NYTimes.com Article: This Is a Religious War

[Don Laird]

Below is a very insightful explanatory model and forecast from the NYTimes
Magazine.
D.


>  This Is a Religious War
>
>  October 7, 2001
>
>  By ANDREW SULLIVAN
>
>
>
>
>  Perhaps the most admirable part of the response to the
> conflict that began on Sept. 11 has been a general
> reluctance to call it a religious war. Officials and
> commentators have rightly stressed that this is not a
> battle between the Muslim world and the West, that the
> murderers are not representative of Islam. President Bush
> went to the Islamic Center in Washington to reinforce the
> point. At prayer meetings across the United States and
> throughout the world, Muslim leaders have been included
> alongside Christians, Jews and Buddhists.
>
> The only problem with this otherwise laudable effort is
> that it doesn't hold up under inspection. The religious
> dimension of this conflict is central to its meaning. The
> words of Osama bin Laden are saturated with religious
> argument and theological language. Whatever else the
> Taliban regime is in Afghanistan, it is fanatically
> religious. Although some Muslim leaders have criticized the
> terrorists, and even Saudi Arabia's rulers have distanced
> themselves from the militants, other Muslims in the Middle
> East and elsewhere have not denounced these acts, have been
> conspicuously silent or have indeed celebrated them. The
> terrorists' strain of Islam is clearly not shared by most
> Muslims and is deeply unrepresentative of Islam's glorious,
> civilized and peaceful past. But it surely represents a
> part of Islam -- a radical, fundamentalist part -- that
> simply cannot be ignored or denied.
>
> In that sense, this surely is a religious war -- but not of
> Islam versus Christianity and Judaism. Rather, it is a war
> of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at
> peace with freedom and modernity. This war even has far
> gentler echoes in America's own religious conflicts --
> between newer, more virulent strands of Christian
> fundamentalism and mainstream Protestantism and
> Catholicism. These conflicts have ancient roots, but they
> seem to be gaining new force as modernity spreads and
> deepens. They are our new wars of religion -- and their
> victims are in all likelihood going to mount with each
> passing year.
>
> Osama bin Laden himself couldn't be clearer about the
> religious underpinnings of his campaign of terror. In 1998,
> he told his followers, ''The call to wage war against
> America was made because America has spearheaded the
> crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of
> thousands of its troops to the land of the two holy mosques
> over and above its meddling in its affairs and its politics
> and its support of the oppressive, corrupt and tyrannical
> regime that is in control.'' Notice the use of the word
> ''crusade,'' an explicitly religious term, and one that
> simply ignores the fact that the last few major American
> interventions abroad -- in Kuwait, Somalia and the Balkans
> -- were all conducted in defense of Muslims.
>
> Notice also that as bin Laden understands it, the
> ''crusade'' America is alleged to be leading is not against
> Arabs but against the Islamic nation, which spans many
> ethnicities. This nation knows no nation-states as they
> actually exist in the region -- which is why this form of
> Islamic fundamentalism is also so worrying to the rulers of
> many Middle Eastern states. Notice also that bin Laden's
> beef is with American troops defiling the land of Saudi
> Arabia -- the land of the two holy mosques,'' in Mecca and
> Medina. In 1998, he also told followers that his terrorism
> was ''of the commendable kind, for it is directed at the
> tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah.'' He
> has a litany of grievances against Israel as well, but his
> concerns are not primarily territorial or procedural. ''Our
> religion is under attack,'' he said baldly. The attackers
> are Christians and Jews. When asked to sum up his message
> to the people of the West, bin Laden couldn't have been
> clearer: ''Our call is the call of Islam that was revealed
> to Muhammad. It is a call to all mankind. We have been
> entrusted with good cause to follow in the footsteps of the
> messenger and to communicate his message to all nations.''
>
> This is a religious war against ''unbelief and
> unbelievers,'' in bin Laden's words. Are these cynical
> words designed merely to use Islam for nefarious ends? We
> cannot know the precise motives of bin Laden, but we can
> know that he would not use these words if he did not think
> they had salience among the people he wishes to inspire and
> provoke. This form of Islam is not restricted to bin Laden
> alone.
