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Here's why: Many Arab-Muslim states today share the same rigid political
structure. Think of it as two islands: one island is occupied by the secular
autocratic regimes and the business class around them. On the other island are
the mullahs, imams and religious authorities who dominate Islamic practice and
education, which is still based largely on traditional Koranic interpretations
that are not embracing of modernity, pluralism or the equality of women. The
governing bargain is that the regimes get to stay in power forever and the
mullahs get a monopoly on religious practice and education forever.
Bin Laden's challenge was an attempt by the extreme Islamists to break out of
their island and seize control of the secular state island. The states responded
by crushing or expelling the Islamists, but without ever trying to reform the
Islamic schools -- called madrasas -- or the political conditions that keep
producing angry Islamist waves. So the deadly circle that produced bin Ladenism
-- poverty, dictatorship and religious anti-modernism, each reinforcing the
other -- just gets perpetuated.
Some are now demanding the circle be broken. Consider this remarkable open
letter to bin Laden that a Pakistani writer and businessman, Izzat Majeed, wrote
in last Friday's popular Pakistani daily The Nation:
''We Muslims cannot keep blaming the West for all our ills. . . . The
embarrassment of wretchedness among us is beyond repair. It is not just the
poverty, the illiteracy and the absence of any commonly accepted social contract
that define our sense of wretchedness; it is, rather, the increasing awareness
among us that we have failed as a civil society by not confronting the
historical, social and political demons within us. . . . Without a reformation
in the practice of Islam that makes it move forward and not backward, there is
no hope for us Muslims anywhere. We have reduced Islam to the organized
hypocrisy of state-sponsored mullahism. For more than a thousand years Islam has
stood still because the mullahs, who became de facto clergy instead of genuine
scholars, closed the door on 'ijtehad' [reinterpreting Islam in light of
modernity] and no one came forward with an evolving application of the message
of the Holy Quran. All that the mullahs tell you today is how to go back a
millennium. We have not been able to evolve a dynamic practice to bring Islam to
the people in the language of their own specific era. . . . Oxford and Cambridge
were the 'madrasas' of Christendom in the 13th century. Look where they are
today -- among the leading institutions of education in the world. Where are our
institutions of learning?''
The Protestant Reformation, melding Christianity with modernity, happened
only when wealthy princes came along ready to finance and protect the breakaway
reformers. But in the Muslim world today, the wealthiest princes, like Saudi
Arabia's, are funding anti-modern schools from Pakistan to Bosnia, while the
dictators pay off the anti-modern mullahs (or use them to whack the liberals)
rather than reform them. This keeps the soil for bin Ladenism ever fertile.
Addressing bin Laden, Mr. Majeed concluded, ''The last thing [Muslims] need
is the growing darkness in your caves. . . . Holy Prophet Muhammad, on returning
from a battle, said: 'We return from little Jihad to greater Jihad.' True Jihad
today is not in the hijacking of planes, but in the manufacturing of them.''
This bargain lasted all these years because oil money, or U.S. or Soviet
aid, enabled many Arab-Muslim countries to survive without opening their
economies or modernizing their education systems. But as oil revenues have
declined and the population of young people seeking jobs has exploded, this
bargain can't hold much longer. These countries can't survive without opening up
to global investment, the Internet, modern education and emancipation of their
women so that they will not be competing with just half of their populations.
But the more they do that, the more threatened the religious authorities feel.
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