9/11/2001 which has put some populations in the West on the defensive, persuaded Muslims living in the West to clarify their position on terrorism and to advocate greater integration into mainstream society in response to 'Islamophobia'. And on the other hand, two new patterns of Islamic radicalism started to develop:The first is `franchising': local groups, based on local solidarities (neighbourhood, family, university) and with few or no ties to Al Qaeda take the label and act according to what they see as Al Qaeda's ideology and strategy. The second is a quest for allies and support beyond the pale of Islamic fundamentalists. The radicals try to find allies and fellow-travellers at the expense of the purity of their ideological message. They may one day find support among the European ultra-left or certain other `liberation' movements (for instance, former Baathists in Iraq, or ETA in Europe). Both trends are in line with the globalisation of Al Qaeda.
One of the issues in this quest for allies is the choice to be made between the national level and the global. Until 1998, every time internationalists joined a movement of national liberation (from Palestine to Afghanistan and Bosnia to Chechnya), it was the national movement that succeeded in imposing its agenda on foreign volunteers, even if it borrowed some tactics (such as suicide bombing). That was the pattern in the 1970s when hundreds of leftist secular militants left Europe and Japan to fight in Bolivia (Régis Debray), Palestine (Japanese Red Army) and Lebanon (Red Army Faction). But we see now a trend in which some `national' movements identify with global organisations. The Taliban movement, for example, committed political suicide when it refused to dissociate itself from Bin Laden after the August 1998 terrorist attacks on US embassies in East Africa. Jemaah Islamiah would not have been repressed as it was by the Indonesian authorities had it not directly attacked Western interests. This is also a consequence of the `failure of political Islam' and the demise of the `Islamic state' paradigm. Globalisation is a pessimistic answer to the failure of national projects.
Internationalism versus nationalism is not a consequence of a reading of the Koran but simply the revival of a radical phenomenon of the 1970s. Thirty years ago, many of today's radicals, specifically in the West, would have joined radical leftist movements, which have now disappeared or become `bourgeois' (like the Revolutionary Communist League in France). Nowadays only two Western currents of radical protest claim to be `internationalist': the antiglobalisation movement and radical Islamists. But their constituencies are quite different. Islamist radicals will not be able to find a stable and lasting constituency, precisely because their appeal is based on uprootedness and the generation gap. To find allies radical Islam has to be less and less Islamic. To put down its roots among Muslims, it has to become less and less radical.
It is clear that Al Qaeda has `Islamised' an existing space of anti-imperialism and contestation. Its militants are activists, with little ideological formation or few ideological concerns. Al Qaeda is heir to the ultra-leftist and Third Worldist movements of the 1970s.The European extreme Left, if existent, is no longer active in depressed housing estates and degraded inner cities. Islamist preachers have replaced far-Left militants and social workers. Many of the young people in these neighbourhoods find in radical Islam a way to recast and rationalise their sense of exclusion and uprootedness. Many radical preachers mix the Koran with almost Marxist statements. Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada deride integration. `The West has greatly oppressed our nation,' declared Qatada. `To strengthen the roots of religion in our nation is to reject the Western ideology."' They tell the young that there is no hope of making their way in Western societies except through violence.
What are the implications of this trend? The reasons why some people rebel will not disappear overnight, nor will reasons for returning to Islam. But rebellion and re-Islamisation should not be confused. Many returns to Islam are transitional and the revolt still lacks a strategic perspective.
We have already noted the main failure of Al Qaeda: the lack of genuine strategic goals. Its aim is to destroy the United States, but the backlash has been severe, from Afghanistan to Iraq. Even if the United States is trapped in a new form of hubris (reshaping the Muslim world), it is not on the verge of collapsing.
