Since September 11th, 2001, there has been much pontificating and theorizing about the "why" behind the murderous suicide attacks on New York and Washington. I have been under whelmed by most of the analysis.
We have heard the phrase "Islam is a religion of peace" repeated like a mantra. The boilerplate articulated by Western politicians and cultural leaders since 9-11 is that the religious affiliation of the fanatics who crashed those airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was irrelevant to their development as terrorists. It is asserted that the vast majority of Islamic states and their peoples are neither associated with nor sympathetic to terrorism.
This is indeed what many believe, or want to believe, but there is little proof supporting the thesis. It is simply politically incorrect to imply anything else.
Consequently, most commentary on the topic has been so couched in the taboos of P.C. ideology that it has served more to obscure rather than clarify. The central underlying issue is, as historian Bernard Lewis presciently observed back in 1990, that we have a "clash of civilizations" -- Islamic vs. Christian and post-Christian; rigid theocratic hierarchy vs. permissive secular modernism -- fueled by what Lewis calls the Muslim world's "downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression." The classical Islamic definition of "peace," and our default assumptions of the meaning of "peace" in the West, are quite dissonant.
In classic Islamic belief, the world is divided into two antagonistic categories: the Dar al-Harb ("abode of war") and Dar al-Islam ("abode of Islam"). Within this dualistic construct, "peace" can only abide where Islam has total political and cultural domination. Anything existing outside the Dar al-Islam sphere is fair game for military and cultural conquest. Classic Islam maintains that Islam is universally sovereign......
