The Three Currents of Islam

According to Bernard Lewis there are three currents in modern Islam, the revival that is trying to deal with the crisis of modernization.

Before modern times the Islamic countries had a fairly pacific government. Rulers had to deal with “established orders—the bazaar merchants, the scribes, the guilds, the country gentry, the military establishment, the religious establishment, and so on.”

But in response to the challenge of the west “A new ruling class emerged, ruling from the center and using the apparatus of the state for its purposes.” Add to that the Nazi influence that seeped into the Middle East through Vichy France and you have a witch’s brew of centralization and brutalization.

Unfortunately the three authentic Islamic responses to the crisis of modernity are Wahhabism, the Iranian Revolution, and Al-Qaeda, all of which are fully jihadist in the Islamic sense that they all subscribe to violent conquest of the rest of the world.

Wahhabism is a problem because it is teaching the children of Islam in the West. The Iranian Revolution is a problem in the same sense that the Soviet Union was a problem. And Al-Qaeda honestly thinks that it knocked out the Soviet Union and is well on its way to knocking out the United States.

The challenge, according to Bernard Lewis, is that it’s a black and white situation.

Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.

But Tony Blankley believes that we have not yet begun to fight.

[Wars] often start with a morally ambiguous view of the enemy, a more limited conception of the war's magnitude and a restrained application of violent tactics.

Eventually, moral clarity is obtained, war objectives expand -- often to grandiosity -- and tactics become ferocious.

He cites the Civil War and WWII as examples.

It is not pleasant to think of the events that will lead to the escalation of Western tactics to the level of ferociousness.