The War the West Refused to Understand

A Response to “The War the West Refused to Name” by: Ali Siadatan

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What twenty-five years of counterterrorism got wrong, and why the founder is the thing nobody will look at

Picture a woman who has had enough.

Her husband has come home with new rules in his head, rules he says the Prophet himself handed down, and she has decided she will not take them secondhand. She is brave enough, or tired enough, to go and ask the man directly. She gets in to see him.

She lays it out plainly. She has cooked his dinner, hauled the water, fed the camels, washed his clothes. She wants to know where, in all of that, the duty ends. At what point in a day may she simply say no to her husband.

He tells her. If her husband were covered head to foot in one running ulcer, and she got down and licked the blood and the pus from it, she would still not have discharged what she owes him.¹ Were it permitted for one human being to bow down to another, he says, he would have commanded wives to bow to their husbands.² And the woman who refuses her husband’s bed and lets him sleep angry is cursed by the angels until morning.³

Then he turns to her and prophesies: “For fourteen centuries, men will quote these very words to settle the question of why a man may beat his wife, and no one will be permitted to ask it again.”

That last line I made up. He never prophesied. Prophecy being, you would think, the one item actually listed in a prophet’s job description, it is a touch awkward that it is the single part of the scene I had to invent. Everything he says before it is in the books, sourced and graded sound, and you will find the references at the bottom of the article. The prophecy is the only fiction, and it is the only part of the scene that has reliably come true. And if Muhammad had said it, the prophesy would have been the only part to his credit. Muhammad did however forbid asking a husband why he beats his wife, but as a command, not as a prophesy. I personally, forbid domestic violence, in opposition to Muhammad’s endorsement.

That is the whole problem in miniature, and it is the problem Ali Siadatan’s recent essay circles honestly without quite landing on.

Siadatan is right that the War on Terror was a strategic misdiagnosis. Naming a tactic instead of an ideology guaranteed that every tactical win would be followed by an ideological rebound. Al-Qaeda was degraded; ISIS emerged. The Taliban was displaced for twenty years and then walked back into Kabul. The Iranian proxy network expanded steadily through two decades of counterterrorism operations. The diagnosis failed because it was built to fail. It was constructed to avoid the conclusion the evidence kept pointing toward.

But Siadatan’s prescription, while far better than the strategy it critiques, stops short of the deepest structural problem. He recommends investing in the battle of ideas, supporting reformist voices, and treating religious freedom as a strategic priority. These are sound as far as they go. The question my book The Two Muhammads presses is whether they go far enough, and whether the system being engaged is even capable of the kind of internal reform those recommendations presuppose.

Naming the tactic was not an accident

Siadatan frames the naming of terrorism rather than ideology as an error made under political pressure. The framing had advantages, he notes: it avoided the appearance of a religious or civilizational confrontation. True, but it understates the depth of the failure.

The avoidance was not merely political cowardice. It was epistemic. The analysts and policymakers who built the War on Terror framework genuinely could not bring themselves to engage the textual and structural question the evidence demanded. They were not simply unwilling to name the ideology. They were, in most cases, entirely unequipped to analyze it. Western secular institutions had spent decades treating religious ideas as a private, largely irrelevant domain. When an ideology rooted in comprehensive religious authority arrived as the security challenge of the era, the analytical infrastructure to meet it was not there.

In The Two Muhammads I describe this as the error of misdiagnosis: “What repeatedly fails in Western analysis of Islamic societies is not sympathy, nor access to information, nor even moral concern. It is diagnosis. The failure occurs earlier than outrage and deeper than disagreement. It occurs at the level where cause and effect are first assigned. Outcomes are observed, violence, repression, emigration, radicalization, legal inequality, but they are persistently interpreted as accidents. They are framed as distortions of an otherwise benign system, or as reactions to colonial history, poverty, geopolitical interference, or cultural trauma.”

Each of those explanations holds a fragment of truth. None addresses the central question: whether these results arise despite the system, or because of it. Until that question is allowed to be asked out loud, every policy response treats symptoms instead of confronting causes.

Radicalization is the wrong word

Siadatan identifies the spectrum of jihad, from intellectual and political to cultural and armed, with useful precision. It helps explain why a strategy focused on the armed dimension kept finding itself surprised by the political and cultural dimensions advancing even as the military one was suppressed.

But the word radicalization carries a buried assumption that needs to be dug out. It implies deviation from a norm. It implies a stable, moderate center from which extremists depart. Western policymakers have spent twenty-five years searching for that center, funding it, amplifying it, praying it would hold.

