Is Clash Unavoidable?

First in a scholarly article, later expanded in book form, Samuel Huntington predicted a "clash of civilizations" between the Protestant/secular West and the rest of the world, including the Arab and/or Muslim nations. I've long agreed with much of Huntington's thesis, but disputed the inevitability of force. Instead, I've advocated encouraging "something like the Protestant reformation, a 'Martin al-Luther' who can distinguish between state and mosque." Similarly, others call for an Islamic Gandhi. In the wake of the London bombings is such optimism still warranted?

Irshad Manji says yes. A Canadian talk show host and author of The Trouble with Islam, Manji hits all the right notes:

Far from regarding Muslims as oppressed they have a “supremacy complex — and that’s dangerous”. This, she contends, is true even among moderates. “Literalists” who consider the Koran the “perfect manifesto of God” have taken over the mainstream; and far from misreading Islam, as Tony Blair and the Muslim Council of Britain insist, terrorists can find encouragement for murder in the Koran.

The underlying problem with Islam, observes Manji, is that far from spiritualising Arabia, it has been infected with the reactionary prejudices of the Middle East: “Colonialism is not the preserve of people with pink skin. What about Islamic imperialism? Eighty per cent of Muslims live outside the Arab world yet all Muslims must bow to Mecca.” Fresh thinking, she contends, is suppressed by ignorant imams; you can see why she has been dubbed “Osama’s worst nightmare.” . . .

[She also blames Europe]: "In continental Europe people of faith are regarded as second-class citizens. In America Muslims are allowed to earn their status by competing. In Europe, Britain included, your past establishes your identity much more than your future. If you don’t have the lineage here people might well feel disaffected.” She points out that American mosques display signs proclaiming: “God bless America”; inconceivable here.

If we are at fault for not encouraging Muslims, they fail to “celebrate the precious gift” of British freedom: “Why do they protest against France for making it illegal to wear hijabs, but not against Saudi Arabia for making it illegal not to wear them?”; more Muslims, she contends, have been killed in recent years by fellow Muslims than by westerners.

Manji thinks Muslims should take tolerant parts of the Koran and ignore the hellfire.

But it's impossible to imagine a Muslim more outside mainstream Islam: Uganda born, a global jet-setter, pro-Israel, pro Iraq invasion, a self-proclamed "lipstick lesbian" praised by Oprah Winfrey. It would take decades and a miracle, literally, for Manji to reach, let alone convince, Arab and North African Muslims.

Answering in the negative is columnist Diana West, for whom London was the last straw:

How strange, though, that even as we devise new ways to see inside ourselves to our most elemental components, we also prevent ourselves from looking full-face at the danger to our way of life posed by Islam.

Notice I didn't say "Islamists." Or "Islamofascists." Or "fundamentalist extremists." I've tried out such terms in the past, but I've come to find them artificial and confusing, and maybe purposefully so, because in their imprecision I think they allow us all to give a wide berth to a great problem: the gross incompatibility of Islam -- the religious force that shrinks freedom even as it "moderately" enables or "extremistly" advances jihad -- with the West. Am I right? Who's to say? The very topic of Islamization -- for that is what is at hand, and very soon in Europe -- is verboten. A leaked British report prepared for Prime Minister Tony Blair last year warned even against "expressions of concern about Islamic fundamentalism" (another one of those amorphous terms) because "many perfectly moderate Muslims follow strict adherence to traditional Islamic teachings and are likely to perceive such expressions as a negative comment on their own approach to their faith." Much better to watch subterranean tunnels fill with charred body parts in silence. As the London Times' Simon Jenkins wrote, "The sane response to urban terrorism is to regard it as an avoidable accident."

In not discussing the roots of terror in Islam itself, in not learning about them, the multicultural clergy that shepherds our elites prevents us from having to do anything about them. This is key, because any serious action -- stopping immigration from jihad-sponsoring nations, shutting down mosques that preach violence and expelling their imams, just for starters -- means to renounce the multicultural creed. In the West, that's the greatest apostasy. And while the penalty is not death -- as it is for leaving Islam under Islamic law -- the existential crisis is to be avoided at all costs. Including extinction.

This is the lesson of the atrocities in London.

