In 1992, Peter Rodman, a former U.S. National Security Council member, published an article in the National Review in which he stated that after the collapse of the Soviet Union the West was being ‘ challenged from the outside by a militant, atavistic force driven by hatred of all Western political thought, harking back to age-old grievances against Christendom .' A year later, the American academic Sam uel Huntington also raised the alarm against the ‘green menace'. In an article published in Foreign Affairs that summer, Huntington argued that Islam ‘ is a triple threat: political, civilisational and demographic. ' A decade or so later, these views on Islam and Islamism (its political expression) have become mainstream and many Western politicians and media outlets continue to believe that those ‘age-old grievances' finally culminated in the attacks on New York City and Washington on 11 September 2001.
Since then, there has been an intense public focus on Islam and Muslims, most of it characterised by exaggerated stereotypes and hostility. Writers such as Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes have asserted that the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - symbols of capitalism, globalisation and Western military might - on 11 September2001 put a permanent end to that sense of security we took for granted since the collapse of the Soviet Union . 11 September brought real horror into the lives of thousands of innocent Americans. It also brought equal or greater suffering to countless more civilians in other parts of the world. The precise revenge for ‘9/11', the ‘war on terror' was utterly foreseeable. It must have been hard for ordinary Americans, as Arundhati Roy pointed out, to look to the world through tear-filled eyes and find only the absence of surprise, that what goes around ultimately comes around.
The terrorism that paved the way for 11 September, the ‘alternative' narrative, is largely ignored or treated as irrelevant by those who continue to believe it is their manifest destiny to govern the world. When the new sheriff entered the Middle East with his false rhetoric of freedom and democracy, the empire we preferred to ignore struck back. A military operation first called Infinite Justice — a meaningless term that had nothing to do with legal procedures — soon became Enduring Freedom ; and sure enough, Afghanistan and now Iraq endure what the White House defines as 'freedom'…
As a word and concept, ‘terrorism' has lately acquired an extraordinary dimension in our public discourse. It has recreated language and inspired a rhetoric that both reflects the errors of American foreign policy and allows policymakers to legitimatise them. To explain terrorism today, we are not required to plough through history. Today's discourse on terrorism is based on yesterday's newspaper or this evening's news bulletin. That suicide terrorism in Western public discourse is now associated with ‘Islamism' obscures two important facts. First, in the past twenty years, suicide terrorism has been the work of many different religious and ethnic groups, most notably the Tamil Tigers in the north of Sri Lanka . Second, nearly all suicide terrorism has the specific goal of compelling foreign military forces to withdraw from territory the terrorists consider to be their homeland.
‘ Think , America ,' Arabs urged in their first demonstrations against the war on terror. ‘Why do we hate you?' The sentiment indicates the essential requirement of a new Western approach to the Muslim world: to remember. One of the effects of 11 September and the war on terror has been the resurgence in the West of an historic memory of Muslim cultural and religious opposition to Western foreign policies in the Arab and Muslim worlds. For Muslims, they have awakened memories of a long and intensive Western (European, American and Soviet) presence in the Middle East , Africa and Asia . Their memories encompass a range of political and economic experiences: colonisation, the artificial creation of nation states, the genesis of Israel and the disenfranchisement of the Palestinians, double standards regarding democracy and human rights and the contempt of some in the West for the suffering of civilian populations in Palestine , Afghanistan and now Iraq .
In the West, associating the Muslim world with terrorism has created and fed prejudices, planted essentialist cultural views of Islam and justified the authoritarian governments of successive Arab regimes. Above all, it has served as a barrier to Western understanding, not only of the diverse social and political realities of the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also of the real problems that hinder their development.
Since the Six Day War of 1967, the system of values - pan-Arabism, socialism and anti-imperialism as well as faith in state schooling and the promise of social mobility - that motivated the first post-colonial generation has gone into crisis. The present generation of young Arabs, aged between twenty and twenty-nine and accounting for the largest proportion of the total adult population across the Arab world, does not identify with these values at all . It is these Arabs who are now demanding greater involvement in the political affairs of their countries. The recurrent failures of ideological models inspired by the West, whether liberal or socialist, have prompted them to search for a new model rooted in their own historical experiences. Since the 1970s, political Islam has provided the people of North Africa and the Middle East with an alternative model for development and with it cultural and political reassurance. The various Islamist movements that have emerged in the Arab world in this period must be examined as part of a complex sociological and historical trajectory that far pre-dates 11 September 2001 . Furthermore, if we are to avoid subsuming them all indiscriminately under the term ‘terrorism', we must identify the different actors within this movement and the sociological roles they carry out in Arab societies.