In The Two Muhammads I argue that this misreads the architecture: “The language of ‘radicalization’ obscures this reality. Radicalization implies deviation from a norm. What actually occurs is reversion to precedent. The system does not radicalize; it reasserts. It does not innovate; it remembers.”

The groups Western analysis labels extremist are not operating outside the system’s grammar. They are operating inside it, with the hedging removed. They discard delay. They discard ambiguity. They treat command as command rather than suggestion. They cite the Quran, the hadith, the prophetic example, the inherited legal categories preserved by mainstream jurisprudence. They do not claim innovation. They claim fidelity. And the tradition, read honestly, cannot entirely disown them, because the man in the scene above is not a distortion of the tradition. He is its source.

This distinction matters enormously for Siadatan’s prescription. If radicalization is deviation, the cure is to strengthen the moderate center. If what we are watching is reversion to precedent, then the moderate center is not a stable destination toward which pressure can be sustained. It is a temporary condition produced by external constraint, and it relaxes the moment that constraint does.

The constraint problem

This is the most important structural observation in the whole debate, and the one Siadatan gestures toward without fully developing. He notes that the ecosystem that produced September 11 did not vanish after twenty years of counterterrorism; in many respects it grew. He attributes this to the failure to fight the battle of ideas. Correct, but that battle faces an obstacle his recommendations do not fully reckon with.

Much of what looks like moderation within Islam is not reform. It is constraint. In The Two Muhammads: “Much of Islam’s apparent durability in the modern world is routinely misread as evidence of adaptability. In reality, what is often being observed is not reform but constraint. The system has not revised its foundational commitments; it has been circumscribed by forces external to its authority, secular constitutions, international law, military deterrence, economic dependency, and demographic dispersion. These forces do not alter doctrine. They suppress its application. The difference becomes visible the moment constraint weakens.”

This is not pessimism. It is diagnosis. The difference between reform and constraint is the difference between a system that has changed and one that has merely been fenced. Reform alters trajectory. Constraint only delays outcome. When the fence comes down, a reformed system keeps walking its new direction; a constrained one reverts.

The post-September 11 period is a near-perfect laboratory of this. The Taliban was removed, fenced by Western military presence, watched for twenty years. The moment the fence came down, it resumed its default posture within weeks. Not because it had radicalized in the interim. Because nothing internal had changed. It had been constrained, not reformed.

Why reform fails from the inside

Siadatan calls for greater support for reformist voices, and the recommendation matters. I do not dismiss it. But it has to be paired with an honest account of why internal reform keeps failing to gain structural traction, or it becomes another round of well-meant investment in a process the system’s own architecture prevents from succeeding.

And here is where the people must be separated from the machine, because this is not a claim about Muslims. It is a claim about a structure. There are reformers of real courage inside these societies, men and women who risk everything to argue for a different reading, and I hold their bravery in the highest regard. Many of them see the problem more clearly than any Western analyst, because they are standing inside it. The tragedy is not that they lack courage or sincerity. The tragedy is what they are up against.

The obstacle is this: reform requires the capacity to name error without threatening authority. In a system where authority is grounded in divine revelation mediated through a prophetic exemplar whose actions remain legally operative, naming error means naming the source. That, the tradition will not permit. As I write in The Two Muhammads: “Evolution requires the capacity to name error without threatening authority. Islam lacks that capacity because its authority is not contingent. It is final. To revise it would be to admit that finality was premature. Such an admission would dissolve the system’s claim to divine perfection. As a result, correction must be externalized.”

This is why reformist voices so consistently end up isolated, marginalized, or forced to hide the implications of their own arguments. They are not facing bad actors who hijacked a peaceful tradition. They are facing the system’s own internal logic, which treats revision of foundational authority as a category of disobedience rather than a legitimate form of inquiry. Reform is permitted right up until it touches the mechanism that sets direction. The moment it does, it is not debated. It is reclassified.

What the Cold War analogy gets right, and what it misses

Siadatan invokes the Cold War as a model for ideological competition done right. Radio Free Europe. Broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain. Ideas eroding the legitimacy of communist ideology over decades. The contrast with the post-September 11 silence is damning and accurate.

But the analogy has a limit worth naming. Marxist-Leninist ideology could be undermined from within because it was a human construction that had promised outcomes it could not deliver. When people behind the Iron Curtain met the gap between promise and reality, they had an internal mechanism for reading that gap as a failure of the ideology rather than a failure of their own faith. The ideology could be falsified.

