Islam and the Internet
By Wolfgang Bruno
Works such as “The
Coming of the Book” or "The
Printing Press as an Agent of
Change"
have documented the monumental changes to
Europe
and Western civilization triggered by the introduction of printed books.
Printing, already used in
China
for centuries, was reinvented in
Europe
by people like Johann Gutenberg.
Its effects were immediate and profound. Perhaps 15 – 20 million copies
of different books were printed even before the year 1500. Conservative
estimates indicate that at least 150 – 200 million books were made in
Europe
during the 16th century. When Martin
Luther put up his Theses in
Wittenberg
in
Germany
in 31st October, 1517, within 15 days they had been translated into German
and summarised, printed as flysheets and distributed throughout every part
of the country. Orders by
Rome
to burn books made by Luther and other Protestant heretics only served to
trigger the curiosity of the masses. Attempts to silence the critics and
re-impose strict censorship were futile. Banned books circulated in
France
in ever greater numbers despite all the regulations forbidding them. The
tide of the first mass media revolution could not be held back.
To claim that the invention
of the printing press alone created the Christian Reformation would be too
simplistic. The Renaissance and a slowly expanding educated audience had
created new forces and needs. Political backers such as
Frederick
the Wise of Saxony
saved Luther’s life long enough for him to finish his work. Still, it is
hard to see how the Reformation could have taken place in this manner
without the printing press. The fates of other critics such as Jan
Hus might have been very different had
they had Gutenberg’s invention at their disposal. At the very least, the
printing press served as an important catalyst for and facilitated changes
already underway.
Many have made comparisons
between the Islamic world today and Christian Europe in the 16th century.
As some like Robert Spencer have suggested, there may be closer analogies
to the Wahhabi movement.
However, it is possible that in hindsight, modern communication technology
such as the Internet may prove a turning point no less crucial to Islam
today than the printing press was to Christianity. The global number of
Internet users is approaching one
billion and growing fast. Now, the
Internet may not be the magic vessel for unrestricted freedom
of speech as was once hoped for, but it
can still retain just enough flexibility to represent a potent challenge
to authoritarian regimes and ideologies.
Mass communication and
education will lead to contradictory results, and could even be imagined
to strengthen Islam. The Islamic Umma,
or community, can be viewed as an old-fashioned Arab tribe in its
aggressive dealings with outsiders, and the demand of absolute loyalty
within the community. With the introduction of Islam, a new
“super-tribe” was born, directing Arab tribal aggression outwards
instead of inwards, and what ex-Muslim Anwar Shaikh has called the Arab
National Movement was created. Later, the
Umma was taken to include all Muslims. Although this concept of a global
community of Muslims supporting each other against the infidels has always
been a central part of the Muslim world view, it has for the most part
remained a theoretical construct. With globalization and even the spread
of the infidel English language
as the world’s lingua franca, Islamic communities across the planet can
keep in closer contact than they have ever done before. Islamists
immigrants in the West can take advantage of Western freedoms to mount an
effective propaganda machine. Individual PC users now have more capacity
at their fingertips than NASA had during its first moon launches, and
setting up your own website is cheap and easy.
The new technology will
give Islam a chance
to realize its original aim of global universalism, and thus increase the
clashes with the non-Muslim world. The revival of
Muslim identity is
spreading outside the Middle East,
including Southeast Asia, Central Asia and
Europe
, where religious identity has traditionally not been as strong. This
revival has been accompanied by a deepening solidarity among Muslims
caught up in separatist struggles in
Chechnya
,
Iraq
, Kashmir and southern
Thailand
. Jihadist groups
on the Internet are multiplying, as can be testified by the Internet
Haganah. One can argue effectively that
the current Islamic tensions have much more to do with long-term
communications changes, combined with high birth rates and Saudi
petrodollars, than with the policies of any specific countries like the
USA
or
Israel
.
Even if new media may in
the short run actually assist Islamic extremism, it is conceivable that in
the longer run, new media will challenge the very existence of Islam as we
know it. The Internet and Muslim exposure to Western society has also
created the first organized networks of ex-Muslims in history, the
counterpart to the Jihadist websites. These ex-Muslim sites may still be
of marginal importance, but it is hard to overestimate the monumental
threat they pose to Islamic orthodoxy. Infidels should make use of this
combination of ex-Muslims, the Internet and greater Western freedom of
speech in a deliberate effort to copy the example of 16th century
Europe
. We should make a selection of, say, 20 or 30 of the best critical books
written about Islam by ex-Muslims and non-Muslims. Pay the authors a
substantial amount of money for the manuscripts, or buy the copyrights
from whomever owns it. Make sure they understand that they receive a
one-time sum in return for sharing their work with humanity. After this,
the books in their full length should be made available in English on the
Internet, perhaps later in translations into other major languages. From
then on, anybody who wants to can freely download, copy, republish and
reprint the books. This would trigger a chain reaction, as the printing
press did with Luther’s pamphlets. The information would spread around
the planet faster CAIR
can say “Islamophobia”. The genie would be out of the bottle, and no
amount of intimidation, hacker attacks or “hate speech” lawsuits could
return it to the bottle. In combination with funding and support to
websites by ex-Muslims and some others like Jihad Watch, we would
basically present Islam with a “sink or swim”-ultimatum: Islam will
have to reform if it can, or Islam will die. The entire operation would
cost some hundreds of millions of dollars, not more than what can be done
quietly and unofficially. We can spend this small amount of money on a
“Gutenberg Fund”, or we can use hundreds of billions of dollars on
defensive measures that will do little to change Islam.
Since Islamists with the
murder of Theo van Gogh demonstrated their fear of Western free speech and
their desire to curb it, giving them such a hefty dose of it seems like a
sweet and fitting reply. This initiative would not mark the end of the
struggle, of course, but we would already have won a crucial, if not
decisive victory. Christianity was up to the challenge presented by modern
education and mass media. It’s time to find out whether Islam is
similarly up to the challenge.
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