An important debate among Muslim radicals has yet to be satisfactorily resolved. Bin Laden has called for jihad and has failed. Moreover, US troops are everywhere, and the main Muslim movements of national liberation are taking the brunt of the unholy antiterrorist alliance: Chechens and Palestinians are losing international support. Innocent Muslims living in the United States are suffering prejudice. Many radicals who share the ideas of Al Qaeda are discussing its strategy (or lack of it).The debate is reminiscent of that between Leninist and ultra-leftists organisations in the 1920s and 1930s: should one call for immediate revolution throughout the world, or first secure `socialism' in one country, while campaigning among the `masses' to win their hearts and minds, before calling them to arms? There is talk among many militants that they should revert to dawah (preaching; that is, propaganda and, in a sense, political action) instead of jihad. Postponement of jihad does not necessarily mean moderation, but implies a return to some sense of reality and pragmatism: one has to deal with the real people. The purity of the neofundamentalist message will be lost in the very process of re-Islamisation. To maintain purity means living in a ghetto or a closed community. To `address the masses' means entering into the real world of politics and compromise. Whatever the tensions, the decision among many European governments not to exclude the so-called fundamentalist movements from political dialogue is positive and pushes those movements towards moderation and compromise. The policy of integration works so long as the call to arms is no longer heard or listened to. Al Qaeda's dream of mobilising the ummah around jihad is self-limiting. The movement is a security threat, but it lacks a strategic agenda.
The Identity Reconstruction of Western Islam
What are the cultural patterns that are supposed to define a Muslim ethnic identity? They do not come from precise ethnic or national cultures (such as the Punjab or Egypt), but are made up of what remains when these pristine cultures have vanished through deculturation. The definition of Islam as a culture per se is possible only after the process of immigration has disconnected religious tenets from a given culture. This disconnection fits with Western secularism, for which a religion is defined as a mere religion separated from other sociocultural fields. After this break Islam is then re-objectified as a culture in itself and called to explain the social attitudes of Muslims (towards women, for example), under the pretext that Islam advocates living as a community.
Tariq Ramadan exhorts young French Muslims to “live out their faith and culture”. But what is the meaning of culture here? Is it something larger than religion? In this case, is it linked with culture of origin? But which point of origin makes sense for a youth who has lost most of his or her links with other cultures? And if religion and culture are the same thing, why maintain the distinction?
The notion of a single `Muslim culture' cannot survive analysis. If it refers to Islam as a religion it is redundant. The different Muslim populations have some elements in common such as diet and holidays, which are nothing more than the basic tenets of the rituals and beliefs, but in themselves they do not constitute a culture. What is beyond the strict tenets of religious rituals and beliefs refers to specific national or ethnic cultures, of which Islam is just a component, even if it is indistinguishable. It is difficult to find a common basis for an `Islamic culture' outside the tenets of the religion. What about Muslim, food, sports, dance, music, literature and even folklore? These elements are expressions either of a native, specific culture or possibly of ethnic groups defined as such from outside (Asians or Blacks in Britain, Arabs in France), but they cannot be part of the definition of a religious community. For instance, there are among Muslim populations living in France fewer cultural, sports or entertainment associations than among other, less numerous ethnic or national communities (Armenians, Portuguese, and so on). This is a consequence of the discrepancy between the ethnic or national cultures and Islamic religious standards of culture and entertainment. A Punjabi ballet makes sense, not an `Islamic ballet'. For traditional believers, and specifically for those with a rural background, fidelity to national culture (diet, clothing, language) might equivate with fidelity towards Islam.
Also modern music and films produced by Muslim artists have nothing to do with Islam. Bhangra among Pakistanis living in Britain, Rai among Algerians, Egyptian films, with their mixture of romance and violence - all express more an appropriation of modernity, and a synthesis between a renewed tradition and the tastes of new audiences, than the persistence of a historical culture.
In fact, the lowest common denominators in defining a Muslim culture are religious norms that can fit with or be recast along the lines of different cultural customs. Halal is a way to kill an animal, not a way to cook it. It is not linked with a culture and could perfectly well fit with global fast food.
