Ayaan Ali: How to Defeat Radical Islam | Big Think

Ayaan Hirsi ALi: How to Defeat Radical Islam | Big Think

"In the long term the best way to beat radical ideas is to make them redundant," says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a politician and ardent critic of fundamentalist Islam. During her recent Big Think interview, she told us that this could be done by making clear to young Muslims that there are alternative narratives than those offered by radicalism. Given the death of Osama bin Laden's and the democratic revolutions sweeping the Arab world, are we now witnessing exactly that shift?

Hirsi Ali harkens this strategy to boosting "the immune systems of young minds" so that they are able to recognize totalitarian ideologies and to defend themselves against them, citing a two-pronged approach:

"Part of it is, I would say, a defensive approach to prepare young people that they are going to be targeted by Islamists, that this is the message Islam is going to impart, this is the model framework that they want, these are the goals that they want to achieve. On the other hand, there must be an offensive strategy too where you provide that young group with a completely different narrative: when the Muslim Brotherhood says Islam is the answer to our political and economic and social problems, we must provide reasons why Islam cannot be the answer to all of those. Islam may satisfy your spiritual needs, but can it really be the answer to our economic and political problems? And then provide the answers to that and why it can’t. That way you prepare young minds when they are approached by radicals to not only ask the question, but to throwback an answer."

There is a historical precedent for this approach, she adds, pointing to the fall of communism. "The communists or Marxist ideologies of the 1950s, 1960s were defeated by providing Eastern Europeans and people living in the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain with reasons, arguments why communism was a bad or why Marxism was a bad ideology for the state, why it wasn’t a solution for the economic or social or political problems."

Social media tools like Facebook like Twitter contributed, at least in part, to the recent Arab Spring uprisings, evidence of new political narratives blossoming in the Middle East. {eople in the West can also use these technology to help combat radical Islam, says Hirsi Ali. The first step in taking part in this debate is to understand truly what the Islamist movement is all about: