LONDON -- Behind all the horrors and bloodshed of Iraq lies a clash of ideas. In the words of one mujahedin leader when asked to explain his hatred of America: "We do not want their capitalism. We do not want communism. We have our own ideas about how we want our country to be run in a Muslim way."
Yet the supreme irony is that this whole way of looking at the world is out of date. Communism is stone dead, its inherent contradictions, greed and misery fully exposed. Capitalism is not even an "ism," merely the best way yet devised of conducting commercial life and distributing its proceeds. In one form or another it has been practiced for centuries, just as much in the Muslim world as elsewhere. Indeed, it was Arab skills with money and with numbers that paved the way for the rise of the great medieval banking houses of Europe, with the Islamic prohibition on charging interest bypassed by simple financial ingenuity.
Today Islamic banking is booming, and large parts of the Arab world are fully integrated in the global commercial system. The idea that Islam is somehow incompatible with the modern capitalist system is proven nonsense. So, too, is the idea that Islam is incompatible with democracy and pluralism.