Unlike many of his contemporaries, Johnson takes the time to define the terms that he uses. Most notable is his discussion of Islamism, a word we often encounter but rarely hear properly explained. Who are all these “Islamists,” really? This is one of the helpful moments at which Johnson breaks his narrative to tell us clearly: “Islamists differ from traditional Muslims because they use their religion in pursuit of a political agenda, via either democracy, or violence.” In his strong but unassuming way, Johnson tells us something that is true and significant: “Implicit in Islamism is a rejection of Western society and its values.” This is one of the most essential—and uncomfortable—truths in the book. Yes, the West has unwittingly fed the rise of political Islam. And still worse, America continues to misunderstand something even more fundamental about the politics of Islamism: much of its ideology is born out of opposing the West.
The question follows, Can the West coexist with Islamists? Johnson reveals that the current ideological fault lines are more insurmountable than we know. Appeasing Islamists is ill-advised policy. But America continues to support groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood anyway. There are two Muslim Brotherhoods, he argues, one in the West and another in the rest of the world. The former is much more perilous to American interests. Still, out of ignorance and laziness in part, many American bureaucrats and foreign policy-makers turn to the best-looking business-suited Islamist leaders as allies. Many are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, which, in the West, is a deliberate proponent of radical Islam. The United States does this, in part, because it’s easier to turn to self-appointed spokesmen for the world’s Muslims than to reach out to far less media-savvy members of civil society—Muslim groups that aren’t so slick and organized by ordinary people. “Ordinary people are messy,” Johnson puts it.
The book is funny and tragic and peaks toward the end when Johnson takes us along on his interviews with contemporary members of the European branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. One day in Cologne, Johnson rides along in the BMW’s passenger seat of Ibrahim El Zayat, a young Islamist who leads many of Germany’s Muslims. Zayat is hugely controversial, and it is hard to know whether or not he condones the use of violence based on some of his murky associations. When Johnson points this out, Zayat points right back at Johnson. “A lot of people say that Ian Johnson is a CIA agent because you write so little.” “My boss says that too,” I say. “You should write more. Sloth is a sin.”
Once World War II ended, many of these men, stuck in Germany and having lost their homelands, found a new employer: the United States. Radio Liberty, the lesser-known stepsister to Radio Free Europe, was the CIA’s effort to broadcast anti-Soviet propaganda into Eastern Europe. In order to reach the thirty million Muslims living within the Soviet Union, the Americans turned to many of these former Nazi sympathizers. The idea, from the 1940s onwards, was to use Islam to undermine the Soviet system. Islam, American officials mistakenly believed, was the ideal antidote to godless communism. Although many of Johnson’s readers will know this story in broad strokes, no book before this one so deftly traces the history of this ideological misstep. And no one, until Johnson, has traced how far back this error in judgment went.