Moving the Issue to Center Stage: John Brown
“Was John Brown a bad man, Dad?” That question came from my son a decade ago as we watched a 1940 Warner Brothers’ movie called Santa Fe Trail. The movie featured Raymond Massey as the incendiary pre–Civil War figure John Brown. While the film has only a few contact points with American reality in the decade before the Civil War, Massey’s portrayal of John Brown was a marvel, mirroring the historical record of Brown as a man who looked, sounded, and acted like the violent prophet of a vengeful God. “Brown had a great yearning for justice for all men, yet a rage for bloody revenge,” historian Ken Chowder has written. “These qualities may seem paradoxical to us, but they were ones that John Brown had in common with his deity. The angry God of the Old Testament punished evil: An eye cost exactly an eye.”4 So frightening was Massey’s sterling performance that it took several years before my son did not shield his eyes or hide behind the chair when Massey was on screen.
Less scared but, with age, more curious, my son continued to ask if John Brown was a bad man. After ducking the question a few times, I did some research and found that scholars have shown that Brown was a multi-faceted character who combined virtues and vices, probably more of the latter. He combined iron resolve, religious zeal, and physical courage with a single-minded devotion to the goal of doing what he saw as God’s work by annihilating the institution of slavery. As David W. Blight has written, the Bible was the only “moral and legal compass” Brown acknowledged. Brown appeared to be a “high-minded, unselfish, belated Covenanter,” as was said at the time, and a “Cromwellian Ironside introduced in the nineteenth century for a special purpose.5 Even the pro-slavery firebrand Edmund Ruffin grudgingly credited Brown with “animal courage … [and] complete fearlessness of and insensibility to danger and death.”6
At the same time, Brown was overwhelmingly self-righteous, excelled at cold-blooded murder, seldom repaid debts, and cultivated a self-centeredness so great that he often left his large family without support. In contemporary America, it would be easy to dismiss Brown as a fraud and a fanatic because of his substantial character flaws and willingness, even eagerness, to sacrifice his life and those of several of his sons to instigate a war he believed was ordained by God. What today could be more unintelligible, after all, than a man eager for martyrdom and who said, “I have been whipped, as the saying is, but I am sure that I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by the disaster [at Harper’s Ferry]; by only hanging a few moments by the neck…. I am worth infinitely more to die than to live.”7 It is little wonder that many in the United States cannot begin to fathom Osama bin Laden’s calm, Brown-like assertion, “I am not afraid of death. Rather, martyrdom is my passion because my martyrdom would lead to the birth of thousands of Osamas.”8
I eventually answered my son to his satisfaction by saying that some of Brown’s actions were bad—fraud, murder, and treason for starters—but that there have been few causes in American history as vital as the abolition of slavery. I tried to explain to him the paradox that Frederick Douglass caught in his 1860 observation about John Brown. “Men consented to his death,” Douglass said, “and then went home and taught their children to honor his memory.” The bad man/good cause summation is the historical consensus on Brown, and I had this fact in my mind as I began trying to write a study to explain bin Laden to Americans. Although the dissimilarities between Brown and bin Laden as individuals are greater than their similarities—the latter is, by far, the better man—the two men share a passionate, uncompromising devotion to ridding their nations, the United States and the Muslim community of believers, or the ummah, of what they perceived to be a dominating evil.
In his exacting biography of the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, All on Fire, the late Henry Mayer wrote that Brown’s actions, and especially his raid on Harper’s Ferry in October 1859, “shocked the entire country and produced an emotional fervor without precedence in the nation’s experience.” Then, when Brown was hanged, the fervor intensified. “In the free states church bells tolled morning, noon, and night from Cape Cod to Kansas,” Mayer noted, and even the eminent American Ralph Waldo Emerson saw Brown as “the new Saint … whose martyrdom if it shall be perfected, will make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Most important, Mayer argues, Brown’s raid “irrevocably moved the slave controversy from the sphere of constitutional and moral abstraction to the visceral realm of feelings intensified beyond measure and reason.”9
Bin Laden’s al Qaeda movement, it seems to me, is traveling a path parallel to Brown’s, a path that led America to a civil war that yielded a harvest of more than 600,000 dead. Bin Laden’s philosophy has not completely moved Muslim perceptions of America’s lethal intentions toward the Islamic world “irrevocably” from abstract discourse and deepening resentment to hatred and widespread violence. His movement seems to be moving it in that direction, however, and after the October 2000 attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden, Yemen, the prominent Egyptian Islamist lawyer Muntasir al-Zayyat said such attacks are becoming “acceptable to the Arab and Islamic peoples, and even a subject for praise and pride.” In addition, the threat and use of violence by bin Laden, as they did for Brown, has kept his cause in the eye of the world, among both men in the street and members of the Muslim elites. And just as some educated, wealthy, and religious Americans thriving in the antebellum United States applauded the Harper’s Ferry raid and committed treason by providing Brown the means to stage it—thereby supporting a man out to destroy the union in which they prospered—so too are some educated, prosperous, and devout Muslims, who are thriving in the Islamic world’s status quo, supporting the al Qaeda network’s efforts to destroy that status quo, apparently forgiving bin Laden’s “errors of judgment” because of “the nobleness of his aims,” as the historian James McPherson has described the attitude of many Americans toward John Brown. Both Brown and bin Laden present their respective societies with the difficult task of reconciling what Professor Blight called the contrast of high ideals and ruthless deeds. Blight’s estimate of John Brown as “one of the avengers of history who does the work the rest of us won’t, can’t, or shouldn’t” seems equally applicable, at least in the eyes of his followers, to Osama bin Laden.10
Staying the Course in God’s Name: John Bunyan
