For those who tire of the Middle East being the sole reason why there is a 24-hour news cycle and who find little solace in either Jon Stewart or Bill O'Reilly, it has been hard not to notice several disturbing tendencies. The current rise of both "apologies" for Islamic "touchiness," that same "touchiness" that leads to riots from Jakarta to Paris over cartoons and teddy bears, has been paired and contrasted with the rising fear of "Islamo-Fascism." The latter has become a sort of a rallying cry to many: not only the xenophobes at Jihad Watch or the perpetual gaping mouths at National Review, but also with the "New Atheist" movement activists such as Christopher Hitchens and even poets with undergraduate minors in International Relations that throw the word around over steaming over-priced coffee and bagels. Yet there is something that rings hollow about the entire set-up, mainly that the whole discourse fits the logical fallacy of a false dichotomy. This particularly common fallacy happens when only two options are given and any middle point is simply excluded from the debate.
After following the riots in the French suburbs in 2005 and 2007, or the Sudanese Teddy Bear debacle that nearly resulted in a British schoolteacher receiving 40 lashes, I realized that I don't know exactly who or what the excluded middle is in this schema. I, like most of the bourgeois West, don't know how to gauge the world through Arabic, Persian, or Pakistani eyes. I cannot react to that mindset with any reliable fairness or insight. The secret of the excluded middle of Western-Islamic relations is often imagined as either not existing, as per the jingoists who throw Islamo-fascist around, or is the holy grail in a Dan Simmons-esque conspiracy of Neo-conservative powers plotting to make money on violence as long as that grail remains lost. What I am disturbed by here is far from that simple: with all that's at stake, both liberal and conservative thought is framed in polar extremes. This dichotomous thinking is what both Arendt and Fukuyama saw the death of politics, with the liberal state devolving into the purely administrative and technocratic regimes in one bloodied hand or the utter favoring of symbolic populism to the real policy on the other bloodied hand. An example of this dangerous bifurcated world occurs when people seem unable to do anything but convolute all totalitarianism as fascism, because of the public relations power of Nazis. Swastikas still have the power to sell books and scare the living shit out of anyone, left or right, with a sense of moral bearing.
The problem with both the apologists and the right-wing "anti-fascists"—whose zeal resembles the Marxist juveniles' elementary throwing that label at anyone who displeases them—is that both U.S. political parties omit the nearly infinite spectrum of ideologies within Abrahamic religion as whole and with Islam in particular. The Shia revolutionaries who disposed the Shah are not even the same as the Shia revolutionaries of Hezbollah in Lebanon, nor are the Sulafi Sunnis of Saudi Arabia the same as the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan. All we have to do to see this is to place ourselves in the panorama of religious opinion in the United States: The Evangelical militia member is not the same thing as the right-wing Catholic traditionalists—whatever values and/or violence they share.
This brings me to the idea of "Islamo-fascism." I don't find Islamo-Fascism to be an offensive term like many of my more "multi-cultural" friends do because the Neo-Caliphate ideologies of all varieties to which the term generally refers are extremely dangerous and, by definition, totalitarian in impulse. Still, in truth, this is not unique to Islam. Most religious organizations will eventually try to be totalitarian if left unchecked—the early Papal states of Italian peninsula, the Calvinists city states, and even the Puritan American colonies would not far well by our modern civil rights standards. This is also true for most majoritarian democracies and republics if not checked by other outside economic powers and civil pressure from powerful minorities. The scores of dictators that begin to assume power through legitimate elections in the early 20th century testify to this. My real problem with "Islamo-fascism" is that it's spectacularly sloppy phrasing, and the squishy semantics actually can lead to even more sloppy thinking. One example: thinking that secular totalitarianisms, such as European fascism, and religious totalitarianisms, such as Neo-Caliphate ideology, Sulafi Sunni Islam, the non-Quietist branch of Shia Islam, Christian Nationalism, Christian Reconstructionism, Kahenist Jewish terrorism, or any other religious ideology represented by a stream of foreign-sounding adjectives, can be fought the same way. You disgrace a political, secular movement, it will become fringe. You disgrace an Abrahamic or even Dharmic religious movement, and you have a fresh martyr cult which then can be used to recruit the poor, the desperate, and the "meaning"-deficient. The romanticism about death when given a shiny, spiritual gloss is a powerful enlistment bonus. So, while that gloss is not totally alien to secular totalitarians, it's much shiner with streets of gold or numerous virgins or a pure land of near-infinite peace or Valhalla.
This is not to say the Islamic theocratic elements are not dangerous like fascism or don't resemble it. Christopher Hitchens is right about "fascism with an Islamic face." But which member of that Janus head is the primary face and how to deface it? Yes, many of the dictatorships of the Middle East have a fascistic face and have had since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Including most of the secular ones, which were brutal in their attempt to force a reduced version of the Western enlightenment unto Islam—Baathists and Egyptian Arab Nationalists come to mind. These movements probably actually set the greater Islamic world back a few hundred years and increased the distrust of the West. Furthermore, this leads to endless "Godwin's law" comparisons with all the emotive thinking that accompanies Nazis. The Islamic world's recent fresh bubbling of anti-Semitism is often seem as a parallel development in the "Nazification" of the Islamic states. Still, as Richard Webster has said about Andrew Sullivan: "'Saddam, Arafat and the Saudis hate the Jews and want to see them destroyed' . . . or so says the right-wing writer Andrew Sullivan. And he has a point. Does the western left really grasp the extent of anti-Semitism in the Middle East? But does the right grasp the role of Europeans in creating such hatred?"
The convolution does not, however, end with the basic American left- and right-wing divisions about multi-culturalism. We know that terrorists must be countered. Brutally, if necessary. Yet, it must be acknowledged that making martyrs of these kinds of men—unlike your average Black shirt or Brown shirt or, even, your average skinhead—will build on their resentment, not elevate it. Furthermore, as Hitchens was one of the only of the big three "New Atheists" to admit when talking about suicide bombings, all the tactics of "Islamo-fascists" were perfected by secular communists and Stalinists, Hindu Nationalists, Tamil Tigers, and right- and left-wing Latin American revolutionaries. So blaming Islam as something unique in inspiring these particular form of violence will also only add to the desperation already felt by many in the Islamic world. As I mentioned before, martyr ideology is not completely antithetical to the secular world, it just takes much less P.R. in the religious sphere.
A key problem with the West is that most of what it gets in dealing with the Islamic world is shadows and sales images. The excluded middle still seems to be hidden like many medieval mystics felt the face of G-d is. What we need is an insider's view of this middle, but we must be realistic. Even that understanding won't be likely to end all the bloodshed. As Hannah Arendt says in The Crisis of the Republic:
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
Many people have thought that economy globalization would be that arbiter, just as people have thought G-d would be, or the state would be. Yet the last ten years have made such assumptions increasing obviously untrue. Merely understanding the Islamic world won't remove the need for munitions, but it is import to remember that any religious battle is a battle of ideas. Bullets rarely kill ideas. We don't know from where the peaceful ideas will come. We haven't found that center. One must ask this: has that center, that excluded middle, survived the widening gyres of this current world?
We can't tell that now. We are left with the prattling of fools against a deafening silence that is pregnant with enough tension to birth many explosions for many years.
Derick sincerely believes that everyone needs to dance around their house naked at least once a week; in addition to that, being declared an ethicist has made him a general misanthrope. Most good ethicists are. He loves tomatoes and thinks that loving such fruit is profound. He does not like to speak in third-person because he understands that it is a sign of true insanity, but so is literature. He has vowed no longer to be witty in biographies that are included in literary journals of any medium.