We try and evade it, but it is obvious that the final aim of fundamentalist terrorism is to mobilise the Muslim masses against the United States and Europe In launching the campaign against Osama Bin Laden and his organisation, Al Qaeda, the Western leaders repeatedly stated that it was not a war against Islam nor a “clash of cultures”, but only the need to eliminate a group of dangerous fanatics that represent a threat for the world as a whole. Thanks to this approach, the United States have managed - at least on paper - to include in the “great coalition” against terrorism most of the Muslim countries, or at least those which, to some extent, move in its orbit. While, still overcome by the shock of the terrorist attacks in New York, President Bush inadvertently spoke of a “crusade” against terrorism, his advisors immediately convinced him to retract so as not to offend the sensitivity of the Muslims, who naturally associate this term with the centuries-old wars of religion. And when the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi blurted out, with the utmost sincerity, that he considered our civilisation superior to the Islamic civilisation, he was attacked from all sides and forced to apologise to the Arab ambassadors in Rome, because it was feared that his statement might damage the diplomatic efforts of the allies. All governments are doing their best to prevent public opinion in the Western countries, shocked by the terrorist attacks, from identifying Muslims as the new enemies, and severely condemn all discrimination towards them. To avoid any possible exasperation, even the calls to “holy war” against the infidels launched by Bin Laden, his closest followers and a large number of religious leaders, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, tend to be shrugged off as the ravings of extremists without any real popular following. If anyone suggests raising barriers against Muslim immigration into Europe, he is promptly labelled as a “racist”, even by the Catholics, who most have to fear from any strong expansion of Islam on our continent. From a geopolitical and economic viewpoint, the West has one thousand and one reasons for not wanting to see the war against Al Qaeda turned into a conflict with the Islamic world as a whole, which counts over one billion people and controls over half the world’s oil reserves. But, if we look at events in a historical and cultural perspective, it is hard to deny that the so-called “clash of civilisations” has existed for nearly 1400 years, has resulted in and continues to result in bloody battles and that the attack against the Twin Towers in New York was intended to be - in the mind of whosoever conceived it - the catalyser capable of opening a new chapter in the story. In other words, through his actions, Bin Laden is trying to consolidate, around his person (or around his successors), the unleashed forces of the so-called “Islamic Reawakening” of the Seventies and Eighties, presenting himself to all Muslims – to use an appropriate image of Gianni De Michelis – as the “virtual Caliph”. We should be hiding our heads under the sand were we to deny that these forces are powerful, spread throughout the Islamic countries, whatever their form of government, and that they can count on a mass of youngsters who, for reasons that are often different and not always rational, hate the West and are ready to take the field against it. If we, Italians or Americans, French or British, have no real reason to want to return to Poitiers, Lepanto or Vienna, because we are in a situation of clear superiority which it is worthwhile maintaining and strengthening, they, on the contrary, have very little to lose were this period of coexistence (in actual fact never very peaceful) which has marked the 20th century to come to an end. By them, I am not referring to the governments, which move within a power logic and in very few instances (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan until the recent change) have thus far openly challenged the USA, but to the masses, which have reaped very few benefits from cooperation with the West, as practised in Egypt or Pakistan. “Islam is the solution”, has been, from the very start, the slogan of the Reawakening, conceived as an attempt to modernise the Muslim world without westernising it, to protect its growth from the all-dominating American and European influence. In the beginning, the movement was not fundamentalist, at least not in the sense given to the word today. Many experts have compared it to the protestant Reform, presenting it as a reaction against immobility and the corruption of institutions and an attempt to convey society back to its religious origins. It was only subsequently, faced with the resistances encountered at the top, that it became increasingly more radical, giving birth to political parties often prepared to resort to violence against regimes generally devoid of democratic legitimacy. The best-known case is that of Algeria, where the Islamic Salvation Front, after an ephemeral election victory immediately thwarted by a military coup, triggered a civil war that has lasted ten years and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Everywhere, the Reawakening has been fuelled by an extraordinary demographic boom, with growth rates of 2.5-3% year, which has resulted in Muslim populations increasing in numbers and passing from 18 to 20% of the world’s population. The current extremist nature of the movement has stemmed, over the years, from the natural revolutionary drive of these youngsters. The deep ethnic and religious differences that divide the Islamic world and the authoritative character of its governments have prevented the Reawakening from having the political consequences of the French or Russian Revolutions. Just as Marxism refused the national state in the name of proletarian unity, so fundamentalism denies it in favour of Islamic unity. But the only expression of such unity is the Islamic Conference Organisation, established in Jeddah in 1972 under the patronage of Saudi Arabia, and this reflects the viewpoint of the leaders rather than the masses and in any case has always played a rather insignificant role. At the end of the Seventies, the fundamentalists seized power in Iran after overthrowing the Shah, a convinced upholder of westernisation, but the Persian ayatollahs and Shiites have never managed to export their faith into the Arab and Sunnite world. For about ten years, they governed the Sudan, but the country was too poor to become a leader. On occasions, they have taken control of Pakistan, but without ever managing to consolidate their power. They have been tolerated and, in some cases helped, by the feudal kingdoms of