political words

The embrace of the dissident argument by a single nuclear physicist, Andrei Sakharov, devastated the morale of the Soviet Communist Party itself.

And, after the apocalypse, the virtuous and superior population would resurrect an ancient empire from the Golden Age, except in a high-tech modern version—a perfect utopia offering a solution to all of life’s problems, which liberalism does not try to do.

It was customary for a while to look on primitive madrassas in remote towns of the peasant universe as the root of the terrorist problem—religious academies where penniless boys with zero prospects for a better life are inducted into a culture of medieval rote-learning.

Meanwhile, the sundry mass movements of the right and the left took to echoing the fascist general in the Spanish Civil War who famously cried (though he himself was echoing the French Jacobins from the Reign of Terror, in token of the twentieth century’s right-left nihilist mélange), “Long live death!”

By the 1970s, sophisticated criticisms of communism had succeeded in decimating the movement in France.

The Qaddafis contracted with a Harvard-connected p.r. agency to generate friendly publicity, and the agency arranged for junkets and interviews, and some of the results turned up in the finest of publications, not excluding The New Republic.

The communists themselves occupied still another corner, vacated of any doctrine but in no rush to vacate their offices, too.

(If the classic Islamist texts can invoke a document like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with its French, Russian, and German provenance, surely anti-Islamists can invoke a few alternative ideas from the French, the Russians, and the Germans!)

And views like mine exacerbated the problem.

Schlesinger made this observation with the European totalitarians in mind, but the observation seemed to me equally insightful about the Islamists in their European and non-European homes.

According to the first criticism, analyses like mine vastly underestimated the danger posed by groups such as Al Qaeda.

By reading too many tracts and by ruminating over too many grandiose theories, I had taken my eye off the main thing.

The heroic anti-communist dissidents, basking in their glory, stood in one corner, upholding the principles of liberal democracy, although not always in a well-defined form.

By liberal societies, I meant societies of the kind that encourage people to think rationally and creatively for themselves, and try to protect everyone’s right to do so, instead of demanding, as non-liberal societies do, that everyone adhere to the venerable and bow to the hierarchical.

Meanwhile, the sundry mass movements of the right and the left took to echoing the fascist general in the Spanish Civil War who famously cried (though he himself was echoing the French Jacobins from the Reign of Terror, in token of the twentieth century’s right-left nihilist mélange), “Long live death!”

On these grounds I figured that it was possible to imagine what Islamism’s demise might look like, someday in the future.

But in regard to Islamism and especially its terrorist branches, the root of the problem seemed to me far more likely to be found on the other end of the educational spectrum: in the medical schools of Egypt or at Punjab University, or in places that might be regarded as still more prestigious—in the professional schools of Hamburg or the London School of Economics, where, after class, the students might amble off to their tea shops or apartments and pore over the same literature that...

From this standpoint, anyone who criticizes the Islamist movement must be Islam’s enemy—in my case, because I was following in the footsteps of my predecessors, the Jews who conspired against Muhammad in ancient Medina (or so I gather, judging from a passage in the preface to a 2004 edition of Qutb’s commentaries).

Yes, the Eastern Bloc had entered into long-term economic doldrums, but this could have gone on for centuries, even if Ronald Reagan had tripled the defense budget.

I ACQUIRED PILES OF Islamist tracts and tomes in English translation, and the tracts and tomes seemed to me oddly fascinating and rich, and this was especially worrisome.

Muste, the mentor to the mentor of Martin Luther King Jr.! Here is something unexpected: a previously unnoticed under-the-radar foreign policy coalition of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and a legacy from America’s Christian pacifist ultra-left, informally united to foment nonviolent liberal revolutions in faraway places.

A point in their favor: it is wrong to suppose that political inexperience and naïveté are invariably fatal.

They told a story about a virtuous and superior population that had come under attack from a cosmic conspiracy of foreign enemies and internal subversives.

