Chapter 10

Resistance and Jihad

Poverty, occupation, lost grandeur, and other grievances—Islam and violence—“Islam is peace”—Moderate Muslims—Tariq Ramadan and double language—Resistance and jihad

Islam was down for a very long time, but the world is taking notice of it now. The main thing people are taking notice of is the terrorism committed in its name, much of it in Europe. Long before September 11, the Arab world had been the main source of terrorist violence touching Europe, outside of England and Spain. But something changed between the late summer of 1972, when Palestinian terrorists murdered seventeen Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich, and Christmas Eve 1994. That night, French special forces at Marseille’s airport overwhelmed and killed four members of Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group who had hijacked Air France flight 8969, killing several passengers. The terrorists had planned to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower.

In the interim, Islam had become not just the cultural sphere out of which terrorism came but the cause in the name of which it was committed. It was a cause that appealed to a growing number of European Muslims. Khaled Kelkal, a train bomber from Lyon, carried out a string of murderous attacks in 1995. Safir Bghouia, shouting that he was a “son of Allah” and firing machine guns and shoulder-launched rockets, made a deadly assault on police and the mayor’s office in his hometown of Béziers, France, the week before the September 11 attacks. Swept up in the romance of Islamist rebellion, European Muslims who had appeared fully assimilated—like Mohammed Bouyeri and Mohammed Sidique Khan—re-defected to their ancestral identities.

Such episodes pose an obvious problem for politicians. On one hand, citizens of every Western European country consistently put terrorism near the top of their lists of worries; on the other, Europe continues to grow more and more Muslim, both through immigration and natural increase. The consensus view was summed up by a senior politician in the summer of 2006: “The first thing that has to be done, is to keep migration separate from terrorism.”

But this is a wish trying to pass itself off as an analysis. As the journalist Lawrence Wright wrote in his authoritative study of al-Qaeda:

What the recruits tended to have in common—besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills—was displacement. Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared. They were Algerians living in expatriate enclaves in France, Moroccans in Spain, or Yemenis in Saudi Arabia.…Islam provided the element of commonality. It was more than a faith—it was an identity.

Migration, in fact, has a lot to do with terrorism. That is part of what makes terrorism so difficult to fight.

Poverty, occupation, lost grandeur, and other grievances

What “causes” terrorism? It is natural to assume that terrorism, like war, is a continuation of politics by other means, that there must be some political grievance at the core of it. The bloody Madrid train bombings of March 2004, unleashed by al-Qaeda-linked Moroccans living in Spain, are the best piece of evidence for this Clausewitzian view, since: 1) al-Qaeda opposed Spanish participation in the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq; 2) so did more than 90 percent of Spaniards; 3) the Socialist candidate José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero campaigned against the Iraq war; and 4) the bombings altered the result of an election that polls had shown him certain to lose.

The argument that Zapatero owed his victory not to the bombings but to the Popular Party’s mishandling of public information in their wake is widespread in Spain. It is alleged that the Popular government of José María Aznar (not the Popular candidate Mariano Rajoy) tried to deceive the country into believing that Basque terrorists of the ETA, rather than al-Qaeda, had been behind the bombings. A full discussion of this argument is beyond the scope of this book, since it requires a precise timeline of the seventy-two hours between the bombing on March 11 and the election on March 14, and a detailed knowledge of Spanish political personalities, police bureaucracies, and military procedures.

But the explanation is not convincing. Surveillance of the ETA led Spanish intelligence officials to fear a bombing on the eve of the elections. The train bombers procured their explosives through ETA channels. And Socialist politicians were as “certain” as Popular ones that the ETA had authored the bombings well after they had taken place. This allegation of Popular Party mendacity probably owes its currency to the psychological requirements of Spain’s fledgling democracy. Spaniards needed to believe, more than most Europeans would have, that their government was brought to power through domestic Spanish deliberations and not through the armed intercession of a foreign adversary. On taking power, Zapatero immediately ordered his country’s troops out of Iraq, repudiating Spain’s alliance with the United States and launching in its place what he calls an “alliance of civilizations” with Islam.

Whether or not the Spanish bombings were a direct result of its Iraq policy, Spain’s capitulation by referendum is likely to be the last of its kind for a long while, for pragmatic reasons. There is no longer a terrorist negotiating partner that can issue clear demands and credibly offer a quid pro quo—the quid being, invariably, a halt to terrorism. On September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden was at least conceivably such a negotiating partner. That is, he enjoyed prestige in the Muslim world, commanded the largest and most effective body of terrorists, made demands, and threatened violence if those demands were not met.

But that command structure has been largely decapitated by the war on terror, and al-Qaeda is now less a command structure than an ideology aimed at wreaking a maximum of destruction on what Islamist propaganda calls the “alliance of Jews and crusaders.” There is no course the West can follow to defuse terrorist grievances, because those grievances are numerous and protean. It is not even possible to say whether the basic gripe of al-Qaeda and kindred organizations is geostrategic, metaphysical, or sociological. Does it concern “occupation” in Muslim lands, whether in the form of U.S. military bases or of Muslim governments that European Muslims happen not to approve of? (If so, it is strange for Muslims to wish to bomb the European countries of which so many of their coreligionists are citizens.) Is it about something vaguer, such as the often-adduced “lament for past grandeur” diagnosed in the Muslim world? (If so, it is bizarre that the European lament for past grandeur should result in the exact opposite comportment—a tendency toward pacifism.)

