THE PROBLEM WITH ISLAM

4

The Problem with Islam
by
Sam Harris

WHILE my argument in this book is aimed at faith itself, the differences between faiths are as relevant as they are unmistakable. There is a reason, after all, why we must now confront Muslim, rather than Jain terrorists, in every corner of the world. Jains do not believe anything that is remotely likely to inspire them to commit acts of suicidal violence against unbelievers. By any measure of normativity we might wish to adopt (ethical, practical, epistemological, economic, etc.), there are good beliefs and there are bad ones—and it should now be obvious to everyone that Muslims have more than their fair share of the latter.

Of course, like every religion, Islam has had its moments. Muslim scholars invented algebra, translated the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and made important contributions to a variety of nascent sciences at a time when European Christians were luxuriating in the most abysmal ignorance. It was only through the Muslim conquest of Spain that classical Greek texts found their way into Latin translation and seeded the Renaissance in Western Europe. Thousands of pages could be written cataloging facts of this sort for every religion, but to what end? Would it suggest that religious faith is good, or even benign? It is a truism to say that people of faith have created almost everything of value in our world, because nearly every person who has ever swung a hammer or trimmed a sail has been a devout member of one or another religious culture. There has been simply no one else to do the job. We can also say that every human achievement prior to the twentieth century was accomplished by men and women who were perfectly ignorant of the molecular basis of life. Does this suggest that a nineteenth-century view of biology would have been worth maintaining? There is no telling what our world would now be like had some great kingdom of Reason emerged at the time of the Crusades and pacified the credulous multitudes of Europe and the Middle East. We might have had modern democracy and the Internet by the year 1600. The fact that religious faith has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument in its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its adherents made foundational contributions to human culture. 

Given the vicissitudes of Muslim history, however, I suspect that the starting point I have chosen for this book—that of a single suicide bomber following the consequences of his religious beliefs—is bound to exasperate many readers, since it ignores most of what commentators on the Middle East have said about the roots of Muslim violence. It ignores the painful history of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It ignores the collusion of Western powers with corrupt dictatorships. It ignores the endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity that now plague the Arab world. But I will argue that we can ignore all of these things—or treat them only to place them safely on the shelf—because the world is filled with poor, uneducated, and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism, indeed who would never commit terrorism of the sort that has become so commonplace among Muslims; and the Muslim world has no shortage of educated and prosperous men and women, suffering little more than their infatuation with Koranic eschatology, who are eager to murder infidels for God’s sake.

We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been “hijacked” by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and actions of the Prophet. A future in which Islam and the West do not stand on the brink of mutual annihilation is a future in which most Muslims will have learned to ignore most of their canon, just as most Christians have learned to do. Such a transformation is by no means guaranteed to occur, however, given the tenets of Islam. 

A Fringe Without a Center

Many authors have pointed out that it is problematic to speak of Muslim “fundamentalism” because it suggests that there are large doctrinal differences between fundamentalist Muslims and the mainstream. The truth, however, is that most Muslims appear to be “fundamentalist” in the Western sense of the word—in that even “moderate” approaches to Islam generally consider the Koran to be the literal and inerrant word of the one true God. The difference between fundamentalists and moderates—and certainly the difference between all “extremists” and moderates—is the degree to which they see political and military action to be intrinsic to the practice of their faith. In any case, people who believe that Islam must inform every dimension of human existence, including politics and law, are now generally called not “fundamentalists” or “extremists” but, rather, “Islamists.”

The world, from the point of view of Islam, is divided into the “House of Islam” and the “House of War,” and this latter designation should indicate how many Muslims believe their differences with those who do not share their faith will be ultimately resolved. While there are undoubtedly some “moderate” Muslims who have decided to overlook the irrescindable militancy of their religion, Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The only future devout Muslims can envisage—as Muslims—is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, subjugated, or killed. The tenets of Islam simply do not admit of anything but a temporary sharing of power with the “enemies of God.” 

Like most other religions, Islam has suffered a variety of schisms. Since the seventh century, the Sunni (the majority) have considered the Shia to be heterodox, and the Shia have returned the compliment. Divisions have emerged within each of these sects as well, and even within the ranks of those who are unmistakably Islamist. We need not go into the sectarian algebra in any detail, apart from noting that these schisms have had the salutary effect of dividing the House of Islam against itself. While this mitigates the threat that Islam currently poses to the West, Islam and Western liberalism remain irreconcilable. Moderate Islam—really moderate, really critical of Muslim irrationality—scarcely seems to exist. If it does, it is doing as good a job at hiding as modern Christianity did in the fourteenth century (and for similar reasons). The feature of Islam that is most troubling to non-Muslims, and which apologists for Islam do much to obfuscate, is the principle of jihad. Literally, the term can be translated as “struggle” or “striving,” but it is generally rendered in English as “holy war,” and this is no accident. While Muslims are quick to observe that there is an inner (or “greater”) jihad, which involves waging war against one’s own sinfulness, no amount of casuistry can disguise the fact that the outer (or “lesser”) jihad—war against infidels and apostates—is a central feature of the faith. Armed conflict in “defense of Islam” is a religious obligation for every Muslim man. We are misled if we believe that the phrase “in defense of Islam” suggests that all Muslim fighting must be done in “self-defense.” On the contrary, the duty of jihad is an unambiguous call to world conquest. As Bernard Lewis writes, “the presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule.” There is just no denying that Muslims expect victory in this world, as well as in the next. As Malise Ruthven points out, “The Prophet had been his own Caesar…. If imitatio Christi meant renouncing worldly ambition and seeking salvation by deeds of private virtue, imitatio Muhammadi meant sooner or later taking up arms against those forces which seemed to threaten Islam from within or without.” While the Koran is more than sufficient to establish these themes, the literature of the hadith elaborates:

Jihad is your duty under any ruler, be he godly or wicked. 

A single endeavor (of fighting) in Allah’s Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it. 

A day and a night fighting on the frontier is better than a month of fasting and prayer.

Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah (in the Hereafter) would wish to come back to this world even if he were given the whole world and whatever is in it., except the martyr who, on seeing the superiority of martyrdom, would like to come back to the world and get killed again (in Allah’s Cause).

He who dies without having taken part in a campaign dies in a kind of unbelief.

Paradise is in the shadow of swords.

Many hadiths of this sort can be found, and Islamists regularly invoke them as a justification for attacks upon infidels and apostates.

            Those looking for ways to leaven the intrinsic militancy of Islam have observed that there are a few lines in the Koran that seem to speak directly against indiscriminate violence.  Those who wage jihad are enjoined not to attack first (Koran 2:190), since “God does not love aggressors.”  But this injunction restrains no one.  Given the long history of conflict between Islam and the West, almost any act of violence against infidels can now be plausibly construed as an action in defense of the faith.  Our recent adventures in Iraq provide all the rationale an aspiring martyr needs to wage jihad against “the friends of Satan” for decades to come.  Lewis notes that one who would fight for God is also enjoined not to kill women, children, or the aged, unless in self-defense, but a little casuistry on the notion of self-defense allows Muslim militants to elude this stricture as well. The bottom line is that devout Muslims can have no doubt about the reality of paradise or about getting there.  Nor can they question the wisdom and reasonableness of killing people for what amount to theological grievances.  In Islam, it is the “moderate” who is left to split hairs, because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.

            The imperative of world conquest is an interesting one, given that “imperialism” is one of the chief sins that Muslims attribute to the West: Imperialism is a particularly important theme in the Middle Eastern and more specially the Islamic case against the West. For them, the word imperialism has a special meaning. This word is, for example, never used by Muslims of the great Muslim empires – the first one founded by the Arabs, the later ones by the Turks, who conquered vast territories and populations and incorporated them into the House of Islam. It was perfectly legitimate for Muslims to conquer and rule Europe and Europeans and thus enable them – but not compel them – to embrace the true faith. It was a crime and a sin for Europeans to conquer Muslims and, still worse, to try to lead them astray. In the Muslim perception, conversion to Islam is a benefit to the convert and a merit in those who convert him. In Islamic law, conversion from Islam is apostasy – a capital offense for both the one who is misled and the one who misleads him. On this question, the law is clear and unequivocal. If a Muslim renounces Islam, even if a new convert reverts to his previous faith, the penalty is death.

