On an Islamic Civil War

This is what happens when you give someone like Tom Friedman a column: He writes something that is either indecipherably stupid or a call for hundreds of thousands of people to be killed. As David Haznoy points out over at Contentions:

Friedman starts with the “war of ideas within Islam,” uses the American Civil War as an example, and then goes on to focus on which ideas are legitimate in the Arab-Muslim world and which are not, and on how many fatwas have been issued against al-Qaeda. As though he hadn’t just said anything shocking.

Hello? The American Civil War was not only a battle of ideas. The “ferocity” he refers to, the lingering antipathy against the North today, was not because Lincoln issued a fatwa or recruited columnists in the South over the Internet or wrote a bestselling book. There was horrific, physical destruction involved. Is he saying that Islam “needs” a moderate-Islamic General Sherman to scorch the earth of Saudi-funded madrasses? Literally?

Because if he doesn’t mean it literally, the metaphor suddenly makes no sense.

Now. I’m actually willing to listen to the idea that Islam needs a reformation birthed in violence. But I seriously doubt that this was Friedman’s intention in this column. Or hell, maybe it was. I mean, he writes this:

We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.

Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims — “infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority — but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate.

Hm. Can I ask someone smarter than I to make sense of this? Because I simply refuse to believe he’s calling for what it sounds like he’s calling for.