Who's right? As befits a Burkean conservative, both, depending on circumstances:

• U.S. Immigration: Even were it possible, closing America's borders would be a mistake; the U.S. has been enriched by immigrants seeking greater individual and market freedoms. Such augmentation concentrates on the bell curve's right slope: prospective citizens who had the get-up-and-go to get-up-and-go.
  
  But immigration is a privilege, not a right, and citizenship can and should be confined to those agreeing to push political change via politics, not pipe-bombs. It's the Protestant consensus; it demands not Christianity but the abandonment of compulsion, and the acceptance of failure:

  a narrow, but necessary virtue within election losers. Constitutional tolerance is each citizen's responsibility to accept a vote's outcome today, knowing another chance is just two, four or six years away.

• Europe: The EU is the poster child for failed immigration policies. The London bombers were home-grown Islamics nourished on distrust of civil society, says Adam Hamdy:

  They could have chosen to take advantage of the free speech we enjoy in Britain and engaged in peaceful protest. They could have chosen to channel their energy to try to bring about constructive change in society. Instead they chose to slaughter unarmed, innocent civilians. The responsibility for such atrocities is theirs alone.
  
  If these attacks turn out to be the work of al-Qa'ida, the choice of violence as a tool should come as no surprise. These people cannot protest peacefully because they have no negotiable demands. What they want is the destruction of free-thinking society and the institution of Islam globally.

  Europe's challenge is to sift current residents and identify and expel those dedicated to destruction. France and Denmark already started; Britain's barely begun. But Germany's practically a no law enforcement zone; Australia is reluctant to intervene; Canada may only now be recognizing the danger.
  
  So long as democracies harbor significant populations hostile to democracy, drastic measures may be necessary. Visitors from the EU, Canada and elsewhere now enter the U.S. without a visa. That should change, says Reuel Marc Gerecht in the current Weekly Standard:

  We should prepare for the worst-case scenario and assume that European society itself will continue to generate the most lethal holy warriors. In doing so, American officials should be skeptical of their own ability to identify through profiling which Muslim Europeans might engage in terrorism against the United States. Stamps in passports indicating travel to Middle Eastern countries can't tell you much, since holy-warrior pilgrimages are not required to fortify jihadist spirits and networks. Living in London, Leeds, or Manchester can be more than enough.
  
  This means, of course, that the Bush administration ought to preempt fate and suspend the visa-waiver program established in 1986 for Western Europeans. It is true that consular officers were a poor frontline defense before 9/11 against Muslim extremists trying to enter the United States. But the United States would be safer with some screening mechanism, however imperfect, before Europeans arrive at our borders. The transatlantic crowd in Washington--the bedrock of America's foreign-policy establishment--might rise in high dudgeon at the damage this could do to U.S.-European relations. . . Ignore them. American-European relations were just fine when we required all Europeans to obtain visas before crossing our borders. . . Issuing visas to Europeans would be an annoying inconvenience for all; it would not, however, be an insult. Given the damage one small cell of suicidally inclined radical Muslim Europeans could do in the New York City or Washington metro or on Amtrak's wide-open trains, it's not too much to ask.

• The Muslim World: We've tried appeasement, human rights pressure, and "huggy bear." None produced an Islamic reformation. Nor is any "passive" approach likely to pacify terrorism or compulsion. So America's now nation building, with some success in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus spill-over effects elsewhere (e.g., Lebanon).
  
  Although isolationism's plainly impossible, we've had some success in isolating America from the dangers of the Islamic world. The first step is barring terrorists at the border, as outlined above. But globalization and cheap Saudi oil necessitate substantial contact. And when nineteen immigration errors kill 3000, the stakes are high.
  
  Without abandoning the Bush Doctrine of preemption, the U.S. must add a dash of cold-war containment. Not of WMDs--that's impossible. Rather, the West should contain the ideas, institutions and individuals devoted to death, deflecting the discontent toward the autocratic Muslim governments that created and exacerbated the nihilism.

Conclusion: A full-scale clash of civilizations may come, but it's not inevitable. Though not shirking the battle if forced, stalling and delaying may suffice sometimes. Islam itself need not be our enemy. But the age of sudden and systemic Muslim terror makes distance appropriate. There will be plenty of time to embrace reformed Islam, when it arrives. If it can.

More:

SC&A previously blogged the London Times article about Manji.