In March 2002 a settlement agreement was signed between McDonald's and a coalition of Jews, Hindus and vegetarians who complained about the presence of beef in French fries. A group of Muslim organisations successfully asked to be included in the settlement (http://www.soundvision.com/info/mcdonalds). In a word, Muslims just want to be able to go to McDonald's and remain good Muslims.
The hijab is also more a concept than a given item of clothing.The way in which a Muslim woman can implement (or twist) the rule of concealing her hair, arms and legs can express either a given culture (Afghan chadri, Pakistani burqa) or a personal reappropriation of modernity (trench coat, headscarf and trousers for Turkish Islamist women or second-generation university students in Europe, not to mention the `chaDior' of the elegant upper-class ladies of Tehran).
Islamic culture is nonetheless often referred to as a set of anthropological patterns and values. For instance, a specific relationship to the body is linked with Islam: reluctance to permit nudity, post-mortem examination and cremation; a stress on men's honour and women's chastity; and opposition to coeducation. All these traits might, of course, seem to be the internalisation of religious norms, but they do not make a culture as such, and they are shared by many other cultures. Some actors try to recast these `cultural' norms in terms of values, which is also a form of westernisation. A value is an ideal norm, not a legal obligation.
Tariq Ramadan (Les Musulmans, pp. 120-1) defines the hijab as a'testimony of faith'. He considers it mandatory, but stresses that Muslim women should arrive at such a conclusion by themselves, without any external pressures. So he still thinks the hijab is compulsory for any Muslim woman, speaks of it in terms of personal achievement, which should not be imposed but discovered through a process of deepening of the faith. Such an approach is more in line with Christian spirituality than with the classic legalistic approach of Islam.To speak in terms of values instead of interdicts and obligations is also a way to recast a Muslim identity in terms compatible with a Western conception of religion. In Iran `new theologians' also speak in terms of values (arzeshha), which is little more than the spiritualising of cultural norms, or giving a cultural form to universal norms. When speaking of the hijab as embodying a woman's chastity (instead of simply being God's commandment), does one mean that chastity is essentially a Muslim value, or that the hijab is just the Muslim way to enforce a value shared by other religions? Defence of values often goes along with social pressure inside the 'community' to enforce what is seen as a cultural heritage threatened by the pervasive influence of a free and almost depraved Western cultural environment.
So we are' witnessing an endeavour by many Muslim community leaders in the West, as well as reformist theologians, to express the difference between Islam and the West in terms compatible with and/or acceptable by the other (a Western non-Muslim). This is the methodological use of the neo-ethnic perception of Muslims in the West, which by definition insists on the legitimacy of recognising differences. But it contradicts the very definition of Islam as a universal true religion.
There is a discrepancy between the avowed values of a'Muslim culture' and the sociological realities of everyday life for people of Muslim origin. As usual, cultural values are more preached than implemented. But this imaginary culture is too often taken at its own word by observers and politicians. With a slight time-lag, Muslim populations are entering the same patterns of sociological modernisation as the West, but this can occasionally be carried out through religious revivalism. In this sense the call to values has to be seen either as nostalgia for a disappearing social order or as a search for renewed foundations of personal religiosity in terms of purely religious values.
The ambiguity of the nineteenth-century Salafism of Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani was that by pretending to return to the Koran and Hadith as the sole corpus, it justified neofundamentalism (in the contemporary incarnation of Salafism, which is nowadays similar to Wahhabism) and liberalism (as exemplified by Saidzadeh in Iran). The difference between then and now is in the liberals' use of critical intellectual tools. It is interesting that few liberal thinkers try to build on the vast corpus of classical theology and interpretation. This is the main critique of the French-Tunisian thinker Abdelwahab Meddeb in his Malady of Islam (NewYork: Basic Books, 2003).
