EVER since 9/11, the British writers, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan have been trumpeting their abhorrence of radical Islam. Not for nothing have they been dubbed the “literary clash of civilizations brigade”.
Amis has been especially given to anti-Islamic utterances. It is true he disavowed his notorious wish to wreak vengeance on Muslims for the consequences of extremism, insisting that his quarrel was with violent Islamic zealots, not with Islam itself. Nevertheless, he has left little doubt that he regards Islam as an inherently regressive culture that far from having anything to teach the West, has much to learn from it.
Celebrities with lavish access to the British and American media, Amis and his friends have done much to lend respectability to Islamophobia. So the emergence, in the person of Alastair Crooke, of a British intellectual with an altogether more considered and nuanced attitude toward Islam and Islamism is a salutary development.
Crooke is an improbable figure, a diminutive, loquacious, widely-traveled, former British intelligence officer of 30 years experience, who has set himself up as a sort of free-lance mediator between East and West. Now in his late 50s, he is based in Beirut, where he presides over the private think-tank, Conflicts Forum, which seeks to enter into constructive dialogue with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah that are seen in the West as bywords for terrorism. Crooke’s curriculum vitae might well suggest that he has, as it were, gone over to the other side — rather as a number of British agents, repelled by the Western political and economic system, defected to the Soviet Union in the 1950s. And in truth, he can sometimes give the impression in his public comments that he is a new species of Western dissident, a convert to the Islamist point of view.
What is certain is that few in the West have thought more seriously than Crooke about the implications of the Islamic Revolution and the question how the West might hope to come to terms with the challenges it poses. Lucid and provocative, his new book, “Resistance”, is the work of a philosophical activist who is acutely conscious of the possibility that the conflict and misunderstanding that bedevil East-West relations could yet escalate into World War III. Crooke is eloquent about the need for the West to abandon once and for all the lethally counterproductive unilateralism that defined the administration of US President George W. Bush, the approach that asserted: “This is what we want and here is what you must do”.
Resistance strengthens the impression that Crooke himself feels more affinity with the Islamist perspective than he does with conventional Western values. The image of Islamism as a movement of reactionary violence directed against Western modernity is, he maintains, grossly misleading; first and foremost, Islamism amounts to the restatement of key Islamic values in the face of ceaseless Western bullying and manipulation. Cook argues that it is rooted in the principled rejection of the Western idolization of free markets and acquisitive individualism in favor of a commitment to cooperation and community.
Crooke writes that the Islamist quarrel with the West is ultimately a quarrel about the “essence of man”. He describes how, according to Islamist analysis, the West has betrayed the humanist vision projected by the thinkers of the 18th century European enlightenment. What Islamists above all wish to convey is that the drive to impose “liberal democracy” and “free markets” on the Islamic world by force belongs to a phase of Western hegemony that is now over; it is because of Western blindness to the resentment provoked by the brutal imperialist character of its dealings with the East that Islamists have increasingly resorted to armed resistance.
Underlying Crooke’s sympathetic treatment of Islamism lies his sense that the West is at a point of epoch-making moral and intellectual collapse. Appearing at a moment when the acute global financial crisis generated by unregulated capitalism is calling into question the very viability of the Western way of life, his book is undeniably timely. Crooke even suggests that those in countries like Britain who are dismayed by the lame response of their own politicians to social fragmentation and injustice may have something to learn from Islamist modes of resistance.
Alastair Crooke is often invited to comment on Middle Eastern issues by the BBC, but it is hard to imagine him finding a niche in mainstream British culture. Indeed, were he operating chiefly in Britain, he might well, given the mounting preoccupation with national security, find himself being smeared as a subversive, an “enemy within”. It is noteworthy that in the acknowledgements to “Resistance” he thanks his publisher, Pluto, for “taking the book on”. Most British publishers would not be eager to associate themselves with a polemic so sympathetic to the Islamist point of view.
Nobody is going to accuse Martin Amis of subversive intent. Yet the irony is that the bilious critique of Western self-indulgence and consumerism embodied in Amis’ fiction and Crooke’s sense of the West’s ills are in many ways complementary. The difference between Crooke and Amis is that the latter is an essentially conservative figure who is, in effect, defending the moral degeneracy his novels excoriate as a price worth paying for Western freedom. Crooke, by contrast, is arguing that at a time when the West’s excesses are generating vast unease among its own citizens, the superiority of Western civilization is by no means self-evident. His message is that the West has less to fear from Islamism than from itself.
