Syria: Quo Vadis?

The unfolding events in Syria form a moment in history that will change the way we think about the relationship between the West and the Islamic world. The deteriorating situation, with the death of tens of thousands of people and the displacement of millions of refugees, is an atrocity several magnitudes beyond this past May’s events in Boston. And if you look around the globe at what is happening elsewhere--in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Turkey, and Iraq--the evident discontent, unrest, economic troubles, and killings dwarf anything occurring between the Islamic world and the West.

Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University recently published an opinion piece in the Washington Post criticizing former Tony Blair.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/wp/2013/06/05/is-islamic-terrorism-a-problem-with-religion-or-politics/

The former British Prime Minister wrote:

There is a problem within Islam--from the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam. And we have to put it on the table and be honest about it…. It has at its heart a view about religion and about the interaction between religion and politics that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies.

Esposito countered with a well worn argument:

Though well intentioned, it perpetuates his long held belief since the Bush-Blair invasion and occupation of Iraq that the primary driver, the root cause of terrorism, is religion and not political and social contexts and foreign policies. It is wrong headed and doomed to continue to be part of the problem not the solution.

Unfortunately, Esposito misses the larger point. Forget Boston, Professor Esposito! Forget London! How do you explain the inter-Arab butchery in Syria with arguments about Western “political and social contexts and foreign policies”?

Do we need to properly digest the meanings and the evils of the Tsarnaev brothers or label the actions of Major Hassan as terrorism instead of workplace violence to understand what is going in the Muslim world? Does it really make much of a difference what motivated the Nigerian converts to Islam who recently butchered a British soldier when we see the bloodbath that is Syria? What of the 200,000 Algerians who have died in their country’s internal fighting over the past twenty years?

This clearly evident reality should make one thing perfectly clear (although for many, such as John Esposito, it will not): while we are free to attribute sporadic Muslim terrorism against and within the West to Western policies of imperialism or colonialism, you can’t attribute the sectarian strife so evident in Syria between Sunnis and Shi’a as being somehow caused by the West. (Yes, I know that you can blame the borders of Syria on the British and French, but no set of borders could have avoided the intermixing of populations given the mosaic that was the Middle East.)

What we are seeing in Syria, and increasingly elsewhere in the Middle East, is something that we are loathe to discuss openly: the inability of Islamic political, economic and social (not religious) culture to cope with the demands of the twenty-first century.

To say that openly is to risk being labeled an Islamophobe.

To avoid saying it is to ignore the obvious.

Ought we to be surprised that a social system developed by a seventh-century man in the Arabian Peninsula, however wise, is inadequate to meet the demands of the modern world? Marxism was a nineteenth-century social system that failed to cope with the demands of the late twentieth century. What should surprise us is that Muhammad’s seventh-century recipe for life survived as long as it did, not that it now is increasingly and obviously a catastrophe.

No alterations of Western policies are going to fix Syria. Withdrawing American naval forces from the Persian Gulf will not bring peace to Syria. Totally eliminating the state of Israel will not bring peace to Syria! (Hezbollah and Hamas would probably start fighting for control.) In fact, the course of action most likely to bring some semblance of peace to Syria would be MORE, not less Western intervention!

Syria, and its capital Damascus, lies at the very heart of the Arab world. That world is decomposing before our eyes. Sunnis and Shi’a are killing each other in bloody massacres, with Sunni jihadists videoing themselves as they gnaw at the organs of their opponents. Shi’a label their opponents “Takfiris”—apostates who can be killed on sight. The sectarian fighting is spreading into Iraq and Lebanon. How in the world can anyone watch what is happening and not understand that these people are killing each other BECAUSE of religion? And that religion is Islam! If Christians, Jews, or Atheists are killed, it’s because they are by-standers, not players in the Syrian drama. (And, yes, Europeans killed each other by the millions from the Protestant Reformation until the end of the Thirty Years War—for religion!)

I made this argument to a friend a few weeks back, as the basic outlines of this argument formed in my mind. His counter was that, while all this was true, it wasn’t that long ago that we witnessed similar barbarism in the non-Islamic world. In the 1930s the Japanese committed atrocities against, not only Westerners, but also fellow Asians--Koreans, Filipinos, Chinese, and others. In Europe the Nazis behaved barbarically against Jews, Poles, Gypsies, the Russians, and assorted other peoples. True, all very true. And, I added, how did the Japanese and Germans fare given their behavior? What did Tokyo and Berlin look like in 1945? In other words, drawing such parallels ought not to be an exercise meant to somehow excuse a behavior, but rather to serve as a warning of the dire consequences that may well be on their way to the inhabitants of the Islamic world.

Syria should make it clear to everyone that the Islam is seriously ill. It is dying before our eyes. The still living corpse is already beginning to rot, but we avert our eyes, smile, spray some cologne about, and pretend we smell not a thing.

And this is the grim reality that Tony Blair, who used to claim that the bin Laden’s of the world had “hijacked” Islam, is only now beginning to comprehend, and that President Obama faces as a stark policy choice in Syria. Some pundits advocate intervention; others non-intervention. All admit that there is no obvious or easy choice of action, or inaction. But the Syrian experience—the putrification of Islam—is the reality Obama faces, even if he has yet himself to recognize it for what it is. There is no obvious course to follow in Syria because there is, by definition, no treatment for terminal illness. There is only burial.