The long term danger, ideologically, from the catastrophe in Syria is that it will create a new wave of secularism in the next generation because the voices of Islamism have become so extreme and unrealistic; telling people that they have to be willing to fight and die, sacrifice their families and futures, in futile armed struggles that rely on the timely provision of Divine miracles to succeed, and which, if no miracles are forthcoming, will leave them subjugated and enslaved. The “make takbir first, ask questions later” approach.
As the Syrian tragedy has been unfolding, they do not have any ideas. As the people are slaughtered, as de facto partition of Syria is being established on the ground, and as Western occupation of that territory is getting closer; the most they can say is that they fell into a trap that was impossible to avoid. “The war was forced on them; they had no choice”. OK, that is intellectual failure. Having no ideas is not the same as having no choices. The coming generation, I think, will expect more of leadership than an inability to detect or avoid the traps of our enemies. If we are unable to do that, they will dismiss us, and they should.
Offering platitudes about the virtues of jihad, and using miraculous victories of the past (while ignoring the defeats) as evidence that entering unwinnable battles is the Islamic thing to do, has not served the interests of Islam and the Muslims very well in recent years.
Perhaps part of the problem is that a great thinker like Hassan al-Banna bequeathed his ideas to an organization. Yes, his ideas were bequeathed to us all, but his organization, more than anyone else, became his heirs. They have not had to earn leadership through intellectual development of his ideas; they simply had to preserve his organization in some form or another. The thinking, therefore, became stagnant. Amidst this stagnation, the Salafi-jihadist ideology ascended, and as it ascended, rationality descended. Selective citations of ayaat of Qur’an (often misinterpreted), hadiths, and fatawa, while excluding variant acceptable opinions of those evidences, has been used to delegitimize thought and discussion and logical analysis. And here we are today, leading our nation into ruin upon ruin.
But, if we think about the future, 10 years from now, 25 years from now; how will the next generation view Islamism? They will be living in occupied Syria; Libya will be likely split into sections, each dominated by multinational corporations collaborating with the small mafiosos who rule them, Quds will be likely recognized as the “eternal capital of Israel”, Turkey may well be destabilized, so on and so on. And the Islamists will shrug their shoulders and say “there was nothing we could do”. They will not accept this answer, and they shouldn’t.
If we do not present a rational Islamism now, Islamism as an idea will disappear in the near future.