It is much more difficult to pinpoint the political grievance behind the suicide bombings in London’s transport network in July 2005. These were carried out by home-grown terrorists who may have been mere imitators of al-Qaeda but may have received al-Qaeda training. Certainly they disapproved of Britain’s Iraq policy. But Iraq was only one of many Muslim grievances that were mentioned in Mohammed Sidique Khan’s suicide video, and it was not the one mentioned most prominently. Polling numbers, as we have noted, suggest that Britain’s involvement in the occupation of Afghanistan is sufficient to win considerable sympathy for terrorism among its Muslim population. So is any support for Israel. So, in many cases, is the sense that Muslims are second-class citizens in Europe. Germany’s role as the founder and the standard bearer of the European anti-Iraq coalition did not spare it an attempt by three terrorists in the city of Ulm to set off a bomb made of three-quarters of a ton of highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide in September 2007. At that time, the state of Baden-Württemberg alone had identified hundreds of suspected potential terrorists.

Lacking a clear sense of what Islamist terrorists are so fired up about, countries have worked by wild guesses and preconceptions to preempt any complaint that might conceivably arise in any irate Muslim individual’s head. A top-level interagency paper prepared for Tony Blair in early 2004 found that “less than 1 percent” of British Muslims were engaged in terrorism in some way, at home or abroad. (One should hope so. One percent would be about 16,000 people.) An analysis from Britain’s Department for Work and Pensions, part of the same package of studies, said: “The key to engaging this group [Muslims] in a positive way is, obviously, by reducing discrimination and promoting integration.” That use of “obviously” is telling. Europeans almost instinctually reach for depraved-on-accounta-I’m-deprived explanations of terrorism and, for that matter, any shortcomings in Muslim communities. Even two of the most judicious observers of the situation of Muslims in France, Laurence and Vaïsse, have a ready-made disclaimer for the high rate of incarceration among French Muslims. “As a result of the alienation and desperation stemming from such socio-economic handicaps,” they write, “persons of Muslim origin constitute a majority of the French prison population.”

There is something condescending about assuming that the agenda of young Muslims will be determined by the actions of non-Muslims. If Muslims are like other people they will tend to build their ideologies out of their own values and aspirations, rather than other people’s. Over recent decades Western attitudes toward the rest of the world have swung wildly, from colonial arrogance to hand-wringing self-detestation. Yet the animus of Muslim radicals against the West has been surprisingly constant. As noted earlier, the anti-Western rhetoric of today’s “religious fanatics” is generally not distinguishable from that of yesterday’s “godless nationalists.” Terrorism is only one face of Muslim self-assertion in recent decades, the self-assertion not just of a religion but of a people.

The German social scientist and genocide researcher Gunnar Heinsohn argues that the violent acts of young men may have nothing to do with any ideological vision. Demography is a more likely spur to murder. Men between the ages of fifteen and thirty are the most violent part of any society. A society with an overload of young men due to rapid population growth—a “youth bulge,” as Heinsohn calls it—is prone to trouble.

In a youth-bulge society there are not enough positions to provide the next generation of men with prestige and standing. Envy against older, inheriting brothers is unleashed. So is ambition. Military heroism presents itself as a time-honored way for a second or third or (as in Osama bin Laden’s case) eighteenth son to wrest a position of respectability from an otherwise indifferent society. By Heinsohn’s calculation, violence is almost inevitable when fifteen- to thirty-year-olds make up more than 30 percent of the male population—as they do in most of the Muslim world. There are sixty-seven countries with youth bulges now and sixty of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing. Heinsohn’s theory does not describe the Muslim youth of Europe, necessarily, but it does describe a lot of the movements around the world that some European Muslims sympathize with.

Heinsohn noted that if Germany had had the same rate of population growth as Gaza (9 children per woman) since the 1960s, it would now have 550 million people, including 80 million young men aged fifteen to thirty. “Do you think these 80 million young Germans would be ten times as pacifist as the 7 million we have today?” he provocatively asked in a German-language newspaper. “Or is it not much more likely that they would be throwing bombs in Prague and Gdansk and Wroclaw and—just like the Palestinians—saying: ’This is our land, and it was taken from us for historical reasons that we had nothing to do with’?”

Islam and violence

If you followed this argument to its logical endpoint, then the “causes” in the name of which much Islamist violence is committed would be immaterial; the violence would simply be about itself. That is roughly what the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid discovered when he studied the most hardened and dedicated jihadists, those who went to wage jihad in Afghanistan in the 1990s. “The young men who trained in these camps,” Rashid wrote, “were not educated in the Islamic schools called madrassas and they were inspired less by extremist Islamic ideology than by their desires to see the world, handle weapons, and have a youthful adventure.” The religion of Islam, the focus of so much contemporary strategic discussion, looks like a red herring in such cases, a convenient rationalization for violent people who want to think of themselves as something more than conventional criminals. While there is a clash of civilizations, it is not necessarily a civilizational clash.

Yet we should hesitate before discarding Islam as an explanation. Whatever terrorist violence is about, Islam is what terrorists say it is about. We can grant that customs, not Islam itself, create the biggest domestic problems in the Muslim confrontation with the West, from honor killing to female circumcision. But jihadist terrorism is different. Osama bin Laden is not fighting for Hadhrami folkways that risk being swept away in a wave of thoughtless globalization. He is fighting for Islam. Certainly there are other ways of living Islam than his. But we know enough now about Osama bin Laden’s life—about his long hours of study in after-school programs, about his devotion to Islam not just as a loud terrorist leader but also as a shy young man—to know that he is living out the commands of Islam as he sincerely understands them. Muslims around the world, including thousands in Europe, have shown themselves willing to follow his path.

