IMPERIAL ISLAM

One of the great problems we face in the prosecution of the war (if you believe, as I do, that we are at war) is the fact that we, for the most part, are almost entirely ignorant about our enemies. That is why articles like this one are so valuable. Professor Efraim Karsh, head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College, University of London, informs readers of Opinion Journal about the imperial ambitions of historic Islam.

"I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah.' " With these farewell words, the prophet Muhammad summed up the international vision of the faith he brought to the world. As a universal religion, Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal, it is incumbent on all free, male, adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising "struggle in the path of Allah," or jihad. As the 14th-century historian and philosopher Abdel Rahman ibn Khaldun wrote, "In the Muslim community, the jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Islamic mission and the obligation [to convert] everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force."

Karsh recites some of the history of Islam and concludes that today's radicals, as well as their numerous sympathizers, are guided by that history.

As we have seen, however, Islamic history has been anything but reactive. From Muhammad to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of an often astonishing imperial aggressiveness and, no less important, of never quiescent imperial dreams. Even as these dreams have repeatedly frustrated any possibility for the peaceful social and political development of the Arab-Muslim world, they have given rise to no less repeated fantasies of revenge and restoration and to murderous efforts to transform fantasy into fact. If, today, America is reviled in the Muslim world, it is not because of its specific policies but because, as the preeminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of regaining, in Zawahiri's words, the "lost glory" of the caliphate.

Nor is the vision confined to a tiny extremist fringe. This we saw in the overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, in the admiring evocations of bin Laden's murderous acts during the crisis over the Danish cartoons, and in such recent findings as the poll indicating significant reservoirs of sympathy among Muslims in Britain for the "feelings and motives" of the suicide bombers who attacked London last July. In the historical imagination of many Muslims and Arabs, bin Laden represents nothing short of the new incarnation of Saladin, defeater of the Crusaders and conqueror of Jerusalem. In this sense, the House of Islam's war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.

To the contrary, now that this war has itself met with a so far determined counterattack by the United States and others, and with a Western intervention in the heart of the House of Islam, it has escalated to a new stage of virulence. In many Middle Eastern countries, Islamist movements, and movements appealing to traditionalist Muslims, are now jockeying fiercely for positions of power, both against the Americans and against secular parties. For the Islamists, the stakes are very high indeed, for if the political elites of the Middle East and elsewhere were ever to reconcile themselves to the reality that there is no Arab or Islamic "nation," but only modern Muslim states with destinies and domestic responsibilities of their own, the imperialist dream would die.

Read the whole article. I look forward to purchasing his new book "Islamic Imperialism: A History". It is vital to understand the historical context that created bin Laden, Zawahiri, Zarqawi and the others and why their message resonates so powerfully among ordinary Muslims. To say that it is simply about Western oppression and Israeli aggression, while those things are part of the total equation, is to miss the most important aspect of the rise of these radicals. If the West were to retreat from the Middle East and Israel annihilated, the imperial dreams of the radicals would still not be sated, which is why they must be defeated so that Islam can evolve into a true religion of tolerance, willing to live side-by-sides as equals with other beliefs.