Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (6 page)

Derided as fundamentalists, conservative Protestants were humiliated by the outcome of the Scopes trial, which marked the beginning of their exile from American public life. Leaving their denominations, they founded new organizations. They disavowed social reform, as they did all modern forms of sociability. The fundamentalist counterculture was typified by Bob Jones University, founded in 1927. The founder, Bob Jones, was no intellectual, but an evangelist who wanted a “safe” school, that taught liberal arts alongside “commonsense Christianity”—at least one Bible course a semester, compulsory chapel attendance, strict social rules that banned interracial dating on campus, and a code of conduct that defined disobedience and disloyalty as “unpardonable sins.” Bob Jones University decided not to seek academic accreditation, thereby retaining tighter control over admissions, curriculum, and library resources. By their actions, if not by admission, they seemed to accept the secular caricature of religious conservatives as fundamentalists stuck in time, as premodern people unfit for modern cultural and political life in a secular America.

It took three decades for religious conservatives to return to public life, and that return happened in two separate but connected waves. The first wave followed the Second World War and was spearheaded by “evangelicals” who renounced the separatism championed by fundamentalists, arguing that “the duty of saving souls in this rotten civilization demanded some degree of cooperation with other Christians, whatever their beliefs.” The founding act of the evangelical movement was the formation in 1942 of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), a public lobby on a
par with the National Council of Churches, which was affiliated with the Liberal World Council of Churches. With the arrival of television in the 1950s, young “televangelists” such as Billy Graham, Rex Humbard, and Oral Roberts replaced old traveling revivalist preachers and formed their own broadcasting empires and publishing houses. Televangelists started the national “prayer breakfast movement” that “rapidly gathered members of Congress and preachers, and evangelist Billy Graham became the spiritual counselor of choice for the post-war generation of U.S. presidents.”

The second wave came on the heels of
Roe v. Wade
, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed abortion as a woman’s right, which religious conservatives saw as a historic defeat. Taking a cue from southern black churches, which had dramatically and successfully entered public life at the helm of the civil-rights movement, fundamentalists resolved to shed the mainstream moderation of evangelicals for an equally bold leadership. Speaking on the “Nebraska tragedy” at a 1982 conference, Jerry Falwell challenged the new Christian right to breach the line of separation between religion and politics and to muster the “kind of backbone to stand up for their freedom that Civil Rights people had.”

Their quarantine had lasted nearly half a century. The return of “fundamentalism” to American public life was unabashedly political and was at first associated with mass mobilization of white Protestant Christians. The movement’s most visible leaders were national televangelists—Jerry Falwell, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker—who were also key in forming organizations with an explicitly political agenda: the Moral Majority, the Religious Round-table, and Christian Voice. When Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, he “rode piggyback on networks of fundamentalist Baptist churches.” He called on Christians to change history.
The idea that “religion and politics don’t mix,” he said, “was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.” As conservative Protestants rushed into the Moral Majority, they “tore up a tacit contract with modern America” not to mix Bible-believing Protestant rhetoric with day-to-day politics. Falwell’s Moral Majority sermons were known as jeremiads. Named after Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet, a jeremiad “laments the moral condition of a people, foresees cataclysmic consequences, and calls for dramatic moral reform and revival.” In his jeremiads, Jerry Falwell defined abortion as “the biological holocaust,” AIDS as “a judgment of God against America for endorsing immorality,” and “God’s absolute opposition to abortion and homosexuality” as part of the “litmus tests of Bible truth.”

Protestant fundamentalists had several victories in the last decades of the twentieth century. They were able to make sure that Arkansas and Louisiana passed bills to ensure that equal time was given in the school curriculum to the literal teaching of Genesis alongside Darwinian evolution. Their most notable achievement, though, was the blocking of the Equal Rights Amendment. Phyllis Schlafly, a Roman Catholic leader whose “Eagle Forum” often held joint events with the Moral Majority, chastised feminism as a “disease,” the cause of the world’s illness. Ever since Eve disobeyed God and sought her own liberation, she said, feminism had brought sin into the world and with it “fear, sickness, pain, anger, hatred, danger, violence, and all varieties of ugliness.” Though thirty of thirty-two required states had voted for the Equal Rights Amendment by 1973, Christian right activists were able to halt its momentum: Nebraska, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and South Dakota all reversed their previous votes for the amendment.

As early as the mid-1970s, George Gallup, Jr., had polled Americans about their religious views and found that more than
one third—that is, more than fifty million adult Americans—described themselves as “born again,” defined as having experienced “a turning point in your life when you committed yourself to Jesus Christ.” Jimmy Carter was America’s first “born-again” president. Ronald Reagan was the second, and George W. Bush is the third. Presidential candidate Reagan embraced the Christian right publicly when he spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in 1980, hosted that year by Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church. Later that year, the Christian right organized a march of several hundred thousand born-again Christians on the Washington Mall for a “Washington for Jesus” rally. Three years later, Reagan boldly introduced the language of self-righteousness, of “good” and “evil,” to American postwar politics when he told the NAE that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.” By the time of the 1992 Republican national convention in Houston, the religious right showed strong evidence of having consolidated its electoral strength. The party platform included two new planks: one unequivocally opposed abortion under any circumstance, the other denounced the Democrats’ support for gay-rights legislation. In his speech on the opening night of the convention, Patrick Buchanan warned of a coming “religious war” that would plague the United States from within: “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”

Jerry Falwell had been right about the civil-rights movement: it did represent a dramatic and successful reentry of religion into politics. The civil-rights and the Christian-right movements illustrate two different forms of political Christianity in the modern world. The contrast between them also shows that the involvement of religious movements in politics is not
necessarily
reactionary.

