Catholic News Service, Washington DC.
BOOK-Muslim Jul-22-2005
Lessons on social alienation in our own back yards

THE WAR FOR MUSLIM MINDS: Islam and the West,

by Gilles Kepel.Translated by Pascale Ghazaleh. Belknap/Harvard University Press
(Cambridge, Mass., 2004). 327 pp., $23.95.

Reviewed by Wayne A. Holst

Catholic News Service

North Americans -- concerned for how Muslims and Christians might live together peacefully on this continent and globally -- would do well to attend to related European debates and policies. Much of the discussion in Europe is currently focused on whether recent Muslim immigrants should be integrated into society or left to develop separately. This is the topic of "The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West." The discussion is particularly relevant in the aftermath of the bombings in London.

At a late-June international symposium dedicated to Christian/Muslim dialogue, Venice's Cardinal Angelo Scola advocated a "politics of integration" for Islamic immigrants in Europe. The cardinal called for adequate schooling, better housing and broader employment opportunities for growing numbers of arrivals from the Near East, North Africa and other Islamic regions. Inherent to these benefits is Muslim inclusion into the democratic process for the first time. All this is necessary to guarantee long term European security and stability in a growingly complex and cosmopolitan world.

Following the Sept. 11 attacks it was discovered that many terrorist cells -- composed of young, angry, disenfranchised Muslims -- exist in Europe. Policies of integration are needed to help unhappy Muslim immigrants "avoid the seductions of radical Islamic movements."

Discussions of this nature are not unfamiliar to North Americans. The benefits of integrationist versus multi-culturalist policies for new immigrants have caused passionate debate. Rarely, however, have the current stakes been so high for Europe and the world.

Gilles Kepel is France's foremost expert on Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. He teaches at the venerable Institute d'études politiques in Paris. For some time, he has been saying that extremists were losers who were no longer attracting the allegiance of the Muslim world.

This line of thinking continues in his newest book, "The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West." The author argues that popular arguments for "Islamic jihad" and the "clash of civilizations" are overly-simplistic explanations for what is actually occurring in Islam today.

Kepel believes that the core problem is conflict within Islamic civilizations. Greater threats to world peace exist within, rather than beyond, Islam. As an alternative to "jihad" Kepel employs the Arabic word "fitna" -- meaning "war within the heart of Islam; a centrifugal force that threatens the faithful with community fragmentation, disintegration and ruin."

The Muslim threat to the West is an issue at least as much internal to Islam as it is external to it. Terrorism needs to be opposed, not primarily by armies and weapons of standard combat but by wise decisions and actions concerning the treatment of the 10 million Muslims already living in Europe.

The author shapes his arguments in support of the interests of Islam, the West and Arab ruling elites in countries like Saudi Arabia. He helpfully retraces the history of conflict over the past decades; describing the rise of Al Qaeda and related groups. He proposes a multi-lateral solution to current global terrorism that includes acceptance of Israel by the Islamic nations, the democratization of Arab societies and (key to it all) the winning of the hearts and minds of Muslims in the West.

This book, in places at least, offers something new and imaginative as the Mid-East simmers with latent discontent and the insurgency in Iraq continues to wreck more havoc. There are things to be done much closer to home. Kepel states: "The most important battle in the war for Muslim minds during the next decade will not be fought in Palestine or Iraq, but in those communities of believers on the outskirts of London, Paris and other European cities where Islam is already a growing part of the West."

Kepel believes that if European societies help these "presently lost groups" of Muslim populations to integrate and steer them toward prosperity, a new generation of Muslims may become the Islamic vanguard of the next decade, offering their co-religionists around the world a new vision of faith and a way out of the dead-end politics that has paralysed their countries of origin.

Kepel's has a thesis Christians should ponder. He calls us to turn our primary attention away from military action against terrorism to a focus on poverty, social alienation and misdirected religion; even in our own back yards.

Read this book for ideas that could lead us beyond impasse and quagmire.
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Holst is an adult educator at St. David's United Church in Calgary, Alberta.
He teaches religion and culture at the University of Calgary