Future Prospects for Peace
What Can End the Conflict?
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This conflict between the West and Islam is not, as some claim, simply a war against terrorism. The divisions are not simply between terrorists and anti-terrorists, no matter what the rhetoric says. We just have to look at who is actually engaged in the conflict to understand what is going on: Western powers against Islam in the Middle East.
Wishful thinking by Muslims and other religious leaders in the West will not and cannot change that. The only thing which would cause such a change would be public and unambiguous statements by Muslim leaders throughout the Middle East expressing support for the anti-terrorism campaign (at least in principle, even if they disagree with military action) and against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
(Note: Since writing this, one prominent Muslim cleric in Pakistan has come out to condemn both bin Laden and the Taliban. Tahirul Qadri, who heads the Pakistani Awami Tehrik Party, is quoted as saying that 'Bombing embassies or destroying non-military installations like the World Trade Center is no jihad. Those who launched the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks not only killed thousands of innocent people in the United States but also put the lives of millions of Muslims across the world at risk.' Although he wanted the military attacks on Afghanistan to stop as well, he holds the Taliban responsible for what happens, even 'for the death of hundreds of innocent Afghans' because he finds the evidence against bin Laden to be credible.)
So who will "win" this conflict? That is difficult to say, because it is not at all clear what "winning" would entail. It used to be that it involved at least making the "losing" culture little more than a shadow of its former self, if not destroying it outright. But neither of those outcomes is likely.
Instead, the more likely condition for "victory" would be for one civilization to experience fundamental changes, thus removing many of the cultural divisions between the two. This means that either the West must adopt many fundamental values from the Islamic East, or Islamic nations will have to adopt some of the fundamental values from the West.
The latter, I think, is more likely in the long run. Muslims who live in the West, and some who live in Muslim countries, already accept and prize some of the most important liberal democratic values of self-determination, tolerance, equality, and so on. Even better, they are able to identify aspects of their own history and traditions which support those values. Thus, they aren't simply imports from the West; instead, pressure from the West encourages people to focus on those traditions.
They don't find it difficult to adopt a democratic Islam rather than a militant Islam - we even see this starting to take hold among the people in Iran. It's not that Islam is incompatible with those democratic values or even that Islam has no experience with them. Unfortunately, Islam as it is currently expressed on a mass scale in the Middle East has ignored or even denigrated those values. What is needed is a change so that Muslims are better able to express them.
If this became more widespread, many of the most violent conflicts between Islam and the West would probably end because a democratic Islam and a democratic West should be able to co-exist peacefully. Conflict itself would never end, because they would never be identical and they would always have divergent interests and values - we see the same even within the West and within Islam. But the existence of conflict and variety is not a bad thing: it only becomes a problem when it leads to violence and death, as we see today.
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