Sun Tzu noted that, to prosecute war, we first must understand and name the enemy. He claims this knowledge "must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation."2 In declaring war on terror, we failed to identify the true enemy.
The real source of the threat against the United States is militant Islamism and its worldwide legions of supporters. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Roosevelt did not declare war on sneak attacks or torpedo planes. He declared war on the group responsible for the attack—not the process by which it was carried out. Calling our current conflict a war on terror diffuses its focus and ignores the true enemy.
Militant Islamic nations are the most repressive, violent, undemocratic, and authoritarian on earth. Their very existence is a destabilizing influence globally because they have been—and remain—incubators for international terrorists.
All U.S. citizens would do well to read Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong?3 Written before 11 September 2001, Lewis's thesis is that the Muslim world, perceiving it had fallen behind in virtually every aspect of human endeavor, answered the question "What went wrong?" with the response, "Who did this to us?" They created the two-headed Great Satan of Israel and the United States "to explain the poverty that they have failed to alleviate and to justify the tyranny that they have intensified." They substituted fanaticism and violence for reform and liberalization, and chose self-destruction rather than rejuvenation and prosperity.
It is anathema for Americans to criticize another's religious beliefs. Freedom of religious expression is at the center of our constitutionally protected freedoms—as it should be. But when any religion opens schools whose "curriculum" includes the violent overthrow of the United States, as Muslims have done in New York City, it is irresponsible for us to ignore the threat or consider it to be protected expression.
We have been inculcated with the belief that all cultures have equal validity and are worthy of appreciation. Moreover, the multiculturists say there is moral equivalence between cultures, religions, and belief systems that mitigates against criticism. While it is true all cultures are worth studying, not all have equal moral or intellectual standing-and they certainly should not be immune from criticism.
In 2002, the University of North Carolina announced that incoming freshmen would be required to read Approaching the Qur'an, a book by Michael E. Sells that purports to enable the reader to understand the Koran. After a firestorm of protest, the university's chancellor backtracked and made reading the book optional. In some respects, the university was on the right track. But it would have been far better to subject the Koran itself to the same intellectual and historical scrutiny applied to other religious texts. Given the influence of the Koran on Islamic militants, dispassionate analysis is in order.
Some of the Koran's most savage passages of violence and retribution serve as the intellectual and moral glue of the Islamic terror movement—of which al Queda is but one entity. Unfortunately, queries about some of these passages usually are deftly side-stepped, answered only by impassioned testimonies to the one true religion.
Salmon Rushdie's Satanic Verses made reference to passages in the Koran that support killing non-Muslims in the name of Jihad. The result: a contract on his life to be carried out as a religious obligation by all Muslims. Rushdie disappeared and reappeared only recently. Condemnation by Muslim leaders for this reprehensible episode has escaped any notice. When Arab scholar Suliman Bashaer argued that "Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than emerging fully formed from the mouth of the Prophet," his students threw him from a second-story window. Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed because one of his books was thought to be "irreligious."4 But it is precisely such examinations that Islamic scholars must initiate. Without them, Islamic terrorists will continue to be sustained and reinforced by the literal language of the Koran.
While the United States has the military power to confront Islamic terrorists, it cannot force the reform and introspection that must come from within. Muslim religious leaders are obligated to do what most religious leaders have done: come to some understanding that religious texts are the accreted wisdom, knowledge, and expression of generations looking for truth to develop a moral code that leads to honorable and purposeful lives. So far, no movement has begun. In the words of Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
The silence of the imams is deafening.
1 An imam is the head of a mosque and a spiritual leader of a group of Muslims.
2 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, lrans. Samuel B. Griffith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 145.
3 Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 159.
4 Alexander Stile, "Radical New Views of Islam and the Origins of the Koran," The New York Times, 2 March 2004.
After a career in education, Dr. Coe is currently a board member of the Wisconsin Veteran's Museum Foundation.