Here’s a thoughtful article by Sadik J. Al-Azm, professor of modern European philosophy at the University of Damascus (via Milt’s File):.
Despite current predictions of a protracted global war between the West and the Islamic world, I believe that war is over. There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline, and the opposition by other Muslim groups will surely grow. 9/11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge. […]
Although unique in its horror, in its desperation 9/11 can be compared to past terrorist acts that foretold the ends of the movements in whose names they were committed: for example, the abduction and murder of the German industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer by the Bader-Meinhoff gang in the summer of 1977 and the abduction and murder, a year later, of Aldo Moro, the dean of Italy’s senior political leaders after World War II, by the Italian Red Brigades. In these cases a swift and decisive response would devastate not only the plotters, perpetrators, and their supporting networks and organizations, but ultimately their protective communist regimes and worldwide radical leftist movements as well. Looking back after 9/11 it seems to me that the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s in Europe was indeed a futile attempt to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis reached by communism, radical labor movements, Third Worldism, and revolutionary trends everywhere. The terrorism of that period was the first visible manifestation of that impasse and the prelude to the final demise of those movements, including world communism itself.
Today the hard-core Islamists’ spectacular terrorist violence reflects a no less desperate attempt to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis reached by the world Islamist movement in the second half of the 20th century. I predict this violence will be the prelude to the dissipation and final demise of militant Islamism in general.
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