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The question of Islam is back, and in the United States at least, that generally has not been very good news for Muslims. American preoccupation with things Islamic is episodic, to say the least; it seems to take moments of extreme gravity -- the 1979 revolution in Iran and the ensuing hostage crisis; the horrendous terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- to awaken our dormant interest. Little wonder, then, that Islam has been at the receiving end of so much stereotyping -- depicted as intolerant, reactionary, fanatical and, when resisted, violent. Such caricature notions of Islam rarely
are far from the surface.
So much of what is thought and said barely resists even cursory analysis. There is, of course, no Islamic monopoly on either violence or terrorism. One tends to forget -- perhaps because they rarely or only indirectly affected Americans -- that for long stretches of the 20th century, groups that resorted to terror could be found in Europe (the Baader Meinhof in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, Action Directe in France), Latin America (the Shining Path in Peru; the Monteneros in Argentina), and other non-Muslim countries such as Sri Lanka and Japan. Indeed, earlier expressions of Palestinian terrorism were the province of secular, not religious, organizations.
Moreover, the notion of a monolithic Islam defies reality and common sense. It is shared by roughly a billion believers, spans several continents and dozens of societies. It encompasses a wide range of different, often contradictory, at times incompatible theories and practices. As a religious belief system, it enjoys more than enough latitude to justify openness to the outside world and seclusion from it; political conservatism and militancy; jihad as an effort to redeem oneself and jihad as a war against others.
And yet, a question looms. From suicide bombers in Israel to political murders in Egypt to indiscriminate and grisly assassinations in Algeria, a recurrent theme appears to be the persistence of a strand of Islam that has opted for religious violence. If the question is not why Islam begets violence -- for it does not -- then it must be why violence has donned the garb of Islam, and why now.
My own research on Algeria -- home to some of the deadliest acts of terror of late -- suggests some clues. To begin, in so much of the Muslim world, the absence of democracy has caused a vacuum that Islamic militants alone were able to fill. While governments silenced all dissident political speech, Islam enjoyed the use of an inviolable space (the mosque) a tribune (the preacher's pulpit) and a sacred public language (religious discourse). Forms of public discontent thus have tended to take on religious accents.
And there has been plenty of discontent to go around. Its roots lie in political repression, economic dislocation and inequality, gaudy consumption rubbing elbows with desperate want, the alienation of the urban young, intellectuals and members of the middle class, threatened by the globalization of their domestic economy and yearning for the certainty and stability that seems so much a thing of the past. It is only one of the many paradoxes globalization that it comes hand in hand with cultural disparity, not homogeneity; polarization, not consensus. For the influx of images and goods from the West may well create shared wants and desires, but not shared enjoyment.
Islam having thus become the privileged channel of protest, both its characteristics and the repressive conditions under which it has had to operate contributed to the radicalization of politics and, in some instances, to the resort to violence: Its moral language and its fusion of the political with the religious, which could turn earthly arguments about right and wrong into holy debates on good and evil; its classical imagery of warfare, conquest and martyrdom; its self-perceived status as an oppressed religion long besieged by non-Muslims (from the Crusades to colonialism to Western support for Israel to America's war against Iraq); the state's suppression of almost all forms of peaceful dissent. All this helped transform Islamic movements into vehicles of radical insurgency -- against repressive regional regimes; against the American
superpower that backs them.
The rise of radical, anti-Western Islamism is the product of several mental associations, whether justified or not: of Westernization with conspicuous consumption and widening inequities; of economic injustice with faithlessness;
of faith (Islamic, that is) with social redemption and political salvation.
There is a leap -- a colossal one -- from these feelings of hostility and even violence that exist among the many to the abhorrent mass-casualty terror carried out by the very few. The terrorist groups succeeded in laying hands on the resentment and the frustration; what they then choose to do with both is something hardly any of us can genuinely comprehend. There is no such thing as Islamic terrorism. There are Muslims who happen to be angry and terrorists who happen to be Muslim. That is a distinction that makes all the difference.
Robert Malley, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "The Call from Algeria: Revolution, Third Worldism, and the Turn to Islam."