Another voice

David Selbourne is right about empires in decline, but wrong about Islam

Wednesday, 25th April 2007

There is a reason for this. Islam, in its more fundamentalist form, doesn’t work. Serious, committed Islamists are most unlikely to succeed within any structures but their own. Their own, meanwhile, are notoriously inefficient and corrupt. Only by lucky coincidence have much of the world’s known petrocarbons been found beneath Islamic nations, giving them what temporary influence they wield. How can any culture which despises modernity, hates mobility, distrusts individual liberty and autonomy, persecutes those who deviate from cultural or ideological norms, imposes a kind of brutal conformity on the way people live, love and work, and at a stroke disempowers 50 per cent of its people (women) from proper education and from all career opportunity so that every boy-child it produces is being brought up by a person who knows little of the world and only a fraction of what the boy must learn — how can such a culture bestride the 21st century, as Selbourne fears Islamism will do?

We are hugely overestimating our supposed enemy. We are overlooking the fractures and potential fractures within it. Even if we were not — even if Islamism really were a great, fearsome and growing beast — cynics would say that we in Europe and America would be best advised to let its most implacable enemies shed their blood and money confronting its advance. In Chechnya, in Southeast Asia, with China, and all across that swath of nations ending in -stan, the struggle between Islam and its rivals is one from which the West can stand aside, leaving both sides to an expensive and wasteful scrap. The Chinese and the Russians are infinitely more savage than we dare be.

This is a battle Islamism cannot win. Fundamentalist Islam is a mediaeval force. It has little to contribute to modern business, science or government, and subsists uneasily in today’s world. Profoundly and essentially reactionary, it hardly creates, innovates or invents, and appears chronically disorganised and prone to internal division and distrust. Islam in its more convinced forms may even be in its death throes — it is too early to say.

We should stand well clear. An imperium in its death throes can be a nasty beast; I am by the same token nervous that the American empire may lurch dangerously around for decades to come. For the rest of us, as we contemplate these dysfunctional beasts, the best advice is that offered to his country (when America really was at a zenith) by President Truman, as the Soviet imperium headed for its afternoon: containment, not confrontation, is the wisest policy.

Matthew Parris is a columnist for the Times.