Who's to blame for bin Laden's sympathizers?

The other day I quoted from President Bush's recent speech about fighting Islamofascism. A good buddy reader of mine argued that Islamic terror is a reaction to U.S./western policies, the implication being that we've brought it on ourselves. So lately I've been reading up on this issue, and I've found some interesting material. I ran across an article in Business Week Online which is positively breathtaking in its misunderstanding of the issues.

Conventional wisdom asserts that fundamentalist schools called madrassas, funded by the Saudis, are indoctrinating terrorist hatred and ideology in young Muslims in the Middle East. Thus, an important front in our fight is to shut down madrassas. Stan Crock, armed with quotes from Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle East and South Asia politics, and Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist at the U.S. Institute for Peace, argues that we've got it all wrong.

Politics played a major role in financing these schools. And nowhere has the growth of madrassas been more of an issue than in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia and Gulf States with majority Sunni populations wanted Pakistan to serve as a buffer against the Shiites who had come to power in Iran in the late 1970s. So they bankrolled madrassas in Pakistan. The Saudis in particular exported Wahhabism, a particularly rigid expression of the Islam faith that relies on strict interpretation of the Koran. But while religion plays an important role in the schools, jihadism by and large doesn't.

"They may train people who are more bent on a religious view of things, but that doesn't necessarily mean a militant curriculum," says Vali Nasr.

Here comes the good part. Keep in mind that violent acts in a vacuum are irrational; something must provide rhyme and reason to those acts. Christine Fair argues that

In fact, madrassas don't give students the kind of education needed to be terrorists. Most of these schools focus on reciting the Koran and learning the duties of the maulvi, the people who run mosques' day-to-day operations. To be a terrorist, you need to know where to get bomb components, how to read labels -- a set of skills madrassas don't teach... Only a tiny percentage of madrassas taught students about both the Koran and Kalashnikovs -- and that was mostly to fight the Soviets when they had invaded Afghanistan.

So the only "education needed to be [a] terrorist" is instruction on how to acquire and assemble bomb materials? That's like saying that a school that teaches racism and homophobia is completely blameless when a student kills a gay Latino--because technically the school didn't teach the kid how to fire the pistol or swing the crowbar. What about the ideology behind bombings? There are plenty of people in the west who have the knowledge of how to assemble a bomb, but there's one key component that separates them from terrorists and keeps them from creating and detonating one: ideology.

But Stan Crock describes something entirely different

A country's military, foreign powers, war lords, and the local economy all play major roles in the growth of jihadism -- certainly more significant roles than the religious-based schools. To be sure, the madrassas that prepare imams have produced their share of hot-headed preachers who can get a crowd going. But for an average guy who attends these schools, "the impact on recruitment for terrorism is much more difficult to prove," says Nasr.

Apparently, the madrassas' worst fault is that they're behind the times:

Their curriculum doesn't prepare students for the modern economy. And they produce religious conservatives who are likely to vote that way if democracy comes to their countries. Only now are these schools starting to buy computers and teach such subjects as English, chemistry, and physics. While those are the skills terrorists need, it will be less of a problem if the economies in these countries improve so that they offer a source of income other than joining al Qaeda.

It's the economy, stupid--not basic beliefs--that fuels terrorism! Yet the purported skills that terrorists need are exactly what westerners also have--computers, English classes, chemistry and physics--and we're not terrorists. What's the lurking variable here? I'll give you one guess.

From the Business Week article, you'd think that madrassas have little-to-nothing to do with fomenting terror in Muslim countries, supported by experts like Nasr and Fair. However, I dug a little deeper and found a full-length interview of Mr. Nasr in which he makes the exact opposite case--against the madrassas.

There is no single cause for something like this [Al Qaeda and the movement worldwide]. But there are a series of causes, and Saudi Arabia is responsible [for] one of them. In order to have terrorists, in order to have supporters for terrorists, in order to have people who are willing to interpret religion in violent ways, in order to have people who are willing to legitimate crashing yourself into a building and killing 5,000 innocent people, you need particular interpretations of Islam.

Historically, madrassas have been the equivalent of seminaries, but for all age groups, and they are "schooled...in reading and religious studies." A complete education produces clerics, scholars, preachers, etc. However,

because of the Afghan war, we have a new kind of madrassa emerging in Pakistan-Afghanistan area...[they] differ from the traditional madrassas [in] that they were not really so much concerned about scholarship. They were more concerned about training religious fighters who would go into the Afghan field and fight.

This new extremism is directly linked to Saudi Arabia's brand of Islam, known as Wahhabism. An "extreme orthodoxy that historically has not been shared by a majority of Muslims," it has spread increasingly over the last thirty years, because Saudi Arabia funds so many madrassas.

What you would have is a growing influence where those who are receiving money would begin to reflect the ideas of the fundgiver.

Despite the fact that "recruitment into terrorist movements is small generally," the Wahhabi madrassas still inject a strain of anti-Americanism into the masses. Nasr argues that Saudi Arabia has created the sympathy for bin Laden and others that many in the Muslim world have. The interviewer asks:

So what you're saying, I guess, is that the Saudis have helped create a kind of world of sympathy for both the grievances cited by someone like bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and also for the consequences that may take place because of our reaction to them?

And Nasr responds in affirmation:

Exactly. In other words, if you promote a fanatical and fundamentalist view of Islam, you're already pretty much determining what kind of reactions people will have to political events, and what kind of views they will have on the west, what kind of views they have on democracy, on capitalism, on social roles and the like...

As I've maintained before, given the nature and targets of terrorism, no possible grievance--correct or otherwise--can justify the methods of radical Islamists. Yet even when the "they have grievances" card is pulled in defense of the terrorists, it's important to note that Saudi Arabia's strict and unorthodox brand of Islam contributes far more to Muslim sympathy of terror than any policies of the West.