Fundamentalism is a factor in the disjunction between culture and norms. By placing any form of behaviour within a set of specific and explicit norms, it ignores or destroys all that is transmitted, implicit and subject to various interpretations. This works in any monotheistic religion. As we have seen in the case of halal fast food, religious norms are not so much culture-compatible as culture-blind, because they bypâss the very concept of culture, in the same way as the US army dreams of an `any-religion-compatible' combat ration. Mecca-Cola is neither a cultural answer to CocaCola nor the _expression of an ethnic culture; it is merely a'halal' Coca-Cola (at least according to the marketing blurb, but its success shows that it works). It is interesting to note how the negative response of many Europeans towards the Islamic presence is often linked not with a traditional Muslim way of life (ethnic restaurants or the traditional veiling of older migrant women) but with a modern assertion of Islamic symbols (the headscarf being worn by French-born schoolgirls, for instance). In Evry, near Paris, the socialist mayor supported the building of a huge mosque in the town centre, but opposed the transformation of a franchised supermarket (Franprix) into an all-halal store (which sold the same products as the Franprix chain store, except wine, pork and non-halal meat). It is the fading of borders between cultures that creates anxiety.
The culture-blind approach of neofundamentalists explains why, in Christianity as well in Islam, only fundamentalists are winning more converts in an era of globalisation and uprootedness. US Protestant evangelists are known for their aggressive policy on conversions. They learn the local language, wear local dress, and may eat local food, but do not adapt to local cultures (for example, reading poetry or novels, or mastering traditional dancing). Propaganda here is also a tool for uprooting and hence works more effectively when people feel uprooted. Millions of Latinos in the United States are turning from Catholicism to Protestantism. Apostasy, the abandonment of one's religious faith, is a trend among Latinos. The percentage of Latino Catholics drops from 74 percent among the first generation to 72 and 62 percent among the second and third generations, according to the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL) study. Simultaneously, the percentage of Latino Protestants and other Christians increases from 15 percent in the first generation to 20 and 29 percent among the second and third generations.' Bruce Murray, `Latino religion in the United States: demographic shifts and trends', http://wwwfacsnet.org/issues/faith/espinosa.php.
This could be compared with the spread of Salafism among second-generation European Muslims. The main battlegrounds for conversion are Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia (specifically Kyrgyzstan - when people turn to Christianity there it is never to Orthodoxy). It also implicates the various sects (such as the Jehovah's Witnesses), all of which are also both the products and the tools of deculturation. Hence the frequent accusations that Protestant missionaries are the vanguard of US influence (a charge that President Bush's decision to make religious organisations eligible for Federal development funds did nothing to dispel).
Fundamentalism is a means of re-universalising religions (whether it be Islam or Christianity) that has ended up being closely identified with a given culture. Any expanding religion has three ways to deal with cultural identity: `going native' (the Jesuits in seventeenth-century China);' considering one's own culture to be the best vector (French or Spanish missionaries, but also many Arab missionaries in Black Africa); or disentangling faith and cultural identity by ignoring culture and turning religion into a universal code of norms.
The paradox is that the more religions are decoupled from cultures, the more we tend to identify religion and culture. Islamic fundamentalists and many conservative Muslims lobby for Islam to be recognised as a culture in the West, using the common idiom of multiculturalism. This too is a paradox, however, because religion is the expression of a universal truth, while a culture is relative to other cultures by definition. The universal (religion) asks to be recognised as a particularity (defence of an identity). Religion becomes a sort of neo-ethnicity - many people, whatever their level of religious practice, citizenship or political activity, claim to react as Muslims against the US-led campaign in Iraq, but would not call themselves believers. At the same time Western leaders label `Muslim' all the inhabitants of Muslim countries as if `Islam' was their principal identity trait.
