Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (5 page)

There is reason to be hugely skeptical of claims that describe
civilizations discretely and identify civilizational histories with particular geographies and polities. One has to distinguish between civilization and power. The very notion of an uninterrupted “Western civilization” across linear time is an idea that only arises from the vantage point of the power we know as the West. This power has both a geography and a history: that history stretches from 1492 through the centuries of the slave trade and colonization to the Cold War and after.

Like the history of Western civilization, the history of Arabs is linked to particular political agendas. At times, such a history doubles as a history of “Islam,” just as the history of “the West” often doubles as the history of “Christianity.” Here, too, the tendency is for cultural identities to get politicized and to take on identities defined by the law.

In its North African colonies, France drew a legal distinction between “Berber” and “Arab.” By governing “Berbers” with a “customary law”
(dahir)
and “Arabs” with a religious law, they turned “Berber” and “Arab” into mutually exclusive identities, first legal, then political. The nationalist response was in reality a backlash that reified the identity “Arab,” so much so that simply “to acknowledge any distinction between Arabs and Berbers was to risk associating oneself with the French colonial attempt to divide the nation into ethnic enclaves.” This response turned the politically charged world of Orientalist culture upside down but failed to change it.

Not surprisingly, who is a Berber and who is not—and what percent of Morocco’s population is Berber today—is now a profoundly political question. How else are we to understand wildly differing estimates of Berbers in the Moroccan population, from the BBC’s claim of “more than 60%” to estimates of “less than 45%” by Berber scholar Fatima Sadiqi and “about 40%” by
activist-scholar Salem Chaker? One problem with equating political identities and cultural ones is that everything becomes too one-dimensional. Cultural developments that are amalgams are given one identity, Arab, as if springing from a single fountainhead. Arabic-speaking North African Berbers thus become “Arabs” and so the conquest of Spain by mainly Berber dynasties from Senegambia, becomes an “Arab” conquest.

Conventional Arab civilizational history has been most effectively questioned by Africans themselves. In 1972, the Sudanese civil war—already the longest civil war in the history of postcolonial Africa—was the subject of a negotiated settlement in Addis Ababa. All those involved in the civil war—the power in the north, the rebels in the south, and the range of foreign states and interests that lined up behind either side—agreed that the civil war had pitted “Arabs” in the north against “Africans” in the south. The presumption that the political adversaries represented two distinct cultural identitites, “Arab” and “African,” was challenged by a group of northern and southern Sudanese intellectuals who came to control the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when a coalition government came to power. In a book written in 1973 and presented to the Organization of African Unity (OAU) at its tenth anniversary, they put forth a radically different perspective on the history of Sudan, one that distinguished its cultural from its political history. The fact that the power that came to rule Sudan after the fifteenth century defined itself as “Arab” was no reason to identify the culture of the period as “Arab.” Those who did so assumed that the Sudanese culture was a result of a one-sided assimilation and deracination of native Sudanese to foreign Arab. Instead, the authors argued that the complexity of this culture could best be understood as the outcome of a many-sided “integration” of its multiple and different ingredients:

Afro-Arab integration in the North tended to be referred to as Arabization. To the extent that Arab symbols of identification, especially their language and religion, have been highlighted over and above their African equivalents, this characterization may be justified, but the process involved more give-and-take than the term “Arabization” would adequately reflect. A significant degree of Africanization of the Arab element also took place.

The point is that even if political identities are singular, cultural identities tend to be cumulative.

Identities shift and histories get rewritten as a result of changing political agendas. The aftermath of civil conflicts often presents us with conflicting histories, each representing the point of view of a contending power in an unstable political context. Wherever adversaries resolve to live together in a single political community—as did Arab and African in 1972 Sudan, Hutu and Tutsi in postgenocide Rwanda, or black and white in postapartheid South Africa—an acute need for a new history is felt. Not surprisingly, none of these places has such a readily available history.

The history of “the West” also underwent a fundamental revision in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In post-Holocaust history Judaism has been recast and the Jewish people have gone from being a prominent other who lived inside Europe to being an integral part of Europe. Contrast the post-Holocaust notion of “Judeo-Christian” civilization with pre-Holocaust notions, equally entrenched, about a Christian civilization that had excluded European Jews. This, for example, is how the nineteenth-century French philologist Ernest Renan distinguished Semites from Caucasians:

One sees that in all things the Semitic race appears to us to be an incomplete race, by virtue of its simplicity. This race—if I dare use the analogy—is to the Indo-European family what a pencil sketch is to painting; it lacks that variety, that amplitude, that abundance of life which is the condition of perfectibility. Like those individuals who possess so little fecundity that, after a gracious childhood, they attain only the most mediocre virility, the Semitic nations experienced their fullest flowering in their first age and have never been able to achieve true maturity.

The shift of perspective after the Second World War that relocated Judaism and Jews to the heart of Western history and Western civilization signifies no less than a sea change in consciousness. The notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization crystallized as a post-Holocaust antidote to anti-Semitism. In the same way, I propose to distinguish between fundamentalism as a religious identity and political identities that use a religious idiom, such as political Christianity and political Islam, which are political identities formed through direct engagement with modern forms of power.

Modernity, Fundamentalism, and Political Islam

“Fundamentalism” is, in fact, a term invented in 1920s Protestant circles in the United States. Like conservatism, fundamentalism is a latecomer on the scene. Just as conservatism was a political response to the French Revolution and not a throwback to premodern times, fundamentalism, too, was a reaction within religion to its changing political circumstances. There is a difference between Christian fundamentalism, which emerged in the 1920s in America, and political Christianity, a phenomenon that arose in America after the Second World War.