Of course, anyone can invoke religion when taking up arms. The question is whether the violence of Islam at this moment is something that comes from a passing conjuncture or from the very depths of Islam itself. Here, views differ. The British sociologist of religion David Martin, asked whether Islam was a religion of peace, replied, “Well, it seeks peace, but on its own terms.” He cited similar observations made by the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who called Islam a fine religion, but one that places a high premium on victory. To some of those who see the Koran as a source of violence, this rivalrous strain in the Koran is what sets its incitements apart from those found in both Judaism and Christianity (from Deuteronomy 18:20 to Acts 3:22–23).

To others, there is a difference in the ethical style of Islam that makes its adherents quicker to resort to violence than the adherents of traditional Christianity. One often-adduced difference is Islam’s lack of a concept of original sin. In sura 14:22 of the Koran, for instance, Satan allows he has no real power over man. The novelist Salman Rushdie has been a forceful proponent of this view: “The Western-Christian worldview deals with the issues of guilt and salvation, a conception that is completely unimportant in the East because there is no original sin and no savior. Instead, great importance is given to ‘honor.’ I consider that to be problematic.”

The Israeli diplomat Mordechay Lewy put the same point somewhat differently in a classic 2003 article on the subject in which he distinguished between Christianity, which he called a “guilt culture,” and Islam, which he called a “blame culture.” According to Lewy, “In the open or undeclared conflict between the two cultures, the West cannot act freely, by reason of its self-imposed moral constraints. This self-restraint is not honored by the blame-attributing culture of the East, but is instead taken for weakness.” Since such matters are decided deep in the consciences of individual worshippers, they are beyond the scope (or competence) of this book. They are mentioned here only to lay out the contours of an ongoing argument, not to intervene in it.

Two peculiar things, however, should be noted about the way Islam has historically interacted with politics, because they concern Europeans’ deepest political fears about Islam. First, Islam has sharia, a code that regulates all areas of social conduct, varied and open to interpretation though sharia may be. Second, Islamic cultures have reliably produced authoritarian regimes—so reliably, in fact, that when well-meaning scholars want to adduce evidence for Islam’s openness to reinterpretation and rational debate, they generally cast back to the very short-lived innovations of the Mu’tazilites in the ninth century. That non-Muslims think of Islam as the authoritarian religion par excellence is the source of much misunderstanding with Muslims, who argue—correctly—that it is a radically egalitarian religion. In theory, it should be a radically free one. It envisions no religious hierarchy and, strictly speaking, has no clergy. Perhaps since Islam recognizes no profane authority, it begets anarchy. And governments that rest their legitimacy on an ability to bring order to an anarchic situation are, almost by definition, authoritarian ones.

This paradox leapt out at the British adventurer Wilfred Thesiger when he was traveling around the Empty Quarter of Arabia in the years after World War II. He saw the Bedouins he met as the original and archetypal Muslims, and wrote in his Arabian Sands (1959):

The society in which the Bedu live is tribal.…There is no security in the desert for an individual outside the framework of his tribe. This makes it possible for tribal law, which is based on consent, to work among the most individualistic race in the world…It is therefore a strange fact that tribal law can only work in conditions of anarchy and breaks down as soon as peace is imposed upon the desert, since under peaceful conditions a man who resents a judgement can refuse to be bound by it.

In the Muslim world, people will bind themselves more willingly to a government that speaks in Islam’s name than to a government that speaks for a rival political party—which may be viewed as a rival tribe. Alternatives to theocracy have been tried over the last century, from Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with varying degrees of success. But their era seems to have passed. The newest governments in Muslim lands—those of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the post-Kemalist AK Party regime in Turkey—all envision a strong constitutional role for Islam.

“Islam is peace”

In 2006, after an inquest by the French interior ministry, forty-three baggage handlers at Charles de Gaulle airport were deprived of their security clearances. Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said it was important that those with access to runways have “no links, whether close or distant, to radical organizations.” The radical organizations to which the baggage handlers were linked were, although Sarkozy did not say so, Muslim ones. French authorities bent over backwards to deny that devotion to Islam had had anything to do with the suspicions leveled at the baggage handlers, or any investigative value whatsoever. Sarkozy insisted that no one had been investigated for any reason having to do with group identity. “Being a practicing Muslim is not a criterion at all,” said Jacques Lebrot, the subprefect of Roissy, where the airport is located. “But someone who goes to Pakistan several times on vacation—that raises questions for us.” So in an attempt to exonerate itself from the suspicion of policing Islam, the government admitted to policing (for Pakistanis) visits home to one’s family and (for others) tourism.

Faced with Islamist terrorism, Western politicians, including many who could not tell a qadi from a wadi, have reacted by making presumptuous claims to expertise in matters of Muslim theology. Some are anti-Muslim, like the Dutch rightist Geert Wilders, whose 2008 film Fitna, released over the Internet, presents the Koran as a kind of terrorist manual. Such politicians can win votes—the party Wilders founded held nine seats in the Dutch second chamber at the time his film came out. But they are held up in the news media as paranoid and sinister bumpkins, and either snickered at or hooted down. By far the majority of politicians, including Sarkozy and Lebrot, profess the opposite certitude: that terrorism never overlaps with the Muslim religion in any way. Those who hold the “nice” interpretation of Islam are spared ridicule, but it is by no means clear that their actual knowledge of Islam exceeds that of Wilders.

George W Bush, days after September 11, set the tone for such interpretations, proclaiming that “Islam is peace.” Therefore terrorism could, by definition, have nothing to do with Islam. Sarkozy tended to agree. “The attacks of September 11,” he wrote in 2004, “were the act of a cult, a terrorist mafia, a clan of megalomaniacs who used religion as a pretext.” In his televised address in the wake of the London bombings, Tony Blair said: “We know that these people act in the name of Islam but we also know that the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad are decent and law abiding people who abhor terrorism every bit as much as we do.” Days later, he extolled “the moderate and true voice of Islam.” Tory leader David Cameron concurs. He insists that Islamism is “driven by a wholly incorrect interpretation—an extreme distortion—of the Islamic faith.”

In this view, no matter how theocratic its rhetoric and pretensions, Islamism is always a political, not a religious, movement. American commentators make this assumption when they speak, as they too often do, of “Islamofascism.” The Islam expert Olivier Roy notes that al-Qaeda’s “trials” of kidnap victims (who, in the early years of the Iraq war, were regularly decapitated on Internet videos for the delectation of stay-at-home jihadists) are “directly borrowed from the extreme left of the 1970s, particularly the staging of the Aldo Moro ‘trial’ by the Italian Red Brigades in 1978.”

In its heyday, Communism was frequently compared to Islam—not to Islamic radicalism, which did not then exist in the way it does today, but to Islam as normally practiced throughout history. The French sociologist Jules Monnerot made such comparisons in the 1940s. Since he wrote at a time when Islam was thought a spent political force, we can assume his observations had no polemical intent, at least not against Islam. For Monnerot, what made Communism like Islam was that it was simultaneously a religion (albeit a secular one) and a universal state (albeit an embryonic one). Like Communism, Islam has a detailed plan for social order, and an egalitarianism in theory that often becomes oppression in practice. “It draws on resentments, and organizes and streamlines the impulses that set men against the societies in which they are born,” Monnerot wrote. In particular, Communists deployed a “historical myth apt to fanaticize men,” as did the Fatimids of Egypt and Safavids of Persia. At the time Communism rose and spread, Monnerot wrote, such an ideology had been unknown “since Europe disengaged from the Mediterranean world”—i.e., since Europeans withdrew before Islam’s advances.

For Monnerot, Stalin was a modern version of the Muslim “commander of the faithful” (emir al-muminin), and the Communist faithful were of a particularly commandable kind. In Communism as in Islam:

the believer does not think of himself as a “believer”: He is in possession of the truth—or, better put, he takes the thing that possesses him for the truth. This truth inspires in him an active attachment that truth, in a scientific sense, doesn’t inspire and never asks for.

Using the jargon of the time, Monnerot called Communism a “total social phenomenon” that breaks with the “autonomy of spheres of action” characteristic of modernity. Religious-type opposition, Monnerot thought, was precisely the kind that a liberal order is least capable of handling, because it “aggravates the real ‘internal contradictions’ of capitalism.”

Comparing Communism to a 1,400-year-old religion that claims a billion-and-a-half worshippers is bound to result in oversimplifications that obscure as much as they reveal. But if we compare Communism to radical political Islam, Monnerot’s idea of a “total social phenomenon” is useful. The greatest ideological asset of Islamism is the breadth of its appeal. Like Communism, it is an ideology capacious enough to accommodate a wide variety of grievances, and thereby to appeal to people of all different backgrounds and social classes. In 2005, the Times of London reported on the results of a government study showing that “most young extremists fall into one of two groups: well educated—undergraduates or with degrees and technical professional qualifications in engineering or IT—or underachievers with few or no qualifications and often a criminal background.” Islamism can be understood by a university professor, as a highly elaborated intellectual structure; and by an illiterate kid with a baseball bat, as a battle cry.

How Islamism is related to Islam is beside the point. We can know that Islamism is a serious enemy of the modern liberal state before we have a clear sense of its religious logic, and before we know what, if anything, it has to do with “real” Islam. Proving that Islamism is not the same thing as Islam will not make it less dangerous.

But to say that Islam is peace is to protest a bit too much, particularly at a time when other time-honored affiliations and affinities (like “patriarchy”) are rigorously examined for hidden structures of violence and coercion. Unlike Gunnar Heinsohn, who sets Islam aside because he thinks it is not the main cause of terrorism, Western politicians appear to be setting Islam aside because they fear, deep down, that it is the main cause. Never do politicians more loudly proclaim Islam a “religion of peace” than when bombs are set off in its name. If the terrorists’ idea of religion is so evidently a perversion of the real thing, then why is it necessary for non-Muslims to lecture normal Muslims about it? If Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, then why do all European governments feel the need to reach out to Muslim groups in the aftermath of any terrorist attack?

Moderate Muslims

Reaching out to so-called “moderate Muslims” is the cornerstone of the European strategy against terrorism. Moderate Muslims are the people who can be trusted not to “distort Islam,” or at least to distort it only in a positive way—by building a “European Islam” that can interact with the continent’s political institutions without breaking them. Discussing Bernard Lewis’s predictions that Islam will dominate Europe by end of this century, the Syrian-German sociologist Bassam Tibi said, “The problem is not whether the majority of Europeans are Islamic, but rather which Islam—sharia Islam or Euro-Islam—is to dominate in Europe.” That kind of talk excites planners, visionaries, and politicians, but it does not exactly set ordinary Europeans’ minds at ease. Euro-Islam wasn’t in their college history textbooks, and they are not confident that it exists except as a figment of their leaders’ politically correct imaginations.

What is more, the dynamic through which Euro-Islam would be promoted resembles that of Israeli-Arab peace negotiations, which center on the idea of “land for peace.” The Western side gives up something (land) that is concrete, quantifiable, and irrevocable, once given. In exchange the Muslim side gives up something (peace) that is vague, subjective, and revocable by a change of mood. Europe can move to create a “Euro-Islam” only by altering its institutions. What it gets in return is an assurance from moderate Muslims that radical Muslims will be less ill-disposed toward it.

No one has defined with any precision what a “moderate Muslim” is, or whether that term should be understood politically or religiously. If a “moderate Muslim” is a person who practices Islam in a moderate way, then by definition there exists another, immoderate alternative. This view is in line with European attitudes toward other religions—they’re okay if you don’t take them too seriously. But without an underlying belief that there is something especially dangerous about Islam, the term “moderate Muslim” makes no sense. Nobody speaks of former French prime minister Lionel Jospin as a “moderate Protestant.”

A more optimistic (and reasonable) view is that a “moderate Muslim” is a political moderate, no matter what his view of religion—that what makes radical Islam “radical” is a certain attitude toward politics, not a certain attitude toward religion. This is the only use of the term “moderate Muslim” consistent with the traditional European idea of freedom of religion. Pushing Muslim identity in a more “fundamentalist” direction could mean more contemplation of God and less contemplation of grievance. Pushing Muslim identity in a more “mainstream,” less pious direction could mean encouraging grandstanding and political ultimatums.

Conservative Muslims can be subversives or patriots or both. The Algerian-born, Saudi-educated conservative imam Hassan Moussa mentioned in chapter 8 as an opponent of genital mutilation was among Sweden’s firebrands at the turn of the century. But after the London bombings of 2005, he professed himself shocked, and called for the establishment of a council to combat extremism. At that point, he said, “I decided that I would leave the word ‘but’ out of my sermons.” (He meant that he would no longer try to explain away terrorism as an overreaction to some just cause.) Moussa didn’t gain much from going public. He lost influence within Stockholm’s central mosque. But his articles in the tabloid press brought many moderate Swedish Muslim voices out of the woodwork.

Islam’s compatibility with liberal institutions is hard to gauge. Like most religions, it is experienced by its believers as an accession to a higher kind of liberty, and extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. So once you favor sharia, you are unlikely to worry that people, institutions, or tactics are “too Islamic.” Consider Lebanon. There, a majority (53 percent) of Christians consider Islamic extremism a threat to the country, while only 42 percent do not. But only 4 percent of Lebanese Muslims worry about Muslim extremism, versus 85 percent who do not. To add to the difficulty, many of the most sophisticated discussions of Islam’s relation to democracy—by the Iranian intellectuals Akbar Ganji and Abdolkarim Soroush, for instance—are not accessible to many Westerners. In many cases they have not even been translated. This tends to de-democratize Western discussions of Islam, and place them in the hands of panels of experts. Experts condescend to European publics who doubt that Islam is compatible with democracy, scolding them, in essence, for not having a doctorate in theology and a reading knowledge of Farsi.

For now, the moderation of Islam is a hope, not a fact. Yet European leaders have wagered so much on it that they see evidence of it everywhere. For example, few Muslim leaders have as high a reputation for moderation as Mustafa Çeric, grand mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina, largely on the strength of Koranic interpretations such as: “Religious tolerance is clearly commanded in our Holy Book: ’God does not forbid you to deal kindly and justly with those who have not declared war on your religion or driven you out of your homes’ (60:8).” To see moderation here is to leap to conclusions. While this Koranic passage is certainly open to a moderate interpretation, it invites other interpretations, too—not as a command to tolerance, but as permission not to be intolerant, if one chooses. “Declaration of war” and “driving out of one’s home” can be construed in radical ways. They can mean “recognition of the state of Israel” or “failure to intervene militarily on the side of the Pakistanis in Kashmir” or something else no one has thought of. In fact, that is how they tend to be construed by the very radical muftis whom people like Çeric are supposed to coax into the liberal fold.

And not everyone is as inclined as Çeric to push in a liberal direction. In the immediate aftermath of the July 7 transport bombings, the British Muslim Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, condemned the attacks—but with an astonishing qualification. “There needs to be a separation between those who are committing those atrocities and those who are passionate about injustice,” he said. “We need to encourage that passion and give them avenues within the civil society to deal with injustices.” While not explicitly supporting terrorism, this view holds al-Qaeda’s analysis of the world to be essentially correct. It passes for “moderate,” but all it really does is shift the ultimatum to the West to a different stage—from detonation to recruitment. Al-Qaeda says the West must do certain things or face terrorism. Moderates say the West must do certain things or moderates will join al-Qaeda. If this is the West’s choice, then it is difficult to see what it gets out of cultivating moderate Muslims.

Voices like Shadjareh’s are the kind that Western politicians—foolishly—want to hear. If the top priority is finding people with the street credibility to dissuade potential terrorists, then the ideal Muslim interlocutor is not just “moderate” but also “authentic.” He is someone whose politics overlap a bit with the terrorists’, but who renounces terrorism. This creates a trap for Muslims themselves. After September 11, Westerners expected loud and unambiguous denunciations of terrorism—because such denunciations were the only way of telling “moderate” Muslims from radical ones. As in the United States, the condemnation of terrorism by Muslims in Europe has never been frequent or full-throated enough to reassure their fellow citizens. There was a collective test of loyalty. Muslims, for the most part, failed it.

In theory, this was outrageously unfair. Why, after all, should Muslims who think of themselves as French or British feel any greater responsibility than their non-Muslim fellow citizens to vilify the perpetrators? The American journalist Kevin Cullen accurately captured the mood in London after the bombings of July 2005:

Muslims say that white Americans were not held responsible for the actions of Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing, and that white Britons were not accused of being complicit in the actions of Harold Shipman, an English doctor who was imprisoned five years ago for murdering more than 500 of his patients. So, why, they ask, are they not only being accused of being responsible for producing the bombers who struck last month, but also told to step back while the great and the good sort it out[?]

In practice there is a very big difference: There was no substantial body of white Americans who applauded McVeigh’s act or said that, although his means were wrong, the injustices he named were real, and that to ignore his message was to invite retribution. There was no body of British whites who found Harold Shipman’s serial killing anything less than repugnant.

