Robert Spencer on whether Islam is globally waxing or waning: transcript

Key points

• Spencer says Islamic history shows a repeating cycle: misfortune is blamed on lack of piety, revivalist movements arise, and strict rules later relax.
• He compares ISIS to the Almohads of 1147 and points to Iran moving toward relaxation and Turkey under Erdogan moving the other way.
• He says the pandemic both emboldens jihadists, who call the virus a soldier of Allah, and may disillusion some Muslims.
• He says Turkey stays in NATO because European leaders want it kept close, and that non-Arab Muslims often become more fanatical.
• He says he does not believe there is a moderate Islam, only moderate Muslims, and thinks Iran's regime has a great chance of falling.
• He says the Obama administration removed mention of Islam and jihad from counterterror training in 2011, and urges a return to realism.

Chapters

1. 0:00Webinar introduction
2. 0:33Cycles of revival and relaxation in Islamic history
3. 3:00Iran and Turkey today
4. 5:56Pandemic and the jihadist cause
5. 8:02Turkey, NATO and the European Union
6. 9:02Ethnicity and the jihad movement
7. 11:24Kurdistan and moderate Islam
8. 13:44Iran's regime and the Western left
9. 15:58What can be done and closing

Full transcript

0:00All right, it's one o'clock. Hello and welcome to the Middle East Forum speaker webinar series. I'm Stacey McKenna and I will be moderating today's discussion. We are pleased to have Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, join us to discuss, is Islam globally waxing or waning? Mr. Spencer will speak for roughly five to ten minutes, then open it up for questions. Should you wish to ask a question, please use the Q&A box located at the bottom of your screen. We will do our best to get to all questions, but we have many participants on this webinar so I apologize in advance if we do not get to yours today.

0:33And with that, I will turn the discussion over to Mr. Robert Spencer. Thank you, Stacey, and thank you all for being here. In considering the question, is Islam globally waxing or waning, that is, has Islam diminished as a political force today, it's useful to consider some background to our present situation. Some time ago, for example, a Muslim leader arose who claimed that the Islamic authorities were corrupt and had strayed from authentic Islam. His group gained control of some territory, and he proclaimed himself the leader of all the Muslims. In its domains, his group instituted strict observance of Islamic law, Sharia, including the sexual enslavement of infidel women, and oppressed the non-Muslims.

1:20Now, you might think that I'm talking about ISIS, and I could be. But actually, every detail of the capsule summary that I just gave you is true also of a group known as the Almohads, or monotheists, who took power in North Africa in the year 1147, and over the next 25 years gained control of Al-Andalus, that is, Muslim Spain. And the point is, of course, that we see this phenomenon throughout Islamic history, as I demonstrate in the book, The History of Jihad. We see periods in which the influence of Islamic teachings is paramount and supreme, and periods in which that interest wanes to the degree that a revivalist movement then arises. Now much of this stems from the fact that the Quran teaches that if you obey Allah you will prosper in this world and that if you do not obey Allah

2:21you will be punished in this world as well as of course in the next. So this has led throughout Islamic history to various kinds of misfortunes being ascribed to a lack of piety and to the rise of revivalist movements that promised to turn away Allah's wrath by restoring the people to the proper and full observance of Islamic regulations. And thus, then, Throughout Islamic history, misfortunes are thereby ascribed to a lack of piety, and the revivalist movements fix all that.

3:00So then, on the other hand, when Sharia restrictions become too onerous, they're relaxed. Because after all, human nature is everywhere the same, and the great majority of Muslims don't want to live under Sharia any more than anybody else does. So the restrictions are relaxed and a period of moderation follows until some misfortune triggers a new revival movement that describes the troubles once again to a lack of Islamic rigor. So today we see movements in both directions. We see a movement toward the relaxation of this Islamic rigor in the Islamic Republic of Iran and that is of course among the people not the regime but the regime is in the view of many on its last legs precisely because people have lived under Sharia now for 40 some years they're tired of living this way there some people still remember the days of the Shah and they want to throw off the Islamic regime as we've even seen some demonstrators say outright The opposing movement we see in Turkey, for example, where President Erdogan is working hard to dismantle Turkish secularism and even to restore the Ottoman Caliphate.

4:13And so the secularism, which never was very popular outside of Istanbul and Ankara, is now severely threatened and Erdogan is quite efficiently and systematically working to dismantle all the traditional locuses of resistance to the re-imposition of Islamic law, notably in the leadership of the military. Now, if we were to look at the same situations in Iran and Turkey in another few generations, probably we would see the same movements again in reverse.