All of which has amounted to saying that authoritative and persuasive liberals from Muslim backgrounds do not exist, and anyone who does appear to exist is either inconsequential or a fake and may well be a bad person, and Muslim liberalism will never be a force.

And along with the official communists came, with a lag, Italy’s ultra-left splinter groups as well, with their desperado mentality—the violent guerrillas who looked up one day and discovered that, while they still had pistols, they no longer had a doctrine.

Marx wrote his books and, thirty-four years after his death, Lenin and a few followers staged a Marxist uprising on the periphery of Europe.

I ACQUIRED PILES OF Islamist tracts and tomes in English translation, and the tracts and tomes seemed to me oddly fascinating and rich, and this was especially worrisome.

The Islamist literature convinced me that no amount of military action or Special Ops derring-do was going to prevent the jihadi vanguards from recruiting their cadres, to use the old Marxist term, from the fanciest of schools, and this was not a small thing.

The virtuous and superior population would shortly wage apocalyptic war to fend off the foreign enemies and to exterminate the subversives.

In a school where I teach a course, I discover in my mail slot a petition signed by university luminaries demanding action against Israel, but not a single manifesto or call for solidarity with the people of Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and other places.

It was customary for a while to look on primitive madrassas in remote towns of the peasant universe as the root of the terrorist problem—religious academies where penniless boys with zero prospects for a better life are inducted into a culture of medieval rote-learning.

By reading too many tracts and by ruminating over too many grandiose theories, I had taken my eye off the main thing.

Why, then, did all these people on either side of the Iron Curtain throw up their hands and announce that communism was henceforth defunct?

The totalitarians lived in fear that liberalism was right, and they fretted over the deviant impulses of their own wanton imaginations, and they insisted on peering into everyone else’s secret thoughts precisely because they knew that liberal heresies were alluring.

Sometimes they rebelled in the hope of preserving the past, a theme for peasants and artisans; and sometimes in the hope of merely expressing themselves, a theme for poets.

As for the failures, we have not yet even learned the basic facts, given that the grisliest failures of all took place not even in the Balkans but along Russia’s southern border, simmering even now, more than twenty years later, where very few reporters have ever been.

The whole history of the Marxist guerrilla movement had demonstrated that, if you can assemble even a modest cadre from among the well-educated, and you can motivate the members to forsake their privileges and comforts and trek into the badlands or the mountains, the cadre will always be able to recruit the wretched of the earth into the battalions of your insurgent army.

Even so, the Islamist advantages are painful to enumerate: the backing of Iran, huge organizations, mosques, a powerful and weathered sense of discipline linked to a long-haul strategy, experienced leaders, and financing that appears to be unlimited.

In the visible zones, the Arab Spring has aroused in the Western countries almost none of the enthusiasm that greeted its Eastern Bloc antecedent.

And for ten years these responses have aroused the dismissive rejoinder that such-and-such a liberal from a Muslim background argues too fiercely or has fallen for Friedrich Hayek, and thereby has lost credibility; or that someone else’s ethnic authenticity is tarnished by too much enthusiasm for America or France or some other country; or that neo-cons or maybe the king of Morocco are paying the bills, and so the anti-Islamist liberals with Muslim or Arab credentials must surely be c...

All the efforts of American commandos and drones notwithstanding, they are the ones who will bring the movement down.

A sufficient number of the politicians nonetheless agreed on the crucial point, which was that, in the former Eastern Bloc, society could aspire to something loftier than ethnic purges and organized crime; and the loftier alternative could be seen in Western Europe, their model and their ideal.

Instead of failing to attack Islam, ideas like mine had indeed attacked Islam, and the attack was bigoted and despicable.

Communism’s grand trunk was always the Soviet Union and the Moscowline communist parties around the world, who tended to profess a conservative and cautious instinct and who sometimes denounced and disdained their own splintery offshoots, the violent Marxist guerrilla sects.

