What's the Matter With Islam?

To paraphrase the formula first articulated by William Allen White in 1896—"What's the Matter with Kansas?"—one is tempted to apply this saying to Islam. The attack on schoolchildren near Peshawar on December 16, leaving 148 dead, carried out by the Pakistani Taliban wearing Pakistan Army uniforms, is but the latest, and arguably the most horrific, of ghastly actions carried out in the name of Islam.

The matter with Islam is not in its inspirational message but in certain holdover practices from ages ago. To be sure there were abhorrent practices carried out during the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church. But that was long ago. Islam's ancient holdover practices—beheadings, amputations, stonings, jihadi killings, sequestration of women—should be ended.

As the late Professor Samuel P. Huntington put it, in his Clash of Civilizations (p. 217)—a book for which he was criticized for "essentialism," which is an academic put-down for oversimplification—there is in the background of what is taking place today an historic rivalry between the West and Islam:

The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel the conflict between Islam and the West.

Statements and views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author and do not imply endorsement by Harvard University, the Harvard Kennedy School, or the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.