The Jihadist Ideology

Since 9/11 there have been two explanations for why we were attacked. For the Left, the reason was that our actions (and inactions) in the Middle East angered Muslims who sought then to exact revenge on us. Alternatively, the Right contended that the reason we were attacked was for who we are - for our free society. As this article describes, both of these analyses are incorrect; we were attacked because that is the ideology of Islam.

In other words, the left believes that the Islamists hate us for our sins, and the right believes that they hate us for our virtues. Both sides commit the same narcissistic fallacy of thinking that the Islamist holy war against the West revolves solely around ourselves, around the moral drama of our goodness or our wickedness, rather than having something to do with Islam itself.
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Using Muhammed as their model, the jihadis live and think and act within paradigms provided by the stages of Muhammed’s political and military career. According to Habeck, this internally driven logic of Islam, and not any particular provocation, real or imagined, by some outside power, is the key to understanding why the jihadis do what they do.
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What is most striking in the Method of Muhammed is the utter absence of any transcendent notion of morality. Unlike in traditional Western religion and philosophy, where God or the Good is the measure of human actions, in Islamism (which after all is simply a pure form of Islam) the measure of human actions is the shifting power tactics and military strategies of a desert brigand and war leader.

It is understandable why we come up with these explanations for the behavior of the Islamists - we do not understand their culture and so transfer our values and ways of thinking to them. This is the same kind of thinking that makes some in the West think that if only we sat down with them, we could come to an agreement. No matter what bin Laden says in his video and audio tapes, or what other Islamist leaders say publicly (MEMRI.org provides excellent translations of speeches and writings from the Arab world), we refuse to be shaken from our mistaken belief that there is something we can do that will actually change the way Islamists see us or what they want to do to us.