Islamic Reformism and Political Islam

Long before political Islam appeared in the twentieth century, Islamic reformers had felt that colonialism was the key challenge facing contemporary Muslims. The question was posed squarely by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897), famous as Ernest Renan’s protagonist in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. When Renan published a piece on “Islam and Science” in
Journal des Débats
(March 29, 1883), al-Afghani responded in the same journal (May 18, 1883). Renan published a rejoinder the very next day after al-Afghani’s response, acknowledging what a great impression al-Afghani had made on him and praising him as a fellow rationalist and infidel. In his lecture, Renan had claimed that “early Islam and the Arabs who professed it were hostile to the scientific and philosophic spirit, and that science and philosophy had only entered the Islamic world from non-Arab sources.” Al-Afghani’s response was to challenge Renan’s racist assumptions—that the Arabs and/or Islam were hostile to science—and in its place argue a surprisingly modern case, that science, as philosophy, develops everywhere over time.

Al-Afghani had traveled widely outside his native Iran, from India in the east to France in the west, before he came to Egypt. His traditional
madrassah
education had included
fiqh
(jurisprudence) alongside
falsafah
(philosophy) and
irfan
(mysticism). His Indian experience both convinced al-Afghani of the future importance of modern science and mathematics and exposed him to Britain’s brutal repression of the 1857-58 anticolonial revolt in India. Whereas early-nineteenth-century Islamic thinkers who embraced progress tended to be enamored with Western modernity and saw Britain and France as benign bearers of progress, al-Afghani highlighted modernity’s
contradictory
impact. His
religious vision came to be informed by a very modern dilemma. On the one hand, Muslims needed modern science, which they would have to learn from Europe. On the other, this very necessity was proof “of our inferiority and decadence,” for “we civilize ourselves by imitating the Europeans.” Al-Afghani had located the center of this historical dilemma in a society that had been subjected to colonialism: if being modern meant, above all, free rein for human creativity and originality, how could a colonial society modernize by imitation?

This was also a debate about colonialism and independence. Not surprisingly, forward-looking Islamic thinkers looked within Islamic tradition for sources of innovation, renewal, and change. Even if both reformers and radicals spoke the language of Islam, they looked to doctrine and history not just for continuity but also for renewal, and so they provided different answers to the question of how to confront Western modernity and global dominance. The main lines of demarcation in the twentieth century were worked out through debates in three different countries: India, Egypt, and Iran.

This process was completely different from the earlier development of Christian fundamentalism and political Christianity. Unlike Christianity, mainstream Islam has no institutionalized religious hierarchy; it has a religious clergy, but not one organized parallel to the hierarchy of the state. There is a major debate on the significance of this historical difference. Reinhard Schulze has argued that the absence of a conflict between secular and religious hierarchies is why the problem of secularism does not appear in Islam and why Islamic religious movements are not necessarily antisecular. In contrast, Bernard Lewis claims that the absence of a clear line of demarcation between the religious and the secular indicates the absence of secular thought in Islam. However, Schulze
points out that modern Islamic discourse is largely secular, concerned more with contemporary political and social issues than with a spiritual concern with salvation or the hereafter, precisely because Islamic societies were able to secularize within Islam, rather than in opposition to it.

Whereas the development of a political Christianity in the United States was mainly the work of a “fundamentalist” religious clergy—such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others—the development of political Islam has been more the work of non-clerical political intellectuals such as Muhammad Iqbal and Mohammed Ali Jinnah in colonial India, and Abul A’la Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, and Ali Shariati in postcolonial Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran respectively. The glaring exception was Ayatollah Khomeini. The secular discourse in Iran has tended to resemble that in western Christianity precisely because only in revolutionary Iran has clerical power received constitutional sanction. Whereas fundamentalist clergy were the pioneers of political Christianity, the pioneers of political Islam were not the religious
ulama
(scholars) but political intellectuals with an exclusively worldly concern. This is another reason why it makes more sense to speak of political Islam—the preferred designation in the Arab world for this movement—than of Islamic fundamentalism, the term most often used in post-9/11 America.

The split between religious ulama and political intellectuals was evident as early as the anticolonial movement in India in the first half of the twentieth century. There, religious and political conservatism did not necessarily go hand in hand: the intellectuals, not the ulama, pioneered the development of Islamist political movements, ultimately championing a call for a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, Pakistan. Contrary to what we might expect, the conservative ulama remained inside the secular Indian
National Congress, whereas modernist secular intellectuals called for an Islamic polity, at first autonomous, then independent. Whereas the ulama made clear distinctions between Islam as a cultural and religious identity and various political identities that Muslims may espouse, secular intellectuals came to insist that Islam was not just a religious or cultural identity; it had become a political identity.

The Indian experience reveals that those who called for nationalist politics were not always progressive, and those who championed religious political nationalism were not all reactionary. The two camps were not divided by the line between democracy and authoritarianism. The poet Muhammad Iqbal and the politician Mohammed Ali Jinnah, both spokespersons for the political rights of Muslims, were determinedly secular in orientation. Iqbal, considered the spiritual founder of Pakistan, was among the few Muslim intellectuals who rejoiced in 1922 when Turkey abolished the Ottoman Khilafat, in effect severing any relationship between the state and religion. He called for the institution of
ijtihad
(legal interpretation) to be modernized and democratized: he argued that the law should be interpreted by a body elected by the community of Muslims, the
umma
, and not the ulama. Jinnah, considered the political founder of Pakistan, was similarly determined that independent Pakistan must have a secular constitution, guaranteeing separation between the state and religion and due protection for the rights of minorities.