WWRN

Whither the violent branch of Islamic fundamentalism? The question has a new urgency now that the Taliban appear to have been routed, the Islamic militants of Pakistan have been unable to mount a revolution against President Pervez Musharraf’s regime, and the Islamic world has not, in fact, rallied to Osama bin Laden’s call for a global jihad against the West. There is also evidence of slow but gradual progress in the campaign to demolish the transnational terrorist cells of Al-Qaeda and other Islamist networks. And, perhaps most important, a host of Muslim religious scholars from various parts of the Islamic world have disowned and denounced bin Laden

WHATEVER THE FATE of bin Laden himself, the future strength of the movement he represents depends as much on the next phases of the Western “war on terrorism” as it does on what bin Laden, or any other Muslim extremist leader, may say or do. If the West, and in particular the United States, is shrewd enough to recognize, acknowledge and set about remedying the justifiable grievances that bin Laden and other Muslim ideologues have articulated, the fate of the violent wing of Islamic fundamentalism may well be in the hands of its opponents.

The sources of popular support for extremism, that is, will evaporate only if and when governments in the Islamic world and elsewhere become responsive to the legitimate demands of justice.
What the Islamic world needs desperately is a viable alternative to violent Islamic fundamentalism. During the eighty-year “period of humiliation” (following the defeat of the Ottoman empire and the abolishment of the caliphate-the ruling seat of Islam), to which bin Laden has repeatedly referred, Islamic fundamentalism has increasingly taken root in popular circles within much of the Arab world as ordinary Muslims have recognized the elements of truth in the fundamentalist critique.
In the wake of the Ottoman defeat and the secularization of Turkey, Islamic fundamentalists complain that the colonizing Western powers (Great Britain and France, in particular, succeeded by the United States) established both a visible military and commercial presence in the Middle East, accompanied by a far more insidious moral and cultural presence via the export and marketing of American goods and “self-indulgent, promiscuous and godless” ways of life. Furthermore, they claim that U.S. policy toward the Middle East and the broader Islamic world has transparently served the narrow interests of an affluent and comfortable American public, which consumes a grossly disproportionate percentage of natural resources (oil-based products in particular) while the mass of humanity in the countries being exploited for their oil live in poverty.
Muslim lives and livelihoods, in this view, are routinely sacrificed to support luxurious American lifestyles. The U.S. is a great hypocrite, espousing democracy and freedom in its rhetoric, while providing critical financial and military support to anti-democratic and repressive regimes like those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where the voice of the Muslim people is silenced.
Meanwhile, the traditional religious leaders of the Islamic world have been co-opted by dictatorial and compromising rulers such as Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, or the monarchy of Saudi Arabia. These traditional Muslim religious leaders (Shaykhs), as a result, have been marginalized and de-legitimated in many circles of the Islamic world, leaving the field open to the religiously unschooled but disgruntled ‘lay’ men, many of whom come from educational backgrounds in engineering, applied science, or business. Bin Laden, for example, has taken to referring to himself as Shaykh Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden, as he did in the “fatwa” he issued on 23 February 1998, announcing his legal “ruling” that every Muslim now has the individual duty to “kill the Americans and their allies-civilians and military.”
The Islamic world, in short, is in dire need of ardent and uncompromised but non-violent religious leaders who will reclaim the mosques, madrasas (theological colleges) and popular educational institutions which have been hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists. Such leaders, even today, are attempting to restore the rule of Islamic law in the minds and hearts of the young men who would otherwise find fundamentalism to be the only available-and potentially effective-response to injustices perpetrated against Muslims. But their voices are drowned out by radicals such as bin Laden, who justify their deadly jihad by pointing to the U.S. military presence in the Holy Land of Mecca (Saudi Arabia), the sanctions against Iraq, the support for the Zionist state of Israel, and the grinding poverty of millions of Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and elsewhere.

The United States is not the perpetrator of every injustice or act of violence that bedevils the lives of Muslims in woefully underdeveloped and non-democratic countries. But if the United States and its European partners want to dry up the wells of Islamic radicalism, they will enter into a new type of alliance with the governments-and the peoples-of the Middle East. Such an alliance will require the commitment of a significant portion of the West’s awesome financial resources, military might, and, most of all, the talent and industry of its people. It must not be a paternalistic relationship, but a genuine collaboration that provides resources for the building of the institutions of civil society, including Muslim educational and cultural institutions. The United States, moreover, must demand more of states such as Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia in terms of genuine democratic or liberal reforms-not the window-dressing that has been the practice of the past.
Islamic fundamentalism has a bright future in the absence of such efforts. If the “war against terrorism” turns out to be merely another war to preserve American/Western supremacy and advantage, Islamic fundamentalism will prove to be a hydra: Cut off one head and four more will grow in its place. The rhetoric of Islamic fundamentalism, which mixes authentic calls for justice with openly un-Islamic calls for deadly violence, will be seen as hollow and, indeed, sinful only if those in the West begins to take seriously its responsibility for people who live outside their national borders, but whose resources they routinely consume.

R. Scott Appleby is co-editor of “The Fundamentalism Project,” a five-part study of religious fundamentalism. He is a Professor of History and director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.