The United States, argues Michael A. Palmer, is engaged in a political crusade to modernize the Islamic world. Americanism is in the vanguard of modernity’s relentless advance, promoting capitalist markets and democratic institutions. In the absence of a renaissance or enlightenment, modernization in the Islamic world has been painful and unsuccessful. While many in the West long for an Islamic reformation, Palmer argues that Islamists such as Osama bin Laden are the face of that reformation. American actions have not provoked this conflict, nor can American withdrawal end it, Palmer contends. Islam’s failure to modernize is the root cause of the current situation.In 1776, the American revolutionaries thought that they were turning the world upside down. They expected monarchism and mercantilism to wither away. They also expected the world to cry out for their formula for life, liberty, and happiness. In this belief the Americans were naive, but that naivete was rooted in an overly expectant time frame and not the general march of history. By the end of the nineteenth century, the global economic system had moved in the direction the Americans had pioneered during and immediately after their revolution. Democracy and republicanism were on the march. In a mere century, the thirteen colonies grew from a struggling confederation to the strongest industrial power on the planet. The twentieth was an American century, replete with deadly struggles but also another series of American successes. Monarchism, aristocracies, mercantilism, fascism, and communism had all fallen prey to the West and, specifically, to Americanism.And now it is the turn of Islam, the last levee of the traditional world still standing against the rising tide of modernization, Westernization, and Americanism. The jihadists hope to build their traditionalist past into a bulwark against a wave of modernization that, if not repulsed, threatens to destroy Islam, not because it is a weak religion, but because it is central to the entirety of the lives of its believers. Whereas the majority of Christians and Jews preserved the basics of their faiths while surrendering the public square to modernity, whether such a retreat is possible for Islam has yet to be determined. And, to be sure, if bin Laden and men like him have their way, it will never be necessary. Modernity shall be Islamized, rather than Islam modernized.But if the Islamists fail - this book’s central thesis is they will - Islam’s shift from the center to the periphery of the public square will be excruciating. Perhaps we are already witnessing that agony: just as in its war with America, Japan’s kamikazes were desperate harbingers of the empire’s end, the homicide bombers herald the death throes of political Islam.
