The West's mistake: not believing islamists

euroislam.pl 11 September 2012
By Jan Wójcik

The end of great narratives, the end of history – postmodernism. Call it as you want, but the West distanced itself from all ideologies. Two big drama of 20th century, caused by totalitarian ideologies of Nazism and communism resulted in distrust toward ideologies. Moreover the richness of various and often changing intellectual and cultural currents have created for decades an environment where ideology is not so important. And even when this or that idea catches our heart, behind the corner waits another new one. We do not follow any of them to the end.
Non of them determines our life.

In that way, one can argue, we are knocking out the teeth of ideologies. They stop to be dangerous and they will never subjugate us. This optimistic assumption could be true, if it was accepted by the whole humanity. However not all share that view. There are people for whom ideas are sense of life. They set the purpose of life and even the purpose of death. On one hand indulgent and on the other naive, attitude toward ideologies is presently one of the biggest mistake of Western societies.
Partisans of political Islam do not hide that their political ideal is Islamic state, where basic rules are set up by Koran and hadiths. Some cannot wait for the state to come true, they take up arms, other engage in political activity.

The reaction to that in Western society is the same as to others ideologies. We hope that it is not so serious, that the real aim is money and fame, that it will somehow dissolve in public dialogue, that economical factors will gain the upper hand etc. Judging by ourselves we cannot imagine that people are able to scarify their life to realize ideal of Islamic state. Several Muslims piloting planes can strike in huge skyscrapers shouting "Allah Akbar”, but we indulgently state that probably they misunderstood something. Other, whole their life, act politically to accustom the West with the concept of sharia, and we will be naively enjoying another participants of civic society, in which the political Islam’s vies become moderated.

The war on terror announced shortly after WTC destruction in no way referred to the terrorists' ideology, common to all Islamists, also those disapproving terrorist methods. Those both groups were influenced by the same ideology created by Muslim fundamentalists. So it is not big difference in term of the goal, that some of them use violence and some reject it. Both want Islamic state, and we, 11 years after 9/11, we still do not believe them.