The current spate of Islamically affiliated violence and activity — from the storming of the Ka’aba in Saudi Arabia in 1979 to the September 11 attacks — is the last dying breath, albeit protracted, of Islamic violence, insists Sadik J. Al-Azm.

Sadik J. Al-Azm is Professor Emeritus of modern European philosophy at the University of Damascus, and in his recent article published in the Boston Review, he makes the case that the world is not headed, in any significant sense, toward a clash of civilizations. In Al-Azm’s conception, we are witnessing the last days of serious Islamic violence; while Islamist violence certainly seems to be going out with a bang, and not with a whimper, it is certainly on its way out.

Writing about the September 11 attacks and Juhaiman Al-’Utaibi’s 1979 storming and occupation of the Ka’aba in protest against what he perceived as the hypocritical Saudi regime, Al-Azm states: “But both acts of terrorism exposed the essential weakness of today’s Islamists: the embrace of the inevitable emergence of a new Islamic order is itself a symptom of a self-deluding fantasy that has afflicted the Arab and Muslim world for more than two centuries.”

Al-Azm continues to state that the primary motivating factor of Islamist violence is the heart-breaking disconnect between the halcyon days of Islamic civilization, on one hand, and “being the object of a history made, led, manipulated, and arbitrated by others,” on the other. Therefore, Al-Azm explains:

“So what else can the Muslim or Arab do but muddle through his sad perplexity in the 21st century with the conviction that perhaps one day God or history or fate or the revolution or the moral order of the universe will raise his umma to its proper role once again. Under these circumstances, various kinds of direct-action violence (including terrorism in some of its most spectacular forms) present themselves as the only means of relief from this hopeless impasse.”

Not many scholars would argue with the claim that Islamist violence is a function of desperation and frustration with real and perceived oppression. However, Al-Azm neglects to highlight the historical and contemporary sources for the continued growth of Islamist movements from the 1960s onwards, which include the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the failure of “modern secular nationalism,” the Egyptian-Israeli war and Arab oil embargo in 1973, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Wahhabi-oil connection, the concrete consequences of modernization in the Muslim world such as rapid population growth, an increase in urban population, mass literacy, a large young segment of the population, and high poverty and unemployment rates. While desperation is a crucial factor, there are also concrete forces at play.

For Al-Azm, the West and the Islamic world are “two supposedly clashing sides … so unequal in power, military might, productive capacity, efficiency, effective institutions, wealth, social organization, science, and technology that the clash can only be of the inconsequential sort.”

The question that Al-Azm doesn’t sufficiently answer, however, is how long this protracted death of Islamic violence is supposed to last. Is it merely a question of time until geo-political factors eventually tame Islamic violence? If the current bloody catastrophe in Iraq is merely a particularly bloody blip in an otherwise calming picture, why does the violence show little sign of abating? And most importantly, what will the new, less violent Islamist worldview look like, and what form will it take? What exactly is it that the world is transitioning toward?

Mimi Hanaoka