The key to any good magic act or con game is misdirection. At the Boston Globe Canadian diplomat and entrepeneur Scott Gilmore while noting that there are a lot of Muslims at war fails to connect the dots:
The end of war in the Americas is part of a larger global trend. According to data collected by the Human Security Project, since the end of the Cold War, the number of armed conflicts has fallen by almost half. Peace is breaking out everywhere.
Everywhere, that is, except in the Islamic world. According to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Conflict Tracker, now that there is peace in Colombia, there remain only six civil wars in the world. Five of those are in Islamic nations. Similarly, all four of the current sectarian wars involve Islamic groups, and all five of the ongoing transnational terrorism conflicts involve militant Islamic groups. All told, of the 28 remaining global conflicts of all kinds being tracked by the council, 22 involve an Islamic state or faction.
He then proceeds to drag a number of red herrings across the trail including homicide rates, the “resource curse”, and Islam itself.
Let’s start with Islam itself. The five largest majority-Muslim countries in the world are Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, accounting for just about half of all Muslims. Although all of them have internal problems with radical Islamists, Indonesian terrorists aren’t raising hell in non-Muslim countries.
Norway, Canada, and North Dakota are all enjoying a boom in oil production. Nonetheless Norse terrorists aren’t setting off bombs in Norway let alone in the United Kingdom or the United States.
What do Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Chechnya, Bosnia, and even Pakistan have in common? I would submit that it’s the influence of wealthy Gulf Arabs. Which is where the “resource curse” comes in, too. I would further submit that isolation and lack of economic are the consequences of a pathology rather than its causes.
Rather than looking at where the problems aren’t, perhaps it might be more productive to look at where they are. When you do it’s blindingly obvious that radical Islamism, being fomented from the Philippines to Nigeria by wealthy Gulf Arabs, is the source of the conflict that’s spilled over from the Middle East into Europe and the United States. To deal with the problem you’ve got to deal with its source.
Your theory overlooks Iran, and its involvement in Bahrain, Bosnia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, and its role in Afghanistan appears ambiguous. I think the broader explanation is Huntington’s 1993 observation that Islam has bloody borders, and some of these borders are internal.
Not entirely although it’s a harder case to make. The gist of the argument would be that Khomeinism was highly influenced by Gulf Arabs.
Stated another way, how would we go about testing the “bloody borders” hypothesis? Presumably, by looking at Islam’s borders.
Its eastern border is Indonesia and its northern border is Kazakhstan. Are these “bloody”? Again, I would submit that to the extent that they are, the sanguinariness is a foreign import.
That’s been noticed both in Kazakhstan and West Africa where traditionally Islam has been highly colored by Sufism. It’s only recently that Salafism has been introduced, largely through Gulf money.
Why is Morocco relatively peaceful and not exporting terrorism? At least notionally it’s an Arab country and it certainly has a Muslim majority. My answer is relative lack of influence by Gulf Arabs.
Where the “bloody borders” hypothesis is most compelling is with respect to the “internal borders” dividing Sunni Islam and Shi’a Islam. IMO there’s considerable overlap in that area between the Sunni vs. Shi’a internal border hypothesis and the Arab nationalism one.
Islamic groups have been fighting on their borders for at least a thousand years. Huntington’s “bloody borders” description was based on three different data sets available in the early 90s, which I would summarize as Muslims were involved in half of the worlds conflicts at that time and two-thirds to three-quarters of inter-civilizational conflicts. He also compared average force ratios and frequency of using military in crisis, and Islamic states from 1928-1979 exceeded all other countries in the former and were second only to China in the latter. Conflicts with multiple hundreds of thousands of casualties ongoing in the early 90s were more likely to involve Muslims: Sudan, Bosnia, East Timor, Somalia, and Iraq vs. Kurds, with the only one not involving Muslims being Angola.
I don’t really want to make this about Huntington, so much as to point out the problem was identifiable over 20 years ago, the trends going back longer, perhaps over a thousand years. Sufism is a militant Islamic ideology, as much as any in Islam. Islamicist find as easy converts among them as any.