What’s in a Name?

Barack Obama’s habit of avoiding Islamic nomenclature and highlighting American gun violence whenever Muslim terrorists strike is surely, in part, a product of his fear of anti-Muslim xenophobia in the United States. Before the rise of Donald Trump, Americans on the right might have scoffed at that concern as an expression of left-wing anti-conservative bigotry. That isn't as easy to do now: Understandable anxiety about Islamic militancy—how a small number of American and European Muslims can go jihadist with internal-security services unable to stop them—has led many Americans to become sympathetic to a ban on Muslim immigration and much more intrusive surveillance of Muslims in the United States. Whether Obama's trepidation is a wise choice domestically—Trump's nasty rhetoric, at full volume after the Orlando massacre, feeds on the president's caution—is nevertheless secondary to the question of whether it is wise strategically. Islamic radicalism generated in the Greater Middle East, after all, has sparked, if not defined, the holy war embraced by Muslims in the West.

Would a more intellectually honest description of this militancy prove helpful in the soft- and hard-power fight against Sunni and Shiite Muslims who intend non-Muslims harm? Many on the right, and not a few on the left, seem certain that correct labeling is essential if we are to confront effectively this radicalism. Many on the left, and a few on the right, are equally certain that the president's lexical caution is astute.

Labeling can certainly matter. Imagine if the White House had been more accurate in describing Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Neither of the clerics, who have often worked together closely on internal oppression, terrorism, the development of ballistic missiles, and nuclear-weapons research, merits the moniker “moderate.” “Pragmatic revolutionaries” or “religious fascists” would be more truthful but would have led to more difficulties with Democratic senators troubled by Obama's nuclear diplomacy. The lack of precision abetted the administration's foreign policy.

Throughout the nuclear negotiations, senior Iranian officials and clerics, including Khamenei and Rouhani, gave speeches, often laden with religious allusions, about the enduring villainy of the United States. The mullah and his minions even let loose venom directly at the president. The nuclear deal certainly did not depend on Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry remaining mum about the animadversions hurled at the United States. Khamenei didn't agree to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action because he found Obama sympathetic to the continuing Islamic revolution. At a minimum, a more forceful American response to such bile would have signaled that diplomacy wasn't making the United States soft. But Obama and Kerry appear to believe that any public criticism with religious overtones leads ineluctably to a counterproductive slippery slope that, in this case, would have threatened the president's most consequential foreign achievement.

Now imagine that President Obama had more forthrightly dissected and named the menace that is terrorizing the United States and Europe and convulsing the Middle East. He might have spoken about Islamic radicalism and the Islamic State with the erudition of Princeton's Bernard Haykel and Michael Cook, exemplars of thoughtful scholarship. Such analysis wouldn't have caused, in Obama's words, a “clash of civilizations” or prevented the Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, or Pakistani security services from working as they do now with the Central Intelligence Agency.

Indeed, Westerners have often decisively contributed to deeply factious debates among Middle Eastern Muslims—about slavery, women's rights, tyranny, and other issues that touch on the holy law, the most important building block of Muslim cultures. That so many influential Islamic thinkers spend so much time excoriating Western ways demonstrates the seductive power of Occidental culture. Muslims in the heyday of their empires showed little curiosity about, and even less umbrage at, Christian cultures and hostile Christian ruminations.

Most Westerners surely don't consider it unacceptably intrusive that their ideas and actions stopped the Islamic slave trade. They should be aware that they reflexively elevate their views into “universal rights” while faithful Muslims, let alone fundamentalists and radicals, don't have that privilege. There is a moral hubris within many Western conversations about Islam. But that doesn't mean Westerners shouldn't try to advance certain ideas, especially when large numbers of Muslims openly aspire to make Western values and rights their own.