Al Qaeda’s exuberant internationalism was hard to miss.

Something less than a school of thought arose—less than a school because not everyone agreed on vocabulary (“totalitarianism” is a vexed term), and not everyone agreed on some large policy questions (e.g., the wisdom of invading Iraq).

In each country, the three-cornered battle yielded its own result: a mostly brilliant liberal success in the Czech Republic, besprinkled for a little while with fairy tale elements; an unexpected alliance of liberals and reformed communists in Poland, who succeeded in tempering the ethnic haters, who maybe were not so dangerous to begin with; a catastrophic fusion of ethnic haters and old communists in Serbia, supported by Russia; a communist continuity in Russia itself, with the ideo...

But other people went poking at the claim.

But in regard to Islamism and especially its terrorist branches, the root of the problem seemed to me far more likely to be found on the other end of the educational spectrum: in the medical schools of Egypt or at Punjab University, or in places that might be regarded as still more prestigious—in the professional schools of Hamburg or the London School of Economics, where, after class, the students might amble off to their tea shops or apartments and pore over the same literature that...

They told a story about a virtuous and superior population that had come under attack from a cosmic conspiracy of foreign enemies and internal subversives.

The rise of Christianity—to cite a non-trivial example—does not lend itself to any obvious material explanations.

A sufficient number of the politicians nonetheless agreed on the crucial point, which was that, in the former Eastern Bloc, society could aspire to something loftier than ethnic purges and organized crime; and the loftier alternative could be seen in Western Europe, their model and their ideal.

THE TOTALITARIAN rebellions of the twentieth century offer variations of the same strange phenomenon, except that, unlike Christianity and Islam, the totalitarian movements have subtracted from world civilization instead of adding to it.

Here were the worst parts of twentieth-century Europe, creatively adapted to the traditions and circumstances of the Middle East.

But in regard to Islamism and especially its terrorist branches, the root of the problem seemed to me far more likely to be found on the other end of the educational spectrum: in the medical schools of Egypt or at Punjab University, or in places that might be regarded as still more prestigious—in the professional schools of Hamburg or the London School of Economics, where, after class, the students might amble off to their tea shops or apartments and pore over the same literature that...

I pictured a liberal revolution, or a liberal-leaning revolution, or at least a few liberal implications turning up in metropolitan centers of the Islamist movement, or wherever the Baath or pan-Arabist dictatorships were thriving—a partial revolution, feeble maybe, but identifiably modern and liberal.

Then again, this argument, the one about Muslim liberals and the power of ideas, has provoked a fourth and ultimate criticism, which I think has been regarded as the most devastating retort of all.

The totalitarians lived in fear that liberalism was right, and they fretted over the deviant impulses of their own wanton imaginations, and they insisted on peering into everyone else’s secret thoughts precisely because they knew that liberal heresies were alluring.

The Islamist and Baathist obsessions about imperialist and Zionist plots, the calls for a utopian resurrection of the ancient Caliphate of yore (which meant theocracy for the Islamists and one-party rule for the Baath), the massacres that followed the Islamist and Baath movements like a shadow—all this seemed, from my lookout perch, entirely recognizable.

Today even his oratory leads from behind.

A study of Roman economics and Mediterranean trade routes might reveal a few circumstances that favored this development, but I do not think that even the most rigorous such study would solve the riddle of what occurred.

But this merely suggests that Islamism offers one more instance of the independent power of ideas—in this case, as in the case of communism, a veritable cult of ideas.

The totalitarians lived in fear that liberalism was right, and they fretted over the deviant impulses of their own wanton imaginations, and they insisted on peering into everyone else’s secret thoughts precisely because they knew that liberal heresies were alluring.

Meanwhile, the sundry mass movements of the right and the left took to echoing the fascist general in the Spanish Civil War who famously cried (though he himself was echoing the French Jacobins from the Reign of Terror, in token of the twentieth century’s right-left nihilist mélange), “Long live death!”

