US Department of Defence

Soldiers on horseback in the primitive terrain of Afghanistan where Al Qaeda forces were thought to be stationed.

This story, of course, links up with the one Robert Fisk tells about his role as the victim of Afghan violence. The people who beat him up were behaving badly, but they were goaded into this bad behaviour by the Americans--indeed, if he had been in their position, the victim of American bombing, he would have done the same thing. To respond to the events of 11 September in the same way, however, would be intolerable, because modern people are to be held morally responsible for their actions and ought not to allow themselves to be provoked, while primitives do not know any better. The policy advice implicit in this narrative is clear: while primitives are unpredictable and violent now, the hope is that if we behave better to them they will become more like us--in which case they will no longer have a free pass allowing them to beat up Robert Fisk and carry out other atrocities.

to complete the circle, a narrative based on a contrast between modernity and primitivism can also be espoused, albeit not in these terms, by Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other so-called 'fundamentalist' Islamic groups such as Hamas in Palestine. In this case, of course, 'primitivism' is read as a term of approval. Part of the religious message these groups are putting forward is that they represent a kind of purified, uncompromising Islam that can quite readily be characterised as primitive and atavistic in so far as it is intended to re-establish contact with the faith of the Prophet and the original community of believers. The idea of primitive nomadic peoples burning out the corruption associated with city life has been a regular trope of the sociology of Islamic societies since at least the time of the philosopher, historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 CE), and bin Laden's presentation of himself in the mountains of Afghanistan wearing traditional dress, carrying a rifle and often on horseback plays to this image, probably consciously.

Primitivism disguised by technology
At this point doubts begin to arise; it is generally good policy to worry about any account that seems to serve quite so many interests, and bin Laden's home-video collection seems a good place to begin to question a narrative of modernity and primitivism in which he features as a primitive. In these videos he portrays himself as the fearless leader of an incorrupt and incorruptible movement bearing down on the corruption of the Saud family and their satanic American supporters. But Osama bin Laden is himself the product of the wealthiest strata of Saudi society, and many of his most active supporters are drawn from the professional classes. Nothing unusual about that, it might be thought--think of Lenin and the Leninists in 1917: very few actual workers there--but what is commonplace for revolutionaries sits rather less well with the supposed representatives of a purified religion. Their extensive use of video technology and the Internet, and the sophisticated management of relations with the Arabic-language TV station Al Jezeera, suggest a decidedly un-primitive sense of public relations. If bin Laden were prepared to cite a Shi'ite precedent, he could point to the iconography of the Ayatollah Khomeini in support of the appearance of his own face on so many banners and T-shirts, but even so there is something suspiciously modern about his sense of PR.

Once this suspicion is let off the leash, the narrative of the modern and the primitive collapses: if Al Qaeda were genuinely primitive, we would not have heard of them--certainly not in the way in which they have made themselves known to the world at large. Rather, Osama bin Laden is as modern a figure as Tony Blair, but represents a different kind of modernity.

This is the key point: Contrary to a great deal of thinking in this area, there are potentially a number of ways of being modern, and not just the one way espoused by the liberal, largely post-Christian, humanist West. The world-view of the latter has, indeed, dominated the last half-century to such an extent that it has ceased to be understood as the particular perspective it is. A rather disparate set of ideas and propositions have come to be seen as a package that gives meaning to the notion of modernity within Western society. What are these ideas? The application of scientific knowledge and rationality to production within the context of a capitalist economy; the subjection of all accounts of the ultimate ends of life to the same rationality, which has induced a self-consciously ironic dimension to even deeply held religious and social beliefs; the notion that representative forms of democracy are the only legitimate basis for political power; and the spread of a human rights culture in which the privileges once extended only to rich and powerful white males are understood as legitimate only if universally available.

	Does George Bush have an ideology?
	(3:05 min) Chris Brown: It might be over-exaggerating to say that George Bush has an ideology. However, some of the people around Bush have quite a strong vision of what American power ought to do in the world. Bush acts as a slightly distant chairman of the board, who has below him a set of executives and managers who do a lot of the thinking. His role is to make the ultimate decisions. Within the administration there are two pretty clear-cut positions. First, there is the defence department, personified by Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and possibly backed up by Richard Cheney. This group is very strongly assertive of American power in the world. They are not terribly worried about building alliances. They regard bringing on the rest of the world as a very pragmatic issue--you need to make friends with some people because you need bases. On the other hand you have people, of whom Colin Powell in the State Department is the most obvious representative, who do believe in building a wider consensus. Bush is, in some senses, caught between the two. Some of his instincts go with the unilateralists, but a lot of the people he cares about are on the other side. George Bush is a slightly reluctant politician. He entered politics partly because other aspirations failed. Rather like Ronald Reagan, who everybody in Europe regarded as an idiot but who became Governor of California twice and American president twice, one thinks that Bush must be good at something, if only at winning elections. Bush really wanted to be commissioner for baseball in the US. When that fell through he ran for Governor of Texas against a very popular Democrat, Ann Richards, and beat her. The political spark arose out of that, but he is not a driven man in the way maybe even Reagan was. Bush doesn't really have an ideology.