A divinely revealed, permanently closed system handles falsification differently. When outcomes disappoint, it does not conclude the doctrine was wrong. It concludes that the believers were insufficiently faithful, that enemies intervened, or that God is testing his people. As I write in The Two Muhammads: “This is why suffering within Islamic societies is so often spiritualized rather than interrogated. Hardship is framed as test. Injustice is framed as destiny. Failure is framed as insufficient faith. These framings do not arise because the system lacks compassion, but because compassion itself is subordinated to obedience. Once suffering is moralized, the pressure to correct its source dissolves.”

This does not make the battle of ideas futile. It means it needs a different theory of change than the one that beat Soviet communism. Broadcasting liberal pluralism into Muslim societies plants seeds, but it does not by itself create the internal mechanism by which those seeds can grow into structural reform. Something more is required.

The structural contribution Christianity can make

Siadatan’s fourth recommendation, treating the spread of religious freedom and alternative beliefs including Christianity as a strategic priority rather than a humanitarian afterthought, is the most important and the most underappreciated of his four. It is also the one that engages the structural problem most directly.

Not because Christianity is the West’s preferred religion or because missionaries deserve protection. Because it is structural. Christianity is a genuinely different model of how revelation, authority, and conscience relate. Its founder refused coercive authority at the origin. His kingdom, he said plainly, was not of this world, and so his servants would not fight. Taken to its most literal and extreme expression, Christianity does not produce morality police or conquest doctrine. It produces the Amish and the Mennonites, communities known for a principled refusal to kill even under compulsion.

Set that beside the scene this essay opened with. Two founders. Two ceilings. When you push each faith toward its most literal extreme, you arrive at opposite destinations, and the destination is set by the man at the origin.

That contrast offers something secular broadcasting cannot: an alternative comprehensive account of God, revelation, and human authority. Secular liberalism can tell a person he has rights. Christianity can tell him why, and anchor the answer in a narrative about God’s own self-limitation in the face of human freedom. That is a different order of challenge to a system built on submission and command. The reports of underground Christian networks and spreading scripture in Iran that Siadatan cites are not human-interest filler. They are evidence that inside a society governed by comprehensive Islamic authority, individuals are actively hunting for a different account of the relationship between God and conscience. That search is the most promising thing happening in the battle of ideas, and it is happening almost entirely without Western strategic support.

The honest assessment

Siadatan ends with a call for the West to move past narrow counterterrorism and confront the religious and ideological drivers of the conflict. Exactly right. But confronting them honestly means admitting something his piece approaches and does not quite land.

The thing being confronted is not simply a political ideology weaponized by bad actors. It is a comprehensive authority structure that does not authorize the internal reform mechanisms Western engagement strategies assume are available. It trades correction for continuity, revision for preservation, moral appeal for command authority. As I write in The Two Muhammads: “That bargain has allowed it to endure. It has not allowed it to escape itself.”

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of accuracy. The West lost twenty-five years to a misdiagnosis. The prescription for the next twenty-five needs to be built on an honest account of what is actually being engaged. Not terrorism. Not extremism. Not radicalization. A system with a specific architecture, specific texts, specific authority structures, and specific internal constraints on the possibility of self-correction.

Go back to the woman at the start. For fourteen hundred years she has been told that her question, the simple where-does-it-end, is itself the sin. Nobody radicalized the man who answered her. He was the standard, and the standard was set at the source. Until the West is willing to look at the source instead of everywhere but, it will keep funding a moderate center that exists only as long as someone holds the fence, and keep being astonished, every time the fence comes down, that the system remembers exactly what it always was.

Understanding that architecture is not the whole solution. But it is the necessary beginning of one. And it is the conversation Western policy has spent a quarter century refusing to have.

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The sayings in the opening scene are drawn from the hadith literature and are not invented (the closing “prophecy” is the single exception, and is flagged as such in the text):

¹ The ulcer and pus: narrated by Anas b. Malik and by Abu Sa’id al-Khudri; recorded in Ahmad’s Musnad, al-Nasa’i, Ibn Hibban, and al-Hakim; graded sahih by al-Albani (Sahih al-Jami’ no. 3148, no. 7725).

² Prostration to the husband: same hadith family, narrated by Anas b. Malik (Ahmad, al-Nasa’i).

³ The angels’ curse on a wife who refuses: Sahih al-Bukhari 3237 and Sahih Muslim 1436.

The framing dialogue is a dramatized reconstruction built around these authenticated sayings, not a verbatim transcript of a single narration.

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Thanks for reading. This post is public, so feel free to share it. A. C. Rosenthal writes on comparative religion, Islamic theology, and the relationship between Christianity and modern Western culture. This work is entirely reader-supported. By choosing a paid subscription, you allow me to continue this long-form research to bring these vital stories to light. Thank you for helping this Lion roar for truth. His book The Two Muhammads is available now. Further analysis at acrosenthal.com

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