The much-vaunted Enlightenment of which we are so proud here in the West persists in avoiding the economic realm. We still believe‚ in endless growth, in the reduction of debt mountains and in our natural right to acquire the world’s resources. The magical multiplication of money belongs to the absurd aspects of the capitalist religion. However, the limits of wealth have naturally not disappeared, which is why good old geopolitics necessarily returns. We are no longer fighting for Lebensraum, but for oil for our cars. For Western democracies the problem now is how to democratically legitimise‚ their thirst for new resources. What is interesting in all this is that the founding acts of democracy deliberately overlook the peoples right to self-determination, the sole legitimate subject of democracy, that is.
An analysis of terrorism today shows that as a phenomenon it not only enhances the Global Security State, it also legitimises the necessity of a global empire. John Gray considers terror/Al-Qaida to be an accompanying symptom of globalisation and a very modern entity indeed. They are the dismal children of modernisation; Muslims who never knew the context of mosque, market and Zakat in their places of upbringing, and now members of revolutionary Shock Troops‚ (one of Sayyid Qutb‚s modernist terms). Their suicide appears to Zizek more the action of someone in doubt, who simply has to know at last what he basically does not know and spiritually could never experience: whether there is another room behind the door. As a modernist ideology, says Zizek in his brilliant analysis Welcome to the Desert of the Real‚ they want capitalism without capitalism. An imaginary land of orthodoxy without economic alternatives, but with scarf-wearing women and a ban on alcohol. Meanwhile, even to the terrorists, the Dollar is the most highly prized cultural asset of all.

In liberalism, wanting to die for a political cause is unthinkable; hence in political theory and within the value-scheme, the terrorist or suicide bomber is a political figure of absolutely no worth whatsoever. He is not even an enemy, he has no values, and since inhuman, he is basically an animal. Cage, camp and leash are the reasonable civilising counter-measures. The outrageous acts themselves pursue an inescapable bio-political logic: the perpetrator utilises his body, but not his faith, against an opponent imagined to be overwhelmingly more powerful. He has nothing left other than this body, and in contravention to the Revelation he finally defiles that very existence which should have brought him to the Next World. All’s bad that ends bad.

The political consequences of terrorism are especially devastating for the Islamic community, but also for non-Muslims. One has only to reflect on the obvious weakening of the important anti-globalisation movement, which has invigorated the political debate. As Muslims we do not just bemoan the superficial loss of image; that longing for recognition, which can be observed among today’s Muslim functionaries, is in fact a secular activity.

But this does not preclude annoyance. The limitless political term Islamist‚ is of course a gross simplification, and like every other simplification it is one of the known preludes of a persecution which must be genuinely feared, quite aside from the typical, inscrutable German incapacity to respect orthodox religious life-practices. The political observer will also have noticed that the term racism has been silently removed from the debate. But more to the point is the regrettable fact that, beneath Terror’s clouds of dust, even Islam itself is hardly recognisable. In the public arena, when advice is sought about Islam, it is as if all that existed were hair-brained fundamentalism or a banal esotericism. In either case, Islam loses its character as a credible alternative way of life.

The denunciation of belief has now assumed shocking proportions. On the Muslim side what is needed is a critique of Islamic modernism, but a critique that leads into Islam, not out of Islam.

The key points are clear:
Islam is neither an ideology nor a totalitarian life-form. Neither is it, as an organic life-pattern, a system with totalitarian ambitions. Islamic thinking lives from the autonomy of its own terminology. Even without the flowery language of tolerance, Islam respected other ways of life in close proximity and for hundreds of years on end.

Abu Bakr Reiger, Berlin