The fundamentalist backlash in Muslim lands against women's rights and a brutal stance against homosexuality—particularly in the Middle East, which once attracted gay Westerners because a respect for privacy and the holy law's demanding standards for proving illicit sexual contact often produced more tolerance than in the West—is in part a reaction to the continuing reach and magnetism of foreign ideas. But today's ethical crisis within Islam is different from the East-West clashes of yesteryear. The lodestars of Islamic thought in the Greater Middle East—Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Egypt—have all become engines of militant, if not revolutionary, Islamic orthodoxy. At the end of the 19th century, the most famous and convulsive Muslim theologians and thinkers were Islamic modernists, who could say, as the renowned Egyptian religious scholar Muhammad Abduh once did, “Oriental nations .  .  . [have] no ambition, little hope of life, and are willing to accept inferiority while the Western nations have the highest and noblest of objectives.” Egypt and Pakistan, where more liberal interpretations of Islam were once competitive with a stern traditionalism, have become satellites of Saudi Arabia's well-funded primitive Wahhabi creed. The nominally secular, oppressive Egyptian and Pakistani militaries have inextricably intertwined themselves with deeply conservative religious forces.

A large part of the Middle East's younger generation may be sympathetic to and envious of Western lifestyles and freedoms. Iranian and Arab Muslim religious identities among the young, especially women, have become more individualistic and less communitarian. But the youth, like many older Muslims who want political and religious reform, are without leadership, institutions, and very often educations of any depth or utility. And among Arab youth, many—probably more than at any time in Islamic history—embrace their faith as a vehicle of political protest. Islam becomes a means for individual empowerment, personal redemption, and communal revenge, a flexible, stripped-down spiritual vessel in which traditional restraints on personal conduct often no longer exist.

Many Westerners want to believe that only Muslims can eliminate the jihadist cancer within their community. That view is probably mistaken, at least in the sense that a consensus of religious scholars, politicians, and public intellectuals could put down this rebellion—and Muslims who embrace religious militancy are ardently rebelling. Western criticisms of secular Middle Eastern authoritarianism and Islamic culture—they combine to form mainstream fundamentalism—don't have the sympathetic echo they once had now that Westernized Muslim intellectuals in so many lands have collapsed or write from exile. And even in a post-imperial age, highly Westernized Arabs (think Edward Said and friends) can be reluctant to criticize Muslims, even fundamentalists, for fear of diminishing the opprobrium against the West, which, somehow, deserves the lion's share of the guilt for ruining the Middle East.

Great progressive Muslim minds today are few. The vast Muslim flight to the West has taken with it most of the best and the brightest, and many of those abandon their faith or run smack into the global network of Saudi-supported mosques, which preach a segregationist creed. The Muslim immune system just may not have the requisite number of healthy white blood cells to stop militancy from growing. It's possible a leaderless upwelling of popular disgust could change the dynamic. This is more likely in the Muslim communities of Europe, where the graphic violence of jihadists, seen most recently in the murder of a French police officer and his wife, may alienate anti-Western Muslims. The Islamic State's rebroadcast of the officer's death deleted the partial decapitation of his wife and the threatening of their 3-year-old child, which the killer livestreamed. Such actions are not, to say the least, historically redolent of the male ethos of early Islam's great bedouin warriors.

The Greater Middle East offers less hope. Looking at the vast geography of destruction and dysfunction, at how its most powerful nation-states fuel radicalism, such a lasting wave of disgust is difficult to envision. An Islamic counterrevolution could develop in Iran, since theocracy has produced rampant dissent. But given the uniquely Shiite nature of the country's faith and politics, it might not have a large impact on the Sunni world.

Americans should understand what is happening within Muslim lands and communities in the West so that they don't believe drones, Kurdish irregulars supported by U.S. Special Forces, or more Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and French internal-security officers are going to dent seriously the biggest problems. President Obama ought to describe “violent extremism” religiously because that is how Middle Eastern Muslims do so. Not doing so does a disservice to those who are trying to turn the tide inside the faith. Iranian pro-democracy dissidents bravely praising President Obama in 2009 didn't want him to ignore them as they were being crushed. Neither should Westerners condescend, which Obama publicly always does. With all the awful things that Muslims have endured since World War II, they're not fragile. There are good reasons to make them wrestle with Western complaints, no matter how unpleasant. Obama can certainly do better in public than to describe Khamenei, who has jailed and brutalized thousands of his own countrymen, assassinated intellectuals, and nourished virulent antisemitism, as simply “complicated.”

The United States is engaged in a long struggle. If Islamic terrorism continues to rack up the civilian body count, today's bipartisan isolationism may give way to a renewed willingness to deploy large numbers of U.S. troops in the Middle East. Knowing the nature of the distemper within Islam, discussing it honestly, can only help us appreciate the difficulty of the challenges before us and the patience required.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.