Ever since 9-11 there has been a nagging question which both pundits and politicians have largely avoided: will the invocation of Islam as justification by terrorists cause Americans in opposing terror to change the normative Free Exercise doctrines deeply embedded in US constitutional jurisprudence? It is sensitive topic even to raise.
Immediately after 9-11, the White House gave a clear endorsement to traditional First Amendment values. It characterized the 9-11 terrorists as individuals who do not represent Islam; the terrorists have misinterpreted the religion's true teachings. So the First Amendment issues could, for the most part, be avoided. In his speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, President Bush set the tone: “The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics -- a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.” This has remained the dominant U.S. government approach. As recently as last week, a State Department official addressing a conference on Human Rights and the Fight Against Terrorism said that “many terrorists have chosen to hide behind a distorted version of their faiths”.
However with the July 7 bombings in London, I detect a change in unofficial attitudes—a suggestion that terrorism may be more normative in parts of Islam than we have been willing to admit. Thomas Friedman’s July 15 New York Times column hinted at this: “Of course, not all Muslims are suicide bombers; it would be ludicrous to suggest that. But virtually all suicide bombers, of late, have been Sunni Muslims. There are a lot of angry people in the world…. But the only ones who seem to feel entitled and motivated to kill themselves and totally innocent people, including other Muslims, over their anger are young Sunni radicals. What is going on? Neither we nor the Muslim world can run away from this question any longer.”
On Saturday, the conservative columnist Robert Klein Engler left no doubt about his attitude. In an American Daily column titled Political Factions and a Modest Proposal for Dealing With Islam, he wrote: “The average American knows the so-called war on terror is not really a war on terror. He knows in his gut that what's happening is that we are fighting another war with Islam. That's what it is, no matter what the politicians say. This war against Islam is the flaring up again of a conflict that has been going on for 1,500 years…. "
Engler continued: "It is a fault of liberalism that it sees Islam as just one faction among many in Western societies…. It is the theological ideas inherent in Islamic law that make Islam the greatest challenge that constitutional democracies face. As soon as these democracies grant Islam the status of a faction, Muslims begins to campaign for the overthrow of the very constitutional structures that make them a viable faction…. The conclusion to draw from this is that either Islam stops being Islam, or it be excluded as a faction from democratic republics….”
Then came Engler's radical proposal. He wrote: “[L]et me make a modest proposal: instead of tolerating Islam, we should build a fence around it. This fence makes no judgment about the religion of Islam. Instead, it respects the uniqueness of Islam. A fence simply recognizes that two world views are incompatible…. A fence around Islam may include the removal of Muslims from Western societies, the outlawing of Islamic practices, cultural parity with Muslim states, new sources of oil and the postponement of economic and technical development in the Muslim world until the military and cultural threat of Islam is diminished.”
That's Engler's view. The difficult question is whether a view like that is also beginning to resonate with the political mainstream in America? Probably, "not yet". But when British Muslim leaders and scholars condemn the bombings in London, but at the same time go out of their way to justify terrorist bombings in Iraq and Israel, they do not help their case. If the mainstream view in the U.S. of normative Salafi Islam does begin to change, the attitudinal shift will have profound moral, political and legal implications for all Muslims and all Americans.
