Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (81 page)
The jihad against the jihadis is being fought at many levels. Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia and Indonesia that once indulged Islamist extremists have decided that enough is enough and have begun to crack down. The movement’s own gurus have also turned on it. In 2007 one of bin Laden’s mentors, the Saudi cleric Salman al-Odah, wrote an open letter accusing him of “fostering a culture of suicide bombings that has caused bloodshed and suffering, and brought ruin to entire Muslim communities and families.”
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He was not afraid to get personal: “My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed . . . in the name of Al Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions on your back?”
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His indictment struck a chord: two-thirds of the postings on Web sites of Islamist organizations and television networks were favorable, and he has spoken to enthusiastic crowds of young British Muslims.
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The grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz al Ash-Sheikh, made it official, issuing a fatwa in 2007 forbidding Saudis to join foreign jihads and condemning bin Laden and his cronies for “transforming our youth into walking bombs to accomplish their own political and military aims.”
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That same year another sage of Al Qaeda, the Egyptian scholar Sayyid Imam Al Sharif (also known as Dr. Fadl), published a book called
Rationalization of Jihad
because, he explained, “Jihad . . . was blemished with grave Sharia violations during recent years.... Now there are those who kill hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of Jihad!”
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He was not afraid to get personal: “My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed . . . in the name of Al Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions on your back?”
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His indictment struck a chord: two-thirds of the postings on Web sites of Islamist organizations and television networks were favorable, and he has spoken to enthusiastic crowds of young British Muslims.
230
The grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz al Ash-Sheikh, made it official, issuing a fatwa in 2007 forbidding Saudis to join foreign jihads and condemning bin Laden and his cronies for “transforming our youth into walking bombs to accomplish their own political and military aims.”
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That same year another sage of Al Qaeda, the Egyptian scholar Sayyid Imam Al Sharif (also known as Dr. Fadl), published a book called
Rationalization of Jihad
because, he explained, “Jihad . . . was blemished with grave Sharia violations during recent years.... Now there are those who kill hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of Jihad!”
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The Arab street agrees. In a 2008 online Q&A on a jihadist Web site with Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s day-to-day leader, one participant asked, “Excuse me, Mr. Zawahiri, but who is it who is killing, with Your Excellency’s blessing, the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco, and Algeria?”
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Public opinion polls throughout the Islamic world have tapped the outrage. Between 2005 and 2010, the number of respondents in Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh who endorse suicide bombing and other violence against civilians has sunk like a stone, often to around 10 percent. Lest even this figure seem barbarically high, the political scientist Fawaz Gerges (who compiled the data) reminds us that no fewer than 24 percent of Americans tell pollsters that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are often or sometimes justified.”
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Public opinion polls throughout the Islamic world have tapped the outrage. Between 2005 and 2010, the number of respondents in Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh who endorse suicide bombing and other violence against civilians has sunk like a stone, often to around 10 percent. Lest even this figure seem barbarically high, the political scientist Fawaz Gerges (who compiled the data) reminds us that no fewer than 24 percent of Americans tell pollsters that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are often or sometimes justified.”
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More important is public opinion in the war zones in which the terrorists rely on the support of the population.
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In the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan, support for Al Qaeda plummeted from 70 percent to 4 percent in just five months in late 2007, partly in reaction to the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto by a suicide bomber. In elections that year Islamists won 2 percent of the national vote—a fivefold decrease since 2002. In a 2007 ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan, support for jihadist militants nosedived to 1 percent.
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In Iraq in 2006 a large majority of Sunnis and an overwhelming majority of Kurds and Shias rejected AQI, and by December 2007 the opposition to their attacks on civilians had reached a perfect 100 percent.
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In the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan, support for Al Qaeda plummeted from 70 percent to 4 percent in just five months in late 2007, partly in reaction to the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto by a suicide bomber. In elections that year Islamists won 2 percent of the national vote—a fivefold decrease since 2002. In a 2007 ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan, support for jihadist militants nosedived to 1 percent.
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In Iraq in 2006 a large majority of Sunnis and an overwhelming majority of Kurds and Shias rejected AQI, and by December 2007 the opposition to their attacks on civilians had reached a perfect 100 percent.
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Public opinion is one thing, but does it translate into a reduction of violence? Terrorists depend on popular support, so it’s highly likely that it does. The year 2007, the turning point in attitudes toward terrorism in the Islamic world, was also a turning point in suicide attacks in Iraq. The Iraq Body Count has documented that vehicle bombs and suicide attacks declined from 21 a day in 2007 to fewer than 8 a day in 2010—still too many, but a sign of progress.
