The Enemy At Home (13 page)

All these groups identify their struggle primarily in religious terms. Their activists speak of themselves as “holy warriors” for Islam. Their communiqués typically begin with the Muslim invocation “In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” The commentaries of radical Islam adopt the tradition of Islamic historical narrative in reporting the death of Muslims with phrases such as “Peace be upon him” or “God have mercy on him.” These writings routinely refer to the adversary as the “enemies of God.” Their references to America and the West are peppered with terms like “unbelievers” and “infidels.” Curses like “vile unbeliever” and “accursed infidel” are not perfunctory slogans or stylistic exaggerations but are deeply meant. The deaths of Western infidels are reported with undisguised enthusiasm and typically accompanied by phrases like “God speed his soul to hell.” Bin Laden’s writings and video recordings are filled with this rhetoric, and the religious emphasis and terminology are not incidental to his message: they are his message.

Virtually every statement made by a Muslim attacker or suicide bomber testifies to an Islamic motivation. We know that the 9/11 terrorists left behind diaries professing their piety and hopes for heavenly reward, and giving detailed instructions of what prayers and ritual washings they should perform before boarding the planes and what religious chants they should make while killing those who stood in their way. Mohammad Sidique Khan explained his participation in the London bombings as an act of “obedience to the one true God.” Muhammad Bouyeri told the Dutch court that his assassination of Theo van Gogh was in fulfillment of “the law that instructs me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah or the Prophet.”
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As these statements make clear, in order to understand Islamic radicalism it is necessary to understand Islam. Even a basic knowledge can help unravel mysteries that would otherwise remain unsolved. For instance, while both Christianity and Islam share a concept of martyrdom, the martyr in Christianity is one who voluntarily endures suffering and death rather than relinquish the faith. In Islam, by contrast, a martyr is one who dies fighting for the faith. This helps to explain the statement I quoted earlier from the Gaza physician who is against suicide bombings but feels helpless in condemning those who carry them out. However terrible he finds their conduct, he cannot reasonably deny that these Muslims are making the ultimate sacrifice for their religious beliefs. From his point of view, there may be grounds for disagreeing with their strategy, or for deploring the consequences of their actions, but their status as martyrs remains secure because they have indeed given their lives fighting for Islam.

SOME CONSERVATIVES AND
liberals, who recognize the importance of Islam in shaping Islamic radicalism and terrorism, nevertheless fall into various types of errors. These too are typically the product of an ethnocentric mind-set. On the conservative side, partisans of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis tend to posit a war between Western civilization on the one hand and Islamic civilization on the other. As Huntington argues, culture is rooted in the cult and therefore the tension between Islam and the West is fundamentally religious. Huntington goes so far as to suggest that the West’s seventy-year conflict with Soviet communism was a brief historical detour and now the centuries-old struggle between Islam and Christianity has resumed.
²⁴
As we will see in the next chapter, this is very close to the way that bin Laden and the Islamic radicals view the conflict. This agreement does not, of course, discredit Huntington’s analysis, but neither does it enhance its credibility. Overall, I think Huntington is wrong.

One problem with Huntington’s thesis is that, as we saw in the previous chapter, the West today is not the religious civilization it once was, and today it is more divided than ever before. Not only are there bitter divisions between America and its major European allies, notably Germany and France, but in addition America itself is deeply split between liberals and conservatives, between blue America and red America. A second shortcoming of the “clash of civilizations” viewpoint is that it treats Islamic society as monolithic whereas, as we will see, there is an important chasm in the Muslim world that parallels the profound cleavage in America. It is time to move past Huntington to recognize the internal clashes within the West and within Islam. Neither “our” behavior nor “their” behavior can be understood without specifying which “us” and which “them.”

