It's Not Islam: Muslims can be free and democratic - Column

A world wracked by acts of terror. Embattled civic forces victimized by violent political gangs. Endless wars resulting in the deaths of millions. Megalomaniacal leaders who seek to expand power through invasion and subversion. Militarized societies characterized by torture, intimidation, and repression. Genocide and mass murder of civilian populations. Millenarian ideologies that claim to provide answers to all of humankind's vexing problems, and offer the snake-oil promise of rapid solutions to poverty and underdevelopment. Virulent anti-Semitism and scorn for the values of democracy, minority rights, and tolerance.

These phenomena are part of the recent history of wide swaths of the Islamic and Arabic worlds. Yet in the middle of the last century, the very same phenomena characterized the worlds of Christendom and Europe. Indeed, while Europe today seems a contented and sleepy zone of democracy, stability, prosperity, and peace, just two generations ago many observers were convinced that Europe was inherently inclined to dictatorship, warfare, extremism, and group hatred.

Europe's dramatic transformation reflects the triumph of democratic values. But it came at an enormous price. The struggle against fascism and Communism in Europe was waged at great cost over more than half a century; it encompassed wars hot and cold, containment, economic competition, the battle of ideas, and clandestine support for democratic opposition movements. But whatever the mechanisms employed in the struggle, Europe's democratic transformation required the utter defeat of its aggressive and absolutist ideologies.

Today the Islamic world -- and by extension the rest of us -- faces similar threats from two kindred totalitarian ideologies. One -- Ba'athism -- is secular and quasi-socialist, inspired by the organizational principles of Marxism-Leninism. The other -- revolutionary Islamism -- resembles fascism in linking radical social ideas with deeply ingrained conservative religious values. These movements are similar to their European counterparts in a number of ways. Ba'athism, a variant of Arab nationalism, and revolutionary Islamism, which seeks to create a universal theocratic Islamic caliphate (khilafah), are hostile to democracy and the free market; they prescribe specific models of social and political organization so intrusive in their impositions on ordinary life as to be totalitarian; they anathematize rival groups and subject political opponents to extreme violence and repression.

The parallels are not coincidental. Ba'athism and revolutionary Islamism were shaped by a handful of ideologues born within five years of one another at the start of the 20th century, who came to political maturity in the period when fascism and Communism were on the rise as political forces. The major ideologists of revolutionary Islamism and Ba'athism consciously adopted the tactics and organizational ideas of fascist and Communist movements.

It is the legacy of these men that today menaces the world. Mawlana Mawdudi, of the Indian subcontinent, was the precursor of today's Pakistani Islamic militants and of the Deobandi madrassas in which the leaders and foot soldiers of the Taliban were trained. Egypt's Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher, was the ideological founder of the Arabic world's militant Islamism; the Muslim Brotherhood movement he created was given renewed impetus after his execution by Egyptian authorities through the writings of another ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, who is regarded as the main philosophical inspiration of al-Qaeda and its leaders Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. The Muslim Brothers were expelled from Egypt and settled in the 1960s in Saudi Arabia, where they made common cause with the Wahhabis, integrated themselves into the Saudi educational system, and used emerging Saudi oil riches to spread revolutionary Islamist ideas worldwide. The Iranian cleric Ruhollah Khomeini's teachings -- a synthesis of militant Third World radicalism derived in part from the writings of Frantz Fanon -- have held Iran in the thrall of a militant theocratic tyranny since 1979. The ideologues of Ba'athism -- Syria's Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar -- were from the same generation and learned from the same models. Their movement exalted the ruling party much as the Communists and fascists had; their ideology now rules Syria and Iraq, and has influence in Libya and Lebanon as well.

These movements have achieved significant successes in visiting destruction and mayhem on the world -- but they have not thus far achieved the kind of regional dominance that fascism and Communism did in Europe in the 20th century. The power of jihadist Islamism is extensive but is facing widespread resistance. The revolutionary Islamists captured state power in Afghanistan, Iran, and Sudan -- but were defeated in Afghanistan, rejected by a vast majority of the citizenry in Iran, and are under pressure in Sudan. Their movement exerts strong influence in Pakistan, but the extremist parties won only 11 percent of the vote in the November elections. Extremist Islamism emerged as a powerful and destructive force in Algeria, but there, too, it lost public backing upon embarking in the 1990s on senseless carnage directed at innocent civilians.