Again, historical analogies—especially cross-cultural analogies—are double-edged tools, equally capable of producing invalid comparisons as valid ones. Still, they are useful for putting events or patterns of thought foreign to a society’s experience into a context from which a measure of understanding can be drawn. The analogy between John Brown and Osama bin Laden is useful in this regard. Another that occurred to me as I studied bin Laden is a comparison between bin Laden and the English Puritan preacher John Bunyan’s heroic-but-very-human protagonist Christian, the pivot of Bunyan’s brilliant allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress.11 Though now largely untaught in American schools, Bunyan’s book historically has been among the most influential in English, after the Bible and Shakespeare’s works. Bunyan’s readers come to know Christian’s strengths and weaknesses and learn that Christian’s ultimate success in overcoming the world’s material seductions and the physical attacks of the ungodly is due to the fact that, in the face of obstacles and threats, he persevered, “believed steadfastly concerning things that are invisible,” and, like Moses, “was rather for dying where he stood, than to go one step without his God.”12
Like John Brown’s journey, Christian’s pilgrimage produced personal salvation and demarcated a road toward salvation for others to follow. Christian believed traveling in God’s path was a personal responsibility because “what God says, is best, though all men in the world are against it”; because it would win him everlasting life in the “Celestial City”; and because it would shield him from temptation with the knowledge that “[t]he Glory of the next World will never wear out.” Bunyan wrote that Christian must match his words with actions if he was to win s
alvation—praising God was necessary but insufficient. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian dismisses the faith of a man named “Talkative” because his faith is a matter of words.
They [saying and doing] are two things indeed, and are as diverse, as are the Soul and Body; for as the Body without the Soul is but a dead carcass, so saying, if it be alone, is but a dead carcass also. The Soul of religion is the Pracktick part: Pure religion and undefiled, before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the World. This Talkative is not aware of; he thinks that hearing and saying will make a good Christian; and thus he deceiveth his own soul. Hearing is but as the sowing of seed; Talking is not sufficient to prove that fruit is indeed in the Heart and life; and let us assure ourselves, at the day of Doom, men will be judged according to their Fruit: It will not be said then, Did you believe? But were you Doers or Talkers only? And accordingly shall they be judged. The end of world is compared to the harvest; and you know men at harvest regard nothing but fruit.13
Bunyan’s hero Christian, like John Brown, also deliberately was setting an example that would encourage—bin Laden would say to “incite”—others to follow. Christian and Brown succeeded. Christian’s initially unbelieving wife and sons decided to follow his example and undertook what Bunyan calls “the most dangerous way in the world … that which Pilgrims go.”14 Brown, after his hopeless attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, was captured and hanged, but within two years a civil war ensued that achieved his and, as he believed, God’s goal of ending slavery, allowing the “crimes of a guilty land” to be “purged away in blood.”15
As will be seen, bin Laden’s goals in traveling his God’s path mirror Christian’s, to assure his entry to paradise by performing his religious duty to defend Islam against attack and by instigating all Muslims to do likewise, thereby redeeming themselves and doing God’s work by restoring the Islamic nation’s honor and dignity. “My marks and scars I carry with me,” Christian said in words that easily could have come from John Brown or Osama bin Laden, “to be witness for me, that I have fought His battles, who will now be my redeemer.”16
A Time for War: Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine
A final analogy I found useful in thinking about Osama bin Laden in a context pertinent to Americans is drawn from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and the political debate in the years before its adoption. Professor John L. Esposito drew me to this analogy in his fine book The Islamic Threat. Myth or Reality?, as did the editors of the respected Pakistani newspaper Nawa-i-Waqt. In his book, Esposito warned that when Americans automatically identify Islamist individuals and groups as terrorists, they forget the “heroes of the American Revolution were rebels and terrorists for the British Crown,” while the editors of Nawa-i-Waqt lamented that “it is unfortunate that the United States, which obtained its independence through a [revolutionary] movement is calling Muslim freedom fighters [a] terrorist organization.”17
When Thomas Jefferson wrote America’s most important state paper, his argument was not drafted in a fit of pique and neither did it pivot off a single grievance against the British Crown. Rather, Jefferson’s clarity, logic, dispassion, and historical precision captured the perception of many Americans—although not most—that by 1775 a lengthy and mostly peaceful journey had ended, a line had been crossed, and inaction was no longer tolerable. Jefferson, in essence, wrote that enough was enough and that further discussion was pointless, a conclusion later also reached by John Brown when, after years spent speaking, writing, and working against slavery, he declared: “Talk, talk, talk. That will never free the slaves. What is needed is action—action.”18 In asserting that the time for “talk” was over, Jefferson reminded his readers that “In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injuries. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be a ruler of a free people.” Despite what he called the “patient sufferance” of Americans, Jefferson concluded that the Crown’s unresponsiveness and continued abuses had yielded a situation for Americans where “necessity constrains them to alter their form of government.”19
While he wrote a clear indictment of America’s oppressor and a precise justification for war, Jefferson did not catch the exact heat of America’s pre-Declaration political debate. His references to God and religion were, in particular, the calm language of the Deist he was and not the voice of the Old Testament that then thundered through American political discourse. Jefferson’s war against Britain would be a just but reluctant necessity. In the spring of 1775, Patrick Henry better captured the more heated, Biblical tone of the debate. Henry spoke as God’s zealous champion, leading a long-suffering people in a struggle to regain usurped rights. “It is in vain, Sir, to extenuate the matter,” Henry said. “Gentlemen may cry peace, peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun.”