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Changes in Muslim attitudes do not deserve all the credit; the surge of American soldiers in the first half of 2007 and other military adjustments helped as well. But some of the military developments themselves depended on a shift in attitudes. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, a Shia militia, declared a cease-fire in 2007, and in what has been called the Sunni Awakening tens of thousands of young men have defected from an insurgency against the American-supported government and are participating in the suppression of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
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Changes in Muslim attitudes do not deserve all the credit; the surge of American soldiers in the first half of 2007 and other military adjustments helped as well. But some of the military developments themselves depended on a shift in attitudes. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, a Shia militia, declared a cease-fire in 2007, and in what has been called the Sunni Awakening tens of thousands of young men have defected from an insurgency against the American-supported government and are participating in the suppression of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
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Terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology or a regime, so we will never win the “War on Terror,” any more than we will achieve George W. Bush’s larger goal (announced in the same post-9/11 speech) to “rid the world of evil.” In an age of global media, there will always be an ideologue nursing a grievance somewhere who is tempted by the spectacular return on investment of terrorism—a huge windfall in fear from a trifling outlay in violence—and there will always be bands of brothers willing to risk everything for the comradeship and glory it promises. When terrorism becomes a tactic in a large insurgency, it can do tremendous damage to people and to civil life, and the hypothetical threat of nuclear terrorism (to which I will turn in the final section) gives new meaning to the word
terror
. But in every other circumstance history teaches, and recent events confirm, that terrorist movements carry the seeds of their own destruction.
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREADterror
. But in every other circumstance history teaches, and recent events confirm, that terrorist movements carry the seeds of their own destruction.
The New Peace is the quantitative decline in war, genocide, and terrorism that has proceeded in fits and starts since the end of the Cold War more than two decades ago. It has not been around for as long as the Long Peace, is not as revolutionary as the Humanitarian Revolution, and has not swept a civilization in the manner of the Civilizing Process. An obvious question is whether it will last. Though I am reasonably confident that during my lifetime France and Germany will not go to war, that cat-burning and the breaking wheel will not make a comeback, and that diners will not routinely stab each other with steak knives or cut off each other’s noses, no prudent person could express a similar confidence when it comes to armed conflict in the world as a whole.
I am sometimes asked, “How do you know there won’t be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?” The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence
have
taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.
have
taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.
Also, the world contains a lot of people. The statistics of power-law distributions and the events of the past two centuries agree in telling us that a small number of perpetrators can cause a great deal of damage. If somewhere among the world’s six billion people there is a zealot who gets his hands on a stray nuclear bomb, he could single-handedly send the statistics through the roof. But even if he did, we would still need an explanation of why homicide rates fell a hundredfold, why slave markets and debtors’ prisons have vanished, and why the Soviets and Americans did not go to war over Cuba, to say nothing of Canada and Spain over flatfish.
The goal of this book is to explain the facts of the past and present, not to augur the hypotheticals of the future. Still, you might ask, isn’t it the essence of science to make falsifiable predictions? Shouldn’t any claim to understanding the past be evaluated by its ability to extrapolate into the future? Oh, all right. I predict that the chance that a major episode of violence will break out in the next decade—a conflict with 100,000 deaths in a year, or a million deaths overall—is 9.7 percent. How did I come up with that number? Well, it’s small enough to capture the intuition “probably not,” but not so small that if such an event did occur I would be shown to be flat-out wrong. My point, of course, is that the concept of scientific prediction is meaningless when it comes to a single event—in this case, the eruption of mass violence in the next decade. It would be another thing if we could watch many worlds unfold and tot up the number in which an event happened or did not, but this is the only world we’ve got.
The truth is, I don’t know what will happen across the entire world in the coming decades, and neither does anyone else. Not everyone, though, shares my reticence. A Web search for the text string “the coming war” returns two million hits, with completions like “with Islam,” “with Iran,” “with China,” “with Russia,” “in Pakistan,” “between Iran and Israel,” “between India and Pakistan,” “against Saudi Arabia,” “on Venezuela,” “in America,” “within the West,” “for Earth’s resources,” “over climate,” “for water,” and “with Japan” (the last dating from 1991, which you would think would make everyone a bit more humble about this kind of thing). Books with titles like
The Clash of Civilizations, World on Fire, World War IV,
and (my favorite)
We Are Doomed
boast a similar confidence.
The Clash of Civilizations, World on Fire, World War IV,
and (my favorite)
We Are Doomed
boast a similar confidence.
