Many professional observers have attempted to predict the future of political Islam throughout the past decade. Yet multiple and variegated Islamic movements are still going strong, increasing their dominance over the political arena in most of the Middle East. There are basically no other political rivals in sight. Confrontation between the Muslim World and Washington is the primary trajectory of current events. What is the problem?

The first is the analytic trap of examining these movements as essentially religious phenomena. Of course these movements are religious in the sense that their point of reference is Islam, but their basic thrust and power lie essentially in the political and social arena. Above all, when it comes to Muslim dealings with foreign Western threats and interventions, political Islam (or Islamism) is functionally nearly indistinguishable from nationalism.

A quick definition: I broadly define Islamism as the belief that the Koran, and the sayings and actions of the Prophet, bear important messages for Muslim society and governance. This definition covers a broad spectrum of movements from the highly moderate ruling party in today’s Turkey to middle and mainstream groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and finally to al-Qa'ida at the violent and most radical extreme. These movements are mostly peaceful, but a few are extremely violent; they are mostly inclined towards accepting some form of democratic governance, but some reject democracy; some are modernist, others are traditionalist; some are radical, some are conservative. They do not agree on political, social, or even theological issues. Even if they agree in principle on the need for adoption of the Shari’a (Islamic Law), major differences separate how they understand Shari’a and how it should be implemented. But they are all grounded in Islamic history, culture, and religion, which lend them a great deal of cachet and authenticity. And they are all evolving.

Muslims have many historical grievances against the West, above all from centuries of Western imperialism or domination of the Middle East. In Muslim eyes, the Western imperial tradition is now spearheaded by the United States in its explicit drive for global hegemony and its determination to weaken the political power of Islam—the last major bastion of resistance to the global American agenda. Today most Muslims feel directly under siege as the Bush administration prosecutes its Global War on Terrorism—perceived by Muslims as a global war against Islam. Indeed, numerous radical anti-Islamic voices in the West lend direct credence to these Muslim fears. In fact, the ultra-right in the Muslim world, the West, and Israel all feed on each other’s fears; they all embrace the certitude that we are indeed experiencing a “clash of civilizations.” Armed struggle against US occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq, against Israeli occupation in Palestine, and against the US-Israeli campaign to crush Hamas and Hizballah—regionally accepted as important and legitimate political movements in Palestine and Lebanon—all help convince Muslims that they are fighting to rid their lands of foreign invaders and imperial domination. Muslim anxieties, fears, frustrations, and anti-American anger are now at all time highs. The policies of the West, and particularly the US, only serve to exacerbate these convictions.

A second analytic trap is the well-developed cottage industry in the US which scans the Koran, cherry-picks texts, and then makes pronouncements on the “eternal character” of Islam and Muslims and its “implacable” struggle against Christianity and the West. Such “methodology” is tantamount to a selective reading of the Old Testament, identifying the more intolerant passages about what punishment God will visit upon the enemies of the Jews, and from there comment on the essence of Jewish character and how Jews will behave into the future, or characterization of the nature of Christianity based on the historical record of its militant manifestations. All these approaches are shallow and ultimately offensive.

The Muslim world suffers from large numbers of problems and pathologies, a great many of which parallel problems in the broader developing world. Dictators, poorly developed economies, corruption, poor education systems, unemployment, ultra-conservative social practices especially towards women, intolerance towards diversity in certain circles, and now a mounting sense of anger toward the outside world all represent well-documented facets of the current agony of the Middle East. Over the past century, the West has itself contributed richly to the emergence of many, though not all, of these phenomena, and it continues to do so at an accelerated rate, widening and deepening the East-West fissure on a daily basis. Yet the thought that the most powerful, sole global hyper-power in history might have anything to do with the trajectory of events in the region is simply inconceivable within US discourse on the problem. Acknowledgment of almost any US role in the creation of the present Middle East morass is absent in almost all policy and think-tank analysis—with the exception of Iraq analysis in more recent days. The reality is that 9/11 had precedents. The issue here is not to cast blame but to analyze the nature of the problem and decide how to extricate ourselves from of it.

Like it or not, there will be little or no internal reform within the Muslim world as long as these societies remain under siege from the outside. There will be no significant domestic movement in the Muslim World to limit or constrain radical, violent, or even terrorist movements as long as Muslims believe that these movements represent “understandable reactions” to present circumstances. Moderate voices in this superheated climate invariably lose out in the Muslim World, much as they have in the US, Israel, and now across much of Europe. Indeed, the essence of the counter-terrorist task today is not so much the killing of actual or suspected terrorists but rather the need to transform the Muslim environment that facilitates the terrorism; this is the environment in which war, occupation, political frustration, political impotence, and anger have now socialized a whole new generation of potential warriors in the name of Islam.

We are now creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our own actions will have a greater impact upon the evolution of Islam in politics in the Muslim world over the next decades than any other factor. US policies themselves represent the single biggest wild-card that confronts analysts seeking to divine the future course of the Middle East.