>
> Its roots lie in an extreme and violent strain in Islam
> that emerged in the 18th century in opposition to what was
> seen by some Muslims as Ottoman decadence but has gained
> greater strength in the 20th. For the past two decades,
> this form of Islamic fundamentalism has racked the Middle
> East. It has targeted almost every regime in the region
> and, as it failed to make progress, has extended its
> hostility into the West. From the assassination of Anwar
> Sadat to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie to the decadelong
> campaign of bin Laden to the destruction of ancient
> Buddhist statues and the hideous persecution of women and
> homosexuals by the Taliban to the World Trade Center
> massacre, there is a single line. That line is a
> fundamentalist, religious one. And it is an Islamic one.
>
> Most interpreters of the Koran find no arguments in it for
> the murder of innocents. But it would be naive to ignore in
> Islam a deep thread of intolerance toward unbelievers,
> especially if those unbelievers are believed to be a threat
> to the Islamic world. There are many passages in the Koran
> urging mercy toward others, tolerance, respect for life and
> so on. But there are also passages as violent as this:
> ''And when the sacred months are passed, kill those who
> join other gods with God wherever ye shall find them; and
> seize them, besiege them, and lay wait for them with every
> kind of ambush.'' And this: ''Believers! Wage war against
> such of the infidels as are your neighbors, and let them
> find you rigorous.'' Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of
> Islam, writes of the dissonance within Islam: ''There is
> something in the religious culture of Islam which inspired,
> in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a
> courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in
> other civilizations. And yet, in moments of upheaval and
> disruption, when the deeper passions are stirred, this
> dignity and courtesy toward others can give way to an
> explosive mixture of rage and hatred which impels even the
> government of an ancient and civilized country -- even the
> spokesman of a great spiritual and ethical religion -- to
> espouse kidnapping and assassination, and try to find, in
> the life of their prophet, approval and indeed precedent
> for such actions.'' Since Muhammad was, unlike many other
> religious leaders, not simply a sage or a prophet but a
> ruler in his own right, this exploitation of his politics
> is not as great a stretch as some would argue.
>
> This use of religion for extreme repression, and even
> terror, is not of course restricted to Islam. For most of
> its history, Christianity has had a worse record. From the
> Crusades to the Inquisition to the bloody religious wars of
> the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe saw far more blood
> spilled for religion's sake than the Muslim world did. And
> given how expressly nonviolent the teachings of the Gospels
> are, the perversion of Christianity in this respect was
> arguably greater than bin Laden's selective use of Islam.
> But it is there nonetheless. It seems almost as if there is
> something inherent in religious monotheism that lends
> itself to this kind of terrorist temptation. And our bland
> attempts to ignore this -- to speak of this violence as if
> it did not have religious roots -- is some kind of denial.
> We don't want to denigrate religion as such, and so we deny
> that religion is at the heart of this. But we would
> understand this conflict better, perhaps, if we first
> acknowledged that religion is responsible in some way, and
> then figured out how and why.
>
> The first mistake is surely to condescend to
> fundamentalism. We may disagree with it, but it has
> attracted millions of adherents for centuries, and for a
> good reason. It elevates and comforts. It provides a sense
> of meaning and direction to those lost in a disorienting
> world. The blind recourse to texts embraced as literal
> truth, the injunction to follow the commandments of God
> before anything else, the subjugation of reason and
> judgment and even conscience to the dictates of dogma:
> these can be exhilarating and transformative. They have led
> human beings to perform extraordinary acts of both good and
> evil. And they have an internal logic to them. If you
> believe that there is an eternal afterlife and that endless
> indescribable torture awaits those who disobey God's law,
> then it requires no huge stretch of imagination to make
> sure that you not only conform to each diktat but that you
> also encourage and, if necessary, coerce others to do the
> same. The logic behind this is impeccable. Sin begets sin.
> The sin of others can corrupt you as well. The only
> solution is to construct a world in which such sin is
> outlawed and punished and constantly purged -- by force if
> necessary. It is not crazy to act this way if you believe
> these things strongly enough. In some ways, it's crazier to
> believe these things and not act this way.
>
> In a world of absolute truth, in matters graver than life
> and death, there is no room for dissent and no room for
> theological doubt. Hence the reliance on literal
> interpretations of texts -- because interpretation can lead
> to error, and error can lead to damnation. Hence also the
> ancient Catholic insistence on absolute church authority.
> Without infallibility, there can be no guarantee of truth.
> Without such a guarantee, confusion can lead to hell.
>
> Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor makes the case perhaps as
> well as anyone. In the story told by Ivan Karamazov in
> ''The Brothers Karamazov,'' Jesus returns to earth during
> the Spanish Inquisition. On a day when hundreds have been
> burned at the stake for heresy, Jesus performs miracles.
> Alarmed, the Inquisitor arrests Jesus and imprisons him
> with the intent of burning him at the stake as well. What
> follows is a conversation between the Inquisitor and Jesus.
> Except it isn't a conversation because Jesus says nothing.
> It is really a dialogue between two modes of religion, an
> exploration of the tension between the extraordinary,
> transcendent claims of religion and human beings' inability
> to live up to them, or even fully believe them.
>
> According to the Inquisitor, Jesus' crime was revealing
> that salvation was possible but still allowing humans the
> freedom to refuse it. And this, to the Inquisitor, was a
> form of cruelty. When the truth involves the most important
> things imaginable -- the meaning of life, the fate of one's
> eternal soul, the difference between good and evil -- it is
> not enough to premise it on the capacity of human choice.
> That is too great a burden. Choice leads to unbelief or
> distraction or negligence or despair. What human beings
> really need is the certainty of truth, and they need to see
> it reflected in everything around them -- in the cultures
> in which they live, enveloping them in a seamless fabric of
> faith that helps them resist the terror of choice and the
> abyss of unbelief. This need is what the Inquisitor calls
> the ''fundamental secret of human nature.'' He explains:
> ''These pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find
> what one or the other can worship, but to find something
> that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is
> that all may be together in it. This craving for community
> of worship is the chief misery of every man individually
> and of all humanity since the beginning of time.''
>
> This is the voice of fundamentalism. Faith cannot exist
> alone in a single person. Indeed, faith needs others for it
> to survive -- and the more complete the culture of faith,
> the wider it is, and the more total its infiltration of the
> world, the better. It is hard for us to wrap our minds
> around this today, but it is quite clear from the accounts
> of the Inquisition and, indeed, of the religious wars that
> continued to rage in Europe for nearly three centuries,
> that many of the fanatics who burned human beings at the
> stake were acting out of what they genuinely thought were
> the best interests of the victims. With the power of the
> state, they used fire, as opposed to simple execution,
> because it was thought to be spiritually cleansing. A few
> minutes of hideous torture on earth were deemed a small
> price to pay for helping such souls avoid eternal torture
> in the afterlife. Moreover, the example of such
> government-sponsored executions helped create a culture in
> which certain truths were reinforced and in which it was
> easier for more weak people to find faith. The burden of
> this duty to uphold the faith lay on the men required to
> torture, persecute and murder the unfaithful. And many of
> them believed, as no doubt some Islamic fundamentalists
> believe, that they were acting out of mercy and godliness.
>
> This is the authentic voice of the Taliban. It also finds
> itself replicated in secular form. What, after all, were
> the totalitarian societies of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia
> if not an exact replica of this kind of fusion of politics
> and ultimate meaning? Under Lenin's and Stalin's rules, the
> imminence of salvation through revolutionary consciousness
> was in perpetual danger of being undermined by those too
> weak to have faith -- the bourgeois or the kulaks or the
> intellectuals. So they had to be liquidated or purged.
> Similarly, it is easy for us to dismiss the Nazis as evil,
> as they surely were. It is harder for us to understand that
> in some twisted fashion, they truly believed that they were
> creating a new dawn for humanity, a place where all the
> doubts that freedom brings could be dispelled in a rapture
> of racial purity and destiny. Hence the destruction of all
> dissidents and the Jews -- carried out by fire as the
> Inquisitors had before, an act of purification different
> merely in its scale, efficiency and Godlessness.
>
> Perhaps the most important thing for us to realize today is
> that the defeat of each of these fundamentalisms required a
> long and arduous effort. The conflict with Islamic
> fundamentalism is likely to take as long. For unlike
> Europe's religious wars, which taught Christians the
> futility of fighting to the death over something beyond
> human understanding and so immune to any definitive
> resolution, there has been no such educative conflict in
> the Muslim world. Only Iran and Afghanistan have
> experienced the full horror of revolutionary
> fundamentalism, and only Iran has so far seen reason to
> moderate to some extent. From everything we see, the
> lessons Europe learned in its bloody history have yet to be
> absorbed within the Muslim world. There, as in 16th-century
> Europe, the promise of purity and salvation seems far more
> enticing than the mundane allure of mere peace. That means
> that we are not at the end of this conflict but in its very
> early stages.
>
> America is not a neophyte in this struggle. the United
> States has seen several waves of religious fervor since its
> founding. But American evangelicalism has always kept its
> distance from governmental power. The Christian separation
> between what is God's and what is Caesar's -- drawn from
> the Gospels -- helped restrain the fundamentalist
> temptation. The last few decades have proved an exception,
> however. As modernity advanced, and the certitudes of
> fundamentalist faith seemed mocked by an increasingly
> liberal society, evangelicals mobilized and entered
> politics. Their faith sharpened, their zeal intensified,
> the temptation to fuse political and religious authority
> beckoned more insistently.
>
> Mercifully, violence has not been a significant feature of
> this trend -- but it has not been absent. The murders of
> abortion providers show what such zeal can lead to. And
> indeed, if people truly believe that abortion is the same
> as mass murder, then you can see the awful logic of the
> terrorism it has spawned. This is the same logic as bin
> Laden's. If faith is that strong, and it dictates a choice
> between action or eternal damnation, then violence can
> easily be justified. In retrospect, we should be amazed not
> that violence has occurred -- but that it hasn't occurred
> more often.
>
> The critical link between Western and Middle Eastern
> fundamentalism is surely the pace of social change. If you
> take your beliefs from books written more than a thousand
> years ago, and you believe in these texts literally, then
> the appearance of the modern world must truly terrify. If
> you believe that women should be consigned to polygamous,
> concealed servitude, then Manhattan must appear like
> Gomorrah. If you believe that homosexuality is a crime
> punishable by death, as both fundamentalist Islam and the
> Bible dictate, then a world of same-sex marriage is surely
> Sodom. It is not a big step to argue that such centers of
> evil should be destroyed or undermined, as bin Laden does,
> or to believe that their destruction is somehow a
> consequence of their sin, as Jerry Falwell argued. Look
> again at Falwell's now infamous words in the wake of Sept.
> 11: ''I really believe that the pagans, and the
> abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians
> who are actively trying to make that an alternative
> lifestyle, the A.C.L.U., People for the American Way -- all
> of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the
> finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'''
>
> And why wouldn't he believe that? He has subsequently
> apologized for the insensitivity of the remark but not for
> its theological underpinning. He cannot repudiate the
> theology -- because it is the essence of what he believes
> in and must believe in for his faith to remain alive.
>
> The other critical aspect of this kind of faith is
> insecurity. American fundamentalists know they are losing
> the culture war. They are terrified of failure and of the
> Godless world they believe is about to engulf or crush
> them. They speak and think defensively. They talk about
> renewal, but in their private discourse they expect
> damnation for an America that has lost sight of the
> fundamentalist notion of God.
>
> Similarly, Muslims know that the era of Islam's imperial
> triumph has long since gone. For many centuries, the
> civilization of Islam was the center of the world. It
> eclipsed Europe in the Dark Ages, fostered great learning
> and expanded territorially well into Europe and Asia. But
> it has all been downhill from there. From the collapse of
> the Ottoman Empire onward, it has been on the losing side
> of history. The response to this has been an intermittent
> flirtation with Westernization but far more emphatically a
> reaffirmation of the most irredentist and extreme forms of
> the culture under threat. Hence the odd phenomenon of
> Islamic extremism beginning in earnest only in the last 200
> years.
>
> With Islam, this has worse implications than for other
> cultures that have had rises and falls. For Islam's
> religious tolerance has always been premised on its own
> power. It was tolerant when it controlled the territory and
> called the shots. When it lost territory and saw itself
> eclipsed by the West in power and civilization, tolerance
> evaporated. To cite Lewis again on Islam: ''What is truly
> evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over
> true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is
> proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance
> of the holy law and gives the misbelievers both the
> opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith.
> But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is
> blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption
> of religion and morality in society and to the flouting or
> even the abrogation of God's law.''
>
> Thus the horror at the establishment of the State of
> Israel, an infidel country in Muslim lands, a bitter
> reminder of the eclipse of Islam in the modern world. Thus
> also the revulsion at American bases in Saudi Arabia. While
> colonialism of different degrees is merely political
> oppression for some cultures, for Islam it was far worse.
> It was blasphemy that had to be avenged and countered.
>
> I cannot help thinking of this defensiveness when I read
> stories of the suicide bombers sitting poolside in Florida
> or racking up a $48 vodka tab in an American restaurant. We
> tend to think that this assimilation into the West might
> bring Islamic fundamentalists around somewhat, temper their
> zeal. But in fact, the opposite is the case. The temptation
> of American and Western culture -- indeed, the very allure
> of such culture -- may well require a repression all the
> more brutal if it is to be overcome. The transmission of
> American culture into the heart of what bin Laden calls the
> Islamic nation requires only two responses -- capitulation
> to unbelief or a radical strike against it. There is little
> room in the fundamentalist psyche for a moderate
> accommodation. The very psychological dynamics that lead
> repressed homosexuals to be viciously homophobic or that
> entice sexually tempted preachers to inveigh against
> immorality are the very dynamics that lead vodka-drinking
> fundamentalists to steer planes into buildings. It is not
> designed to achieve anything, construct anything, argue
> anything. It is a violent acting out of internal conflict.
>
> And America is the perfect arena for such acting out. For
> the question of religious fundamentalism was not only
> familiar to the founding fathers. In many ways, it was the
> central question that led to America's existence. The first
> American immigrants, after all, were refugees from the
> religious wars that engulfed England and that intensified
> under England's Taliban, Oliver Cromwell. One central
> influence on the founders' political thought was John
> Locke, the English liberal who wrote the now famous
> ''Letter on Toleration.'' In it, Locke argued that true
> salvation could not be a result of coercion, that faith had
> to be freely chosen to be genuine and that any other
> interpretation was counter to the Gospels. Following Locke,
> the founders established as a central element of the new
> American order a stark separation of church and state,
> ensuring that no single religion could use political means
> to enforce its own orthodoxies.
>
> We cite this as a platitude today without absorbing or even
> realizing its radical nature in human history -- and the
> deep human predicament it was designed to solve. It was an
> attempt to answer the eternal human question of how to
> pursue the goal of religious salvation for ourselves and
> others and yet also maintain civil peace. What the founders
> and Locke were saying was that the ultimate claims of
> religion should simply not be allowed to interfere with
> political and religious freedom. They did this to preserve
> peace above all -- but also to preserve true religion
> itself.
>
> The security against an American Taliban is therefore
> relatively simple: it's the Constitution. And the
> surprising consequence of this separation is not that it
> led to a collapse of religious faith in America -- as weak
> human beings found themselves unable to believe without
> social and political reinforcement -- but that it led to
> one of the most vibrantly religious civil societies on
> earth. No other country has achieved this. And it is this
> achievement that the Taliban and bin Laden have now decided
> to challenge. It is a living, tangible rebuke to everything
> they believe in.
>
> That is why this coming conflict is indeed as momentous and
> as grave as the last major conflicts, against Nazism and
> Communism, and why it is not hyperbole to see it in these
> epic terms. What is at stake is yet another battle against
> a religion that is succumbing to the temptation Jesus
> refused in the desert -- to rule by force. The difference
> is that this conflict is against a more formidable enemy
> than Nazism or Communism. The secular totalitarianisms of
> the 20th century were, in President Bush's memorable words,
> ''discarded lies.'' They were fundamentalisms built on the
> very weak intellectual conceits of a master race and a
> Communist revolution.
>
> But Islamic fundamentalism is based on a glorious
> civilization and a great faith. It can harness and co-opt
> and corrupt true and good believers if it has a propitious
> and toxic enough environment. It has a more powerful logic
> than either Stalin's or Hitler's Godless ideology, and it
> can serve as a focal point for all the other societies in
> the world, whose resentment of Western success and
> civilization comes more easily than the arduous task of
> accommodation to modernity. We have to somehow defeat this
> without defeating or even opposing a great religion that is
> nonetheless extremely inexperienced in the toleration of
> other ascendant and more powerful faiths. It is hard to
> underestimate the extreme delicacy and difficulty of this
> task.
>
> In this sense, the symbol of this conflict should not be
> Old Glory, however stirring it is. What is really at issue
> here is the simple but immensely difficult principle of the
> separation of politics and religion. We are fighting not
> for our country as such or for our flag. We are fighting
> for the universal principles of our Constitution -- and the
> possibility of free religious faith it guarantees. We are
> fighting for religion against one of the deepest strains in
> religion there is. And not only our lives but our souls are
> at stake.
>
> Andrew Sullivan is a contributing writer for the
> magazine.
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/magazine/07RELIGION.html?ex=1003816269&ei=
> 1&en=723f864a23ea40ed
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