The Turmoil Within

But other Muslim voices offer a different prescription for their societies' ills. Muslim reformers are formulating -- tentatively and, thus far, inconclusively -- a Muslim position on pluralism and political participation. Some may automatically assume that these reformers would eventually replace what Lewis calls one "shabby" tyranny with another, but noteworthy are the groups advocating for women, human rights, and other special interests that are increasingly making their views known and heard. Many Muslims now argue that Islam and democracy are indeed compatible -- taking the debate away from those who consider democracy an alien system at variance with obedience to divine rather than popular sovereignty and a complete, revealed law that makes a legislative body superfluous. An increasing number of Muslim intellectuals in societies as diverse as Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia are now concerned with how what they regard as the intrinsically Islamic values of pluralism, tolerance, and civic participation can be implemented.

Taken together, these agents of radical and moderate opinion give us a picture of roiling Muslim societies, preoccupied with their own unfaithfulness or inefficiency and uncertain how to reconcile the contradictory prescriptions, but in some cases intent on creating an Islamic state or Islamizing their societies. With the images of the destruction at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon freshly in mind, we may be forgiven for failing to see the full complexities of the internal Islamic situation. As Lewis elegantly explains, intercivilizational contacts have often been difficult. Yet to view the intricate problems and prospects of modern Muslims through the framework of a clash between Islam and the West (or even more generally of East versus West), as What Went Wrong? occasionally does, is to become preoccupied with a balance sheet that tells, at best, only part of today's story. "Imbalance" and "painful asymmetry" may well have characterized the Muslim-Western relationship since the seventeenth century. But there has also been a turning inward by Muslims that challenges the status quo -- political, economic, social, gendered. And these challenges lie beyond and, in many ways, take precedence over relations with any outside world.

Moreover, the Islamic realm is itself in the process of redefinition as Muslim minorities become a permanent and indigenous presence in the Western societies of Europe, North America, and Australia. And these Muslim minorities, who live with the daily demands of an open society, are especially important to the work of the reformers in shifting the terms of the debate away from the radicals.

WHITHER JIHAD?

Should we conclude that the Islamist challenge, or what some refer to as the Islamist revolt, is bound to fail? Prior to September 11, Kepel and others, notably Olivier Roy in The Failure of Political Islam, argued that a combination of state power and Islamist intellectual incoherence was fatally wounding Islamist movements before they could bring their vision to fruition. A prime example is post-1979 Iran, where the policy of exporting the revolution dismally failed and a domestic "clerisocracy," to use the word coined by the late political scientist P. J. Vatikiotis, has remained on top of a fairly secular society through sheer authoritarianism, not moral worthiness.

Kepel's Jihad builds on an impressively extensive investigation of Islamist movements across the world to document this relative decline in their effect and appeal. Like Lewis, Kepel constructs an expansive and forceful argument but keeps his eyes on events since the late 1960s. Setting out to chart the rise and fall of a utopian movement, Kepel capably points to the combination of actors that provided both its strength and its ultimate weakness. The discontents unleashed by the modernizing, nationalist regimes of the 1950s and 1960s mobilized the urban young, elements of the middle classes -- the pious bourgeois of the suqs (bazaars) and the professionals -- and Islamist intellectuals. With all the certainty that a vaguely defined but symbolically charged religious agenda can provide, these Muslim visionaries grew in influence and number throughout the 1970s. The Iranian Revolution, however, sharpened intra-Muslim conflict and raised the question of whether the Iranian regime or the Saudi monarchy should lead the Islamic cause. The subsequent decade seemed to settle the matter, however: the Iran-Iraq War diverted and sapped Iranian power while the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union cast Saudi Arabia and Pakistan into the role of defenders of the umma (pan-Islamic community). The conservative forces became dominant.

In the 1990s, the situation changed again, but the trend of radical Islamist decline continued. The introduction of U.S. forces into Saudi Arabia split the Islamist base; the urban poor and radical intellectuals vehemently opposed the Saudis now, whereas the middle class was torn but conscious of the side on which its bread was buttered. Into this gap stepped the state -- whether Egyptian, Saudi, Turkish, Algerian, Tunisian, or other -- deliberately seeking to split the movement further, co-opting those it could and repressing those it could not. Suicide bombings, hostage-taking, and other terrorist actions continued, but (actions against Israel aside) they increasingly seemed acts of desperation. By the end of the century, the signs of jihad's failure seemed everywhere.