Obsession: A Lack of Academic Credibility
The tragedy of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West is that the film takes up a very relevant issue and fails to address it in any meaningful way. This evening a student group on campus held a viewing followed by a discussion. My comment during this time was a critique of the academic authenticity of the film.
First, Obsession begins and ends with short segments promoting the idea of Islam as a peaceful religion hijacked by radicals. It then goes on to list radical violence around the world, from 9/11 to the London bombings to Muslim violence in Thailand, and connects the dots with one single strand: Islam. Combined with statements made by those interviewed in the film, it becomes hard for me to give credence to Obsession’s claim that its arguments are not about Islam as a whole. The film seems to be at loggerheads with itself about whether or not it wishes to indict Islam.
Stemming from this use of Islam as a common link between terrorist incidents around the world comes a second critique. From a political science perspective, Obsession fails because it does not acknowledge any other sociological, economic, political, or geographic motivations behind extremist violence around the world. Equating violence in Chechnya, which has distinct nationalistic roots, with the Shia extremism of Hezbollah or the Sunni insurgency in Iraq simply ignores reality. Many of the Islamic groups the film links together via radical Islam would consider each other to lie beyond the pale of Islam. Though many have adopted Islamic ideological stances or ideas from one another, citing Islam as the single motivating factor behind them all will not stand up to academic investigation. Each group has a number of other motivating factors, all of which Obsession completely ignores.
Obsession spends almost half of its length attempting to draw a connection between the rise of radical Islam and the rise of Nazism in Germany. While I must admit the similarities are intriguing, actually proving causality between the two would be very difficult. Nazism rose within a well structured political party in a state actor, as opposed to the disparate radical Islamic groups spread throughout the world. That we should see traces of Nazi ideological fervor in radical Islam is not surprising, ideologies are constantly adopted by new groups. This does not mean that radical Islam derives from Nazism, however. Much academic work has traced the link between the rise of radical Islam in the past quarter century and the Communist ideology exported by the Soviet Union. Yet Obsession doesn’t purport to connect radical Islam to Communism. Ideologies are adopted, transformed, and manipulated for political advancement by any group seeking to advance its goals.
Radical Islam does undoubtedly pose a threat to the West. This does not mean, however, that all radical Islamic groups are connected and jointly waging a carefully directed war against the West. Nor does it mean that Islam alone lies at the heart of this problem, an incredibly simplistic assertion. In the end, Obsession contributes little to any useful consideration of the problem of radical Islam.
