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December 28, 2004
On Coming to Terms: Militant Islam or Radical Islam?
Topics: War on Terror - the issues.It's late and I am tired of having had to address so many serious issues today. So how about a semi-serious look at the difference between Islamists and radical Islamists.
The following Dec 26 article is by Danial Pipes:
My title here plays off of Martin Kramer's spring 2003 article in the Middle East Quarterly, "Coming to Terms: Fundamentalists or Islamists?" In it, he reviews the "heated debate" of the past two decades on how to label in English the phenomenon variously known as Muslim fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, political Islam, militant Islam, radical Islam, and Islamism. He concludes the survey by noting that "It is impossible to predict which terms will prevail in the West's own struggle to come to terms with change in contemporary Islam."
True enough, and I have my own colorful history of terms for this topic. In my first-ever article on it, "This World is Political!! The Islamic Revival of the Seventies," Orbis, 24 (1980-81): 9-41, I used neo-orthodox Islam. I then moved successively over to fundamentalist Islam and Islamism. Islamism remains my preferred term (because it is used by Islamists themselves; and because of its parallel with the other ideological "isms"), but it is heavy to say, so after 9/11, I adopted militant Islam and used it in the title of a book and in many articles and television appearances.
Then, in the year and a half since Kramer wrote his article, militant has become the main euphemism for terrorist, to the point that now even militant Islam offends my ear. So, with some reluctance, I take up a new term, that being radical Islam. I hope this term lasts longer than the others - and longer than the phenomenon itself. (December 26, 2004)
Having been coined by no less an authority than Danial Pipes I feel like I also should call the mentally deranged, homicidal, Islamofascists - followers of radical Islam, or radical Islamists. Now just having completed a post addressing the issues of faith and intelligent design, it seems appropriate to comment on what I believe to be the difference between a believer(one that has faith) in Islam and a believer in radical Islam(a radical Islamist). Without getting too terribly technical here (because I have very limited expertise in theological matters and with too much discussion I would be exposed as a mouthy fool), I'd like to propose that the difference between the Islamist and the radical Islamist, now that we are following the Pipes model, is reason. Just reason, nothing more complicated than that. I offer three simple examples of what I mean by this.
First of all it is not reasonable to have a desire to murder innocents in order to have 72 virgins after loosing your life at your own hand. On my best days as a much younger man I would consider it most unreasonable to contemplate activities with that many women, being fully aware of how unreasonable 1 virgin could be - much less 72 of them. Secondly, it is not reasonable to blow yourself up at the suggestion of someone who wouldn't consider doing the same thing himself, as is evidenced by the mere fact that the suggestor is still alive and if there was such assurance for going to heaven and that going to heaven by blowing yourself up was so much a better thing to do than stay alive, the suggestor would be dead already and unable to suggest to the suggestee that he or she go blow themselves up. Finally, it is not reasonable to believe such foolishness as that murder, violence, rape of women, forced conversions, intolerance of others, and deceit have anything to do with any representation of anyone's view of God. So without having to dive into matters of which I am not qualified to discuss, I feel sufficiently comfortable that on the basis of reason alone - even using my obviously unsophisticated examples, the radical Islamist is in no way a reasonable human being and the moderate follower of Islam could be a reasonable human being. So, the model holds and reason is the difference between the two.
I understand that you sophisticated philosophy and logic types out there are probably not going to buy in to my thinking on this matter. If it's any consolation, I'm not sure I do either. But I do feel rather comfortable about items 1 and 2, above - the 72 virgins and the blowing one self up issues. It is unreasonable to do anything just to be around 72 women all the time and if someone else is alive enough to tell you to kill yourself, they certainly don't think it's such a great idea or they would already be dead - and if you can't figure that much out you're on very shakey ground to claim that you have much of an ability to reason. Therefore, you are a radical Islamist. Let it not be said that a simple test could not be devised to identify radical Islamists.
Posted by Hyscience at December 28, 2004 1:52 AM
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