Successive Arab governments have used the ulama , or Islamic clerics, to legitimate their power. In return, these ‘mouthpieces' of Islam have been granted a monopoly over the political uses of religion. Governments allow them to become the censors of society and guardians of tradition, blocking all social and political change and reform. The prominence of this state-sponsored Islam complicates any discussion of more progressive Islamist factions.
The paradox is this. When the West blames ‘Islamists' for terrorist atrocities, it assumes that all Islamist movements in the Arab and Muslim worlds endorse the use of terror. Yet, on the contrary, many of these movements have great modernising potential and are alien to violence. Even before the attacks on New York and Washington , various Islamic groups in the Arab world had begun to question the use of violence and the way it was being justified. A good example is the imprisoned leadership of Egypt 's militant groups. In July 1997, they committed themselves to non-violence and produced an accompanying rationale in four books. Written by individuals but approved collectively, these books provided arguments, rooted in Islamic scripture, for rejecting interpretations of 'jihad' based on the works of the medieval legal scholar Ibn Taymiya. The titles are suggestive: one is called ‘ Initiative of cessation of violen ce' and another ‘ Shedding light on errors committed in the jihad.' An article written by Jailan Halawi and published in Al-Ahram Weekly in August 2003 included a harsh criticism of Al-Qaeda: ‘… they have waded in blood and not earned a single benefit for Islam or the Muslims.'
A clear distinction must therefore be made between radical or extremist Islamist movements and the Islamism of reformers. The radical movements, which support the use of violence in service of their ideology, were born in the 1970s. Their founders witnessed and were deeply affected by the defeat and humiliation of Arab armies in both 1967 and 1973. Their doctrines are based on a rigid and intolerant interpretation of Islam, which cuts them off from mainstream society. They are opposed by reformists, who denounce their violent actions--including the attacks on New York and Washington .
On the other hand, Islamist reformism is the majority social trend in Muslim societies. Its objectives and development have been very different from those of extremist groups including, of course, the branches of Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda. Islamist reformism is politically self-determining and has been involved in the social and political experiments of all contemporary Muslim societies. It is intellectually distinct from the a-historical visions of traditionalist ulama in Saudi Arabia or the Taliban in Afghanistan . The Islam of reformists allows new interpretations of Islamic law. In other words, this new generation of reformists puts Islam on an historical plain and attempts to find for a common ground between modern values and Islamic legitimacy. It looks to its history to recover a positive self-image, which is not then constructed in terms of hostility to the West. However, the new generation also questions the way in which Western cultural paradigms have been elevated into absolute universal references. In consequence if these Islamists occasionally express resentment of the West, it is not because of a disregard for such values as progress and development, or distaste for the public liberties that Westerners enjoy. Rather, their resentment is a reaction to the West's own moral arrogance and double standards when it comes to defending human rights, democracy or the plight of the Palestinians. The new Islamists question the way in which we identify modernity with Westernisation, but they do not reject the former. In fact, as long ago as the nineteenth century Arab reformists were expressing a certain longing for a critical appropriation of modernity, provided they could participate in its construction.
These Islamists come not from traditional Islamic institutions but from the new spaces created by modernisation. They are graduates of modern educational establishments and, often, specialist universities. In fact, university campuses have provided fertile ground for the spread of Islamic ideas since the 1980s, when their proponents supplanted the left-wing student leadership of the previous decade. And the majority of people who support these Islamists are urban-dwellers who live by the modern values of consumerism and social advancement. Some of them come from the most marginalised sections of society: victims of unequal development; or poor workers in outlying suburbs who are attracted to the egalitarian message of Islam and the effective Para-state social work it performs in the least protected neighbourhoods. However, it would be a mistake to think of Islamist reformism as an ideology of the dispossessed. The key to Islamism is not economic but political; it is closely related to identity. It embraces all groups in society. For example, representatives of Egypt 's Muslim Brotherhood are often professionals, such as lawyers, doctors and engineers.

That Islamists have been the primary beneficiaries of the decline of the old regimes- is probably because left-wing parties are often associated with a system of Arab socialist values that, given their cumulative failures, are perceived as outdated. Alongside failures in political and economic independence, one other area seems, in retrospect, to have been neglected by the nationalist elites who built up the state: that of the identity and cultural independence of the individual. In the Muslim world these are inseparable from Islam. In sociological terms, Islamism is an inevitable response to the need felt by a large part of the Arab population to construct a new modern and democratic order rooted in its own culture and identity.
The evolution of this Islamist ‘third generation' owes less to pan-Islamism than to its origins in nation state. It has been a process of political maturation, based on pragmatism, which has made people realise that they share, with even non-Islamic political projects, an appreciation for the culture of consensus within a framework of political pluralism, elections and government.
