibn Khaldun wrote, “In the Muslim community, the jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Islamic mission and the obligation [to convert] everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”

Hence, jihad is global and non-stop, and comes from the universalism of Islam. It is an error of the most serious sort by the fatuous, negotiation-obsessed elites of the West to think that the right amount of talking will turn the tide against men ideologically bred to aggression:

The legacy of this imperial experience is not difficult to discern in today’s Islamic world. Physical force has remained the main if not the sole instrument of political discourse in the Middle East. Throughout the region, absolute leaders still supersede political institutions, and citizenship is largely synonymous with submission; power is often concentrated in the hands of small, oppressive minorities; religious, ethnic, and tribal conflicts abound; and the overriding preoccupation of sovereigns is with their own survival.

At the domestic level, these circumstances have resulted in the world’s most illiberal polities. Political dissent is dealt with by repression, and ethnic and religious differences are settled by internecine strife and murder. One need only mention, among many instances, Syria’s massacre of 20,000 of its Muslim activists in the early 1980’s, or the brutal treatment of Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or the genocidal campaign now being conducted in Darfur by the government of Sudan and its allied militias. As for foreign policy in the Middle East, it too has been pursued by means of crude force, ranging from terrorism and subversion to outright aggression, with examples too numerous and familiar to cite.

We think that the brutality of sharia governments is intrinsic to the powerful, but psychologically stunted, view of human nature discussed below. As such, it is not the province of some rougue bands of extremists. Therefore, it is yet another mistake — one which the Bush administration and the elites of the West have publicly pretended they believe — to think that the imperial yearning of Muslims is confined to some fringe group:

From Muhammad to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of an often astonishing imperial aggressiveness and, no less important, of never quiescent imperial dreams. Even as these dreams have repeatedly frustrated any possibility for the peaceful social and political development of the Arab-Muslim world, they have given rise to no less repeated fantasies of revenge and restoration and to murderous efforts to transform fantasy into fact. If, today, America is reviled in the Muslim world, it is not because of its specific policies but because, as the preeminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of regaining, in Zawahiri’s words, the “lost glory” of the caliphate.

Nor is the vision confined to a tiny extremist fringe. This we saw in the overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, in the admiring evocations of bin Laden’s murderous acts during the crisis over the Danish cartoons, and in such recent findings as the poll indicating significant reservoirs of sympathy among Muslims in Britain for the “feelings and motives” of the suicide bombers who attacked London last July. In the historical imagination of many Muslims and Arabs, bin Laden represents nothing short of the new incarnation of Saladin, defeater of the Crusaders and conqueror of Jerusalem. In this sense, the House of Islam’s war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.

One idea we were exploring in the piece below is this: in dealing with the Islamic world, we are dealing with many people who are using a different playbook of what it means to be a man, to be religious, and to have a successful life. Indeed, Islam contains a different model of human nature than the West in its concept of the self. This is one reason that it is extraordinarily dangeous to assume that powerful Islamic leaders think like us or have the same objectives. Many of them do not, but are clever and resourceful and are more than happy to delude the gullible, and to allow the West to forget the ways of war and manliness and defeat itself.

One of the dumbest things ever said by a smart American was said by John Adams: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” Each generation must study war anew, for aggressive, ruthless and utterly motivated men of violence will arise in each generation. We would do well to stop pussy-footing around.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 2:13 pm and is filed under General, Religion, War, art, culture, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.