Islam in Decline

Raymond William Baker (One Islam, Many Worlds of Muslims) wants to reassure his Western readers. Islam’s resurgence isn’t mainly driven by extremists and terrorists, but by mainstream Islam of the Islamic renewal: “The source of Islam’s power derives from the far broader al Tagdid al Islami (Islamic Renewal). First stirring in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Renewal has swept across Islamic lands. Those who respond call for revitalizing and rethinking the heritage. At the same time, they resist Western intrusions, challenge established authoritarian systems, and counter criminal Islamic extremists.”

Western observers have difficulty making sense of this Renewal because of our Western biases concerning religion and politics: “The most important source of Western confusion about the meaning of the Renewal is the insistence on distinguishing between Islam as religion and so-called political Islam. Neither of these characterizations is in fact applicable. Islam is far more than a religion, and its political dimensions have no such autonomy. Islam is a pluralistic way of life that in all its varieties is insistently holistic and therefore unavoidably political. . . . Islam as lived faith refuses any division between the religious experience and human efforts to act in this world. In short, there is no such thing as political Islam. There is only Islam, although it is subject to adaptations and a wide variety of human interpretations.”

Baker argues that the Renewal is fueled by “Wassatteyya (Islamic midstream) that emerged in complex and adaptive forms as the guiding force of the Renewal. . . . In the view of its adherents, the Wassatteyya functions as a vital yet flexible midstream, a centrist river out of Islam.” Baker thinks that this midstream will determine the future of Islam, but only if the West lets it happen: “The obsessive focus of the West on contemporary Islamic extremism has obscured and, at times, even obstructed and delayed this outcome.”

Even if one isn’t convinced that Islam is as peaceable as Baker wants us to think, his assessment of Islam rings true: “By all economic and political measures, the late twentieth century was a time of terrible decline for the Islamic world, particularly its Arab heartland. The deterioration continues in the first decades of the twenty-first century, accelerated by the American shattering of Iraq and Afghanistan, the disintegration of Syria, and the resurgence of virulent extremisms. Sober voices from the Islamic world regularly and accurately described the condition of Dar al Islam (the Islamic world) as the worst in the 1,400-year-old history of Islam.”

This isn’t necessarily reassuring either, but it does suggest that the militancy of Islam might be less an expression of power than of frustrated weakness.