What is Islam? Is the barbarity of September 11 rooted in the preaching of Muhammad? Or are the Islamists, the Islamic fascists, bent on the destruction of all who disagree with them, merely an aberration, mixing politics, religion and violence in an appeal to the lowest psychological denominators of suicide bombers? Historians, political scientists and psychologists are all over the place in supplying answers to these questions. … The historical forces at play are obvious. Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar of Islamist rage, places the fault line at the failure of the Muslim world to keep up with the West in the modern world. Diminishing Muslim power is both a humiliation and in Muslim minds a reversal of divine law, driving the losers to pick through the verses of the Koran to find justification for violence against winners. … Other scholars blame Western colonialism and imperialism, along with Judeo-Christian traditions, as contributing to the violent mentality of the extremists. These aberrations, they say, cannot be found in the teachings of Muhammad. … Islamists distorted this phenomenon for their own malevolent ends, fusing politics and religion into an all-purpose aggression for the “long-suffering victims” of Western imperial expansion. But there’s another view. “The Middle East’s experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, first and foremost the region’s millenarian imperial tradition,” writes Efraim Karsh, a British scholar, in “Islamic Imperialism,” a provocative and persuasive book. … He looks directly to the words of Muhammad, who in his farewell address to his followers ordered them to fight all men until they submit with the assertion that “There is no god but Allah.” … Muhammad proselytized with violence and used violence to consolidate conquest. Occupying territory was as important as converting or killing unbelievers. When the Jews of Medina resisted Muhammad in the 7th century, he beheaded the men and sold their women and children into slavery. The prophet, who claimed to derive his power and authority from Allah, was not only head of the captured states but was the single religious authority. “This allowed the prophet to cloak political ambitions with a religious aura,” writes Mr. Karsh, a professor at the University of London, “and to channel Islam’s energies into its instrument of aggressive expansion.” The ultimate goal would be for the world either to embrace Islam or live under its domination. This goal was realized in part with the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, which allowed certain other religions to exist but not prosper. Christians who sought domination, on the other hand, never invoked the teachings of Christ to justify violence. … The interpretation of the Islamist mentality as rooted in Muhammad’s appeal to violence, and the Islamist determination for religious domination of the world, may not tell the whole story today, but it explains why, for millions of Muslims, the image of the warrior trumps the image of a prophet of peace – if, indeed, there ever was one.
