Political Islam growing in opposition to West

NEW DELHI, India — U.S. officials scolded Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia last week for declaring to the world's largest Muslim organization that Jews control the world and that frustrated Muslims should try to learn from them. President Bush privately told the Malaysian leader that his comments were "wrong and divisive," presidential aides said. The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said, "I don't think they are emblematic of the Muslim world."

By many accounts, though, Rice is voicing wishful thinking.

After Mahathir spoke, the Muslim heads of state gathered at the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference gave him a standing ovation for his speech, which ultimately criticized the Islamic world for failing to modernize.

Growing influence

The acceptance of such conspiratorial views may strike Americans as despicable or even laughable, but they reflect the influence of Islamic radicals on the worldviews of millions of Muslims. Conveyed with ease and authority via the Internet and satellite television, anti-American and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories abound, not only in Muslim countries but across the world.

Many of these theories are spread by radical groups that adhere to an ideology loosely known as political Islam. Stridently anti-Western and antimodern, political Islam portrays itself as the strongest ideological counter to democracy and capitalism.

Radical Islamists do far more than simply declare that Bush and Israel, for example, are evil. Political Islam is a sophisticated mixture of fundamentalism and nationalism that can foment acts of violence against Western targets. But for its followers, it is a romantic liberation movement — a militant ideology with Marxist echoes that combines Islam's powerful call for social equality with a critique of Western corporate imperialism and the corrupt Muslim elites who benefit from it.

The growing voice of political Islam suggests that the United States faces a much more nebulous enemy in its war on terrorism than a movement of religious zealots. It is an ideology that persuades some alienated young Muslims, whether deeply religious or not, to join what they see as an epic struggle against an evil empire.

Pollsters emphasize that popular support for radical Islamists remains relatively low in the Muslim world, a vast amalgam of 1.5 billion people that is by no means monolithic. But by taking advantage of overwhelming Muslim public disapproval of American policies in Israel and Iraq, political Islam appears to be gaining traction in some regions.

Another view of war