Muslim repugnance was far from unanimous. In 2003, on the second anniversary of the bombings of September 11, 2001, the British radical Muslim group al-Muhajiroun posted handbills to publicize an event that would celebrate the 9/11 hijackers as “the Magnificent 19.” The event was rightly seen as a tool for whipping up homicidal rage and recruiting fresh terrorists. Part of Britain’s response to such threats—particularly after it had been devastated by four deadly bombings in July 2005—was to craft legislation mandating prison or deportation for those “attacking the values of the West.” The home secretary at the time, Charles Clarke, suggested that saying “Terrorists go straight to paradise when they die” might be captured by the law. But what else might be captured under the rubric of “glorifying” terrorism? Some asked if an Irishman who celebrated the Easter Rising of 1916 would fall afoul of the statute. Authorities replied that obviously he would not. So “glorification of terrorism” wound up being like U.S. jurist Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography: as something that people know when they see it. In the name of universalism, Britain was making law that could be reasonably enforced only through folk wisdom.

In April of 2007, almost two years after the London transport bombings, Scotland Yard’s head of counterterrorism, Peter Clarke, said, “I firmly believe that there are other people who have knowledge of what lay behind the attacks in July 2005—knowledge that they have not shared with us. In fact, I don’t only believe it. I know it for a fact.” Urging those with knowledge of the terrorists to come forward, he added, “I do understand that some of you will have real concerns about the consequences of telling us what you know. I also know that some of you have been actively dissuaded from speaking to us. Surely this must stop.”

Not every Muslim, then, was a “moderate Muslim.” To say there were moderate and immoderate Muslims was simply a euphemistic way of expressing the view for which Europeans had heaped so much scorn on George W. Bush: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

Tariq Ramadan and double language

After 2001, Muslim caginess in talking about terrorism unnerved Europeans, as it did Americans. Many who had a nodding acquaintance with Muslim terminology thought Muslims were using the ancient Shiite tactic of taqiyya, self-protective dissimulation, and jumped to the conclusion that nothing Muslims said on the subject of religion, or of the clash between East and West, could be trusted. But in most instances, the troubling utterances of Muslim leaders were neither lying nor taqiyya. They were what came to be called “double language.” Some Muslim leaders just flatly contradicted themselves, making one kind of speech in a European language and a very different kind in Arabic. A good example was the late Danish imam Abu Laban, who spoke in late 2005 about the new concept of Islam that his Copenhagen-based center, Islam Trossam, was working on. “It is a progressive vision, not built on fear of Western culture. There is no ghetto mentality. Women play an important role, parallel to men’s role.” As for terrorism, he added, “If we discovered Islam was a threat to the West, I would be the first to fight it.”

Yet Abu Laban was at that very moment arranging to rile up certain radical religious leaders in the Middle East with sensational presentations of the Danish caricatures of Muhammad, which had been published a few weeks earlier. In the coming months, those leaders’ broadcast denunciations would help spark violent protests around the world. And Abu Laban had given ample evidence of this less moderate side throughout his career. In 1995, he gave a talk about “ways to defend ourselves against Western contamination,” before the Ninth Congress of the Islamic Cultural Institute of the viale Jenner in Milan. “They accept Muslims in their midst, they accept the chador and Islamic lifestyles,” Abu Laban said. “We, therefore, must pretend that we accept their religion and their individual freedom. But this is impossible. Islam can accept no one who does not adore Allah.”

Double language means something different. Double language is not saying two different things to two different audiences. It is preaching a consistent message that will be understood in different ways by two different audiences. A good example was community leaders’ use of the word respect to describe the aspirations of France’s ghetto dwellers. To social workers and politicians, respect sounded like a demand for equal rights under the French political system. To those who lived in the ghetto, it had a retributive, intimidating, power-related connotation.

Tariq Ramadan—a charismatic political activist, prolific writer, freelance theologian, and motivational speaker based in Geneva—is, to his foes, the very embodiment of double language. Ramadan has denied using any kind of “double discourse.” He told Andrew Hussey of the New Statesman, “To those who say it, I say: bring the evidence. I am quite clear in what I say.” Ramadan tours university campuses in Europe promoting a reasonable-sounding society based on Islamic law, and demanding full recognition of Islam in all of Europe’s institutions. Americans are used to well-read, highly politicized men of God of every political and theological leaning—Pat Robertson, William Sloane Coffin, Jeremiah Wright, John Shelby Spong, and Michael Lerner are among the varied examples. Contemporary Europeans are less well equipped to figure out Ramadan’s role and views, which can be hard to pin down even after one has read most of his writings.

Ramadan is the grandson (on his mother’s side) of Hassan al-Banna, who in 1928 founded the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and with it the style of Islamism that has swept the world in the last few years. Ramadan’s father, Said, was arguably more radical still. Although published accounts suggest he worked as a CIA informer, he was also close to Said Qutb, the anti-American Egyptian intellectual whose writings had a big influence on the founders of al-Qaeda, and he was implicated in the plot against the Egyptian government for which Qutb was hanged.

In an age of celebrity, all of this makes Tariq Ramadan, to any Muslim fundamentalist, a person to be reckoned with. The unapologetic radicalism of his brother Hani, with whom he works closely and who has publicly supported the stoning of adulterous women, increases his street credibility. Ramadan himself is given to remarks that leave fair-minded Europeans nervous. Even months after the September 11 attacks, he would go only so far as to say that there was a “very strong probability” that Muslim terrorists were involved. He insisted that there were other possibilities, including drug and arms dealers and unspecified gas and oil interests. He is given to looking for the “objective causes” of Islamist outrages, including the massacre of Christians in Nigeria, of which he has said, “We need to consider the situation objectively and bring a critical view as much to the causes—global homogenization and a sometimes savage Westernization—as to the consequences—ethnic and religious tension.”