Fundamentalism and irony
Even a sketchy knowledge of the history of the last two centuries reveals that the various elements of the package that makes up this version of modernity can, in fact, be taken apart and either allowed to stand alone or be re-combined in different ways to create alternative, but equally 'modern', accounts of society. The authoritarian modernisers of the second half of the nineteenth century, and the fascist movements of the first half of the twentieth, wanted, in different ways, to create industrial societies devoid of irony, without representative institutions and without extended human rights, and in this they are followed by contemporary 'fundamentalist' movements. Such fundamentalists want a world with modern technology, but with scientific rationality confined to the technical; a world with IT, mass media and 'infotainment', but with its content strictly regulated; a world where the community of believers exercise political power, but non-believers are disenfranchised; and, a consistent theme of fundamentalisms of all varieties, a world where women remain subjected to men, and transgressive sexual identities are de-legitimised. In short, they want a world devoid of irony--a world in which individuals do not distance themselves from their own beliefs--and they see no reason why such a world cannot encompass the creature comforts of modernity. This is why it is not uncommon for fundamentalists to do rather well for themselves--we are familiar with this from the life-styles of Christian TV evangelists in the US, but it seems from news reports that Mullah Omar's compound in Kandahar was also, as an estate agent might say, well-appointed.

So, are Al Qaeda and their ilk 'Islamo-fascists', as writers as diverse as Francis Fukuyama and Christopher Hitchens have suggested? This designation is reasonable enough, so long as it is understood that there are also 'Christo-fascist', 'Judaeo-fascist' and 'Hindu-fascist' movements at loose in the world. Islamo-fascists are the most prominent of these groups--and, perhaps, the most ruthless and unpleasant--not because of any features specific to Islam as a religion, but because of the particular conditions to be found within the so-called 'world of Islam', in particular the failure of any state or society with a majority Islamic population to offer a convincing, non-fundamentalist model of modernity.

What keeps Christian and Jewish fundamentalism at bay is the fact that Western society provides satisfactory outlets for its youth, either in the mainstream or in anti-establishment but non-fundamentalist counter-cultures. The Mohammed Attas of the post-Christian West generally end up in merchant banks or working for Greenpeace. Hindu fundamentalists have become the government of India, and have found themselves obliged to compromise and temporise in order to stay in power in a state where the commitment to the rule of law and constitutionalism runs deep--Islamic movements have never found themselves in such a position.

The struggle ahead
Are the forces of radical Islam doomed to be defeated, and, if not, what can be done to bring about such a defeat? If they actually were primitives, then it would be possible to believe that the tides of history would, eventually, leave them stranded--and much Western thinking seems to make this assumption. But if they represent an alternative modernity, no such guarantee is available. Fascism and National Socialism did not collapse of their own contradictions, but rather succumbed to superior force after a struggle that, had it been in a better cause, one would have to describe as heroic. The willingness of the Al Qaeda to continue fighting when all is lost can be seen in this light. So the opponents of Islamo-fascism have to be prepared to fight for what they believe in, and the intelligent use of military force will, inevitably, be one component of the struggle.

It is, however, of the utmost importance that such an application of force does not betray the values of the conception of modernity that it is designed to promote. In part, this is a matter of following, as far as possible, the rules of war and not endorsing gratuitous violence, but it also involves preserving a sense of irony, which is ultimately what distinguishes 'our' modernity from 'theirs'. To have an ironic commitment to the values associated with freedom of thought and human rights means to hold these values wholeheartedly, while acknowledging that they cannot rest upon some ultimate sense of what is true or false. To believe passionately in something while holding on to the thought that one might, just possibly, be wrong--to be able to insert a degree of distance between oneself and one's beliefs--is terribly difficult, but also liberating, and the capacity to function in the world in this way is precisely what fundamentalists lack.