4:50for example also a hundred years ago the ascendancy of Western values in the Islamic world looked more or less assured it looked as if jihad terror was a thing of the past the caliphates were a thing of the past the caliph the last caliphate was abolished long after it became just a figurehead anyway the caliphate was abolished Turkish secularism prevailed the Shah of Iran followed Turkey's lead and everywhere Muslim women were dressing in a Western style, and it looked as if...

5:22Sharia was a thing of the past. There's a notorious video that you can readily see on YouTube of the Egyptian President Nasser in the 1950s joking about the Muslim Brotherhood demanding that women wear hijab and saying their daughters don't wear it. And just let's see them try to convince Egyptian women to wear it. Of course, nowadays, you have most Egyptian women wearing the hijab. And so, what Nasser was joking about and thinking inconceivable has come to pass.

5:56As long as the fundamental principles of Islam remain the same, particularly in regard to the punishment in this world for disobedience, and then the ascribing of various misfortunes to that disobedience as a result, as long as these ideas remain influential, we're going to see the same cycle. so is Islam globally waxing or waning yes thank you very much and if you have any questions I'll be glad to take them now thank you so much mr. Spencer the first question we have is is the pandemic helping or hurting the jihadist cause Once again, the answer is yes. It is helping or hurting the jihadist cause. I'll give you some specifics on both.

6:41The jihadist cause has been considerably emboldened as a result of the pandemic. We see Al-Qaeda and ISIS both have termed the virus a soldier of Allah and have called on Muslims. Muslims also who are not part of ISIS and Al Qaeda have called upon their co-religionists to weaponize the virus, to use it against infidels if they get infected. Many Islamic leaders around the world, although by no means most, have said that the virus is something that is Allah's judgment on the infidels and once again counseled prayer and Islamic piety as the remedy to it.

7:21And now at the same time, that means that some Muslims are going to think all they have to do is pray or lick an Islamic shrine, as we've seen in Iran, or something of that nature, and then they'll be saved from the virus. Then they're going to get it, and that's going to create some disillusion. On the other hand, this kind of piety is, in a certain sense, irrefutable and self-reinforcing, because most likely, or more likely, instead of being disillusioned with the religious leaders that have been following, Muslims who get the coronavirus after believing that they could not possibly get it, will likely just think that they weren't praying hard enough, weren't being pious enough, and redouble their efforts to please Allah.

8:02Thank you. Do you see NATO taking action to pressure Turkey for its increasing support of Hamas and making Turkey a spiritual home for the Muslim Brotherhood? Also, what keeps Turkey's membership in NATO so well protected? Turkey is protected by the European Union. The European Union is very clear, the leadership anyway, that they want Turkey in the European Union. they don't want it out of NATO and so consequently they will they turn a blind eye to all this the euro-arab agreements dating back to the 1970s also commit the European Union to various forms of cultural societal and political cooperation with the Arab League and that has led to an increasing opposition to Israel itself within the European Union so when Turkey cozies up to Hamas and tolerates Hamas activity, there's not really a whole lot of pushback in Europe

9:02to that, at least once again among the leadership in Western Europe. So I don't think that NATO is going to act against this because of the European powers that are essentially driving the car there in NATO despite the pushback from the president. How much do you see ethnicity influence the global jihad movement? There is a variety of aspects to that. One is that non-Arab Muslims generally, if they are pious and devout, tend to become even more fanatical than the Arabs.

9:42Islam is in many ways a vehicle for Arab supremacism. if you convert to Islam you generally take an Arabic name you have to pray in Arabic the leading figures are of course Arabs the caliph of the Muslims and Sunni theology has to be a member of the Quraysh Arab tribe and so on and so on so if you're a Pakistani non-Arab or an Iranian there's a tendency to try to out Arab the Arabs by being even more Islamic than they are and this is I think one reason why we see such a virulence in Islamic practice, in Pakistan in particular, as well as in some other areas that are not Arab, like Afghanistan, as well as Iran. At the same time, in Iran also, there is the counter-movement, as there is so often, because the Persians had a great history before the advent of Islam.

