The choice for the West: help root out Muslim extremism, or face a worldwide confrontation with Islam

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 24, 2015

When gunmen charged into a hotel in Bamako, Mali, last week, they were shouting “Allahu Akbar”. It’s probably safe to conclude that they were not familiar with the writings of Father Thomas Rosica.

But that’s not why they stormed the hotel. The gunmen—who left 22 people dead—evidently believed that they were serving the cause of Islam.

You can argue—as many prominent people have argued—that terrorism is a perversion of true Islam. But you cannot deny that Islamic terrorism is a major worldwide threat, and that Islam and terrorism have been all too closely associated. To counter the threat we must do one of two things. If the penchant for brutal violence is a sort of virus that has infected Islam, we must eliminate the infection. If violence is in inherent aspect of the faith, we must defeat Islam.

Which is it? At Regensburg, Pope Benedict gently suggested that we should discuss (among other things) whether Islam will accept the rule of reason. The reaction to that suggestion was, to put it mildly, discouraging. As Robert Reilly explained in The Closing of the Islamic Mind, there was a time when Muslim scholars could argue rationally about the interpretation of the Qu’ran. But that time ended with the triumph of the Ash’arite school, which insisted that the teachings of Allah cannot be subjected to logical analysis by mere humans. The Ash’arites were ready to use force to silence what they considered the blasphemous suggestions of their intellectual opponents. So began the great divorce between faith and reason in the Islamic world. And so began the trend toward the use of violence to resolve disagreements.

Some prominent Islamic leaders today are prepared to denounce violence, and even to cooperate with the West in a campaign to root out extremist imams. They are wise to pursue that sort of alliance, because if the extremists continue to gain power and influence, the “moderate” Muslims will lose their positions and quite possibly their lives. The men with guns tend to win all the arguments.

It behooves the Western world, too, to ally with Islamic leaders who are committed to a peaceful exchange of ideas. Most Christian-Islamic dialogue today is based on a polite pretence: a deliberate choice to ignore the radical differences that make any real meeting of the minds impossible. As Robert Reilly has again demonstrated the only real hope for constructive cooperation is an alliance with those Muslims who accept the rule of reason.

Are those potential partners in dialogue—the Muslim leaders who accept reason—representative of true Islam? That’s the question we must answer. Many Americans are now convinced that Islam is intrinsically prone to violence. Perhaps they are right; certainly Muslim extremism is widespread, and it is spreading at an accelerating rate. But if there is a form of Islam that will eschew violence—even if it is a form that has been submerged for centuries—making common cause with those Muslims is a far more attractive option than making war on the radicalized faith of one billion people.