Significant examples include the 1995 Platform of Rome, comprised of left-wing parties, human rights movements and Islamists seeking democratic political solutions for Algeria , and the platform demanding the democratisation of Egyptian political life. More recently, there has been the joint proposal in favour of democratisation in Tunisia , endorsed by the Social Democratic Party (MDS) and the Islamist group, Al-Nahda . The founding of the Al-Wassat party in Egypt by Islamic leaders and Christian Copts is further evidence that the underlying issue is not a divide between Islamists and non-Islamists, but the fight for democracy against dictatorship, to which both may be dedicated. This is why Islamist reformist parties need to be understood as joint participants with other parties in the process of democratic transition.
You could argue that these reformists do not defend a different statute for men and women, but to do so lacks historical imagination. Islamists are not the only occupants of this position. The Christian ‘ ulama' of America , for example, uphold inequalities between men and women and in so doing defend the patriarchal model with all its consequences. At least the Islamist situation is dynamic. It is undergoing a process of transformation, arising from the changes that Muslim women themselves are introducing from within the movement. Reformist parties have ensured the active participation of women (much more in fact than traditional or left-wing parties), and are working to reverse the marginalisation that traditionalists continue to insist upon by defending the domestic sphere as the natural space for women. Muslim women are increasingly accessing public space, perceiving themselves as equal to men, assuming public roles, and affirming their individuality; moreover, they are imposing this reality upon Muslim men. These women, mainly young, cultured and urban, wear the hijab voluntarily. For them, far from being an oppressive symbol, it is a sign of identity and liberation. This among other things indicates a transformation in Islamic societies that cannot reach fruition without democratisation and social change.
It is not just that we cannot afford to tar Islamist reformists and extremists with the same brush. We must also be aware that the marginalisation or repression of reformists can only benefit dictatorships which have survived through intensive repression and the manipulation of the war on terror. If Islamist parties have become the bête noire of such regimes, it is because, far from enshrining Islamic conservatism, they represent an important political opposition to those ruling parties. The confusion has its roots in the West's prevailing views of Islamists. This does not distinguish between the majority of reformists and the minority of radical Islamists. State security forces often conflate the two, pursuing the whole mongrel mix as ‘terrorists'. By this means, autocratic governments have adopted the convenient poise of the ‘good' despot, based on the assumption that the transition to democracy in the Muslim world can be postponed until they have defeated suicide terrorism. The military coup in Algeria in 1992 spawned this mistaken perception. In fact, the war on terror has provided much-needed cover for the brutal repression of Islamic reformists and secular opposition groups alike. It has given government's free reign, using hastily convened anti-terror legislation, to pursue all opposition, both Islamic and non-Islamic, which seeks democratic reform and an end to such despotic regimes.
By adopting terms such as ‘Islamic terrorism' and emphasising ‘divisions' between the West and Arab and Muslim societies, Western powers have backed the strategic interests of oppressive Arab leaders, giving them substantial help to stay in power. Unless this amalgam is deconstructed, the fight against terrorism may become a dangerous witch-hunt conducted by spurious state interests in the region, allied and protected by Europe and America . In the aftermath of 11 September, it should be remembered; both Israel and Egypt declared that the West at last understood their own conflicts with ‘Islamic' terrorism . Such opportunism hides a multitude of sins including the radicalisation, sooner or later, of some local Islamic movements, and the emergence of other radical groups.
This, then, is the crux of the matter both in legitimating the fight against terrorism and in decisively winning it. The Western failure to promote democracy by more explicitly recognising and supporting Islamist reformism in the Middle East not only fails to improve the lot of Muslim peoples, but also fails to protect Western populations. Problems in the region affect all our societies. We in the West must understand that what our political leaders do out there will have inevitable repercussions over here.
In her remarkable book, Islam and Democracy , the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi insists that Muslim history has been marked by two trends: ‘ an intellectual trend that speculated on the philosophical foundations of the world and humanity, and another trend that turned political challenge violent by resort to force. ' According to Mernissi, the first trend generated a tenth-century Islamic Enlightenment that reconciled reason and philosophy with revelation and orthodox dogmatic theology. The purveyors of the second trend ‘ simply thought that by rebelling against the imam and sometimes killing him they could change things.' Both trends ‘raise the issues that we are today told are imports from the West, ' issues of freedom of thought and expression, resistance and accountability, consent and authoritarianism—in other words, of democracy. I believe that Britain, as the birthplace of political and personal liberty in 1215, as the land of the Magna Carta, must lead the way to a better Western understanding of Islam and Islamism— that democratisation in the Arab and Muslim worlds must not be a reaction to 11 September, but a process grounded in political and social reform from within. Imposing it from without and thereby branding all indigenous opposition groups as 'terrorists' is not only a form of imperialism but also a recipe for failure.