10:35And increasingly, as the Islamic Republic continues to fail and grow more unpopular, more and more Iranians are harking back to that history, including converting to Zoroastrianism, which was largely driven out of Iran centuries ago by the Muslims. But it's considered to be, of course, the ancestral religion of the Iranians, and so many Iranians are returning to it. that if you are an Arabian Arab, you don't really have anything but Islam to form part of your cultural heritage. And so the Iranian dissidents can fall back upon their non-Arab traditions, their pre-Islamic traditions as a locus for the dissent against the regime.

11:24Thank you. Do you feel that supporting creation of an independent Kurdistan in northeast Syria would help to oppose Erdogan's expansionism along with that of Iran and Russia? Yeah, absolutely it would. The Kurds have been dealt a very bad hand. They were promised a national home at the same time that the Jews were promised a national home at the end of World War I. And of course the British as always or or so often, I should say, reneged on the promise there never was an independent Kurdistan.

12:02But it would allow for Kurdish forces to gain a great deal more international support against the Turks and to marshal world opinion at the UN and elsewhere against what they're doing there. Thank you. So is there a moderate Islam? And is that waxing or waning? I don't believe that there is a moderate Islam. There are moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. This is a distinction that is incredibly muddled today. People don't seem to be capable anymore of distinguishing between the belief system, the ideology, and the people. But the reality of the unfortunate reality of the Quran and Sunnah, as they have been interpreted over 1400 years, among all the sects and schools of jurisprudence, is that they all teach warfare against unbelievers and the necessity to subjugate those unbelievers under the rule of Islamic law.

12:59Now, does this mean that each and every Muslim is committed to that? Of course not. Not any more than every Christian loves his enemies and turns the other cheek. The reality of the individual observance of any particular Muslim is informed by a great many things besides Islam. Everybody has a variety of perspectives, a variety of priorities, a variety of influences and so there are plenty of Muslims around the world who have no intention of waging jihad against unbelievers and never will. And for that, of course, we can all be glad, but there is no traditional form of Islam that does not contain the elements mandating this jihad imperative against unbelievers.

13:44Wonderful answer. So there have been talks about protests in Iran like in 2011 and the regime they're falling. What are the chances of this happening? Oh, I think there's a very great chance of the regime falling. I've seen some extraordinary things coming out of Iran recently. Saw a video not long ago of an entire stadium full of people there for a soccer game chanting long live Reza Shah, Reza Shah being the father of the Shah of Iran who was deposed by Khomeini in 1979. And by chanting such a thing, they're saying we don't want an Islamic Republic, which is something also that some of the demonstrators in Iran have chanted explicitly in recent weeks. So the problem, of course, is that the Iranian regime is so ruthless that there is no opposition that can There's no political opposition that can organize itself at all. The kind of situation that allowed for Khomeini to be able to mobilize people against the Shah in the first place, the Islamic Republic is making sure it's not replicated.

14:55But there are so many people, and I think every day there are more Iranians who hate the regime. I don't think it can possibly withstand the pressure of that indefinitely. wonderful and I think this will be our last question how far will the left move towards Islamic lobbies as opposed to Israeli or Jewish lobbies as far as you can go the pretty much already the left has done this it seems to be a priority that they've chosen of anti-american of opposition of anti-americanism opposition to the Judeo-Christian tradition opposition to the United States as a political and moral force in the world and consequently they see in Islam ideological allies in the sense of here's a force that's been for 1400 years at war with the West and they are essentially at war with the West so they see them as ideological kin thank you so much and as a closing note what can

15:58we do to help this What can we do to help what? Just the waxing and waning and then try and move towards the ideals that we're looking for. Well, I think there's a great deal of, in general, a great deal of unreality about the issues regarding the global jihad today, a great deal of wishful thinking, a great deal of denial of plain facts. Of course, most notoriously, the Obama administration in 2011 removed all mention of Islam and jihad from counterterror training materials so that means that intelligence agents and law enforcement operatives ever since then have not been able to even study at least under official auspices the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism so I think a return to realism would be most well welcome and tremendously helpful at this point wonderful thank you so much for taking time out of your day to speak with us we've come sorry we've come to the close of our webinar thank

17:01you all for joining us today uh next week we'll have dr jonathan schwanzer join us on monday at 1 p.m eastern to speak on the cause of the middle east next war thank you again for joining us and and we hope you have a great day.

Source and licence

Recording: File:"Is Islam Globally Waxing or Waning" with Robert Spencer - MEF Podcast Ep. 10.webm by Middle East Forum (2020-04-21), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY 3.0.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.