A common view about conflicts in the Middle East (Palestine and Iraq) is that they will widen the gap between `Muslims' and the West (almost nobody says between Muslims and Christians). The Bush administration and Tony Blair took pains to show that their campaign in Iraq was not directed against the Muslims. President Chirac opposed the invasion partly because he considered that it would indeed alienate the Muslim world from the West, while Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia, in his farewell speech to the Islamic Conference Organisation at Kuala Lumpur (October 2003), unleashed his wrath not only upon the West and the Jews, but also upon Muslims who failed to address the challenge of the backwardness 'of the Muslim world. We see here that the word `Muslim' has a deep political meaning. It refers not to a religion but to some sort of neo-ethnic group that is defined in its opposition to the `West'. The Third World and Muslims are almost synonymous. For an in-depth analysis of Islamism and fundamentalism as a political protest, see François Burgat, Face to Face with Political Islam, London: I.B.Tauris, 2003. Let us remember that in the early USSR `Muslims' was also used as an ethnic term, as shown by the brief episode of the `Muslim Communist Party' in 1918.
But why does such a comparison work apparently only for Islam? First, the main battlefields where the West (including Russia) is involved are in Muslim countries, even if none of them has anything to do with religion (Israel/Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and Iraq). Second, the Middle East is to the south of Europe, and the tensions between South and North inevitably take on the form of a debate between Islam and the West. Third, the spaces of social exclusion in Western Europe are populated by a growing Muslim population. All this is congruent with the fact that Islam, after the disappearance of the extreme Left, is one of the few discourses of political contestation available on the market. The other discourse of contestation in the West is the antiglobalisation movement. It is thus not by chance that some Islamic militants, such as Tariq Ramadan in Europe, are trying to find common ground with the antiglobalisation movement, which is also eager to reach beyond the `white' middle classes to second-generation migrants. In Paris, on 13 November 2003, the Economic Social Forum, a coalition of antiglobalisation movements, invited Tariq Ramadan to speak, even after he had come under heavy attack for denouncing the 'communitarianist' approach (see page 20) of some French Jewish intellectuals.
Authenticity is, incidentally, a motto of authoritarian Third World regimes (not necessarily Muslim), which also use it to oppose Western encroachments and to call for democratization and human rights: Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore or President Mugabe of Zimbabwe often referred to `authenticity' and to the need to find one's own way. The opposition `Islam versus the West' appears less relevant if one refers to the other Third World `cultural areas', which tend to agree with the Muslim countries in their critiques of Western cultural and political encroachments. By identifying democracy With Western culture and reproducing the ‘clash of-civilizations’ paradigm, many non-Western regimes of course want to delegitimise democracy as a universal concept. They love Huntington's statement that `claims that Western values are universally relevant are false, immoral and dangerous? By contrast, many US `universalists' firmly believe that democracy is a universal value, as Paul Wolfowitz stated in a speech in Singapore: To win the war against terrorism and help shape a more peaceful world,
we must speak to the hundreds of millions of moderate and tolerant people in the Muslim world, regardless of where they live, who aspire to enjoy the blessings of freedom and democracy and free enterprise. These values are sometimes described as `Western values,' but, in fact, we see them in Asia and elsewhere because they are universal values borne of a common human aspiration.( International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), `The Gathering Storm: The Threat of Global Terror and Asia/Pacific Security', Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Asia Security Conference: The Shangri-La Dialogue, Singapore, 1 June 2002. See http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/0206061 9.htm.)
If we extend the scope of the debate we see that it is not between Islam and the West, but between the West and many non-Western leaders. The rejection of US-style democracy, either for selfish reasons or because many people do not trust the United States, is expressed by using any available term from the toolbox of symbolic meanings. Huntington provides such a toolbox, hence his immense popularity as the man `you love to hate' if you are a Third Worldist multiculturalist or an Islamic fundamentalist. The assimilation of Islam with a culture is a means of expressing a worldly collective political protest, and logically has nothing to do with religion (that is, with personal salvation).
Religion is used as a marker, often quite a hollow one, to recast identities in a time of deculturation and social protest. Old tools are given new tasks. Nevertheless, the fact that even conservative and fundamentalist Muslims advocate promoting a Muslim identity on the basis of multiculturalism shows how the agenda is fixed by the Western debate. The dominant discourses promoting either universalism or multiculturalism are Western inventions, as indicated by the two mirror-image quotations of Huntington and Wolfowitz.
