Investigative Project on Terrorism, 9 March 2010: The “most important ideological struggle in the world today is the battle over the future of Islam,” writes Hudson Institute scholar Zeyno Baran. Baran is the editor of an important new book, which goes on sale March 16, entitled The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular
. . . . For several decades, Wahhabists and Muslim Brotherhood groups have been courted by Western governments and treated by the media as representatives of a near-monolithic “Muslim community.” But an alternate narrative has emerged in the Muslim world – one that rejects the Islamist worldview as anti-democratic. Baran, director of Hudson’s Center for Eurasian Policy, minces no words in describing the danger.
“Islamism has much [in] common with totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism, Fascism, and Marxism-Leninism, including anti-Semitism, ethno-religious hatred, ambition to restructure the world, and an embrace of violence,” she writes in the introduction to the book. “However, unlike purely political totalitarian movements, Islamism has a profound and deeper appeal that derives from its claim to stem from the will of Allah.”
At a March 3 Hudson Institute forum launching The Other Muslims, Baran, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, and Hedieh Mirahmadi, an Iranian-American lawyer and activist, said that officials in Western democracies mistakenly try to promote nonviolent Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood as “alternatives” to violent Islamists like Al Qaeda.
But the real differences between these organizations are tactical in nature. Both believe that Islam is superior to other religions and seek to impose sharia law in order to regulate virtually every aspect of life. “The West has lost sight of a fundamental truth: empowering Islamists, regardless of whether or not they are violent, sows the seeds for future radicalization that undermines our civilizational structures and breeds terrorism,” Baran writes. “It is difficult to understand that ‘nice people’ who may even share an outwardly secular lifestyle still firmly believe that their lives should be governed according to a legal code of seventh-century Arabia.”
The book’s other contributors are Muslims from a wide variety of backgrounds who also oppose Islamists. Some are devoutly religious, while others are relatively secular. They are united in the belief that Islam is fully compatible with Western liberal democracy, and that Western governments should not be yielding to Islamist demands for the creation of “parallel societies,” where they will be forced to live under Sharia. . . .
