Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern
By John Gray.
‘The suicide warriors who attacked Washington and New York on September 11, 2001, did more than kill thousands of civilians and demolish the World Trade Centre. They destroyed the West’s ruling myth.’ John Gray 2003
As the US were plotting the invasion of Iraq British political philosopher John Gray was publishing his short book Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, a work which challenges the common perception that al Qaeda is a product of the past, not as Gray argues, the present.
A compelling read the book transcends the usual philosophical lexicon for a language decipherable to most readers. It’s useful that Gray has ensured this ‘arresting’ book is assessable to non-philosophy major’s, as his argument deserves widespread attention.
Do not be fooled into thinking that the book is an analysis of AQ, it merely uses the terrorist group to convey a greater message about human reaction to modernity and the global free-market. Gray argues that AQ is an entirely modern phenomenon and links the emergence of Islamic Fundamentalism with the Enlightenment notion of the utopia and man’s perceived ability to change the world. Gray maintains that the Positivist movement of the Enlightenment resulted in the human endeavour to rationalise all existence including the economic model. Post-Enlightenment (or Neo-Liberal) economists such as Milton Friedman, Gray writes, dislocated free-market economics from the human experience in an attempt to simplify economics to a simple equation that would answer all human problems.
Economists Friedman and [Francis] Fukuyama believe that the ‘price mechanism’ of ‘supply and demand’ will resolve all economic conundrums. Take natural resource scarcity such as the pending Oil Crisis, neo-liberal economics suggests that an increase in price will lead to technological advances and/or further successful oilfield exploration. In theory this makes sense, but as Gray points out, this forgets the human element. Will resource scarcity lead to conflict (as history suggests it will) and will the possible development of new oilfields lead to environmental disaster?
Gray devastatingly unravels the American belief that its model of free-market economics and democratic governance can be exported and implemented across the world regardless of culture and history. The writer scrutinizes the current American economic hypocrisies on protectionism and financial solvency to debunk this myth, and states that there are few if any examples of neo-liberal economic success.
Left-leaning readers should be careful in following the author’s argument, it’s easy to swallow anything if the line of reasoning is favourable to ones own beliefs, and readers should be prepared to disagree with some of the more tenuous assertions. In fact The Guardian’s Martin Bright flatly refutes a core premise that AQ is a product of the modern world: –
His analysis of al-Qaeda as modernist is quite simply wrong. Bin Laden is a millionaire businessman who runs his organisation as the chairman of the board. It is self-evident that al-Qaeda is a phenomenon of the twenty-first century, but it is essentially anti-modernist. It is a psychotic fantasy parading as a philosophy. Al-Qaeda is devoted to the halting of time, the reversal of history and the recreation of an Islamic caliphate based on the seventh-century Arab empire.
I disagree with Bright, as regardless of the strategic and moral aims of Bin Laden’s group, they are wholly modern in their operation and structure. Imperialism, be it implicit or explicit, will always be resisted, and in a echo of America’s own founding fathers; AQ seek self-determination for the Islamic World, not Western imposed democracy or puppet dictators.
Personally I believe that the ‘Caliphate’ would operate as little more than a dictatorship anyway, and the regions Muslims would be under a theocratic yoke. However it is the polarisation of the Whitehouse’s policy that is driving Islam into itself. Take Iran. Just as young Iranians were testing the boundaries of the Mullah’s rule Bush unified the nation – behind the theocracy – by declaring it a ‘terror state’.
I have no doubt that only democratic capitalism can bring stability to the world. People need opportunity, freedom, and reward, and only the market system (with some social security) can deliver these virtues. Rather than using our military might to forcefully subjugate the Islamic world, we should use our culture and prosperity to convey to Muslims that only open lines of trade, peace, and opportunity, will usher in growth and stability.
John Gray is Professor of European thought at the London School of Economics.
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