Finally, in international relations and in domestic politics the politicisation of Islam goes hand in hand with a reluctant secularisation. Precisely because neofundamentalists are unable to throw off the concept of culture (even when they burn books and destroy Buddhas, or would like to ban novels, music and dancing), they contribute to the isolation of religion from culture, and thus the promotion of secularisation. When one refuses to give any but a negative religious meaning to a field one cannot suppress, one explicitly acknowledges that there are two separate spheres. Neofundamentalists expel culture from the scope of human activities; they ignore existing societies and political systems. Their concern for purity pushes them to ignore real life. By fighting to purify religion, fundamentalists tend to objectify religion, to define it as a closed and explicit set of norms and values, separated from a surrounding culture systematically seen as corrupting. Secularisation does not mean the end of religion, but the separation of religion from the other spheres of social life. Thus a religious revival can be perfectly compatible with growing secularisation. The Islamic revolution in Iran has been, in my opinion, one of the key factors in secularisation: who in Iran, apart a cabal of conservatives (or fanatical secularists), can speak of the growing influence of religion in society? The same is true in the United States, one of the last religious nations in the Western world. Despite a legislative backlash, the growing affirmation of people's religiosity did not really affect secularisation. The United States is still far more liberal than was the case in the 1950s (who today advocates banning homosexuality?). The more God returns, the more Satan is a frequent visitor too.
Cultural Values
When cultural content is disappearing, differences are expressed in terms of codes and/or values. Fundamentalists of both the Muslim and the Protestant ilk speak in terms of orders from God. More liberal (or simply conservative) branches prefer to speak in terms of values (which is relevant for the Catholic Church, moderate Protestants and many mainstream Muslim organisations). As I have said previously, mainstream Muslims in the West (but increasingly also in the Middle East) tend to recast religious norms in terms of values: chastity for women, defence of the family, and opposition to legalising homosexuality, pornography and sexual freedom. These values are almost identical in all religions, along the same spectrum from strictly conservative to liberal views. In the ongoing debates in the West on ethics and values (abortion, homosexuality, genetic engineering), alignments have little to do with belonging to a given religion. Muslims increasingly align with conservative Christians and Jews, to the extent that they adopt some positions that till recently had no equivalent in Islam (for example, defining abortion as a mortal sin, or adopting the category `homosexual' instead of speaking of `acts of depravity').
The issue is not Western versus Muslim values. When Pim Fortuyn entered the political fray in the Netherlands on an anti-Islamic platform, it was not to defend traditional European values, but to protect the homosexual rights that had been won in the 1970s in the face of conservative Christian traditionalists. Interestingly, the Dutch-speaking Moroccan Imam el-Moumni, who triggered Fortuyn's ire by saying in a radio broadcast that homosexuality is a disease and has to do with bestiality, was not in line with traditional ulama, for whom homosexuality is a sin and thus punishable by death. By calling it a disease he took the same line as the Catholic Church in modern times: exonerating the homosexual of sin as long as he does not practise, but refusing to give him any legal rights as a homosexual; in the eyes of the church this is a modern and benevolent position. The Catholic Church at present accepts the concept of sexual orientation, so could accept the concept of a'chaste homosexual', while for traditional canon law, as well as sharia, it is the performance of a sexual act that makes somebody a `deviant' and hence a sinner because one is responsible for one's actions. For traditional believers one can be homosexual only by choice, not by nature.
Incidentally, Fortuyn was assassinated not by a Muslim, but by an animal rights activist who was also, in his own way, defending the freedom movement of the post-1980s.
In many instances conservative Muslims and the Christian Right are on the same side: calling for an end to compulsory coeducation, fighting the teaching of Darwinism, rejecting anything that could even come close to being a'homosexual marriage'. See Harun Yahya, `The Bloody Alliance: Darwinism and Communism' in Islam Denounces Terrorism, Bristol: Amal Press, 2002. See, by the same author, http:// www darwinism-watch.com.