Huntington’s fallacy is part of a broader misperception on the right. This view holds that since pious Muslims are the ones launching attacks against Europe and America, Islam is to blame and Islam is the problem. Ibn Warraq and Oriana Fallaci both blame Islam for fostering the fanatical mind-set that leads to terrorism, and some Christian conservatives have gone so far as to allege that Islam is a “wicked religion” and that “Muhammad was a terrorist.”
²⁵
Even Pope Benedict in a September 2006 speech cited a medieval emperor to the effect that Islam was an evil faith founded and sustained by violence. If these views seem churlish and exaggerated—and they are—the misperception of Islam among many American liberals is no less egregious.

Several liberals who recognize the importance of Islam as a galvanizing force tend to draw from this the conclusion that “religion is the problem.” Sam Harris writes in
The End of Faith
that on 9/11 “the evil that finally reached our shores…is the evil of religious faith.” Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg argues that since religious people believe in an afterlife, they are more likely to participate in suicide attacks because they don’t really expect to die as a consequence. The same point was made by Richard Dawkins: “To fill a world with religion is like littering the streets with loaded guns…. Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.”
²⁶
According to this view, religion when taken too seriously leads to fanaticism and fundamentalism, and this has become a serious problem in the Muslim world, as it has become a serious problem in America.

The problem with this argument is that no other religion has displayed the characteristics that we see in today’s Islam. Christianity in all its history has never had suicide bombers, and neither has Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism. Nor can anyone reasonably assert that Islam is intrinsically the problem. Despite the religious enthusiasm of many suicide bombers, Islam has been around for more than a thousand years, and for most of its history it produced neither suicide attackers nor terrorists. It is only contemporary Islam that provides an inspiration for suicide missions and attacks on civilians. Consequently we need to ask: what is the situation in Islam today that has given rise to a new kind of radicalism and terrorism?

To understand Islamic radicalism, we need to understand the culture from which it grows. Many Americans—liberal as well as conservative—seek to identify Islamic fundamentalism as a distinctive feature of either the Sunni or the Shia groups. Which of these groups—I am often asked—is theologically susceptible to the doctrines of Islamic radicalism? The problem with the question is that it presumes there are doctrinal or creedal differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims. This assumption reflects the Western tendency to understand Islam through the lens of the Catholic-Protestant divide. But unlike the Catholics and the Protestants, who fought hard over fine points of doctrine, there are no meaningful theological distinctions between the Sunni and the Shia.

Their real disagreement is over the issue of legitimate succession. It is a debate over the authentic Islamic family tree. Shia Muslims believe that the true line of descent passes through the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali. Sunni Muslims recognize the legitimacy of the various caliphs and sultans who have ruled Islamic empires through the centuries. Admittedly the Sunni and the Shia have different styles of worship. The notion of martyrdom is much more deeply rooted in Shia history, whereas it is a recent development in Sunni Islam. Certainly the two groups sometimes fight each other for political and economic power—as they are doing in Iraq. But these are not religious disputes and the two groups remain united on the main tenets of Islamic belief and practice. The crucial point is that Islamic radicalism, with its insurgents, holy warriors, and suicide attackers, has arisen out of both groups. The Khomeini revolution arose in Shia-dominated Iran, and radical groups like Hezbollah are made up of Shia. Al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgents are mainly Sunni.

Another common illusion, held across the American political spectrum, is that the Muslim world is divided into “liberals” and “fundamentalists.” This distinction suffers from two limitations. First, there are virtually no liberals in the Muslim world. I am not referring here to classical liberalism—a belief in free markets, voting, or religious toleration—but rather to modern liberalism, which is characterized by doctrines such as “Men and women should have the same roles in society,” “Freedom of expression includes the right to publish material that is sexually explicit or blasphemous,” or “Government should not seek to promote religion or legislate morality.” Liberalism of this sort is confined to a small number of Muslim intellectuals whose voice is amplified in the West but who have no influence in Islamic countries.
²⁷
Throughout the Arab world and in most of the Muslim world, liberalism as a political force simply does not exist.

