Mein Kampf vs. The Al Qaeda Reader

Raymond Ibrahim has a fascinating article up at the National Review Online, posted here on VDH's Private Papers. Ibrahim, translator and editor of The Al Qaeda Reader, addresses the similarities and differences between Adolf Hitler's polemical Mein Kampf and the Reader, a collection of documents assembled by al Qaeda founders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in order to indoctrinate Muslims to their particular brand of fanatic Islamism.

Ibrahim's article is disturbing, as much for the differences between the two texts as for the similarities. Both texts are expressly anti-democratic, militaristic, expansionist, and pervasively anti-Semitic. The Al Qaeda Reader is even more blatant than Mein Kampf in its unyielding stance on achieving world domination. Negotiation is unacceptable and the "infidel" must submit to Allah or be killed. Both texts appeal to ideals of heroism and self sacrifice while bemoaning the decadence of the West.

It is at first surprising how similar the two texts are according to the excerpts that Ibrahim presents, but it makes sense when one considers that both ideologies - Hitler's eugenic fascism on the one hand and al Qaeda's Islamo-fascism on the other - stem from a perceived victimization at the hands of the world Jewry, allegedly responsible for the moral degradation of the Western democracies.

What is unsettling about the contrast between the two texts is that Hitler's was a secular ideology, and while virulent, destructive, and evil in the extreme, an ideology that was nevertheless soundly defeated by the so-called Arsenal of Democracy in the immediate military sense (with rather a significant part played by the Communists), and that has largely lost credence in the half-century since with the spread of progressive, liberal democratic ideals. Mein Kampf was written by a single man, and from what I understand it is to a large degree a treatise wrapped up in Hitler's personal experience.

The Al Qaeda Reader, however, was not written by one man, nor is it a secular polemic. As Ibrahim says, about half of the Reader comprises quotations, from the Koran, Muhammad himself (hadith), and authoritative Islamic theologians, collected and assembled by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. The anti-Semitic, illiberal, anti-democratic, expansionist, fascistic version of Islam presented in the Reader isn't a hodgepodge of crackpot extremism cooked up by a couple of nutjobs in an Afghani cave, but rather a worldview fundamental to Islam, firmly supported by the ultimate theological authorities. It is easy to discredit and defeat secular extremism with liberal, rational thought. It is far more difficult to defeat an ideology that has theological tenets entirely antithetical to religious pluralism, democracy, diplomacy, and liberalism.

When you argue against a secular ideology you are merely in disagreement with a man; when you argue against an ideology grounded in theology you are, ipso facto, an infidel.

And that's a tough obstacle to overcome.