Daniel Pipes Interviewed

Via new-to-me blogger philopundit , an interesting article in Harvard Magazine about Daniel Pipes.

Here’s a quote:

This might be the place for one of Pipes’s definitions of the adversary, a virtual catalog of frights:

Militant Islam derives from Islam but is a misanthropic, misogynist, triumphalist, millenarian, anti-modern, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, terroristic, jihadistic, and suicidal version of it. Fortunately, it appeals to only about 10 percent to 15 percent of Muslims, meaning that a substantial majority would prefer a more moderate version.

Nevertheless, this “totalitarian ideology,” even with “only” 10 to 15 percent signed on (roughly 100 to 150 million persons worldwide), “regards itself as the only rival, and the inevitable successor, to Western civilization.” To many people this is scary stuff. But such warnings are his specialty. Among his many disquieting predictions, he wrote, as early as March 1994:

From [an American] point of view, the Middle East increasingly stands out as a region that develops and exports problems, including political radicals, terrorism, drugs, unconventional weaponry, and conspiracy theories. We should recognize that this region resembles the Pacific rim less than it does Africa; and we should ready ourselves for the many troubles yet to come.

Pipes is the anti-Cole, a PhD in Early Islamic History who says “I have the simple politics of a truck driver,” he told an interviewer, “not the complex ones of an academic. My viewpoint is not congenial with institutions of higher learning.”

Funny, to a large extent, neither are mine.

12 thoughts on “Daniel Pipes Interviewed”

  1. >>Fortunately, it appeals to only about 10 percent to 15 percent of Muslims, meaning that a substantial majority would prefer a more moderate version.

    I always find these kinds of arguments very amusing. You see, at least 10-15% of *all humans* are _assholes_. Somewhere around 20% of all humans are mentally ill. The percentage of Musilms actively engaged in violence of any kind is much, much less than 1%.

    When the 100yr running Islamic democide per capita starts to rise above the US democide per capita (it’s nowhere near there yet) then I’ll begin entertaining the thought that Muslims are more dangerous and murderous than any other group. Heck, the insurgents in Iraq have failed to kill as many innocent civilians as the US has.

  2. Hey, wasn’t this Daniel Pipes character involved with the Team B fiasco in the early 80’s?

    Thomas Barnett sounds pretty smart until one thinks about the massive scale of the central planning he’s advocating. Based on past experiments in central planning, how well should we expect that to work, exactly?

  3. JC, got that interview “futureblogged” for the 29th. It will come 1 day after another post that links to a great article on Europe’s future, and also includes some good critiques of Barnett’s ideas. It’s nice to see them talked about more widely.

    T.J., “Team B” was right about the USSR, and overturned several decades’ worth of CIA assumptions about robust Soviet economic growth et. al. that even you would find laughable. We should have many such fiascos, insh’allah.

  4. >>”Team B” was right about the USSR, and overturned several decades’ worth of CIA assumptions about robust Soviet economic growth et. al. that even you would find laughable.

    It was my understanding that Team B vastly overstated the USSR’s military and economic capabilities as well as their aggressiveness, and that the CIA estimates were (for once) much closer to the mark. (But I could be very confused)

    Does anybody have some good reference material on this?

  5. What Pipes has touched on in other writings is Islam’s unerring hostility to modernism. So has Bernard Lewis. For whatever reason, Islam stopped believing in a changing, evolving society that improved, and looked back to a “golden age” that could be achievable if just the “right” policies were adopted.

    This is why military reform, educational reform, dress code reform, western factories, etc. have all failed … Islamic Societies as a whole didn’t feel the need or the desire to change, and so haven’t. It’s why they have not prospered where even poverty stricken places like India, China, South Korea, and Thailand, Vietnam etc have made great strides in economic and social development. And interesting isn’t it that the most “marginal” Islamic countries, being more open to modernism, Turkey and Maylasia/Indonesia … have advanced by larger measures than their more heartland Arab brethren?

    Ironically I think only a massive defeat, on the scale of the Black Fleet of Perry in Tokyo Bay, or Meggido with Kemal Ataturk having the epiphany that it was Western Society that produced the Army that defeated the Ottoman Empire, can bring about change. Otherwise the forces of conservatism and reaction (not too different from the Shoguns of Japan) keep their brethren in Medieval bondage and away from the positive contributions that a modernist, syncretic Islam could provide to the world and themselves.

  6. And isn’t it interesting that Turkey was once the seat of the Ottoman Empire and therefore not “marginal” in any sense to Islam?

    I’d look to geography, lack of a colonial legacy, the success of Turkish nationalism and the unique attributes of Attaturk first before I’d assert that Turkey was in any sense “marginal” to Islam.

  7. I’m with Praktike on this. Indonesia has 170 million Muslims and they seem to be making some pretty good progress. Whatever has held the Middle East back, it’s not the Islam, or at any rate not just the Islam. Radical Islamism is a symptom of psychological problems, not the cause.

  8. I’ve found it interesting that the growth of the fascist strains of Islam more or less coincides with the penetration of modern mass media into the Islamic sphere. It’s tempting to say- and I have – that this is a coincidental element of a general response to Western modernism. On the other hand, we’re now getting for the first time a look at the distortion of discourse that has been imposed by our own mass media, and this in an environment with considerable competition and little government control. Not all madness is self-induced. Anyone know of a good history of the media in Islam?

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