Word: islamically
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This is not to say that Islamic fundamentalism is dead. But it has suffered a grievous blow. Its great appeal was not just its revival of a glorious past but also the promise that it was the wave of the future, the inexorable tide that would sweep through not just Arabia but all Islam--and one day the world...
That is why Afghanistan is such a turning point. It marks the first great reversal of fortune for radical Islam. For two decades it tasted one victory after another: the Beirut bombings of 1983 that chased America out of Lebanon; "Black Hawk Down" that chased America out of Somalia; the first Afghan war that chased the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan--and led to the collapse of a superpower, no less. These were heady victories, as were the wounds inflicted with impunity on the other superpower: the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 destruction...
...secular West no longer thinks in those terms. But radical Islam does. Which is why the Osama tape, reveling in the success of Sept. 11, is such an orgy of religious triumphalism: so many dead, so much fame, so much joy, so many new recruits--God is great...
...have just witnessed something new in the modern world: the rollback of Islamic fundamentalism. We have just witnessed the first overthrow of a radical Islamic regime, indeed, the destruction of radical Islam's home base. Yesterday the base was Afghanistan. Today it is a few caves and a few hidden cells throughout the world. Al-Qaeda controls no state, no sovereign territory. It is an outlaw...
...beginning of self-reflection in the Arab press, asking what Arab jihadists are doing exporting their problems to places like Afghanistan and the West; wondering why the Arab world uniquely has not developed a single real democracy; and asking, most fundamentally, how a great religion like Islam could have harbored a malignant strain that would rejoice in the death of 3,000 innocents. It is the kind of questioning that Europeans engaged in after World War II (asking how Fascism and Nazism could have been bred in the bosom of European Christianity) but that was sadly lacking in the Islamic...