The Evolution Of Radical Islam – Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. His column appears regularly in the Jerusalem Post and other newspapers around the globe. His website, DanielPipes.org, is one of the most accessed internet sources of specialised information on the Middle East and Islam. Daniel Pipes joined with Ida Lichter to address The Sydney Institute on Thursday 5 November 2009. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of that address.

The Evolution Of Radical Islam

Daniel Pipes

My topic is the evolution of radical Islam in recent years. The primary figures in the first phase of this phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s, and indeed until the first years of this millennium, were figures like Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and Osama bin Laden from Saudi Arabia. And while they’re very different, they share a brutality in common – the willingness to use force, terrorism, criminality, totalitarian means – to impose the Sharia Islamic law. I think it’s safe to say that this project is not going to succeed.

The Iranian Republic, although it’s been around for 30 years now, is doomed. It does not have the following of its people. The Iranians, by large measure, reject the system that they live in. Clearly, Bin Laden’s vision is unattainable. And while these kind of Islamists who use violence and who are ready to impose their will by brutal means are dangerous – very dangerous – I don’t think they can achieve their goals. They can kill people. The 200 people in Bali and the 3,000 in New York and Washington are actually very small numbers compared to what they could be. Bin Laden has been known to look for atomic weaponry. If he obtained this, deaths could be in the hundreds of thousands, or even the millions. I don’t dispute that they could pull off such atrocities. I do doubt that they will achieve their goal of creating societies where Islamic law is applied, where a caliphate is created.

There’s another way that Islamists have that is more subtle, more political, less violent and more sustainable. In part because it doesn’t attract our attention and our venom in the way that, say, terrorism, does. That’s working through the system. That is working with the media and the schools and the politicians and the law courts, and the other institutions – the businesses – the institutions of society. One can see this at play in the majority of Muslim countries, and in the West.

For example, in a country like Egypt, where there was a powerful terrorist organisation at work for many years called Al-Gama Islamiyah, which, for example, attacked tourists in Luxor killing some 58 Swiss and other tourists a few years ago, decimating the tourist trade in Egypt which some 10 per cent of Egyptians are said to rely on. They can have a real impact. But they were rejected. They had an approach that was unpopular. And so, Al-Gama Islamiyah gave up terrorism and at first blush it appeared to be a total defeat. They’d given up.

But in fact, they hadn’t given up their goals. They gave up their tactics. They gave up violence, murder, and instead they began to work through the system and the Egyptian government has rewarded the Islamists who come in from the cold. It has given them television programs, access to the schools, an ability to organise the unions of syndicates, and it’s resolved to build hospitals and clinics and schools. And as a result, the Islamists are penetrating society and the state and are furthering their goals in a much more unobtrusive manner.

One can see the same in Algeria, where there was a major insurrection in the 1990s. It was defeated. The Islamists are working through the system. In Syria, the violent insurrection was capped in the 1982, with an attack by the state on the city of Hama, killing estimated 20,000 people. That insurrection is done. It’s over with. But instead one finds an infiltration of society.

Likewise in the West, one sees terrorism. But what are the benefits of terrorism? The only real example I can point to was Madrid where the killing of a couple hundred people led to a change in policy towards Iraq – it didn’t lead to an Islamisation of Spain. And elsewhere, if one looks, what did Bali achieve? What did 9/11 achieve? What did 7/7 achieve in London? What did Beslan achieve in Russia? What did these major atrocities achieve? I don’t think one can point to much.

But at the same time, I can see a chipping away, a termite-like eating through the institutions of society by the Islamists. The most dramatic case is in the United Kingdom, where one sees the onrush of Islamisation at an extraordinary pace. Practically everyday, there’s some news. I’m someone who’s been studying Islam for four decades now and I’m astonished at the things that are taking place in Britain, things that just haven’t happened before. One can watch the transformation of Britain before one’s very eyes. And this is happening, not through violence. 7/7 is the exception and, again, it’s hard to see what it achieved. The real work is being done quietly, or not so quietly, but steadily through non-violent means, political means, lawful means.

