Egypt ranks 180th out of 184 countries in the world in material wealth. It is material wealth that builds hospitals and schools and prevents unnecessary infant mortality. Islam has blocked the education of women, the creation of a workable banking system, the creation of laws of inheritance that allow a business entity to continue beyond the death of one of its owners. Mullas today debate wether insurance is a form of gambling.
Before wealth is distributed it must be created. Islamic scholars have no clue how to create wealth. The Ummayad and Ottoman empires grew by conquest not productivity. The individual productivity of the American worker has grown by 30% in the last 12 years. Productivity in Egypt has dropped.
Before the Mullahs preach they should find a way to stop the starvation of Muslim children.

Shabbir Akhtar is a British cleric who belongs in a sort of broad way to the ideological circle of Sayyid Qutb (there's a chapter on Qutb in his book), about whom someone wrote a really scary article in the New York Times Magazine some weeks ago. I haven't read either Qutb's book, In the Shade of the Qur'an, or the longer version of the magazine article that was just published. But Akhtar's book confirms my suspicions that we are not only not winning the ideological war, we are losing it. To those of us who have some feeling for this country, or for the project of enlightenment, broadly conceived, or for the idea of democratic governance, this is more than troubling.

Akhtar's book is a cutting polemic against the vague liberal Christian ethic that advocates religion's abstention from politics and that condemns any religious involvement in politics as ultimately corrupt. It's so powerful and so ready to confront Christianity on its own terms that he doesn't even mention the way in which this seemingly pure religious ethic quietly serves rather horrific political ends until the end of the book, when the (theological) substance of the argument is already made.

Instead he advocates an Islamic ethic of engagement with power, which is both very interesting and also, I think, very difficult to contest from any standpoint. The basic claim that Islam is politically responsible whereas Christianity is not is, I think, fallacious, but certainly the sort of Christianity that is advocated by most liberals today falls for his critique. It's almost reminiscent of Slavoj Zizek:

"Islam certainly presupposes human beings -- ordinary, fallible, human, all too human. And the involvement with power is, as Christian critics rightly insist, characteristic of Islam. But isn't it similarly true of all viable ideologies? Perhaps Muslims are frank about their willingness to employ force, duly constrained by moral scruple derived from religious revelation. Perhaps Christians lack candour here."

Perhaps the reason we call suicide bombers "murderers" and "cowards" is that we are too frightened to face bravery on its own terms or draw the sorts of lines that you need to draw to see the difference between killing and murder. Perhaps the reason we need to cast the World Trade Center bombing as a horrific act of barbarism is that in the age of precision bombing and zero-casualty warfare we are terrified of any act whose decisiveness belongs to war. Perhaps.

In any case this book is powerful enough and rich enough to inspire such melancholy ruminations. It should be read not merely because it is of interest -- beyond geopolitics, that is; for instance, Akhtar makes some very perceptive observations about the existence of a Judeo-Islamic, not Judeo-Christian, tradition, observations which in some ways answer the short-sightedness of some writers on the split between Judaism and Christianity (I think of Zizek again) -- but it should also be read by every serious student of philosophy today. This is the challenge we need to answer. This is the task set for the West, if we are not to hand the world over to God again, in his various incarnations. It is a book to respect but also to fight, to fight ruthlessly and absolutely, in the way that only an enemy worthy of true respect (not tolerance) deserves.

"Money without a challenging ideology can safely be ignored. Islam cannot be ignored: the Arabs might run out of oil and cash, but they seem unlikely to run out of Islam.
"[...]
"The last word, of course, is about peace. 'O you who believe,' says the Koran, 'enter fully into a state of peace.' This is an imperative, the final imperative. For the pursuit of peace is an active affair. A wholesome and enduring peace, founded on justice and mercy, is not easy to secure in our kind of world -- a world in which, in the greatest yet most challenging paradox, one often needs to wage war in order to secure a hearing for peace."

I can't wait to read Qutb.