But in general he has made the case for Islam in a pluralistic enough way to reassure European political leaders that he can act as a bridge between Muslims and the broader European population. He has not ruled out Israel’s right to exist. He is not a misogynist. His adversaries in Muslim countries are often arch-conservative clerics. And he has a gift for pithy formulas that offer something to both Muslims on the march and jittery Westerners: “Islam stands for the liberation of women,” he says, “but not at the expense of children.”

Not everyone is put at ease. Ramadan was barred from France in the 1990s, and was, as of this writing, still persona non grata in Tunisia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. In 2004, he was scheduled to take up a tenured professorship at Notre Dame in Indiana, but the State Department withdrew his visa, on grounds that were never made clear, although the USA Patriot Act was invoked vaguely. There has been a lot of published speculation about the reasons for Ramadan’s exclusion: The Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón allegedly discovered contacts with an al-Qaeda operative. Ramadan reportedly told a U.S. embassy official in Bern that resistance in Iraq was justified. He made a €600 contribution to a French-based (and legal) Palestinian foundation that the United States has linked to Hamas.

Ramadan moved to Britain and spent the last months of Tony Blair’s term in office teaching at Oxford and advising the British government. Since Ramadan is the most broadly listened to contemporary explainer—to both Muslims and non-Muslims—of Islam’s most troubling doctrines, it is important to figure out whether his reflections on Muslims’ role in the West are workable and sincere. Does he believe Muslims can be real European citizens or does he believe they will always remain somehow foreign?

Muslims have traditionally addressed such questions through a division of the world into two parts. There is dar al-islam (or the “house of Islam”) on one hand and dar al-harb (or the “house of war”) on the other. Ramadan starts by refusing this division altogether, on two grounds. First, the terms come from historians, not from the Koran. They are appropriate to the first three centuries of Muslim conquest, Ramadan believes, but not to a world altered by colonization and mass migration. Second, aside from a few frictions surrounding mosque construction, European laws give Muslims a liberty to practice their faith and vent their opinions that has no parallel elsewhere. “This could lead one to conclude,” Ramadan insists, “that, in terms of security and peace, the name dar al-islam is applicable to almost all Western countries, but that it does not apply in the slightest to the great majority of contemporary Muslim ones.” He refers to Europe as dar al-shahada—which means something like the “domain of witness.”

The problem, in Ramadan’s view, is that Europe’s core values are corrupt and sinful. He may not refer to the European geographical space as dar al-harb—but he reviles the “soulless capitalism that puts everything up for sale,” and refers to the European-American system that underpins it as alam al-harb: the “abode of war.” He has called for “resistance to the homogenizing international order” and declared himself “willing to do the impossible,” he says, “to join and support any movement of consciousness-raising and resistance, such as the citizens’ movement we saw [at the anti–World Trade Organization meetings in 1999] in Seattle.” He is a regular at such anti-capitalist gatherings as the European Social Forum.

Ramadan is easily mistaken for a run-of-the-mill European Marxist or anti-globalization activist—a comrade-in-arms of a mostly secular movement who happens to be a Muslim, too. Since hard-line Islamists are known to hold Communism in low esteem, it is easy to assume that Ramadan is going out on a limb before his Muslim audiences, taking risks, speaking truth to power. To judge him this way—as a number of astute European and American thinkers, including Gilles Kepel and Ian Buruma, have done—is to understand his message as far more secular, and far less religious, than it actually is. According to Buruma: “Ramadan, as Kepel observes, is ‘balanced on a tightrope,’ for his socialism is not always congenial to devout Muslims. Marx (along with ‘the Jew,’ ‘the Crusader’ and ‘the Secularist’) is a demonic figure for the Muslim Brothers.” But the thing about Ramadan’s “socialism” is that there is no positive content—no political, materialist, or economic theory—behind it at all. His leftism is purely a negative spiritual evaluation, from a strictly Islamic viewpoint, of the Western moral order, of which “capitalism” is just an outgrowth and a metonym. He is anti- the Western order without being pro- anything that would alienate the hardest of hard-line Muslims in the slightest.

The word resistance is the master key to Ramadan’s thinking. It is the foundation of everything else about Ramadan that can be understood doubly. The word appears almost constantly in all of Ramadan’s most important writings and speeches. He notes that “in my family, resistance was a key concept, resistance against dictatorship and colonialism.” Resist is not a democratic verb, in the way that reform or dissent or oppose is. It is a revolutionary verb. Resistance is what one offers against a system that has no legitimacy whatsoever behind it. The French reformed their constitutional order in 1958; they resisted the Nazis after 1942.

In Ramadan’s worldview, Muslims are a saving remnant. They are the last force capable of presenting a spiritual alternative, of saying no, to an anti-spiritual world order. If no major Western religion has seen fit, or been able, to stare down capitalism, that is not the fault of Muslims. “As far as this so-called ‘progressive’ order is concerned,” Ramadan says, “the Catholic ‘bastion’ and the Jewish ‘bastion’ have both, it seems, surrendered. They’ve adapted, they have even at times supported and promoted the new economic order. The only ones left, it seems, are the implacable ones, the Muslims.”

Contemporary Europeans, unable to conceive of themselves as thoroughly without legitimacy in anyone’s eyes, have chosen to believe that when Ramadan speaks of “resistance,” and calls on Muslims everywhere to wage it, he really means “reform.” He does not. He means jihad.

