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Tuesday 7 October 2008

For the Islamist doctor, terror is healing

Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi say that radical Islam is less the product of extreme deprivation than of the thwarted aspirations of the Muslim middle classes and professionals

Furthermore, the political success of the Egyptian Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah is seen in some quarters as a product of their capacity to provide medical and other social services in countries where state budgets are grossly inadequate and corrupted. Islamists have been quick to understand this dynamic as a means to manipulate the masses. Many observers claim that Hamas gained its strength st the ballot box on the back of its social services. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its splinter groups, including Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), gained a high profile among the poor by providing health care in exchange for opportunities to recruit neighbourhood youth in extremist ideology. Al-Zawahiri is a product of EIJ; the road from his conception of ‘Islamic free clinics’ to al-Qa’eda was not long.

Osama bin Laden used his personal wealth to build schools and hospitals in Sudan, and thereby gained credibility as a benefactor and provider of healing services. But it should also be noted that, by contrast, the Indonesian Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), a Sufi and traditionalist body with 40 million members, operates large and successful networks of schools, hospitals and community rehabilitation projects without recourse to extremist ideology. NU ‘good works’ are Islamic, but not Islamist, and they deserve greater attention from those in the West hypnotised by the public welfare programmes of groups like the Egyptian MB and Hamas.

Meantime, however, professionals and other ‘privileged’ people play a more important role in the Islamist counter-offensive against the West than ‘the Muslim street’. In the Muslim world the ordinary peasant or labourer is chiefly concerned with supporting a family and gaining economic stability; it is only after he has some economic security that the Muslim may turn to radical religion. The West has got radical Islam wrong: it is less a product of misery and the sense of extreme oppression than of the thwarted aspirations of the Muslim middle classes.

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