Certain years leap out as turning points in world history:
1517, 1776, and 1917. These are years when powerful ideas strode onto the world
stage: The Reformation, democratic capitalism, and revolutionary communism.
اضافة اعلان
The period around 1979 was another such dawn. Political
Islam burst onto global consciousness with the Iranian revolution, the rise of
the mujahedeen after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamization
program in Pakistan and the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood across the
Arab world.
The ideas that seized the imagination of millions had deep
and diverse intellectual roots. For example, mid-20th century thinker Sayyid
Qutb mounted a comprehensive critique of the soulless materialism of the US,
tracing it in part to the separation of church and state — the fatal error, he
believed, that divided the spirit from the flesh. In the Muslim world, he
argued, body and soul should not be split asunder, but should live united in a
resurrected caliphate, governed by sharia.
This vision could manifest in more temperate ways, as
clerics seeking to exercise political power, or in more violent ways, as
militants trying to overthrow Arab regimes.
By 2006, in an essay called “The Master Plan,” Lawrence
Wright could report in The New Yorker how Al-Qaeda had operationalized these
dreams into a set of sweeping, violent strategies. The plans were epic in
scope: Expel the US from Iraq, establish a caliphate, overthrow Arab regimes,
initiate a clash with Israel, undermine Western economies, create “total
confrontation” between believers and nonbelievers, and achieve “definitive
victory” by 2020, transforming world history.
These were the sorts of bold dreams that drove Islamist
terrorism in the first part of the 21st century.
To the terrorists behind Thursday’s bombing outside the
Kabul airport, the murder of more than a dozen Americans and scores of Afghans
may seem like a step toward that utopia. The humbling US withdrawal from
Afghanistan may to them seem like a catastrophic defeat for Western democracy
and a great leap toward the dream of a unified Muslim community.
But something has changed over the past several years. The
magnetic ideas at the heart of so many of these movements have lost their
luster.
If extremists thought they could mobilize Muslim opinion
through acts of clarifying violence, they have failed. Across 11 lands in which
Pew surveyed Muslims in 2013, a median of only 13 percent had a favorable
opinion of Al-Qaeda.
In his 2011 book, “The Missing Martyrs,” Charles Kurzman
showed that fewer than 1 in every 100,000 Muslims had become an Islamist
terrorist in the years since September 11. The vast majority rejected the
enterprise.
When political Islamists tried to establish theocratically
influenced rule in actual nations, their movement’s reputation was badly hurt.
In one of extremism’s most violent, radical manifestations, Daesh’s so-called
“caliphate” in Iraq and Syria became a blood-drenched nightmare.
Globally, Islamist terrorism is down. Deaths from attacks
fell by 59 percent between 2014 and 2019. Al-Qaeda’s core members haven’t
successfully attacked the US homeland since September 11.
Experts see Islamist extremism’s fortunes slipping away.
“The past two decades,” Nelly Lahoud writes in the current issue of Foreign
Affairs, “have made clear just how little jihadi groups can hope to accomplish.
They stand a far better chance of achieving eternal life in paradise than of
bringing the United States to its knees.”
In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria notes that “most
Islamist terrorism today tends to be local — the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko
Haram in Nigeria, Al-Shabab in the Horn of Africa. That’s a major reversal from
the glory days of Al-Qaeda, when its leaders insisted that the focus must be
not on the ‘near enemy’ (the local regimes) but rather the ‘far enemy’ (the
United States and the West more broadly).”
In this humiliating month, as the Taliban takes power in
Afghanistan and Daesh still spreads mayhem, it’s obvious that even local
conflicts can create incredible danger. But the idea of global glory — a
fundamental shaking of the world order — that burst on the world stage roughly
40 years ago has been brought low.
The problem has not been eliminated by any means, but it has
shrunk.
We blundered when we sought to defeat a powerful idea
through some decisive military victory. But much is achieved when we keep up
the pressure, guard the homeland, promote liberal ideas and allow theocracy to
shrivel under the weight of its own flaws.
The men and women, in and out of uniform, who have done this
work over the past 40 years, and are still giving their lives to it, deserve
our gratitude and admiration.
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Opinion and Analysis