And the crowds proclaimed themselves to be citizens of states.

Those tracts and tomes and Koranic commentaries, the scholarly works of Khomeini and other people—those are not just tchotchkes of the cause, like the giant posters of bearded sages and the miniature models of the Al Aqsa mosque.

The liberal enterprise has kept on swelling, even so—and among the people who have felt outraged or frightened, the dynamism and the evident attractiveness of liberal principles around the world have sometimes generated panic, too, along with a suspicion that gigantic and sinister conspiracies must be at work.

A sufficient number of the politicians nonetheless agreed on the crucial point, which was that, in the former Eastern Bloc, society could aspire to something loftier than ethnic purges and organized crime; and the loftier alternative could be seen in Western Europe, their model and their ideal.

The surface details in those mythologies varied from movement to movement.

The whole region seemed to be veering in terrorist directions, with battles almost everywhere going on between Islamists of different stripes and mukhabarat regimes, likewise of different stripes, ranging from the bad to the ghastly.

It was not going to look like a return to the yesteryears of Ottoman antiquity or some other era of the Islamic or Middle Eastern past.

The crowds chanting “The people want to topple the regime” in one country after another have altered these stubborn highbrow Western assumptions not at all.

By liberal societies, I meant societies of the kind that encourage people to think rationally and creatively for themselves, and try to protect everyone’s right to do so, instead of demanding, as non-liberal societies do, that everyone adhere to the venerable and bow to the hierarchical.

By focusing on Islamist ideas, and by emphasizing the importance of intellectual argument, instead of dwelling on the material factors, I had promoted the delusionary idea that abstract thinking rules the world.

I pictured a liberal revolution, or a liberal-leaning revolution, or at least a few liberal implications turning up in metropolitan centers of the Islamist movement, or wherever the Baath or pan-Arabist dictatorships were thriving—a partial revolution, feeble maybe, but identifiably modern and liberal.

And the post-communist liberals could then present themselves to the general public in their own countries and persuasively boast: we are welcomed and admired by the world.

A point in their favor: it is wrong to suppose that political inexperience and naïveté are invariably fatal.

A lot of readers’ eyebrows must have arched.

And this same seductive potential leapt up at me from the Koranic commentaries of the Islamist master-thinkers, Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Mawdudi.

The progressive thinkers from Muslim backgrounds, the people who have chosen to retain their religious identity and the people who have chosen to foreswear it, the people who have experienced for themselves the atmosphere of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fraternal organizations, the jihadis who have contemplated their course in life and have elected to become thoughtful and articulate exjihadis, the people who know what it is to be locked in an Egyptian jail, the people who find no d...

The crowds chanting “The people want to topple the regime” in one country after another have altered these stubborn highbrow Western assumptions not at all.

It was customary for a while to look on primitive madrassas in remote towns of the peasant universe as the root of the terrorist problem—religious academies where penniless boys with zero prospects for a better life are inducted into a culture of medieval rote-learning.

Back in 1949, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. pointed out in The Vital Center that totalitarians were already engaged, if only in the recesses of their own imaginations, in a heated argument with liberalism and its principles.

And for ten years these responses have aroused the dismissive rejoinder that such-and-such a liberal from a Muslim background argues too fiercely or has fallen for Friedrich Hayek, and thereby has lost credibility; or that someone else’s ethnic authenticity is tarnished by too much enthusiasm for America or France or some other country; or that neo-cons or maybe the king of Morocco are paying the bills, and so the anti-Islamist liberals with Muslim or Arab credentials must surely be c...

A COMPARISON of the Arab spring to the Eastern Bloc revolutions of 1989 does seem apt, if you bear in mind that Eastern Europe’s success stories are not its only stories.

The religion got started in a backwater province among people with very little power or wealth, and yet within a mere three hundred years, a blink of an eye in those times, it managed, by force of persuasion, to conquer the Roman Empire and change world history irreversibly.