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. My aim in the rest of this chapter is to point out that maybe they’re wrong. This isn’t the first time we’ve been warned of certain ruin. The experts have predicted civilization-ending aerial gas attacks, global thermonuclear war, a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a Chinese razing of half of humanity, nuclear powers by the dozen, a revanchist Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage superpredators, a world war fought over diminishing oil, nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and weekly 9/11-scale attacks.
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In this section I’ll look at four threats toto the New Peace—a civilizational clash with Islam, nuclear terrorism, a nuclear Iran, and climate change—and for each one make the case for “maybe, but maybe not.”
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In this section I’ll look at four threats toto the New Peace—a civilizational clash with Islam, nuclear terrorism, a nuclear Iran, and climate change—and for each one make the case for “maybe, but maybe not.”
The Muslim world, to all appearances, is sitting out the decline of violence. More than two decades of headlines have shocked Westerners with acts of barbarity in the name of Islam. Among them are the 1989 clerical death threat against Salman Rushdie for portraying Muhammad in a novel, the 2002 sentencing of an unmarried pregnant woman in Nigeria to execution by stoning, the fatal stabbing in 2004 of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for producing Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film about the treatment of women in Islamic countries, the lethal 2005 riots after a Danish newspaper printed editorial cartoons that were disrespectful to the prophet, the jailing and threat of flogging of a British schoolteacher in Sudan who allowed her class to name a teddy bear Muhammad, and of course the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which nineteen Muslims killed almost three thousand civilians.
The impression that the Muslim world indulges kinds of violence that the West has outgrown is not a symptom of Islamophobia or Orientalism but is borne out by the numbers. Though about a fifth of the world’s population is Muslim, and about a quarter of the world’s countries have a Muslim majority, more than half of the armed conflicts in 2008 embroiled Muslim countries or insurgencies.
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Muslim countries force a greater proportion of their citizens into their armies than non-Muslim countries do, holding other factors constant.
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Muslim groups held two-thirds of the slots on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, and (as mentioned) in 2008 Sunni terrorists killed nearly two-thirds of the world’s victims of terrorism whose perpetrators could be identified.
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Muslim countries force a greater proportion of their citizens into their armies than non-Muslim countries do, holding other factors constant.
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Muslim groups held two-thirds of the slots on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, and (as mentioned) in 2008 Sunni terrorists killed nearly two-thirds of the world’s victims of terrorism whose perpetrators could be identified.
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In defiance of the rising tide of democracy, only about a quarter of Islamic countries elect their governments, and most of them are only dubiously democratic.
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Their leaders receive farcically high percentages of the vote, and they exercise the power to jail opponents, outlaw opposition parties, suspend parliament, and cancel elections.
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It’s not just that Islamic countries happen to have risk factors for autocracy, such as being larger, poorer, or richer in oil. Even in a regression analysis that holds these factors constant, countries with larger proportions of Muslims have fewer political rights.
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Political rights are very much a matter of violence, of course, since they amount to being able to speak, write, and assemble without being dragged off to jail.
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Their leaders receive farcically high percentages of the vote, and they exercise the power to jail opponents, outlaw opposition parties, suspend parliament, and cancel elections.
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It’s not just that Islamic countries happen to have risk factors for autocracy, such as being larger, poorer, or richer in oil. Even in a regression analysis that holds these factors constant, countries with larger proportions of Muslims have fewer political rights.
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Political rights are very much a matter of violence, of course, since they amount to being able to speak, write, and assemble without being dragged off to jail.
The laws and practices of many Muslim countries seem to have missed out on the Humanitarian Revolution. According to Amnesty International, almost three-quarters of Muslim countries execute their criminals, compared to a third of non-Muslim countries, and many use cruel punishments such as stoning, branding, blinding, amputation of tongues or hands, and even crucifixion.
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Every year more than a hundred million girls in Islamic countries have their genitals mutilated, and when they grow up they may be disfigured with acid or killed outright if they displease their fathers, their brothers, or the husbands who have been forced upon them.
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Islamic countries were the last to abolish slavery (as recently as 1962 in Saudi Arabia and 1980 in Mauritania), and a majority of the countries in which people continue to be trafficked are Muslim.
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In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not just on the books as a crime but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.
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Every year more than a hundred million girls in Islamic countries have their genitals mutilated, and when they grow up they may be disfigured with acid or killed outright if they displease their fathers, their brothers, or the husbands who have been forced upon them.
248
Islamic countries were the last to abolish slavery (as recently as 1962 in Saudi Arabia and 1980 in Mauritania), and a majority of the countries in which people continue to be trafficked are Muslim.
249
In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not just on the books as a crime but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.
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