The World At War: What will become of Islam?

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The current wars being fought across the globe are flavored with an unfortunate condition: the battle of Islamic Extremists for the allegiance of Islamic peoples.

For various reasons, the hierarchy of the Christian Church has steadily lost its hold on those parts of the world that have been traditionally Christian.  The advance of Science, the universality of education, and the corruption within the church have all helped this process.

The Islamic world, however, has observed the secularization of Christian society with disgust and distaste.  One sector of Islamic society has responded by declaring war against the Christian West, and its perceived representative, the United States of America.  Generally speaking, the USA is not so much interested in defending Christianity as it is in making an (ahem) honest buck, and no doubt this annoys this particular sector of the Islamic world even more.

Another sector of the Islamic world admires the Secular West.  All religions are equal in the West, mostly, and have no power of their own in the Government, except, of course, through the actions of their adherents as individuals.  Religious extremists of all sorts are thoroughly frustrated by this state of affairs; they would prefer a role for religions above and beyond the role it plays via the action of the faithful.  It is not enough for the Christian Right to vote via conservative senators and congressmen.  The conservatives want their control of society to flow through the constitution itself.  They want Christian Prayer in School not to be at the mercy of a majority in Congress or the Supreme Court.  They know that Islamic prayer is not to be feared, because the Christian brats will never let it happen.  At any rate, admiring Islamic people, including many women, see that Western women, or women from Christian backgrounds, are not barred by their religion from participating in practically any activity, even if their salaries are often lower.  So even before the tragedy of September 11, 2001, there was a division within Islam.  We are not at war with a religion, but rather a power-hungry minority within it.  Its influence has grown because of the war.  The minority has temporarily succeeded in providing leadership in the crisis it itself helped to create.

At any rate, this protracted state of war is resulting in the vilification of a religion, Islam.  In many ways, the tenets of Islam are far more vague than those of Christianity.  The Sermon On the Mount lays out a pattern for living that the Koran must struggle to equal.  This is not because God is on the side of the Christians; it is rather that Jesus was a more enlightened and articulate man than was Mohamed.  Mohamed had the task of forging the tribes of the desert into a nation, and he chose religion to do it.  Jesus's agenda was different: it was to defeat the stranglehold that the clergy had on the Jewish people.  He failed, but he succeeded in setting out principles that fired the imagination of a large, underprivileged minority, and ultimately spread to the underclasses of Rome, and eventually to the entire world.  So Jesus failed, but his message lived on.  Mohamed succeeded, and what we are seeing now is the struggle of his message to become meaningful to a world whose imperatives are dramatically different from those of Mohamed.

The ideological struggle between Islam and the other philosophies current today may result in great loss of moral stature for the former.  But this is not what this war is about.  If the Islamic extremists lose this war, it will not necessarily be a condemnation of Islam itself.  Islam is not more wrong than Christianity, and in any case, a war cannot settle the matter.  This war is, at least partly, about whether religious wars are right.

There something more we must all fear: the Israeli government is led by people with very little wisdom or judgment.  It could be that Israel makes a strike that sets the Islamists back.  But such a strike will set civilization even further back.  Every victory that Israel has won has only set the stage for greater suffering, and greater efforts on the part of the USA and other governments to minimize the danger that Israel poses to the stability of the Middle East generally, and to the Islamic nations in particular.  Will an Israeli victory mean that Judaism is right, and Islam wrong?  Won't it prove that Judaism is superior to Christianity as well?

This war --or these wars-- have much to teach us.  But the lessons we will probably learn will be all wrong.  One lesson we will learn is that if any nation or rebel group want to inflict countless deaths, they will certainly have their wish.  Another lesson is that when the USA sets out to bring peace to any part of the world, it results in incredible loss of life, both for the Americans and their allies, and to the enemy.  There is another lesson, and this one will not be learned by anybody: the massive loss of enemy lives will never deter the religious extremist enemy.

The reason I got onto this topic is that I was reading L. M. Montgomery's sequence of Anne books.  In the last volume: Rilla of Ingleside, we see the mild nation of Canada being drawn into World War 1, and how the gentle intelligentsia of a rural town get elbowed out by common, jingoistic self-styled patriots.  Pacifists are made to despise themselves, and innocent young men egged on to enlist and die.  Rilla, Anne's youngest child, is devastated when her brother decides to enlist, and is ridiculed by her friends.  But she is pestered into making an oration to encourage young men to enlist, and she is labeled a hypocrite, because she hates seeing her brother enlist, but turns round to encourage other young men to get into uniform.  And, worst of all, in the process of getting up the ire to fight, it becomes a habit to vilify Germans.

Walter, the poet of the family, suffers agonies at the thought of having to participate in a bayonet charge, and to kill a man who could be a brother, or a son or a husband or a father of some innocent German woman or child.  But he is shamed by being given a white feather, the despicable means whereby so-called patriotic Canadian women shamed men into enlisting.  We can only guess that similar methods must be used against reluctant Muslim widows and orphans, to make them enlist as suicide bombers.  And similar methods will eventually be used to induce feeble-minded young American boys into donning uniform.  It is a miracle that the disgust and hostility American society had towards Vietnamese people has been forgotten, and young Vietnamese students welcomed here.  One can only hope that Afghan, Iraqi and Saudi youngsters in decades to come will be equally welcome here.