Resistance and jihad

When Ramadan describes—quite movingly, it must be added—how we should struggle against the Western order, it is clear that he is not just talking about an economic system. He has bigger fish to fry. His point is metaphysical and even religious:

A human being who lives only by his superficial desires, and whose needs have for the most part been manufactured [by someone else] is no longer a human being.…He can become a mere beast, holding up the illusion of his humanity, a virtual monster whose excesses are sometimes restrained only by a strand of rationality that serves as a leash. If this rationality is a humane one, the monster is under control. But if the rationality should become no more than economic or financial, then the beast is unleashed and we can expect the worst, from slaughter to genocide, as we have seen all too often.

Our religion teaches us that the first resistance to these errors is an internal one.

That internal resistance is what Ramadan elsewhere calls jihad:

For the vast majority of Muslims, the concept of jihad refers to a spiritual effort and, more generally, to resistance…I use the word daily in my relationship to myself. Jihad is primarily the effort one makes on oneself to resist the negative forces that inhabit us. It is a work of resistance against one’s own anger, one’s violence, one’s greed.

Ramadan explicitly rejects the usage of jihad to mean holy war. This puts him in line with a couple dozen academic spokesmen for Islam in the West, who claim that the “greater jihad” is a struggle for self-mastery. But is it really accurate to say that a majority of Muslims think of a “spiritual effort” when they hear the word jihad? Why is it so desperately important to keep this word in common circulation, when it is understood by Muslims’ Western interlocutors, not to mention many ordinary Muslims, as a call to battle? Diffident modern Westerners tend to purge such words from their vocabulary altogether.

To be precise about how Ramadan is using the words resistance and jihad, it helps to go back to the writings of his grandfather. It would be unfair to use the writings of al-Banna as a means of elucidating Ramadan’s thinking if Ramadan did not constantly claim al-Banna as an influence, touchstone, and source of pride. Ramadan’s writings about his grandfather are more curatorial than critical, and we will confine ourselves to the writings of al-Banna that Ramadan himself has cited in his own work. In al-Banna, mental resistance (conscience) and political resistance (revolution) are simply different ways of describing the same coherent process. To al-Banna the worst thing about English economic and political colonization was that it produced a “colonization of the mind” (colonisation des intimités). It shaped and warped the private deliberations of Muslims, drawing them away from religious reflection. So for the Muslim Brotherhood in al-Banna’s time, demanding the departure of the English from Egypt was an Islamic duty. You may agree or disagree with al-Banna’s view of things, but it has its logic. There aren’t two kinds of jihad—“real,” spiritual jihad and its evil twin—even if pretending there are helps calm European nerves. Jihad means reconnecting with one’s true, better self by struggling against harmful, foreign, un-Islamic elements, whether they are found in one’s society or in one’s own head.

The victory of this better self was inevitable, in al-Banna’s view, because the West was spiritually bankrupt. Its materialist civilization was on the verge of collapse. “This is no illusion,” al-Banna wrote. “It is rather a law of nature, and if it doesn’t happen in our time, then ‘Allah will bring a people whom He loveth and who love Him, humble toward believers, stern toward disbelievers, striving in the way of Allah, and fearing not the blame of any blamer.’”

Ramadan proclaims al-Banna a pluralist, on the grounds that he “never demonized the West.” But this is an eccentric reading. At best, al-Banna is a pluralist of a selective and asymmetrical kind. What he admires about the West is its power, and what he admires about Islam is its wisdom. Islam has sagesse; the Occident has mere savoir faire. In a just society, power must serve wisdom, not vice versa. If Muslims possess a truth, and Europeans possess only a bag of practical tricks, then Europeans’ system of ordering society—the European regime of rights—cannot be valuable for its own sake. It is valuable, but only for the opportunities it affords for the practice of Islam.

Let us be clear about what this means. As soon as the practice of Islam is constrained, the social contract is null and void. Muslims’ acceptance of the European countries in which they live can only ever be provisional, contingent on Europe’s willingness to give Islam free rein. The integration of Muslims into Europe will happen on Muslim terms. Or, as Ramadan puts it, “It will succeed when Muslims find in their tradition elements of agreement with the laws of the countries of which they are citizens, because that will resolve any questions of double allegiance.” This is an extraordinary statement: Only when Europe’s ways are understood as Islam’s will Muslims obey them. And if not, not. “Islam is an element that needs to be taken into account, and will need to be in the future,” Ramadan has said. “If this reality continues to be denied, it will inevitably produce radical resistance and clashes.” Is this double language? While never threatening violence, Ramadan is warning the West that it if it does not change in accordance with Muslim wishes, violence will somehow befall it.

When he discusses the world outside of the West, pluralism and rights seem hardly to enter the picture at all. “The future of Muslim countries,” he says, “will evolve through a reappropriation of their [own] traditions, and through an endogenous evolution, according to the thinking and mindset internal to the civilization, albeit in relation to others.” For Ramadan, the twentieth-century Islamists Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani are exemplars. “They saw the need to resist the West, through Islam, while taking what was useful from it,” he told Ian Buruma in 2007. Twentieth-century Islamists thought they could make cynical use of Western technological innovations while holding in contempt the culture out of which they sprang. Twenty-first-century Islamists such as Ramadan take the same attitude toward Western freedoms and rights. For Ramadan, freedom of religion is not a good in itself. It is a good because it allows the practice and consolidation of Islam.

Like al-Banna, Ramadan says what he says and does what he does in the confidence that the West is in eclipse. “Day-to-day life in Europe,” he writes, “with its ways of thinking and consuming, its arrangements of work and free time, its movies and its music, winds up shaping, almost unconsciously, a second nature that seems like a prison.” Under the circumstances, to raise the question of reciprocal obligations, or ask what Islam will “contribute” to Western society, is off the subject. To a thinker such as Ramadan, it is an impertinence. What Islam will contribute to the West is Islam.