In France the Catholic Church and the Chief Rabbinate opposed a law forbidding the Islamic headscarf in schools, because they agreed that religion ought to be present in the public sphere. A poll taken among Arabs and Westerners showed that the opposition between them over values is not about democracy (a value in itself for 86 per cent of Westerners and 87 per cent of Arabs), but is about divorce (60 per cent of Westerners and only 35 per cent of Arabs approve), abortion (48 and 25 per cent) and homosexuality (53 and 12 per cent). This is not a conflict between `Western' and `Muslim' values (according to the sharia, divorce is easy for a male Muslim), but between religious conservatives and non-religious people. Muslims tend to align with Christian conservatives. (World Values Survey, pooled sample 1995-2001; see Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, NewYork: Freedom House, 1981-98. See also Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, `The True Clash of Civilizations', Foreign Policy, March-April 2003.)
Of course there may be some requests by fundamentalist Muslims that seem (and are) unacceptable, all of them revolving around women's rights. But once again conservative Catholics, Protestants and Jews are discomfited by sharing the anti-Islamic feminist viewpoint because they can be (and have been) targeted too: why should women be excluded from the priesthood? In any case, as we have seen, it is the West that defines the space of the debate. Often debates on Islam are no more than debates on the meaning of the West. A good example is the `headscarf affair' in France, arising from some hundred individual cases of girls wanting to wear headscarves, or veils, at school. It became a national debate, with the creation of a commission, a vote in parliament, weekly debates on television, and headlines and hundreds of passionate opinion pieces in the press. By contrast, the headscarf is not an issue in Britain, where even policewomen are allowed to wear it. This shows that the issue is not about the West and Islam; instead it is a form of French soul-searching debate about the meaning of laïcité (laicism) in the creation of national identity, and about the relationship between state, church and civil society. The French model of the nation-state is in crisis, due to European integration, globalisation, the crisis of the welfare state, and so on, but the debate on Islam is a way to externalise and intellectualise the issue.
The debate occurs within a single `cultural' framework: that of the West. Many neofundamentalists are aware of this and try to prevent any debate and interaction, putting the sharia forward as the real dividing line, with the consequence that they can live not in the West but in a ghetto. The quest for a strict application of the sharia aims to re-create an absolute otherness that has no possible concrete application. Even if strict neofundamentalists reject integration into Western societies, the bulk of the conservative Muslims are eager to integrate but want to push for conservative moral values that they can share with other citizens, whatever their faith.
Military Strategy
International Islamic terrorism is a consequence of the globalisation of the Muslim world rather than a spillover of the Middle Eastern conflicts. Nevertheless, the real wars are in the Middle East.
Globalisation means that Islam has less and less to do with a given territory. The historical Muslim space of the Middle East is now reshaped by nationalisms, and too often authoritarian states appear to offer a better defense than democracy against Western encroachments. In this context radical Islamic movements have little choice but to join the national agenda. Democracy is also too often seen as an alien import, and the US military campaign in Iraq will not help to allay that view. The discrepancy between a holistic view of what a Muslim nation should be (embodied in all the failed models of Baathism and Islamism) and a world of migrations, Muslim settlement in non-Muslim countries and the decoupling of religion from given cultures and lands - all this has culminated in a general deterritorialisation of Islam.
But the fight against terrorism is still understood in terms of territory and states, as embodied in the expression `war on terror'. An army fights to occupy a territory or to destroy a state, but international terrorist groups need no territory. The campaign in Afghanistan made sense to the extent that Bin Laden had a territorial sanctuary that had to be destroyed. Once he became deterritorialised too, what was the use of occupying the territory? Iraq has never been an asylum or training ground for Islamic radical groups (the Ansar al-Islam pocket in Kurdistan could have been dealt with without a ground invasion).The only coherent rationale is the building of democracy. By turning Muslim countries into democratic ones, through a mixture of military action, destabilising `rogue states' and the hoped-for domino effect, we might expect to undermine support for terrorism and build peace in the Middle East. But we may also attain the reverse: an alliance or even a merger between nationalist and fundamentalist radical movements (the merger of nationalism and Islamism has already happened), which is apparently the dominant trend.