A secular liberal like Salman Rushdie has no constituency in the Muslim world. Author Thomas Friedman says the West desperately needs Muslim leaders who will reject the concepts of jihad and martyrdom and instead “embrace religious diversity” and “affirm that God speaks multiple languages.”
²⁸
My reaction to this is: Good luck, Tom. Contact me, or my descendants, when you find such Muslims. I do not deny that there are feminists and secularists and perhaps even advocates of unrestricted free speech and homosexual marriage in Muslim countries, but I deny that they have any political significance. I admit that there are a sizable number of feminist and secular Iranians, but they live in Los Angeles.

But what about those liberals who voted for the reformist president Muhammad Khatami, and who continue to press for change in Iran? We can get a better sense of this group by following the debate over the past several years between “hard-liners” and “moderates” over the issue of public flogging for adulterous women. The hard-liners hold that public flogging is essential because this is what the holy law mandates, and moreover, an example has to be made of blatant offenders. The moderates counter that public flogging has given Iran a bad international image and therefore it would be better to have the floggings administered in private. Some moderates argue that Islamic law is a bit vague on the precise nature of the punishments that should be administered, and therefore the regime could consider other alternatives, such as fines or imprisonment.
²⁹
One may say that the spectrum of debate in Iran is between the right and the far right.

The term “fundamentalist” is not a useful term of distinction in the Muslim world. The concept is derived from Protestant Christianity. In America, a fundamentalist is one who believes the Bible is the literal, unadulterated word of God. By this definition, however, all Muslims are “fundamentalists” because all Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal, unadulterated word of God given in the Arabic language by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad.
³⁰
The term Koran means “recitation” and Muslims hold the suras of this holy book to be divinely composed and strictly speaking untranslatable. If you don’t believe these things, you’re not a Muslim. Unlike in the West, the term “fundamentalist” has no negative connotation in Islamic society. The Saudi ruling family, for instance, never refers to its religious and political enemies as fundamentalist because it saves the description for itself. I realize that the term “fundamentalist” has become so widely used in the contemporary political discussion about Islam that it is unavoidable. When it is used, however, let us seek to define it clearly or at least be aware of its limitations.

The real divide in the Muslim world is between Islamic radicals and traditional Muslims. Traditional Muslims are not well known in America, so let me offer a brief anecdote to illustrate who these people are and what they believe. While I was growing up in Mumbai, we had a Muslim family that rented the ground floor of our house. We lived on the next floor and my grandparents on the top floor. One year, my grandfather decided not to renew the Noorani family’s lease. Since the Nooranis were reluctant to leave and were protected by rent control laws, my grandfather offered them a sum of money to leave in a year. But a year later, property values had surged, and the Nooranis felt they could extract some more compensation from my grandfather, so they showed no signs of leaving. My grandfather approached a local Muslim minister, who confronted the patriarch of the Noorani family. “Mubarak, did you give your word that you would leave?” the minister asked. “Yes,” Noorani replied, “but that was before the prices—” He could not finish his sentence because the minister interrupted him. “You gave your word and you are still here? You call yourself a Muslim? You are a disgrace to Islam! I advise you to start packing.” Within a month, the Noorani family was gone. I narrate this episode not to demonstrate the moral character of traditional Muslims—who are in this respect no better or worse than anyone else—but to show the respect that even ordinary Muslims show for Islam’s moral code.

Traditional Muslims are not “moderates.” Many of them are just as zealous in their religious faith and practice as radical Muslims. Traditional Muslims are best understood as those who practice Islam in the way that it has evolved in the centuries since Muhammad. By contrast, radical Muslims are those who believe that Islam has reached a point of crisis and that violent conflict is both the inevitable and desirable outcome of this crisis. (When I use the term “fundamentalist” in this book, I am always referring to the radical Muslims.) What are the theological differences between traditional Islam and radical Islam? On the fundamental religious questions, there are none. What are the political differences? In general, there are few. Remarkable though it seems, traditional Muslims and radical Muslims agree on the threats faced by Islam, on where those threats come from, and even on the general solution. The main area of disagreement is that Islamic radicals are willing to pursue insurgency and terrorism to achieve the shared goals. This program includes a new form of jihad against the infidels, a category that includes not only Westerners but many Muslims as well.