the Gulf, which have always been hesitant between a natural attraction for their cause and the need for US military protection. They even tried seizing power in Turkey, the most secular and westernised country in the Islamic world, but their efforts were thwarted by the army. They have even been crushed in Countries such as Iraq and Syria, that cannot be considered friends of the West and are now suspected of pulling the strings of terrorism. By proselytising the masses, fundamentalism is nonetheless the number one culprit both as regards the strong anti-West feeling that has grown in the Islamic world over recent years, and the religious conflicts that have marked the last twenty-year period. It has instilled new confidence in Muslims as regards the superiority of their civilisation with respect to that of the West (exactly the opposite concept to that expressed by Berlusconi, and undeniably shared by the great majority of Europeans); it has fuelled the resentment of Muslims about the economic and military interference of the West in their areas of the world; it has reduced or even cancelled out tolerance towards the followers of other religions, leading to the violent submission of the Christian-Maronites in the Lebanon, the massacre of Christian-animists in Sudan and to the persecution of Catholics in the Moluccas. Even the disappearance, ten years ago, of the common enemy - Soviet communism - gave fresh drive to a situation of conflict that has its roots in history, in religion, in traditions, in the economy and which not even the fairest of globalisations will ever eradicate. Apart from the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is a classic of the “genre”, the Balkan conflicts of the nineties also have their roots, to a greater or lesser extent, in this clash of civilisations, though the borderlines are not always so clearly defined: the attack on Muslim Bosnia by Orthodox Serbia, the attempt by Serbia to crush the Muslim separatists of Kosovo, the violent contrasts between the Slav majority and the Albanian minority in Macedonia are all undeniably part and parcel of the “religious wars”. In these cases, in the name of human rights, the West gave assistance to the Muslims, before soon realising that it had helped foster highly dangerous extremist movements, especially in a future perspective. Notwithstanding the presence of the NATO, both Bosnia and Kosovo do in fact provide hospitality to organisations tied to Al Qaeda and, to all effects, represent bridgeheads for Islamic fundamentalism in Europe. Other conflicts tied to the opposition between Christianity and Islam are those that broke out in the Caucasus after the break-up of the USSR: those between Armenia and the Azerians for the possession of Nagorno-Karabakh, that between Georgians and Abkhazians on the coastal strip of the Black Sea and, fundamentally, that between the Russians and the Chechens, the latter having joined the fundamentalist cause and sought the aid of Bin Laden. President Putin is so aware of the Islamic threat for Russia, not only in the Caucasus but also in central Asia, that he has joined up, without reservation, with the USA in the war against Al Qaeda. While in the West, the civilisation clash theorists are far and few between (Samuel Huntington above all, and to some extent Bernard Lewis), in the Islamic world, this has quite clearly been the most addressed issue among academics, journalists and religious leaders every since the early Nineties. Below are some of the most significant quotes reported by Huntington: “Unmistakable signs exist of a final clash between Western Jewish-Christian ethics and the Islamic Reawakening movement”. “The next enemy the West will have to face will be Islam, which will try and overthrow the current world order that sees it in an intolerably subordinate role”. “Colonialism tried to alter the cultural traditions of Islam. Now we have freed ourselves of it, we must carry on the struggle and relieve ourselves of Western influence on our society, on our politics and on our morals”. Even authors considered modern and open to innovation such as Fatima Mernissi express a totally negative opinion of the West, defined as militarist, imperialist and corrupt. It is still too early to say what side most of the Islamic intelligentsia will take in the West’s war against Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Talebans, but after the formal and duty-bound censure of the attacks of 11 September, things soon began to change, first of all with a request to stop the bombing on Afghanistan and then increasingly more acute criticism of yet another infidel intrusion into Muslim lands. Aware or not of the consequences of their actions, many intellectuals are playing along with “the prince of terror”, whose most realistic aim lies in mobilising the Islamic world against the West. As far back as 1996, Huntington sustained that, ever since the coming to power in Teheran of the ayatollah Khomeini (paradoxically supported by a part of Europe, especially by France) a state of “almost-conflict” has existed between Islam and the West. “Almost”, according to the US expert, for three reasons. The first, because it involves only a relatively small number of Islamic countries, besides a large number of root organisations, hostile to governments which - for economic or military reasons - continue to cooperate with the USA. The second, because after “Desert Storm”, organised to liberate Kuwait, it has been fought with limited means, terrorism on the one side, air bombing and economic sanctions on the other. The third, because it continues to be carried on in stops and starts, with more acute periods interrupted by moments of truce. If this were true five years ago, it is even truer today and, in all likelihood, will be still truer in the future. “The basic problem for the West”, Huntington ends the chapter on relations between the two worlds, triggering the violent reaction of a large part of the academic world, “is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam itself, a different civilisation where people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and obsessed by the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the Pentagon, but the West as a whole, a different civilisation whose people in turn are persuaded of the universality of their culture and consider that their power superiority gives them the right to spread their values worldwide”. Let us hope he is wrong, though we fear he might be right. Let us hope above all that those who govern us are well aware of the evolution of the Islamic world and that they take it into account not only when shaping foreign policies, but also immigration policies.

(trad.Interpres SaS -Giussano)