Boko Haram: Burning Books and Children. By Kevin D. Williamson. National Review Online, July 8, 2013.
Williamson:
President
George W. Bush had a peculiar way with words. He was relentlessly mocked for
saying of al-Qaeda et al., “They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion,
our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each
other,” which was soon reduced to “They hate us for our freedoms” and held up
for scorn. “No, dummy,” said both the antiwar Right and antiwar Left (Remember
the antiwar Left? Whatever happened to those guys?), “they don’t hate us for
our freedoms, they hate us for our bombs, for our support of strongman
governments, for our alliance with Israel, etc.” As was so often the case,
President Bush’s critics, left and right, got it wrong. They should have
listened to his actual words and not relied upon the Will Ferrell précis.
There
are no words adequate to the horrific attack on a group of schoolchildren in
Nigeria, carried out by the jihadist Boko Haram outfit, a partner to the
Algeria-based al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which claimed the lives of 42
children and teachers on Saturday. The jihadists set fire to the school and
then shot children as they tried to escape; many were burned alive. It was the
group’s third attack on a school this summer. Randi Weingarten of the American
Federation of Teachers sent out the obligatory press release — because when it
comes to terrorist massacres, America needs to hear from its union bosses — in
which she identified a “violent religious sect” (no word on which religion) as
the malefactor. “No religion demands the callous murder of children,” she
wrote. Perhaps George W. Bush could take a moment to tutor Ms. Weingarten on
the finer points of the English language: No religion should demand the callous
murder of children. But one does. The word “Islam” of course appears nowhere in
that press release. It is necessary to hear what is said, and equally necessary
to hear what is not said.
Liberal
values — “our freedoms,” in President Bush’s words — are precisely what Boko
Haram objects to, which is why the organization makes a point of attacking
schools.
The
organization’s name is the subject of some linguistic dispute, which may seem
trivial but is not. “Boko” is a Hausa word meaning “education,” an adaptation
of the English word “book.” “Haraam” and “haram” are related terms in Islamic
jurisprudence, both denoting “forbidden.” “Haraam” is the opposite of “halal”
and denotes the highest level of religious prohibition; “haram” means “sacred,”
or forbidden in the sense that access to holy places and sanctuaries is
restricted.
It is a
linguistic irony that the Arabic word for “sacred” is closely related to the
word for “sinful,” both deriving from an earlier Semitic word for “forbidden,”
used to denote a restricted place, as in the English borrowing “harem.” It is
another linguistic irony that Boko Haram, an anti-Western group (formally
Jamā’a Ahl al-Sunnah li-Da’wa wa al-Jihād, or Congregation and People of
Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad), cannot express its agenda without
adapting an English word in Hausa. “Boko Haram” is generally translated as
“Western education is sinful,” but it might well be rendered “books are
banned.”
Boko
Haram is a mutant: part indigenous group, part Islamist group, part motorcycle
gang, founded by a virulently anti-Western cleric with a graduate degree, good
English, and a Mercedes-Benz. Some analysts describe it as a cult. But we
should not dismiss the group’s own words: It is an organization for Islamic proselytism
and jihad, and its aim is, among other things, to forbid education.
Boko
Haram is hardly the only group of Muslims opposed to education. The Taliban
routinely attacks girls on their way to school in Pakistan. In Afghanistan,
jihadists have managed to cripple the education of girls. Islam, deriving as it
does from the Jewish tradition, venerates scholarship — but not all
scholarship, and not all scholars. Boko Haram may not be orthodox in its
understanding of Islam, but both its means and its ends would be more than
familiar in many other Islamic societies. Likewise, its anti-Western agenda —
killing Europeans, bombing the UN building in Abuja — is not at all dissimilar
to what we have experienced in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
But
while Afghanistan can (and probably will) simply sink into a more or less
self-contained oblivion, Nigeria can hardly withdraw from the world. It is an
important player in the global energy economy, and Lagos is a center of culture
and commerce. Nigeria is the seventh-largest country in the world, home to 170
million people, half of them Christians. This isn’t Waziristan. Islam can hang
a haram sign at the Afghan border, but it cannot do so in Nigeria.
The
Bush project — creating reasonably liberal and democratic regimes in the Middle
East — has failed. Its execution was faulty, and so were its premises. But Bush
was right about the thing he was mocked for: Jihadists hate us for our values,
and they hate schoolchildren in Nigeria and Pakistan to the extent that they
share those values, an allegiance defined by the act of picking up a book or
walking into a classroom. Islam and the West simply have competing and
incompatible sets of values, and that discrepancy, while most dramatically
apparent in actions such as those of Boko Haram, is not limited to extremists.
Nor is it limited to such Muslim-dominated backwaters as Afghanistan. Walking
to a kebab shop in the 1990s in Delhi, one of the most civilized cities in the
world, I had garbage (and what I assume were insults) hurled at me by a crowd
of angry young Muslims for reasons that mystified me until I learned that the
source of offense was my girlfriend’s pants. (There was nothing remarkable
about them, beyond their being pants.) We were not going to the famous Jama
Masjid, but we were in the same neighborhood as that mosque, the haram-ness of
which apparently is diffused through its precincts. Some years later, a busload
of tourists was shot up a few blocks away by the Indian Mujahideen. Muslims may
be outnumbered 7 to 1 in India, but still they intend to have their way.
As
Andrew C. McCarthy always points out, we should not be surprised that Islamic
societies are full of people who prefer Islamic civilization to Western
civilization. It isn’t just the terrorists who reject our liberal values and
democratic institutions. Our failure in Iraq and Afghanistan will make
Americans more cautious about the prospects of military engagements in the
Islamic world, and that’s for the better, but it will also tempt us to ignore
that world so long as Boko Haram is in Nigeria instead of New Jersey. That is
not really an option, either: Ron Paul types who believe that Islam will leave
us alone if we leave Islam alone are deluding themselves, as are libertarians
who believe that things like commercial relations and cultural exchange are going
to be sufficient to lubricate away the friction between Islam and the West.
What we
can do is be honest, at least with ourselves, about the nature of the problem.
The world is shrinking, and the two main contenders for global cultural
hegemony are Islam and Western liberalism. Islam is a serious underdog but, at
its edges, is serious enough about prevailing that it is willing to declare
education itself a sin and to enforce injunctions against it by burning
children alive. President Bush got a lot of things wrong, but he got that much
right: They do hate us for our freedom.
Sometimes Terrorists Win. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 8, 2013.
Boko Haram Leader Urges Global Jihad. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, December 1, 2012.
Boko Haram emir praises al Qaeda. By Bill Roggio. The Long War Journal, November 30, 2012.
Inside Story: Boko Haram and the Battle for Nigeria’s North. Video. AlJazeeraEnglish, May 18, 2013. YouTube.
Greg Gutfeld Talks Nigerian Children Killed by Boko Haram. Video. The Five. Fox News, July 9, 2013. YouTube.
