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September 09,2o02
U.S. Edition
Bin Laden's
Bad Bet
Al Qaeda
is still a danger. But the appeal of Osama bin Laden's fundamentalist
ideology is fading, even in the Arab world.
By
Fareed Zakaria
In one of his legendary moments of brilliance, Sherlock Holmes pointed the attention of the police to the curious behavior of a dog on the night of the murder. The baffled police inspector pointed out that the dog had been silent during the night. "That was the curious incident," explained Holmes. Looking back over the last year, I am reminded of that story because the most important event that has taken place has been a nonevent. Ever since that terrible day in September 2001, we have all been watching, waiting and listening for the angry voice of Islamic fundamentalism to rip through the Arab and Islamic world. But instead there has been... silence. The dog has not barked.
The health of Al Qaeda is a separate matter. Osama bin Laden's organization may be in trouble, but--more likely--it may simply be lying low, plotting in the shadows. In the past it has waited for several years after an operation before staging the next one. Al Qaeda, however, is a band of fanatics, numbering in the thousands. It seeks a much broader following. That, after all, was the point of the attacks of September 11. Bin Laden had hoped that by these spectacular feats of terror he would energize radical movements across the Islamic world. But in the past year it has been difficult to find a major Muslim politician or party or publication that has championed his ideas. In fact, the heated protests over Israel's recent military offensives and American "unilateralism" have obscured the fact that over the past year the fundamentalists have been quiet and in retreat. Radical political Islam--which grew in force and fury ever since the Iranian revolution of 1979--has peaked.
Compare the landscape a decade ago. In Algeria, Islamic fundamentalists, having won an election, were poised to take control of the country. In Turkey, an Islamist political party was gaining ground and would soon also come to power. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak's regime was terrorized by groups that had effectively shut down the country to foreign tourists. In Pakistan, the mullahs had scared Parliament into enacting blasphemy laws. Only a few years earlier, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini had issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, who was still living under armed guard in a secret location. Throughout the Arab world, much of the talk was about political Islam--how to set up an Islamic state, implement Sharia and practice Islamic banking.
Look at these countries now. In Iran, the mullahs still reign but are despised. The governments of Algeria, Egypt, Turkey and (to a lesser extent) Pakistan have all crushed their Islamic groups. Many feared that, as a result, the fundamentalists would become martyrs. In fact, they have had to scramble to survive. In Turkey, the Islamists are now liberals who want to move the country into the European Union. In Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere they are a diminished lot, many of them re-examining their strategy of terror. If the governments brings them into the system, they will go from being mystical figures to local politicians.
Many Islamic groups are lying low; many will still attempt terrorism. But how can a political movement achieve its goals if none dare speak its name? A revolution, especially a transnational one, needs ideologues, pamphlets and party lines to articulate its message to the world. It needs politicians willing to embrace its cause. The Islamic radicals are quiet about their cause for a simple reason. Fewer and fewer people are buying it.
Don't get me wrong. This doesn't mean that people in the Middle East are happy with their regimes or approve of American foreign policy, or that they have come to accept Israel. All these tensions remain strong. But people have stopped looking at Islamic fundamentalism as their salvation. The youth of the 1970s and 1980s, who came from villages into cities and took up Islam as a security blanket, are passing into middle age. The new generation is just as angry, rebellious and bitter. But today's youth grew up in cities and towns, watch Western television shows, buy consumer products and have relatives living in the West. The Taliban holds no allure for them. Most ordinary people have realized that Islamic fundamentalism has no real answers to the problems of the modern world; it has only fantasies. They don't want to replace Western modernity; they want to combine it with Islam.
Alas, none of this will mean the end of our troubles. The Arab world remains a region on the boil. Its demographic, political, economic and social problems are immense and will probably bubble over. Outside the Middle East, in places like Indonesia, the fundamentalists are not yet stale. (Like a supernova whose core has gone dark, radical Islam's light still shines in the periphery.) But you need a compelling ideology to turn frustration into sustained, effective action. After all, Africa has many problems. Yet it is not a mortal threat to the West.
Nor does it mean, alas, the end of terrorism. As they lose political appeal, revolutionary movements often turn more violent. The French scholar Gilles Kepel, who documents the failure of political Islam in his excellent book "Jihad," makes a comparison to communism. It was in the 1960s, after communism had lost any possible appeal to ordinary people--after the revelations about Stalin's brutality, after the invasion of Hungary, as its economic model was decaying--that communist radicals turned to terror. They became members of the
Red Brigades, the Stern Gang, the Naxalites, the Shining Path. Having given up on winning the hearts of people, they hoped that violence would intimidate people into fearing them. That is where radical political Islam is today.
For America this means that there is no reason to be gloomy. History is not on the side of the mullahs. If the terrorists are defeated and the fundamentalists are challenged, they will wither. The West must do its part, but above all, moderate Muslims must do theirs. It also means that the cause of reforming the Arab world is not as hopeless as it looks today. We do not confront a region with a powerful alternative to Western ideas, just a place riddled with problems. If these problems are addressed--if its regimes become less repressive, if they reform their economies--the region will, over time, stop breeding terrorists and fanatics. The Japanese once practiced suicide bombing. Now they make computer games.
It might be difficult to see the light from where we are now, still deep in a war against terrorists, with new cells cropping up, new forms of terror multiplying and new methods to spread venomous doctrines. But at his core, the enemy is deadly ill. "This is not the end," as Winston Churchill said in 1942. "It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning."
CORRECTION-DATE: September 30, 2002
In "Bin Laden's Bad Bet" (Sept. 11) the Stern Gang is incorrectly listed among communist radical groups of the 1960s that turned to terror. We should have said the Baader-Meinhof Gang instead. We regret the errors.