We have petitioned—we have remonstrated—we have supplicated—we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne. In vain, after these things, may we indulge in fond hope of peace and reconciliation? There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been for so long contending—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have so long been engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon, until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained—we must fight!—I repeat, Sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left to us.20
Osama bin Laden: Like America’s Heroes—Fighting Not Submitting
Common among these Anglo-American leaders was the journey from remonstrance to war, from pen to sword. Common also was sincerity, dedication, and an absolute refusal to compromise after the line between tolerable and intolerable was crossed. Osama bin Laden has traversed a nearly identical journey and shares the grim determination to prevail or die trying. Bin Laden’s words and deeds are slowly changing the nature of Islamic political discourse, because, as Professor Esposito has said, his “message and cause resonates with many in the Arab and Muslim worlds.”21
Like John Brown, bin Laden has framed his argument in the context of God’s words and has acted on those words, mirroring Bunyan’s assertion that the genuinely faithful must do God’s work with deeds as well as words. Indeed, bin Laden seems to be moving the Islamic world toward violence in the manner of Brown, altering the nature and intensity of the Muslim debate over U.S. foreign policy. “[A]s a result of John Brown,” Professor G. A. Fine has written in his study of the abolitionist crusader’s impact, “more people committed themselves to abolition and committed themselves more strongly. If Brown did not cause a revolution in thinking, he increased the number who accepted militant action. Brown made militant verbal abolition seem moderate in comparison.”22
The Muslim media are making a similar judgment about bin Laden, and correctly so. By his deeds, bin Laden “has earned the respect of men hardened in battle,”23 and by his words he is inciting Muslims “who will stand against the evil force [the United States] and will continue their struggle seeking the liberation of our Islamic land from the forces of evil, sins, and darkness.”24 Also like Bunyan’s heroic pilgrim Christian, bin Laden is described as having “the courage to turn the tide of the times…. Such a Muslim revolutionary is hard to find in this age.”25
And the tie to Jefferson and the founders? Well, almost exactly 200 years after the signing of Jefferson’s exposition of America’s profoundly conservative and religious mind, bin Laden published a declaration of
his own, which, like Jefferson’s, displayed a deeply conservative and religious mind. Bin Laden’s “Declaration of Jihad against the United States”26 deserves quotation at length because it details, as did Jefferson’s declaration, the “patient sufferance” of Saudi nationals under the misdeeds of their own king and his family; the “long train of abuses and usurpations” to which they have been subjected; and their duty to destroy a government that is ignoring the rights that Muslims “were endowed by their Creator.”
As had Jefferson, bin Laden drafted a detailed indictment of the al-Saud family’s transgressions, a list that includes harassment, persecution, and incarceration of reformers; media censorship and manipulation; official corruption in the financial and economic sectors; perversion of the Islamic legal system with man-made laws; use of foreign mercenaries against Muslims; failure to defend the country; and material support to the enemies of Islam. The Muslim media paid close attention to this indictment and told its readers that bin Laden was turning to armed resistance because the al-Sauds had rejected all efforts at peaceful reform. “Shaykh Usama also concentrates on the reasons that justified his recourse to this [warlike] attitude,” Al-Islaah’s editors commented in words reminiscent of Patrick Henry’s, “[i]n this context he reviewed the past peaceful attempts and all means to deal with the [al-Saud] regime in this regard had been exhausted, with the regime countering them with ferocity, roughness, and defiance.” Al-Islaah likewise noted that bin Laden and his brother Saudi reformers had not acted impetuously. “Those who are fully familiar with the Shaykh’s [bin Laden’s] personality,” Al-Islaah explained, “were surprised at his delay in taking this attitude and his failure to take this attitude long before.” The editors also said that bin Laden had long controlled forces capable of military action against the al-Sauds and their allies.27
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 4