Let me give you one example. The Muslim Council of Britain, which is the most important Islamist institution in the country put out a couple of years ago, a book about state funded, or tax payer funded, schools, in which it gave its program for what changes it would like to see. This 80 page booklet transforms British schools into Saudi schools, because it encompasses every aspect of school life from the yearly schedule, to the holidays, to the weekly schedule and the prayer services, to the subjects being taught, such as art, and history and religion, and food services, sports practices, relations between males and females – and if the whole of it were applied it would be a fundamentally different school.

Now, it has not been applied. But, yet, the presence of this book and the backing of an important Islamist organisation means that there’s pressure, steadily. And one day you wake up and find that a primary school in Oxford is serving Halal food just like that – and no one was really consulted. Or other such developments.

Step by step, in the aggregate, one sees a change of society – just as in Egypt or Algeria or Syria. One sees that same transformation taking place in the West. I would argue that that’s more effective. On the one hand, it doesn’t create the reaction. When a municipal swimming pool has women-only hours – is that a banner headline?

There are not the institutions of state arrayed against non-violent transformation, as in the case with violence. When you have violence, you’re provoking the law enforcement, the military, the intelligence service, the judiciary system – the entire gamut of the protective institutions of the state come into play. And they have lots of experience at crushing violent efforts. When you have a movement that claims to be the carrier of a superior civilisation, quietly going about its work, we, particularly in the West, have no muscle, we have no consciousness, this is not something we’re aware of.

So, there has been a fundamental shift, in the last decade or so. What appeared to be, with Khomeini and bin Laden, what I called Islamism 1.0 or the first version of it, the first iteration – violent, aggressive, totalitarian – now is Islamism 2.0 which is aggressive, but in a political way, not a violent way. It has far greater prospects for success, be it in Algeria or in Britain, be it in Egypt or Australia. One’s focus needs to be much more on this insidious, quiet, political, lawful movement and not just simply on the terrorism, the criminality and the violence.

What’s to be done? I think it’s a very deep question. It’s not a matter for the police, it’s not a matter for politicians, it’s a matter of culture. The key is whether we believe that our way of life and our political order is worth fighting for, worth maintaining. I don’t mean fighting in the military sense. I mean it in a cultural sense. Do we have something that’s worthwhile? Or is it something that we easily give up?

The British case is so astonishing. Here is a country of such accomplishments, whether they be scientific or cultural or political. Yet, the current scene is one in which Britons, by and large, shrug their shoulders and have no real sense of deep, connection to it.

In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, there were a number of attempts – pathetic, I might add – to instil such a sense of patriotism and pride. The government came up with 120 icons of British life – everything from Shakespeare to Marmite. There were attempts in press to say, “We really are a worthy nation; we have great history.” It wasn’t very inspiring.

And I am sorry to say that in many cases – in the West – that spirit is lacking. It’s most lacking in the countries that are basically an extended family. To be Danish is basically a matter of having the same ancestor, and eating the same funny foods and singing the same Ribald songs. Whereas to be French is not just that. It’s also “liberty, equality, fraternity”. To be American, it’s the “pursuit of happiness”. There’s something beyond simply being members of the same clan and we’re working that out.

I’ll finish on one interesting case – the Dutch, who’ve had many problems. The Dutch government came up with a film, a two hour film for potential immigrants, explaining what it means to be Dutch. Among other things, besides the funny foods and so forth, the film suggested that being Dutch meant accepting homosexuality and it showed a nude woman on a beach. Now, is that the essence of being Dutch or not?

That is the heart of the debate here. What does it mean to be Canadian? Dutch? And so on. These debates are taking place as a result. Matters of national identity which have always been taken for granted, now have to be discussed. We’re at the very beginning of this debate, of this discussion, and it’ll be fascinating to see what comes of it. I’m rather pessimistic.