To speak of fundamentalist Islam, at least in the case of mainstream
Sunni Islam, is misleading. Since mainstream Islam did not develop a religious hierarchy parallel to a secular state hierarchy, as historical Christianity did, it lacks the problem of secularism. “Fundamentalism” can be applied to those forms of Shi’a Islam that have indeed developed a religious hierarchy. When this book focuses on political movements that speak the language of religion, they will be referred to as political Islam and not Islamic fundamentalism.

This book will also question those writers who speak of “religious fundamentalism” as a political category and associate it with “political terrorism.” “Fundamentalism” as a religious phenomenon has to be distinguished from those political developments that are best described as political Christianity and political Islam. Religious “fundamentalism” is akin to a countercultural, not a political, movement. The problem with using the term “fundamentalism” to describe all such movements is that it tends to equate movements forged in radically different historical and political contexts, and obscures their doctrinal differences, including the place of violence in religious doctrine. This is why after explaining the historical context in which Christian “fundamentalism” emerged, and distinguishing it from political Christianity, I won’t use the term “fundamentalism” to describe countercultural movements inside Islam or other religions. And I question the widespread assumption that every political movement which speaks the language of religion is potentially terrorist.

The clue to the nature of a political movement lies not in it’s language but in its agenda. Just as the onset of political Christianity after the Second World War in America produced movements as diverse as the civil-rights and the Christian-right movements, so did the onset of political Islam during the Cold War give rise to movements with diverse, even contradictory, political agendas.
Moderate movements organize and agitate for social reform within the existing political context. Radical movements organize to win state power, having concluded that the existing political situation is the main obstacle to social reform. There are two kinds of radical movements, society-centered and state-centered: whereas society-centered radicals link the problem of democracy in society with the state, state-centered radicals pose the problem of the state at the expense of democracy in society. It is state-centered political Islam that has been the harbinger of Islamist political terror.

Christian Fundamentalism and Political Christianity

The term “fundamentalism” was invented in 1920 by the Rev. Curtis Lee Laws and was immediately taken up as an honorific by his Baptist and Presbyterian colleagues who swore to do “battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith.” Karen Armstrong has located this phenomenon in a rapidly growing set of American debates over the validity of biblical literalism then being taken up by the increasingly powerful and entrenched conservative Republicans who supported it. In 1910, the Presbyterians of Princeton defined a set of five dogmas standing for the infallibility of Scripture: (1) the inerrancy of Scripture, (2) the virgin birth of Christ, (3) Christ’s atonement for our sins on the cross, (4) his bodily resurrection, and (5) the objective reality of his miracles. Between 1910 and 1915, they issued a series of twelve paperback pamphlets called
The Fundamentals
, dispatching some three million copies to every pastor, professor, and theology student in America. Their next step was to try to expel liberals; the fiercest institutional battles were fought where fundamentalists were the strongest, among Baptists and Presbyterians.

Karen Armstrong concludes her historical discussion of fundamentalism with the observation that fundamentalism is not a throwback to a premodern culture but a response to an
enforced
secular modernity. In other words, there would be no fundamentalism without modernity. Furthermore, fundamentalism emerged as a struggle inside religion, not between religions, as a critique of liberal forms of religion that religious conservatives saw as accommodating an aggressive secular power.

Begun in the late nineteenth century, these debates rapidly turned into contests for power and influence across the institutional landscape of America, in universities and public schools, seminaries and churches, elections and the press, courts and legislatures. The outcome was mixed and unstable: fundamentalists won partial legislative victories in several states. Then they won a full victory in 1925 when the Tennessee legislature passed a law that made it a crime to teach evolution in state-funded schools. A few months later, the law was challenged in court when a young biology teacher, John T. Scopes—having decided to strike a blow for free speech against religious convention—confessed that he had broken the law when substituting for his school principal in a biology class.

Brought to trial in July 1925, Scopes was defended by the great rationalist lawyer Clarence Darrow, sent by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). On the side of the law was the well-known Democratic politician and Presbyterian leader William Jennings Bryan, who had already launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools. The Scopes trial not only invoked important principles of liberal democracy against one another, it also made for a public debate on the dichotomy in modern Western thinking. If Darrow claimed to stand for free speech, Bryan championed “common sense” as understood by ordinary people. If Darrow stood for progress, Bryan contended that there was a link between
Darwinist theories of progress and the German militarism that had surfaced in the carnage of the First World War. Known for the lecture with which he had toured the United States, “The Menace of Darwinism,” Bryan argued that the notion that the strong could or should survive had “laid the foundation for the bloodiest war in history.” He warned that “the same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brutal ancestry” and is “eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible.” In the final analysis, though, the trial provided a public spectacle of a historic “contest between God and Science.”

Put on the stand by Darrow, Bryan was forced to concede that a literal interpretation of the Bible—holding, for example, that the world was six thousand years old and created in six days—was not possible. Bryan was ridiculed publicly and died a few days after the trial, and Darrow emerged “the hero of clear rational thought.” Even though the fundamentalists won the legal battle, they lost the cultural one. Susan Harding, writing in
The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics
, comments on how the triumph of modernism at the same time involved a caricature of “fundamentalism”:

The modern point of view in America emerged in part from its caricature of conservative Protestants as Fundamentalists. They were the “them” who enabled the modern “us”. You cannot reason with them. They actually believe the Bible is literally true. They are clinging to traditions. They are reacting against rapid social change. They cannot survive in a modern world…. Before the Scopes trial, it was unclear which of the opposed terms, Fundamentalist or Modern, would be the winner and which the loser, which was superior and which was inferior, which term represented the universal and the future and which the residual, that which was passing away.