The contest on the world stage is not merely between Islam and the Judeo-Christian world, but between modernity and tradition.
Modern life has disrupted traditional values creating a cultural environment in flux. Modernity has also ushered in a standard of living unprecedented in human history transforming the way people live and think. Material benefits are at the forefront of this new era. They are accompanied by lassitude, enterprise, licentious behavior, envy and greed, i.e. a mix of emotions and actions.
The rise of secularization in conjunction with material welfare has resulted in a latitudinarian worldview in which limits, ostensibly moral limits, are to be shattered.
For many imams this moral laxity is what they often associate with the Western form of government. In their mind, there is a belief that moral turpitude found in popular culture is a reflection of democratic injunctions. Their argument to adherents is that the West has lost its virtue. Hence Islamic leaders regard themselves as the guardians of virtue. Needless to say, it is a perverse view of morality that permits the stoning of adulterers and other grotesque practices. However bizarre these sharia imposed laws may be, they reinforce a Muslim perception that Islam is the last reservoir of moral strictures.
Western leaders can use a bullhorn to contend that advanced technology and free market applications can improve economic standards in Muslim nations relying on sharia, but it will not make the slightest difference. Islam and the West speak past one another. The West is driven by materialism – a view shared by many in Asia – and Islam is searching for virtue.
Wars are fought on many levels. We must defeat Islam on military fronts and avoid the establishment of caliphates that inspire young misguided youths searching for meaning in their lives. We must defeat Islam with ideas that challenge the violent dimensions in Koranic texts. But it is also necessary for the West to ask questions of itself. Most significantly, it must address the relationship between modernity and virtue.
As long as Western celebrities have planned “wardrobe malfunctions,” violent lyrics in rap music, internet pornography and so many other lascivious dimensions of culture, imams will balk at rapprochement with the West.
There is an uplifting, romantic story in Western history, but it is no longer imbibed. It is a virtuous tale of struggle and overcoming hardship and war. Surely there were errors made in the name of Western positions, but there is also sacrifice, honor and dedication, qualities universally admired. And these are qualities routinely overlooked in contemporary life.
The strategic outlook for the future is based on several factors: Radical Islam should be resisted and rolled back on every front; reformers within Islam should be encouraged, recognized and honored, and the West should employ its educational resources to capture the qualities that set western civilization apart from all others.
Radical Islam will be defeated when the West recaptures the spirit and confidence that resulted in its prodigious achievements. The guilt that surrounds western thought today is choking the expression of accomplishment. It also prohibits an honest portrayal of radical forces and an accurate self-assessment.
Reason uninformed by faith is as inert as a faith uninformed by reason. The West is immersed in the former condition with secularism on the ascendency. Radical Islam represents the latter condition. Obsessed, as it is, with fanatical opinion unguided by the moderation of reasoned judgment.
For those in the West, it is time to realize that modernity has distinct benefits, but it fails to recognize the virtue in its history. Recapturing that sense of virtue not only empowers the western perspectives, it answers the criticism leveled against the West by Islamic leaders.
Herbert London is President of the London Center for Policy Research, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the book The Transformational Decade (University Press of America). You can read all of Herb London’s commentaries atwww.londoncenter.org
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