            We will return to the subject of apostasy in a moment. We should first note, however, that Lewis’s comment about not compelling the convert to embrace the true faith is misleading in this context. It is true that the Koran provides a handbrake, of sorts, for Muslim “moderates” – “there shall be no compulsion in religion” (Koran 2:256) – but a glance at the rest of the Koran, and that Muslim history, reveals that we should not expect too much from its use. As it stands, this line offers a very slender basis for Muslim tolerance. First, the Muslim conception of tolerance applies only to Jews and Christians – “People of the Book” – while the practices of Buddhists, Hindus, and other idolaters are considered so spiritually depraved as to be quite beyond the pale. Even People of the Book must keep to themselves and "humbly" tithe (pay the jizya) to their Muslim rulers. Fareed Zakaria observes, as many have, that Jews lived for centuries under Muslim rule and had a relatively easy time of it – but this is only compared with the horrors of life under theocratic Christendom. The truth is that life for Jews within the House of Islam has been characterized by ceaseless humiliation and regular pogroms. A state of apartheid has been the norm, in which Jews have been forbidden to bear arms, to give evidence in court, and to ride horses. They have been forced to wear distinctive clothing (the yellow badge originated in Baghdad, not in Nazi Germany) and to avoid certain streets and buildings. They have been obliged, under penalty of violence and even death, to pass Muslims only on their left (impure) side while keeping their eyes lowered. In parts of the Arab world it has been a local custom for Muslim children to throw stones at Jews and spit upon them. These and other indignities have been regularly punctuated by organized massacres and pogroms: in Morocco (1728, 1790, 1875, 1884, 1890, 1903, 1912, 1948, 1952, and 1955), in Algeria (1805 and 1934), in Tunisia (1864, 1869, 1932, and 1967), in Persia (1839, 1867, and 1910), in Iraq (1828, 1936, 1937, 1941, 1946, 1948, 1969, and 1969), in Libya (1785, 1860, 1897, 1945, 1948, in 1967), in Egypt (1882, 1919, 1921, 1924, 1938 – 39, 1945, 1948, 1956, and 1967), in Palestine (1929 and 1936), in Syria (1840, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949, and 1967), in Yemen (1947), etc. Life for Christians under Islam has been scarcely more cheerful.

As a matter of doctrine, the Muslim conception of tolerance is one in which non-Muslims have been politically and economically subdued, converted, or put to the sword. The fact that the Muslim world has not been united under a single government for most of its history, and may never be again, is immaterial where this aspiration for hegemony is concerned. For each political community within Islam, "it is the task of the Islamic state to bring about obedience to the revealed law.”

Zakaria observes that Muslims living in the West generally appear tolerant of the beliefs of others. Let us accept this characterization for the moment – though it ignores the inconvenient reality that many Western countries now appear to be "hotbeds of Islamic militancy." Before we chalk this up to Muslim tolerance, however, we should ask ourselves how Muslim intolerance would reveal itself in the West. What minority, even a radicalized one, isn't generally “tolerant” of the majority for most of its career? Even terrorists and revolutionaries spend most of their days just biding their time. We should not mistake the “tolerance” of political, economic, and numerical weakness for genuine liberalism.

Lewis observes that “for Muslims, no piece of land once added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced.” We might also add that no mind, once added to the realm, can ever be finally renounced – because, as Lewis also notes, the penalty for apostasy is death. We would do well to linger over this fact for a moment, because it is the black pearl of intolerance that no liberal exegesis will ever fully digest. Within the House of Islam, the penalty for learning too much about the world – so as to call the tenets of the faith into question – is death. If a 21st century Muslim loses his faith, though he may have been a Muslim for only one hour, the normative response, everywhere under Islam, is to kill him.

While the Koran merely describes the punishments that await the apostate in the next world (Koran 3:86-91), the hadith is emphatic about the justice that must be meted out in this one: “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” No metaphor hides this directive, and it would seem that no process of liberal hermeneutics can brush it aside. We might be tempted to accord great significance to the fact that the injunction does not appear in the Koran itself, but in practical terms the hadith literature seems to be every bit as constitutive of the Muslim world view. Given the facts that the hadith is often used as a lens through which to interpret the Koran, many Muslim jurists consider it to be an even greater authority on the practice of Islam. It is true that some liberal jurists require that the apostate subtly speak against Islam before sanctioning his murder, but the penalty itself is generally not considered “extreme.” The justice of killing apostates is a matter of mainstream acceptance, if not practice. This explains why there did not appear to be a single reasonable Muslim living on earth when the Ayatollah Khomeini put a bounty on the head of Salman Rushdie. Many Westerners wondered why millions of “moderate” Muslims did not publicly disavow this fatwa. The answer flows directly from the tenets of Islam, according to which not even Cat Stevens, a Western-born folksinger (now Yosef Islam), could doubt the justice of it.

As we have seen, Christianity and Judaism can be made to sound the same, intolerant note – but it has been a few centuries since either has done so. It is, however, a current reality under Islam that if you open the wrong door in your free inquiry into the world, your brethren deem that you should die for it. We might well wonder, then, in what sense Muslims believe there should be “no compulsion in religion.”

In reviewing Lewis’s recent book on Islam, Kenneth Pollack raised a criticism that could be applied with even greater felicity to my account thus far: Lewis has not grappled with the deeper questions for his readers. He still has not offered his explanation for why the Islamic Middle East stagnated, why efforts to reform failed, why it is notably failing to become integrated into the global economy in a meaningful way, and why these failures have produced not a renewed determination to succeed (as in East Asia over the past 50 years, and arguably in India, Latin America, and even parts of sub-Saharan Africa today) but in anger and frustration with the West so pervasive and vitriolic that it has bred murderous, suicidal terrorism despite all of the Islamic prohibitions against such actions.

These are all good questions – and Zakaria offers plausible answers to them – but they are not the “deeper questions.” If you believe anything like what the Koran says that you must believe in order to escape the fires of hell, you will, at the very least, be sympathetic with the actions of Osama bin Laden. The prohibitions against “suicidal terrorism” are not nearly as numerous as Pollack suggests. The Koran contains a single ambiguous line, “Do not destroy yourselves” (4:29). Like most commentators on these matters, Pollock seems unable to place himself in the position of one who actually believes the propositions set forth in the Koran – that paradise awaits, that our senses deliver nothing but evidence of a fallen world in desperate need of conquest for the glory of God. Open the Koran, which is perfect in its every syllable, and simply read it with the eyes of faith in order to see how little compassion need be wasted on those whom God himself is in the process of “mocking,” “cursing,” “shaming,” “punishing,” “scourging,” “judging,” “burning,” “annihilating,” “not forgiving,” and “not reprising.” God, who is infinitely wise, has cursed the infidels with their doubts. He prolongs their lives and prosperity so that they may continue heaping sin upon sin and all the more richly deserve the torments that await them beyond the grave. In this light, the people who died on September 11 were nothing more than fuel for the eternal fires of God’s justice. To convey the relentlessness with which unbelievers are vilified in the text of the Koran, I provide a long compilation of quotations below, in order of their appearance in the text. This is what the Creator of the universe apparently has on his mind (when he is not fussing with gravitational constants and atomic weights):

“It is the same whether or not you forewarn them [the unbelievers], they will have no faith” (2:6). “God will mock them and keep them long in sin, blundering blindly along” (2:15). A fire “whose fuel is men and stones” awaits them (2:24). They will be “rewarded with disgrace in this world and with grievous punishment on the Day of Resurrection” (2:85). “God’s curse be upon the infidels!” (2:89). “They have incurred God’s most inexorable wrath. An ignominious punishment awaits [them]” (2:90). “God is the enemy of the unbelievers” (2:98). “The unbelievers among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews], and the pagans, resent that any blessing should have been sent down to you from your Lord” (2:105). “They shall be held up to shame in this world and sternly punished in the hereafter” (2:114). “Those to whom We [God] have given the Book, and who read it as it ought to be read, truly believe in it; those that deny it shall assuredly be lost” (2:122). “[We] shall let them live awhile, and then shall drag them to the scourge of the Fire. Evil shall be their fate” (2:126). “The East and the West are God’s. He guides whom He will to a straight path” (2:142). “Do not say that those slain in the cause of God are dead. They are alive, but you are not aware of them” (2:154). “But the infidels who die unbelievers shall incur the curse of God, the angels, and all men. Under it they shall remain for their punishment shall be lightened shall they be reprieved” (2:162). “They shall sigh with remorse, which shall never come out of the Fire” (2:168). “The unbelievers are like beasts which, call out to them as one may, can hear nothing but a shout and a cry. Deaf, dumb, and blind, they understand nothing” (2:172) “Theirs shall be a woeful punishment" (2:175). "How steadfastly they seek the Fire exhalation point that is because God has revealed that Book with truth; those that disagree about it are in extreme schism" (2:176) "slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage….[I]f they attack you put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbelievers be rewarded: but if they desist, God is forgiving and merciful. Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God's religion reigns supreme. But if they desist, fight none except the evildoers" (2:190-93). "Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it. But you may hate anything although it is good for you, and love anything although it is bad for you. God knows, but you know not" (2:216) "they will not cease to fight against you until they force you to renounce your faith – if they are able. But whoever of you cats and dies an unbeliever, his work shall come to nothing in this world and in the world to come. Such men shall be the tenants of Hell and “humbly”, wherein they shall abide forever. Those that have embraced the Faith, and those that have fled their land and fought for the cause of God, I hope for God’s mercy” (2:217-18). “God does not guide the evildoers” (2:258). “God does not guide the unbelievers” (2:264). “The evildoers shall have none to help them” (2:270). “God gives guidance to whom He will” (2:272).

“Those that deny God’s revelations shall be sternly punished; God is almighty incapable of revenge” (3:5). As for the unbelievers, neither their riches nor their children will in the least save them from God’s judgment. They shall become fuel for the Fire” (3:10). “Say to the unbelievers: ‘You shall be overthrown and driven into Hell—an evil resting place!’” (3:12). “The only true faith in God’s sight is Islam…. He that denies God’s revelations should know that swift is God’s reckoning” (3:19). “Let the believers not make friends with infidels in preference to the faithful—he that does this has nothing to hope for from God—except in self-defense” (3:28). “Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people. They will spare no pains to corrupt you. They desire nothing but your ruin. Their hatred is evident from what they utter with their mouths, but greater is the hatred which their breasts conceal” (3:118). “If you have suffered a defeat, so did the enemy. We alternate these vicissitudes among mankind so that God may know the true believers and choose martyrs from among you (God does not love the evil-doers); and that God may test the faithful and annihilate the infidels” (3:140). “Believers, if you yield to the infidels they will drag you back to unbelief and you will return headlong to perdition…. We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers…. The Fire shall be their home” (3:149–51). “Believers, do not follow the example of the infidels, who say of their brothers when they meet death abroad or in battle: ‘Had they stayed with us they would not have died, nor would they have been killed.’ God will cause them to regret their words…. If you should die or be slain in the cause of God, God’s forgiveness and His mercy would surely be better than all the riches they amass” (3:156). “Never think that those who were slain in the cause of God are dead. They are alive and well provided for by their Lord pleased with His gifts and rejoicing that those they left behind, who have not yet joined them, have nothing to fear or to regret; rejoicing in God’s grace and bounty. God will not deny the faithful their reward” (3:169). “Let not the unbelievers think that We prolong their days for their own good. We give them respite only so that they may commit more grievous sins. Shameful punishment awaits them” (3:178). “Those that suffered persecution for My sake and fought and were slain: I shall forgive them their sins and admit them to gardens watered by running streams, as a reward from God; God holds the richest recompense. Do not be deceived by the fortunes of the unbelievers in the land. Their prosperity is brief. Hell shall be their home, a dismal resting place” (3:195–96). 

“God has cursed them in their unbelief” (4:46). “God will not forgive those who serve other gods besides Him; but He will forgive whom He will for other sins. He that serves other gods besides God is guilty of a heinous sin…. Consider those to whom a portion of the Scriptures was given. They believe in idols and false gods and say of the infidels: ‘These are better guided than the believers’” (4:50–51). “Those that deny Our revelation We will burn in fire. No sooner will their skins be consumed than We shall give them other skins, so that they may truly taste the scourge. God is mighty and wise” (4:55–56). 

“Believers, do not seek the friendship of the infidels and those who were given the Book before you, who have made of your religion a jest and a pastime” (5:57). “That which is revealed to you from your Lord will surely increase the wickedness and unbelief of many among them. We have stirred among them enmity and hatred, which will endure till the Day of Resurrection” (5:65). “God does not guide the unbelievers” (5:67). “That which is revealed to you from your Lord will surely increase the wickedness and unbelief of many among them. But do not grieve for the unbelievers” (5:69). “You see many among them making friends with unbelievers. Evil is that to which their souls prompt them. They have incurred the wrath of God and shall endure eternal torment…. You will find that the most implacable of men in their enmity to the faithful are the Jews and the pagans, and that the nearest in affection to them are those who say: ‘We are Christians’” (5:80–82). “[T]hose that disbelieve and deny Our revelations shall become the inmates of Hell” (5:86).

“[T]hey deny the truth when it is declared to them: but they shall learn the consequences of their scorn” (6:5). “We had made them more powerful in the land than yourselves [the Meccans], sent down for them abundant water from the sky and gave them rivers that rolled at their feet. Yet because they sinned We destroyed them all and raised up other generations after them. If We sent down to you a Book inscribed on real parchment and they touched it with their own hands, the unbelievers would still assert: ‘This is but plain sorcery.’ They ask: ‘Why has no angel been sent down to him [Muhammad]?’ If We had sent down an angel, their fate would have been sealed and they would have never been reprieved” (6:5–8). “Who is more wicked than the man who invents falsehoods about God or denies His revelations?” (6:21). “Some of them listen. But We have cast veils over their hearts and made them hard of  hearing lest they understand your words. They will believe in none of Our signs, even if they see them one and all. When they come to argue with you the unbelievers say: ‘This is nothing but old fictitious tales.’ They forbid it and depart from it. They ruin none but themselves, though they do not perceive it. If you could see them when they are set before the Fire! They will say: ‘Would that we could return! Then we would not deny the revelations of our Lord and would be true believers’ (6:23–27). “But if they were sent back, they would return to that which they have been forbidden. They are liars all” (6:29). “Had God pleased He would have given them guidance, one and all” (6:35). “Deaf and dumb are those that deny Our revelations: they blunder about in darkness. God confounds whom He will, and guides to a straight path whom He pleases.” (6:39) “[T]heir hearts were hardened, and Satan made their deeds seem fair to them. And when they had clean forgotten Our admonition We granted them all that they desired; but just as they were rejoicing in what they were given, We suddenly smote them and they were plunged into utter despair. Thus were the evil-doers annihilated. Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe!” (6:43–45). “[T]hose that deny Our revelations shall be punished for their misdeeds” (6:49). “Such are those that are damned by their own sins. They shall drink scalding water and be sternly punished for their unbelief” (6:70). “Could you but see the wrongdoers when death overwhelms them! With hands outstretched, the angels will say: ‘Yield up your souls. You shall be rewarded with the scourge of shame this day, for you have said of God what is untrue and scorned His revelations” (6:93) “Avoid the pagans. Had God pleased, they would not have worshipped idols…. We will turn away their hearts and eyes from the Truth since they refused to believe in it at first. We will let them blunder about in their wrongdoing. If We sent the angels down to them, and caused the dead to speak to them,…and ranged all things in front of them, they would still not believe, unless God willed otherwise…. Thus have We assigned for every prophet an enemy: the devils among men and jinn, who inspire each other with vain and varnished falsehoods. But had your Lord pleased, they would not have done so. Therefore leave them to their own inventions, so that the hearts of those who have no faith in the life to come may be inclined to what they say and, being pleased, persist in their sinful ways” (6:107–12). “The devils will teach their votaries to argue with you. If you obey them you shall yourselves become idolaters…. God will humiliate the transgressors and mete out to them a grievous punishment for their scheming” (6:121–25). “If God wills to guide a man, He opens his bosom to Islam. But if he pleases to confound him, He makes his bosom small and narrow as though he were climbing up to heaven. Thus shall God lay the scourge on the unbelievers” (6:125). 

THIS is all desperately tedious, of course.  But there is no substitute for confronting the text itself. I cannot judge the quality of the Arabic; perhaps it is sublime. But the book’s contents are not. On almost every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise nonbelievers. On almost every page, it prepares the ground for religious conflict.  Anyone who can read passages like those quoted above and still not see a link between Muslim faith and Muslim violence should probably consult a neurologist.

Islam, more than any other religion which human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death. Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential thinkers in the Islamic world, and the father of modern Islamism among the Sunni, wrote, “The Koran points to another contemptible characteristic of the Jews: their craven desire to live, no matter at what price and regardless of quality, honor, and dignity.” This statement is really a miracle of concision. While it may seem nothing more than a casual fillip against the Jews, it is actually a powerful distillation of the Muslim worldview. Stare at it for a moment or two and the whole machinery of intolerance and suicidal grandiosity will begin to construct itself before your eyes. The Koran’s ambiguous prohibition against suicide appears to be an utter non-issue. Surely there are Muslim jurists who might say that suicide bombing is contrary to the tenets of Islam (where are these jurists, by the way?) and that suicide bombers are therefore not martyrs but fresh denizens of hell. Such a minority opinion, if it exists, cannot change the fact that suicide bombings have been rationalized by much of the Muslim world (where they are called “sacred explosions”). Indeed, such rationalization is remarkably easy, given the tenets of Islam. In light of what devout Muslims believe—about jihad, about martyrdom, about paradise, and about infidels—suicide bombing hardly appears to be an aberration of their faith. And it is no surprise at all that those who die in this way are considered martyrs by many of their coreligionists. A military action that entails sufficient risk of death could be considered “suicidal” in any case, rendering moot the distinction between suicide and death in the line of duty for one who would “fight for the cause of God.” The bottom line for the aspiring martyr seems to be this: as long as you are killing infidels or apostates “in defense of Islam,” Allah doesn’t care whether you kill yourself in the process or not.

Over 38,000 people recently participated in a global survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The results constitute the first publication of its Global Attitudes Project entitled “What the World Thinks in 2002.” The survey included the following question, posed only to Muslims:

Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?

Before we look at the results of this study, we should appreciate the significance of the juxtaposed phrases “suicide bombing” and “civilian targets.” We now live in a world in which Muslims have been scientifically polled (with margins of error ranging from 2 to 4 percent) as to whether they support (“often,” “sometimes,” “rarely,” or “never”) the deliberate murder and maiming of noncombatant men, women, and children in defense of Islam. Here are some of the results of the Pew study (not all percentages sum to 100):

SUICIDE BOMBING IN DEFENSE OF ISLAM

Justifiable?

YES    NO      DK/REFUSED 

Lebanon                     73        21        6

Ivory Coast                56        44        0

Nigeria                       47        45        8 

Bangladesh                44        37        19 

Jordan                        43        48        8 

Pakistan                     33        43        23

Mali                           32        57        11

Ghana                        30        57        12

Uganda                      29        63        8 

Senegal                      28        69        3 

Indonesia                   27        70        3

Turkey                       13        73        14 

If you do not find these numbers sufficiently disturbing, consider that places like Saudia Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories were not included in the survey. Had they been, it is safe to say, the Lebanese would have lost their place at the top of the list several times over. Suicide bombing also entails suicide, of course, which most Muslims believe is expressly forbidden by God. Consequently, had the question been “Is it ever justified to target civilians in defense of Islam,” we could expect even greater Muslim support for terrorism.

            But the Pew results are actually bleaker than the above table indicates.  A closer look at the data reveals that the pollsters skewed their results by binning their responses “rarely justified” and “never justified” together, thus giving a false sense of Muslim pacifism.  Take another look at the data from Jordan: 43% of Jordanians apparently favor terrorism, while 48% do not.  The problem is, however, that 22% of Jordanians actually responded “rarely justified,” and this accounts for nearly half of their “No” responses.  “Rarely justified” still means that under certain circumstances, these respondents would sanction the indiscriminate murder of noncombatants (plus suicide), not as an accidental by-product of a military operation but as its intended outcome.  A more accurate picture of Muslim tolerance for terrorism emerges when we focus upon the percentage of respondents who could not find it in their hearts to say “never justified” (leaving aside the many people who still lurk in the shadows of “Don’t Know/Refused”).  If we divide the data this way, the sun of modernity sets even further over the Muslim world:

SUICIDE BOMBINGS IN DEFENSE OF ISLAM

Is It Ever Justifiable

                                    YES    NO      DK/REFUSED

Lebanon                    82        12        6

Ivory Coast                73        27        0

Nigeria                       66        26        8

Jordan                        65        26        8

Bangladesh                58        23        19

Mali                           54        35        11

Senegal                      47        50        3

Ghana                        44        43        12

Indonesia                   43        54        3

Uganda                      40        52        8

Pakistan                     38        38        23

Turkey                       20        64        14

These are hideous numbers.  If all Muslims had responded as Turkey did (where a mere 4% think suicide bombings are “often” justified, 9% “sometimes,” and 7% “rarely”), we would still have a problem worth worrying about; we would, after all, be talking about more than 200 million avowed supporters of terrorism.  But Turkey is an island of ambassadorial goodwill compared with the rest of the Muslim world.

Let us imagine that peace one day comes to the Middle East.  What will Muslims say of the suicide bombings that they so widely endorsed?  Will they say, “We were driven mad by the Israeli occupation”?  Will they say, “We were a generation of sociopaths?” How will they account for the celebrations that followed these “sacred explosions?”  A young man, born into relative privilege, packs his clothing with explosives and ball bearings and unmakes himself along with a score of children in a discotheque, and his mother is promptly congratulated by hundreds of her neighbors.  What will the Palestinians think about such behavior once peace has been established?  If they are still devout Muslims, here is what the must think: “Our boys are in paradise, and they have prepared the way for us to follow.  Hell has been prepared for the infidels.” It seems to me to be an almost axiomatic truth of human nature that no peace, should it ever be established, will survive beliefs of this sort for very long. 

We must not overlook the fact that a significant percentage of the world’s Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God, amid “rivers of purest water, and rivers of milk forever fresh; rivers of wine delectable to those that drink it, and rivers of clearest honey” (47:15). These men—who slit the throats of stewardesses and delivered young couples with their children to their deaths at five hundred miles per hour—are at present being “attended by boys graced with eternal youth” in a “kingdom blissful and glorious.” They are “arrayed in garments of fine green silk and rich brocade, and adorned with bracelets of silver” (76:15). The list of their perquisites is long. But what is it that gets a martyr out of bed early on his last day among the living? Did any of the nineteen hijackers make haste to Allah’s garden simply to get his hands on his allotment of silk? It seems doubtful. The irony here is almost a miracle in its own right: the most sexually repressive people found in the world today—people who are stirred to a killing rage by reruns of Baywatch—are lured to martyrdom by a conception of paradise that resembles nothing so much as an al fresco bordello.

Apart from the terrible ethical consequences that follow from this style of otherworldliness, we should observe just how deeply implausible the Koranic paradise is. For a seventh-century prophet to say that paradise is a garden, complete with rivers of milk and honey, is rather like a twenty-first-century prophet’s saying that it is a gleaming city where every soul drives a new Lexus. A moment’s reflection should reveal that such pronouncements suggest nothing at all about the afterlife and much indeed about the limits of the human imagination. 

Jihad and the Power of the Atom

For devout Muslims, religious identity seems to trump all others. Despite the occasional influence of Pan-Arabism, the concept of an ethnic or national identity has never taken root in the Muslim world as it has in the West.  The widespread support for Saddam Hussein among Muslims, in response to the American attack upon Iraq, is as good a way as any of calibrating the reflexivity of Muslim Solidarity.  Saddam Hussein was, as both a secularist and a tyrant, widely despised in the Muslim world prior to the American invasion; and yet the reaction of most Muslims revealed that no matter what his crimes against the Iraqi people, against the Kuwaitis, and against the Iranians, the idea of an army of infidels occupying Baghdad simply could not be countenanced, no matter what the humanitarian purpose it might serve.  Saddam may have tortured and killed more Muslims than any person in living memory, but the Americans are the “enemies of God!”

It is important to keep the big picture in view, because the details, being absurd to an almost crystalline degree, are truly meaningless.  In our dialogue with the Muslim world, we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot even be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us.

It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher’s stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side.

The Clash

Samuel Huntington has famously described the conflict between Islam and the West as a “clash of civilizations.” Huntington observed that wherever Muslims and non-Muslims share a border, armed conflict tends to arise. Finding a felicitous phrase for an infelicitous fact, he declared that “Islam has bloody borders.” Many scholars have attacked Huntington’s thesis, however. Edward Said wrote that “a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization.” Said, for his part, maintained that the members of Al Qaeda are little more than “crazed fanatics” who, far from lending credence to Huntington’s thesis, should be grouped with the Branch Davidians, the disciples of the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana, and the cult of Aum Shinrikyo: “Huntington writes that the world’s billion or so Muslims are ‘convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.’ Did he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and fifty Bosnians? Even if he did, what sort of sample is that?” It is hard not to see this kind of criticism as disingenuous. Undoubtedly we should recognize the limits of generalizing about a culture, but the idea that Osama bin Laden is the Muslim equivalent of the Reverend Jim Jones is risible. Bin Laden has not, contrary to Said’s opinion on the matter, “become a vast, over-determined symbol of everything America hates and fears.” One need only read the Koran to know, with something approaching mathematical certainty, that all truly devout Muslims will be “convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power,” just as Huntington alleges. And this is all that his thesis requires. 

Whether or not one likes Huntington’s formulation, one thing is clear: the evil that has finally reached our shores is not merely the evil of terrorism. It is the evil of religious faith at the moment of its political ascendancy. Of course, Islam is not uniquely susceptible to undergoing such horrible transformations, though it is, at this moment in history, uniquely ascendant. Western leaders who insist that our conflict is not with Islam are mistaken; but, as I argue throughout this book, we have a problem with Christianity and Judaism as well. It is time we recognized that all reasonable men and women have a common enemy. It is an enemy so near to us, and so deceptive, that we keep its counsel even as it threatens to destroy the very possibility of human happiness. Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself. 

While it would be comforting to believe that our dialogue with the Muslim world has, as one of its possible outcomes, a future of mutual tolerance, nothing guarantees this result—least of all the tenets of Islam. Given the constraints of Muslim orthodoxy, given the penalties within Islam for a radical (and reasonable) adaptation to modernity, I think it is clear that Islam must find some way to revise itself, peacefully or otherwise. What this will mean is not at all obvious. What is obvious, however, is that the West must either win the argument or win the war. All else will be bondage.

The Riddle of Muslim “Humiliation”

Thomas Friedman, a tireless surveyor of the world’s discontents for the New York Times, has declared that Muslim “humiliation” is at the root of Muslim terrorism. Others have offered the same diagnosis, and Muslims themselves regularly assert that Western imperialism has offended their dignity, their pride, and their honor. What should we make of this? Can anyone point to a greater offender of Muslim dignity than Islamic law itself? For a modern example of the kind of society that can be fashioned out of an exclusive reliance upon the tenets of Islam, simply recall what Afghanistan was like under the Taliban. Who are those improbable creatures scurrying about in shrouds and being regularly beaten for showing an exposed ankle? Those were the dignified (and illiterate) women of the House of Islam.

Zakaria and many others have noted that as repressive as Arab dictators generally are, they tend to be more liberal than the people they oppress. The Saudi Prince Abdullah, for instance—a man who has by no means distinguished himself as a liberal —recently proposed that women should be permitted to drive automobiles in his country. As it turns out, his greatly oppressed people would not stand for this degree of spiritual oppression, and the prince was forced to back down. At this point in their history, give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedoms by the root. We should not for a moment lose sight of the possibility that they would curtail our freedoms as well, if they only had the power to do so. 

There is no doubt that our collusion with Muslim tyrants—in Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere—has been despicable. We have done nothing to discourage the mistreatment and outright slaughter of tens of thousands of Muslims by their own regimes—regimes that, in many cases, we helped bring to power. Our failure to support the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, which we encouraged, surely ranks among the most unethical and consequential foreign policy blunders of recent decades. But our culpability on this front must be bracketed by the understanding that were democracy to suddenly come to these countries, it would be little more than a gangplank to theocracy. There does not seem to be anything within the principles of Islam by which to resist the slide into sharia (Islamic law), while there is everything to encourage it. This is a terrible truth that we have to face: the only thing that currently stands between us and the roiling ocean of Muslim unreason is a wall of tyranny and human rights abuses that we have helped to erect. This situation must be remedied, but we cannot merely force Muslim dictators from power and open the polls. It would be like opening the polls to the Christians of the fourteenth century.

It is also true that poverty and lack of education play a role in all of this, but it is not a role that suggests easy remedies. The Arab world is now economically and intellectually stagnant to a degree that few could have thought possible, given its historical role in advancing and preserving human knowledge. In the year 2002 the GDP in all Arab countries combined did not equal that of Spain’s. Even more troubling, Spain translates as many books into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic since the ninth century. This degree of insularity and backwardness is shocking, but it should not lead us to believe that poverty and lack of education are the roots of the problem. That a generation of poor and illiterate children are being fed into the fundamentalist machinery of the madrassas (Saudi-financed religious schools) should surely terrify us. But Muslim terrorists have not tended to come from the ranks of the uneducated poor; many have been middle class, educated, and without any obvious dysfunction in their personal lives. As Zakaria points out, compared with the nineteen hijackers, John Walker Lindh (the young man from California who joined the Taliban) was “distinctly undereducated.” Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who organized the kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl studied at the London School of Economics. Hezbollah militants who die in violent operations are actually less likely to come from poor homes than their nonmilitant contemporaries and more likely to have a secondary school education. The leaders of Hamas are all college graduates, and some have master’s degrees. These facts suggest that even if every Muslim enjoyed a standard of living comparable to that of the average middle-class American, the West might still be in profound danger of colliding with Islam. I suspect that Muslim prosperity might even make matters worse, because the only thing that seems likely to persuade most Muslims that their worldview is problematic is the demonstrable failure of their societies. If Muslim orthodoxy were as economically and technologically viable as Western liberalism, we would probably be doomed to witness the Islamification of the earth.

As we see in the person of Osama bin Laden, a murderous religious fervor is compatible with wealth and education. Indeed, the technical proficiency of many Muslim terrorists demonstrates that it is compatible with a scientific education. That is why there is no cognitive or cultural substitute for desacralizing faith itself. As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on earth to live, we will continue to murder one another on account of our myths. In our dealings with the Muslim world, we must acknowledge that Muslims have not found anything of substance to say against the actions of the September 11 hijackers, apart from the ubiquitous canard that they were really Jews. Muslim discourse is currently a tissue of myths, conspiracy theories, and exhortations to recapture the glories of the seventh century. There is no reason to believe that economic and political improvements in the Muslim world, in and of itself, would remedy this.

The Danger of Wishful Thinking

Paul Berman has written a beautiful primer on totalitarianism—of the left and the right, East and West—and observed that it invariably contains a genocidal, and even suicidal, dimension. He notes that the twentieth century was a great incubator of “pathological mass movements”— political movements that “get drunk on the idea of slaughter.” He also points out that liberal thinkers are often unable to recognize these terrors for what they are. There is indeed a great tradition, in Berman’s phrase, of “liberalism as denial.” The French Socialists in the 1930s seem to have had a peculiar genius for this style of self-deception, for despite the billowing clouds of unreason wafting over from the East, they could not bring themselves to believe that the Nazis posed a problem worth taking seriously. In the face of the German menace, they simply blamed their own government and defense industry for warmongering. As Berman suggests, the same forces of wishful thinking and self-doubt have been gathering strength in the West in the aftermath of September 11. Because they assume that people everywhere are animated by the same desires and fears, many Western liberals now blame their own governments for the excesses of Muslim terrorists. Many suspect that we have somehow heaped this evil upon our own heads. Berman observes, for instance, that much of the world now blames Israel for the suicidal derangement of the Palestinians. Rather than being an expression of mere anti-Semitism (though it is surely this as well), this view is the product of a quaint moral logic: people are just people, so the thinking goes, and they do not behave that badly unless they have some very good reasons. The excesses of Palestinian suicide bombers, therefore, must attest to the excesses of the Israeli occupation. Berman points out that this sort of thinking has led the Israelis to be frequently likened to the Nazis in the European press. Needless to say, the comparison is grotesque. The truth is, as Dershowitz points out, that “no other nation in history faced with comparable challenges has ever adhered to a higher standard of human rights, been more sensitive to the safety of innocent civilians, tried harder to operate under the rule of law, or been willing to take more risks for peace.” The Israelis have shown a degree of restraint in their use of violence that the Nazis never contemplated and that, more to the point, no Muslim society would contemplate today. Ask yourself, what are the chances that the Palestinians would show the same restraint in killing Jews if the Jews were a powerless minority living under their occupation and disposed to acts of suicidal terrorism? It would be no more likely than Muhammad’s flying to heaven on a winged horse.

Berman also takes issue with Huntington’s thesis, however, in that the concept of a “civilization,” to his mind, fails to pick out the real variable at issue. Rather than a clash of civilizations, we have a “clash of ideologies,” between “liberalism and the apocalyptic and phantasmagorical movements that have risen up against liberal civilization ever since the calamities of the First World War.” The distinction appears valid, but unimportant. The problem is that certain of our beliefs cannot survive the proximity of certain others. War and conversation are our options, and nothing guarantees that we will always have a choice between them. 

Berman sums up our situation beautifully: 

What have we needed for these terrorists to prosper? We have needed immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world. We have needed an almost willful lack of curiosity about those failures by people in other parts of the world—the lack of curiosity that allowed us to suppose that totalitarianism had been defeated, even as totalitarianism was reaching a new zenith. We have needed handsome doses of wishful thinking—the kind of simpleminded faith in a rational world that, in its inability to comprehend reality, sparked the totalitarian movements in the first place…. We have needed a provincial ignorance about intellectual currents in other parts of the world. We have needed foolish resentments in Europe, and a foolish arrogance in America. We have needed so many things! But there has been no lack—every needed thing has been here in abundance.

But we have needed one more thing to bring us precisely to this moment. We have needed a religious doctrine, spread over much of the developing world, that makes sacraments of illiberalism, ignorance, and suicidal violence. Contrary to Berman’s analysis, Islamism is not merely the latest flavor of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their worldview has been transfigured by the light of paradise. Given what Islamists believe, it is perfectly rational for them to strangle modernity wherever they can lay hold of it. It is rational, even, for Muslim women to encourage the suicides of their children, as long as they are fighting for the cause of God. Devout Muslims simply know that they are going to a better place. God is both infinitely powerful and infinitely just. Why not, then, delight in the death throes of a sinful world? There are other ideologies with which to expunge the last vapors of reasonableness from a society’s discourse, but Islam is undoubtedly one of the best we’ve got.

 

SECULARISTS tend to argue that the role of Islam, or religion in general, is secondary to that of politics in determining the character of a society. On this account, people are motivated by their political interests first and find a religious rationale to suit the occasion. No doubt there are numerous examples of political leaders’ invoking religion for purely pragmatic, and even cynical, reasons (the tenure of Pakistan’s Zia ul-Haq seems a good example). But we should not draw the wrong lesson here. A lever works only if it is attached to something. Someone, after all, must believe in God, for talk of God to be politically efficacious. And I take it to be more or less self-evident that whenever large numbers of people begin turning themselves into bombs, or volunteer their children for use in the clearing of minefields (as was widespread in the Iran-Iraq war), the rationale behind their actions has ceased to be merely political. This is not to say that the aspiring martyr does not relish what he imagines will be the thunderous political significance of his final act, but unless a person believes some rather incredible things about this universe—in particular, about what happens after death—he is very unlikely to engage in behavior of this sort. Nothing explains the actions of Muslim extremists, and the widespread tolerance of their behavior in the Muslim world, better than the tenets of Islam.

Given what many Muslims believe, is genuine peace in this world possible? Is the relative weakness of Muslim states the only thing that prevents outright war between Islam and the West? I’m afraid that encouraging answers to such questions are hard to come by. The basis for liberalism in the doctrine of Islam seems meager to the point of being entirely illusory. Although we have seen that the Bible is itself a great reservoir of intolerance, for Christians and Jews alike—as everything from the writings of Augustine to the present actions of Israeli settlers demonstrates—it is not difficult to find great swaths of the Good Book, as well as Christian and Jewish exegesis, that offer counterarguments. The Christian who wants to live in the full presence of rationality and modernity can keep the Jesus of Matthew sermonizing upon the mount and simply ignore the world-consuming rigmarole of Revelation. Islam appears to offer no such refuge for one who would live peacefully in a pluralistic world. Of course, glimmers of hope can be found in even the shadiest of places: as Berman points out, the diatribes of Muslim orthodoxy are predicated upon the fear that Western liberalism is in the process of invading the Muslim mind and “stealing his loyalty”—indicating that Muslims, like other people, are susceptible to the siren’s song of liberalism. We must surely hope so. The character of their religious beliefs, however, suggests that they will be less susceptible than the rest of us.

For reasons we have already begun to explore, there is a deep bias in our discourse against conclusions of this sort. With respect to Islam, the liberal tendency is to blame the West for raising the ire of the Muslim world, through centuries of self-serving conquest and meddling, while conservatives tend to blame other contingent features of Middle East, Arab, or Muslim history. The problem seems to have been located everywhere except at the core of the Muslim faith—but faith is precisely what differentiates every Muslim from every infidel. Without faith, most Muslim grievances against the West would be impossible even to formulate, much less avenge.

Leftist Unreason and the Strange Case of Noam Chomsky

Nevertheless, many people are now convinced that the attacks of September 11 say little about Islam and much about the sordid career of the West—in particular, about the failures of U.S. foreign policy. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard gives these themes an especially luxuriant expression, declaring that terrorism is a necessary consequence of American “hegemony.” He goes so far as to suggest that we were secretly hoping that such devastation would be visited upon us:

At a pinch we can say that they did it, but we wished for it…. When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer. It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this brutal retaliation…. This is terror against terror—there is no longer any ideology behind it. We are far beyond ideology and politics now…. As if the power bearing these towers suddenly lost all energy, all resilience; as though that arrogant power suddenly gave way under the pressure of too intense an effort: the effort always to be the unique world model.

If one were feeling charitable, one might assume that something essential to these profundities got lost in translation. I think it far more likely, however, that it did not survive translation into French. If Baudrillard had been obliged to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban, would he have thought that the horrible abridgments of his freedom were a matter of the United States’ “effort always to be the unique world model?” Would the peculiar halftime entertainment at every soccer match—where suspected fornicators, adulterers, and thieves were regularly butchered in the dirt at centerfield—have struck him as the first rumblings of a “terroristic situational transfer?” We may be beyond politics, but we are not in the least “beyond ideology” now. Ideology is all that our enemies have.

And yet, thinkers far more sober than Baudrillard view the events of September 11 as a consequence of American foreign policy. Perhaps the foremost among them is Noam Chomsky. In addition to making foundational contributions to linguistics and the psychology of language, Chomsky has been a persistent critic of U.S. foreign policy for over three decades. He has also managed to demonstrate a principal failing of the liberal critique of power. He appears to be an exquisitely moral man whose political views prevent him from making the most basic moral distinctions—between types of violence, and the variety of human purposes that give rise to them. 

In his book 9-11, with rubble of the World Trade Center still piled high and smoldering, Chomsky urged us not to forget that “the U.S. itself is a leading terrorist state.” In support of this claim he catalogs a number of American misdeeds, including the sanctions that the United States imposed upon Iraq, which led to the death of “maybe half a million children,” and the 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant in Sudan, which may have set the stage for tens of thousands of innocent Sudanese to die of tuberculosis, malaria, and other treatable diseases. Chomsky does not hesitate to draw moral equivalences here: “For the first time in modern history, Europe and its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of atrocity that they routinely have carried out elsewhere.”

Before pointing out just how wayward Chomsky’s thinking is on this subject, I would like to concede many of his points, since they have the virtue of being both generally important and irrelevant to the matter at hand. There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad. In this respect, we can more or less swallow Chomsky’s thesis whole. To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.

  

We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds over the years has undermined our credibility in the international community. We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky’s acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness.

Take the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant: according to Chomsky, the atrocity of September 11 pales in comparison with that perpetrated by the Clinton administration in August 1998. But let us now ask some very basic questions that Chomsky seems to have neglected to ask himself: What did the U.S. government think it was doing when it sent cruise missiles into Sudan? Destroying a chemical weapons site used by Al Qaeda. Did the Clinton administration intend to bring about the deaths of thousands of Sudanese children? No. Was our goal to kill as many Sudanese as we could? No. Were we trying to kill anyone at all? Not unless we thought members of Al Qaeda would be at the Al-Shifa facility in the middle of the night. Asking these questions about Osama bin Laden and the nineteen hijackers puts us in a different moral universe entirely. 

If we are inclined to follow Chomsky down the path of moral equivalence and ignore the role of human intentions, we can forget about the bombing of the Al-Shifa plant, because many of the things we did not do in Sudan had even greater consequences. What about all the money and food we simply never thought to give the Sudanese prior to 1998? How many children did we kill (that is, not save) just by living in blissful ignorance of the conditions in Sudan? Surely if we had all made it a priority to keep death out of Sudan for as long as possible, untold millions could have been saved from whatever it was that wound up killing them. We could have sent teams of well-intentioned men and women into Khartoum to ensure that the Sudanese wore their seatbelts. Are we culpable for all the preventable injury and death that we did nothing to prevent? We may be, up to a point. The philosopher Peter Unger has made a persuasive case that a single dollar spent on anything but the absolute essentials of our survival is a dollar that has some starving child’s blood on it. Perhaps we do have far more moral responsibility for the state of the world than most of us seem ready to contemplate. This is not Chomsky’s argument, however. 

Anudhati Roy, a great admirer of Chomsky, has summed up his position very well: 

[T]he U.S. government refuses to judge itself by the same moral standards by which it judges others…. Its technique is to position itself as the well-­intentioned giant whose good deeds are confounded in strange countries by their scheming natives, whose markets it’s trying to free, whose societies it’s trying to modernize, whose women it’s trying to liberate, whose souls it’s trying to save…. [T]he U.S. government has conferred upon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people “for their own good.”

But we are, in many respects, just such a “well-intentioned giant.” And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky and Roy, fail to see this. What we need to counter their arguments is a device that enables us to distinguish the morality of men like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush and Tony Blair. It is not hard to imagine the properties of such a tool. We can call it “the perfect weapon.” 

Perfect Weapons and the Ethics of “Collateral Damage”

What we euphemistically describe as “collateral damage” in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons—weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their property. What would we do with such technology? Pacifists would refuse to use it, despite the variety of monsters currently loose in the world: the killers and torturers of children, the genocidal sadists, the men who, for want of the right genes, the right upbringing, or the right ideas, cannot possibly be expected to live peacefully with the rest of us. I will say a few things about pacifism in a later chapter—for it seems to me to be a deeply immoral position that comes to us swaddled in the dogma of highest moralism—but most of us are not pacifists. Most of us would elect to use weapons of this sort. A moment’s thought reveals that a person’s use of such a weapon would offer a perfect window onto the soul of his ethics.

 

Consider the all too facile comparisons that have recently been made between George Bush and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin Laden, or Hitler, etc.)—in the pages of writers like Roy and Chomsky, in the Arab press, and in classrooms throughout the free world. How would George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons? Would he have targeted the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs? Would he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers? Whether or not you admire the man’s politics—or the man—there is no reason to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have done? They would have used them rather differently.

It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources. We might even conceive of our moral differences in just these terms: not all societies have the same degree of moral wealth. Many things contribute to such an endowment. Political and economic stability, literacy, a modicum of social equality—where such things are lacking, people tend to find many compelling reasons to treat one another rather badly. Our recent history offers much evidence of our own development on these fronts, and a corresponding change in our morality. A visit to New York in the summer of 1863 would have found the streets ruled by roving gangs of thugs; blacks, where not owned outright by white slaveholders, were regularly lynched and burned. Is there any doubt that many New Yorkers of the nineteenth century were barbarians by our present standards? To say of another culture that it lags a hundred and fifty years behind our own in social development is a terrible criticism indeed, given how far we’ve come in that time. Now imagine the benighted Americans of 1863 coming to possess chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. This is more or less the situation we confront in much of the developing world.

Consider the horrors that Americans perpetrated as recently as 1968, at My Lai: 

Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by helicopter. Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and animals. There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired at Charlie Company all day, but they carried on. They burnt down every house. They raped women and girls and then killed them. They stabbed some women in the vagina and  disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps. Pregnant women had their stomachs slashed open and were left to die. There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women and children, were machine-gunned in a ditch. In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed.

This is about as bad as human beings are capable of behaving. But what distinguishes us from many of our enemies is that this indiscriminate violence appalls us. The massacre at My Lai is remembered as a signature moment of shame for the American military. Even at the time, U.S. soldiers were dumbstruck with horror by the behavior of their comrades. One helicopter pilot who arrived on the scene ordered his subordinates to use their machine guns against their own troops if they would not stop killing villagers. As a culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not. 

Wherever there are facts of any kind to be known, one thing is certain: not all people will discover them at the same time or understand them equally well. Conceding this leaves but a short step to hierarchical thinking of a sort that is at present inadmissible in most liberal discourse. Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions, there will be better or worse ways to get those answers, and better or worse ways to put them to use. Take child rearing as an example: How can we keep children free from disease? How can we raise them to be happy and responsible members of society? There are undoubtedly both good and bad answers to questions of this sort, and not all belief systems and cultural practices will be equally suited to bringing the good ones to light. This is not to say that there will always be only one right answer to every question, or a single, best way to reach every specific goal. But given the inescapable specificity of our world, the range of optimal solutions to any problem will generally be quite limited. While there might not be one best food to eat, we cannot eat stones—and any culture that would make stone eating a virtue, or a religious precept, will suffer mightily for want of nourishment (and teeth). It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of “better” we might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very real differences in human happiness. 

Any systematic approach to ethics, or to understanding the necessary underpinnings of a civil society, will find many Muslims standing eye deep in the red barbarity of the fourteenth century. There are undoubtedly historical and cultural reasons for this, and enough blame to go around, but we should not ignore the fact that we must now confront whole societies whose moral and political development—in their treatment of women and children, in their prosecution of war, in their approach to criminal justice, and in their very intuitions about what constitutes cruelty—lags behind our own. This may seem like an unscientific and potentially racist thing to say, but it is neither. It is not in the least racist, since it is not at all likely that there are biological reasons for the disparities here, and it is unscientific only because science has not yet addressed the moral sphere in a systematic way. Come back in a hundred years, and if we haven’t returned to living in caves and killing one another with clubs, we will have some scientifically astute things to say about ethics. Any honest witness to current events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim governments. Chomsky seems to think that the disparity either does not exist or runs the other way.

Consider the recent conflict in Iraq: If the situation had been reversed, what are the chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualties? What are the chances that Iraqi forces would have been deterred by our use of human shields? (What are the chances we would have used human shields?) What are the chances that a routed American government would have called for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide bombers? What are the chances that Iraqi soldiers would have wept upon killing a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint unnecessarily? You should have, in the ledger of your imagination, a mounting column of zeros.

Nothing in Chomsky’s account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this “terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this “collateral damage”). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could hardly be more distinct. 

Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life of a child in jeopardy is unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a principle we can follow. The makers of roller coasters know, for instance, that despite rigorous safety precautions, sometime, somewhere, a child will be killed by one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know this as well. So do makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags, swimming pools, chain-link fences, or nearly anything else that could conceivably contribute to the death of a child. There is a reason we do not refer to the inevitable deaths of children on our ski slopes as “skiing atrocities.” But you would not know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.

We are now living in a world that can no longer tolerate well-armed, malevolent regimes. Without perfect weapons, collateral damage—the maiming and killing of innocent people—is unavoidable. Similar suffering will be imposed on still more innocent people because of our lack of perfect automobiles, airplanes, antibiotics, surgical procedures, and window glass. If we want to draw conclusions about ethics—as well as make predictions about what a given person or society will do in the future—we cannot ignore human intentions. Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.

A Waste of Precious Resources

Many commentators on the Middle East have suggested that the problem of Muslim terrorism cannot be reduced to what religious Muslims believe. Zakaria has written that the roots of Muslim violence lie not in Islam but in the recent history of the Arab Middle East. He points out that a mere fifty years ago, the Arab world stood on the cusp of modernity and then, tragically, fell backward. The true cause of terrorism, therefore, is simply the tyranny under which most Arabs have lived ever since. The problem, as Zakaria puts it, “is wealth, not poverty.” The ability to pull money straight out of the ground has led Arab governments to be entirely unresponsive to the concerns of their people. As it turns out, not needing to collect taxes is highly corrupting of state power. The  result is just what we see—rich, repressive regimes built upon political and economic swampland. Little good is achieved for the forces of modernity when its mere products—fast food, television, and advanced weaponry—are hurled into the swamp as well. 

According to Zakaria, “if there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world.” Perhaps. But “the rise of Islamic fundamentalism” is only a problem because the fundamentals of Islam are a problem. A rise of Jain fundamentalism would endanger no one. In fact, the uncontrollable spread of Jainism throughout the world would improve our situation immensely. We would lose more of our crops to pests, perhaps (observant Jains generally will not kill anything, including insects), but we would not find ourselves surrounded by suicidal terrorists or by a civilization that widely condones their actions. 

Zakaria points out that Islam is actually notably antiauthoritarian, since obedience to a ruler is necessary only if he rules in accordance with God’s law. But, as we have seen, few formulas for tyranny are more potent than obedience to “God’s law.” Still, Zakaria thinks that any emphasis on religious reform is misplaced: 

The truth is that little is to be gained by searching the Quran for clues to Islam’s true nature…. The trouble with thundering declarations about “Islam’s nature” is that Islam, like any religion, is not what books make it but what people make it. Forget the rantings of fundamentalists, who are a minority. Most Muslims’ daily lives do not confirm the idea of a faith that is intrinsically anti-Western or anti-modern.

According to Zakaria, the key to Arab redemption is to modernize politically, economically, and socially—and this will force Islam to follow along the path to liberalism, as Christianity has in the West. As evidence for this, he observes that millions of Muslims live in the United States, Canada, and Europe and “have found ways of being devout without being obscurantist, and pious without embracing fury.” There may be some truth to this, though, as we have seen, Zakaria ignores some troubling details. If, as I contend  throughout this book, all that is good in religion can be had elsewhere—if, for instance, ethical and spiritual experience can be cultivated and talked about without our claiming to know things we manifestly do not know—then all the rest of our religious activity represents, at best, a massive waste of time and energy. Think of all the good things human beings will not do in this world tomorrow because they believe that their most pressing task is to build another church or mosque, or to enforce some ancient dietary practice, or to print volumes upon volumes of exegesis on the disordered thinking of ignorant men. How many hours of human labor will be devoured, today, by an imaginary God? Think of it: if a computer virus shuts down a nation’s phone system for five minutes, the loss in human productivity is measured in billions of dollars. Religious faith has crashed our lines daily, for millennia. I’m not suggesting that the value of every human action should be measured in terms of productivity. Indeed, much of what we do would wither under such an analysis. But we should still recognize what a fathomless sink for human resources (both financial and attentional) organized religion is. Witness the rebuilding of Iraq: What was the first thing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shiites thought to do upon their liberation? Flagellate themselves. Blood poured from their scalps and backs as they walked miles of cratered streets and filth-strewn alleys to converge on the holy city Karbala, home to the tomb of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet. Ask yourself whether this was really the best use of their time. Their society was in tatters. Fresh water and electricity were scarce. Their schools and hospitals were being looted. And an occupying army was trying to find reasonable people with whom to collaborate to form a civil society. Self-mortification and chanting should have been rather low on their list of priorities.

But the problem of religion is not merely that it competes for time and resources. While Zakaria is right to observe that faith has grown rather tame in the West—and this is undoubtedly a good thing—he neglects to notice that it still has very long claws. As we will see in the next chapter, even the most docile forms of Christianity currently present insuperable obstacles to AIDS prevention and family planning in the developing world, to medical research, and to the development of a rational drug policy—and these contributions to human misery alone constitute some of the most appalling failures of reasonableness in any age.

What Can We Do?

In thinking about Islam, and about the risk it now poses to the West, we should imagine what it would take to live peacefully with the Christians of the fourteenth century—Christians who were still eager to prosecute people for crimes like host desecration and witchcraft. We are in the presence of the past. It is by no means a straightforward task to engage such people in constructive dialogue, to convince them of our common interests, to encourage them on the path to democracy, and to mutually celebrate the diversity of our cultures.

It is clear that we have arrived at a period in our history where civil society, on a global scale, is not merely a nice idea; it is essential for the maintenance of civilization. Given that even failed states now possess potentially disruptive technology, we can no longer afford to live side by side with malign dictatorships or with the armies of ignorance massing across the oceans.

What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence. If you live in a land where certain things cannot be said about the king, or about an imaginary being, or about certain books, because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or imprisonment, you do not live in a civil society. It appears that one of the most urgent tasks we now face in the developed world is to find some way of facilitating the emergence of civil societies everywhere else. Whether such societies have to be democratic is not at all clear. Zakaria has persuasively argued that the transition from tyranny to liberalism is unlikely to be accomplished by plebiscite. It seems all but certain that some form of benign dictatorship will generally be necessary to bridge the gap. But benignity is the key—and if it cannot emerge from within a state, it must be imposed from without. The means of such imposition are necessarily crude: they amount to economic isolation, military intervention (whether open or covert), or some combination of both. While this may seem an exceedingly arrogant doctrine to espouse, it appears we have no alternatives. We cannot wait for weapons of mass destruction to dribble out of the former Soviet Union—to pick only one horrible possibility—and into the hands of fanatics. 

We should, I think, look upon modern despotisms as hostage crises. Kim Jong Il has thirty million hostages. Saddam Hussein had twenty-five million. The clerics in Iran have seventy million more. It does not matter that many hostages have been so brainwashed that they will fight their would-be liberators to the death. They are held prisoner twice over—by tyranny and by their own ignorance. The developed world must, somehow, come to their rescue. Jonathan Glover seems right to suggest that we need “something along the lines of a strong and properly funded permanent UN force, together with clear criteria for intervention and an international court to authorize it.” We can say it even more simply: we need a world government. How else will a war between the United States and China ever become as unlikely as a war between Texas and Vermont? We are a very long way from even thinking about the possibility of a world government, to say nothing of creating one. It would require a degree of economic, cultural, and moral integration that we may never achieve. The diversity of our religious beliefs constitutes a primary obstacle here. Given what most of us believe about God, it is at present unthinkable that human beings will ever identify themselves merely as human beings, disavowing all lesser affiliations. World government does seem a long way off—so long that we may not survive the trip.

Is Islam compatible with a civil society? Is it possible to believe what you must believe to be a good Muslim, to have military and economic power, and to not pose an unconscionable threat to the civil societies of others? I believe that the answer to this question is no. If a stable peace is ever to be achieved between Islam and the West, Islam must undergo a radical transformation. This transformation, to be palatable to Muslims, must also appear to come from Muslims themselves. It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that the fate of civilization lies largely in the hands of “moderate” Muslims. Unless Muslims can reshape their religion into an ideology that is basically benign—or outgrow it altogether—it is difficult to see how Islam and the West can avoid falling into a continual state of war, and on innumerable fronts. Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons cannot be uninvented. As Martin Rees points out, there is no reason to expect that we will be any more successful at stopping their proliferation, in small quantities, than we have been with respect to illegal drugs. If this is true, weapons of mass destruction will soon be available to anyone who wants them. 

Perhaps the West will be able to facilitate a transformation of the Muslim world by applying outside pressure. It will not be enough, however, for the United States and a few European countries to take a hard line while the rest of Europe and Asia sell advanced weaponry and “dual-use” nuclear reactors to all comers. To achieve the necessary economic leverage, so that we stand a chance of waging this war of ideas by peaceful means, the development of alternative energy technologies should become the object of a new Manhattan Project. There are, needless to say, sufficient economic and environmental justifications for doing this, but there are political ones as well. If oil were to become worthless, the dysfunction of the most prominent Muslim societies would suddenly grow as conspicuous as the sun. Muslims might then come to see the wisdom of moderating their thinking on a wide variety of subjects. Otherwise, we will be obliged to protect our interests in the world with force—continually. In this case, it seems all but certain that our newspapers will begin to read more and more like the book of Revelation.