A military campaign can only hope at best to reshape states and societies. This presupposes some sort of long-term process of social engineering, which is exactly what Washington's neoconservatives had in mind when invading Iraq. However, such a project is based on an ideological view of human beings, societies and cultures, which ignores sociology, history and nationalism.
The problem is that deterritorialisation accompanies a decrease in state influence. International terrorism has triggered a debate on the role of states. `Failed states' and `rogue states' have been targeted as potential sources of terrorism. The problem is that the state factor is negligible among contemporary terrorist movements. Efforts to implicate Iraq in 9/11 have even been contradicted by Bush himself. The support of Syria and, to a lesser extent, Iran for Hezbollah is undeniable, but Hezbollah is not an international terrorist organisation. In Washington since 9/11 a macabre game has been played out, entitled `Which is the real rogue state?' The official view was, of course, that Saddam's Iraq was the rogue state by definition, involved in every kind of threat (terrorism, weapons of mass destruction). Some dissident views (for example, Michael Ledeen) point to Iran. See, among others, Michael Ledeen, `Time to Focus on Iran -The Mother of Modern Terrorism', address to the Policy Forum of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Washington, DC, 30 April 2003
Others point to Saudi Arabia, while a small minority still think that Syria could be an easier target. The issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction goes far beyond that of rogue states. It involves many non-state actors and some `friendly' states (Pakistan and Russia), or states which are beyond the range of a military attack (China). See also, Stephen Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror, New York: Doubleday, 2002. See also Laurent Murawiec who, as a Rand analyst, presented a controversial lecture to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board on 10 July 2002, entitled `Taking Saudi out of Arabia'. See, for example, Jack Shafer, `The PowerPoint that Rocked the Pentagon: The LaRouchie Defector Who's Advising the Defense Establishment on Saudi Arabia', Slate, 7 August 2002, http://slate.msn.com/id/2069119/.
The passage of Islam to the West and the globalisation of Islam make most of the representations that founded policies towards the Middle East, Islam and terrorism irrelevant.The culturalist approach misses the point of the westernisation of Islam, and specifically that fundamentalism is also a modern phenomenon. The strategy of the war against terror misses the deterritorialisation element. The concept of a world Muslim ummah as a geostrategic actor is nonsense.
Terrorism is, of course, a real security threat, but it can be dealt with more effectively by using intelligence and police tools than by waging military campaigns. The terrorists do not have a long-term strategy; they are unable to change regimes in the West (the change in government in Spain following the April 2004 terrorist attack there was not a regime change), and even in the East except in the short term. Their avowed strategy is to oblige the United States to invade Muslim countries in the hope that it will become overstretched and bogged down there. Terrorists know that they cannot stir up the religious feelings of the Muslim masses in the absence of a direct occupation. Terrorism is a strategic factor only to the extent that it changes the perceptions and policies of its targets, or, more accurately, offers an opportunity to find a reason to put existing ideologies and virtual strategies into practice.
There is no geostrategy of Islam because Islam is not a territorial factor. Instead of a land of Islam or of an Islamic community, there is simply a religion that disembodies itself painfully from the ghosts of the past; there are simply Muslims who are negotiating new identities by conflicting means, usually peacefully, sometimes violently. The globalisation of Islam should be dealt with while remembering that terrorism is a marginal symptom that tells a lot, as does any symptom, and obliges everybody (above all Muslims) to go beyond wishful thinking, misgivings and passivity.
For the sake of a multi-point of view two other voices, the first is an article published around the same time we concluded the above. We have no opinion on Turkey joining the EC in ten years or not, however further down this article contains some interesting bits about the history of Islam: