Taming the Gods

by Ian Buruma

  Japan’s imperial system, as it existed until 1945, had two effects, apart from justifying military conquest. First, it actively impeded the successful development of democratic institutions. The emperor and his courtiers were extremely conservative men, whose primary duty was to protect the imperial institution. Liberals and democrats were viewed with deep suspicion, and the court’s strongest political alliances were with equally conservative bureaucrats and military officers. Anyone who could speak for the imperial will trumped politicians, who were merely elected by the people. Even though the emperor’s constitutional status was vague, his sacred presence worked in favor of authoritarian politics.

  Second, his presence made it difficult, if not impossible, for a secular dictator to grab power. Japan never had a Hitler, or even a Mussolini, for the supreme authority was still vested in the sacred throne. Wartime allied propaganda sometimes made General Tojo Hideki out to be a dictatorial figure. In fact, Tojo, although certainly a martinet, was no more than a prime minister who could be deposed (not by voters, to be sure, but by fellow autocrats), as he was in 1944, when his government was deemed a failure. After 1940, Japan did have a fascist-type party, the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, but it was not a success, and its founder, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, prime minister at the time, was far from being a dictator. Some Japanese militants, especially in the middle ranks of the army officer class, did dream of making Japan into a fascist state with the emperor as a real dictator, but when they staged a coup in 1936, the emperor demanded that it be put down—one of the few instances of his direct intervention.

  The fact that imperial Japan lacked a fascist or Nazi strongman did not necessarily make it more benign. Emperor worship was promoted as part of a chauvinistic ideology that justified atrocities against lesser breeds, that is, people not descended from the gods. But some of Japan’s most excessive wartime behavior was due less to cruel dictatorship than to a fuzzy chain of command in a political system that lacked accountability because the emperor was responsible for everything, and nothing. Anything could be perpetrated in his name, even as he remained as passive as a sacred idol gathering dust in the inner sanctum of a holy Shinto shrine.

  To the Americans who occupied Japan after its defeat, emperor worship was a form of dangerous idolatry. One of the first measures taken by the allied occupation authorities, led by General Douglas MacArthur, a devout Christian, was to ban State Shinto and make the emperor renounce his divinity. Emperor Hirohito had a speech released to the Japanese press on the first day of 1946. It was a much rewritten version of a draft written by two scholars, an American and an Englishman. The emperor talked about returning to Emperor Meiji’s Charter Oath, promising a certain degree of democracy, without mentioning the nineteenth-century emperor’s sacred status. Nor did Hirohito deny that he was descended from the Sun Goddess. But he did say that he was not a “manifest deity.” This impressed the Americans more than the Japanese, who had only the haziest idea of what was meant by manifest deity (akitsumikami). A kami, they would have understood. Nature is full of kami, or holy spirits. The point was his divine ancestry, something he never renounced.24

  Nonetheless, after 1945, Shinto was no longer a state cult, and the emperor went at least halfway to becoming a real constitutional monarch. Of course, religion did not go away, especially in such hard and bewildering times as early postwar Japan. Instead it was privatized. Several women, declaring that the Sun Goddess spoke directly through them, started highly successful cults, mostly revolving around themselves. Different Buddhist and Shinto-derived sects and associations, many of them banned under the militarist regime, sprang to life and gathered large numbers of believers. These years, just after the emperor’s declaration that he was human, became known as “rush hour of the gods.”

  Most Japanese were happy with their secular democracy, which the Americans had helped them set up. Few mourned the demise of emperor worship or State Shinto. But a hard core of nationalists, lodged in the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, organized crime, and right-wing intellectual journals, could never forgive the Americans and their liberal Japanese allies for having destroyed the “spirit” of the Japanese people. Their rhetoric is a mixture of Confucianist conservatism, with its emphasis on moral education, and Japanese chauvinism, with its reverence for cultural purity and sacred bloodlines. One of the chief goals of the rightists is to rewrite the postwar constitution, drawn up by Americans, by abolishing the pacifist Article 9, in which Japan renounces its right to use military force, and by reinstating the emperor as a sacred figure.

  Just as hunger for material prosperity in China replaced the fervor of Maoism, dark memories of wartime extremism were pushed away in Japan by a state-led effort to expand the nation’s wealth. In the early 1960s, Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato promised the Japanese that their incomes would be doubled. Within two decades the country had become so rich that people from all over the world sought to imitate “the Japan model.” But this led to a common complaint—again, as in post-Maoist China—that Japanese were suffering from a spiritual and moral vacuum. Materialism did not seem enough. Conservatives talked about restoring the nation’s moral fiber by going back to prewar moral education, with strong doses of patriotism. But the same alleged vacuum also lent itself to private spiritual enterprises, which were not always peaceful.

  A half-blind guru named Asahara Shoko, using a mish-mash of Hindu and Buddhist language, promised his followers in the Aum Shinrikyo that they would establish a utopian superpower after the rotten, corrupt, empty Japanese system had collapsed from a devastating assault. As a first step, in 1995, his disciples dropped sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, killing a dozen people and injuring thousands. People were shocked to hear that many members of this sinister cult were highly educated scientists, disgusted with the spiritual vacuum in a technological, capitalist society.

  The liberal answer to the discontents of modern prosperity is that each should find his or her own way to Jerusalem. It is not the task of a liberal democratic state to provide answers to the deeper questions about life, let alone impose metaphysical beliefs on its citizens. Japan, as well as Asian countries occupied by imperial Japanese soldiers, was devastated because the Japanese state had tried to do just that.

  Religion can play a part in promoting ethical behavior, but it is not the only moral glue available to hold a society together. Locke and Tocqueville talked about the necessity of faith, but Spinoza spoke about the law, Hume about tradition, Confucius about rites, the fast vanishing Japanese Left about pacifism, and the still limited, but highly visible, Japanese Right about restoring the prewar national spirit.

  This old spirit is hard to rekindle because it was so badly discredited by Japan’s wartime record. Debates about World War II in Japan are still vexed for that reason. Pacifists use the past as a warning. Right-wing conservatives gloss over that same past to burnish the spiritual ideals that were tarnished by the war. Emperor worship was an experiment in mixing politics with religious faith, which destroyed the chances of a Japanese democracy. If those who wish to go back to it were to face the past honestly, they would know this, which is precisely why they persist in their refusal to do so.

  THREE

  ENLIGHTENMENT VALUES

  I NEVER DARED TO BE RADICAL WHEN

  YOUNG, FOR FEAR IT WOULD MAKE

  ME CONSERVATIVE WHEN OLD.

  —Robert Frost

  Tocqueville took a view of Islam and democracy that is still the conventional one. Muhammed, he wrote, “brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as
in all others.”1

  The great French Catholic thinker was not an expert on Islam. And comparing the Koran with the Gospels alone is not quite sufficient. Tocqueville conveniently forgot to mention that the Old Testament (let alone the Talmud) contains politics and laws too. Moreover, as Tocqueville himself observed in the United States, the most irrational, and indeed unenlightened, beliefs can easily hold sway over the citizens of democracies. And the citizens he saw were not Muslims. The question is whether people who hold such beliefs can still agree to play by the rules of democratic government. By and large, American Christians could, and still can. Is there reason to believe that Muslims cannot?

  Thinkers of the Enlightenment were divided on this issue. But some radical Spinozists, such as Pierre Bayle, took the view that Islam was superior to Judaism and Christianity because it was more tolerant and less superstitious. Eighteenth-century philosophes also remembered that it was scholars from the Muslim world—though not always Muslims themselves; some were Jews—who had been responsible for passing on the classics of Greek philosophy in Arabic translation. Like Confucius, the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was even compared to Spinoza as a paragon of reason.2

  Democracy is, in any case, neither new nor strange to many Muslims. The Indian population includes around 150 million Muslims. Like most democracies, the Indian system of government is far from perfect, but its flaws—corruption, demagoguery, crime, caste-based fury, and so on—have nothing to do with the contents of the Koran. Turkish democracy is equally imperfect, but the ideological “secularists” are as much to blame for its defects as the Islamists, possibly more so. And Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority nation in the world, is now one of the few functioning democracies in Southeast Asia.

  Still, it is certainly the case that Middle Eastern, predominantly Muslim countries have tended to be autocratic. There are many possible reasons—cultural, historical, political—but it should be remembered that except for Iran, and briefly Afghanistan, Middle Eastern dictatorships are secular. Nasserism borrowed heavily from Marxism. Saddam Hussein was an Arab fascist. Egyptian and Syrian strongmen crushed Islamist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, as ruthlessly as any nineteenth-century European colonial regime might have done. The main target of radical religious activism has been the corrupt secular police state. Because the corruption of autocratic Middle Eastern elites is associated with the decadent, unbelieving West (not entirely unjustly, since the West continues, perhaps faute de mieux, to support these elites), Europe and the United States have become prime targets for the religious radicals. This in turn has inflamed the passions of young Muslims in Europe, who have found a ready-made cause to kill and die for.

  However, the fear of Islam among Europeans is not limited to concern about revolutionary Islamist violence. The worry is more what Tocqueville articulated: that Islam is incompatible with what we now call “Enlightenment values,” or “Western values” (as though these were identical), and that the presence of a large Muslim minority in the West will damage, if not destroy, values that we have come to take for granted (forgetting how recently they were acquired), such as free speech and equal rights for women and homosexuals. Since it is assumed, in time-honored fashion when it comes to unpopular minorities, that Muslims will consistently produce more children than non-Muslims, there is a fear of being “swamped,” of losing the European identity, of seeing the continent turned into “Eurabia.” Many Europeans are not just frightened of religious violence; they are anxious about being “Islamized.”

  Alarm about minorities cut off from the rest of society is widespread—alarm, that is, when it comes to Muslims; Chinatowns and Hassidic communities are treated with indifference. The latter are peaceful and too small to worry about. The worry concerns what philosophers and political thinkers have been agonizing about for centuries, at least as far back as the time of Confucius: how to constitute a political community on the basis of common ethics, mores, beliefs, or laws. In present-day terms, if citizens fail to share common values, how can democracy survive?

  Even if one believes, as I do, that shared values are not essential for a democracy to function, as long as citizens abide by the laws, the worry is legitimate when a significant number of people are prepared to break those laws for ideological reasons. Since some of the most ferocious enemies of liberal democracy now happen to be revolutionary Islamists, the concern about Muslims who express views that are hostile to Western society is understandable and must be faced. The problem is all the more acute, since the violent revolutionaries are no longer strangers from faraway countries but young people born and bred in Europe whose first languages are not Arabic but English, French, or Dutch.

  A cursory look at some of the people responsible for atrocities should dispel one commonly held idea, introduced by Bernard Lewis and popularized by Samuel Huntington, that we are dealing with a “clash of civilizations.” The men who came to western European countries in the 1960s from Turkey and North Africa to work in factories or clean the streets were indeed from a different world. Often illiterate, usually from rural areas, the first generation of Gastarbeiter had customs and traditions that were strange to most Europeans and might have become a source of conflict. In fact, content to make enough money to send home to their families and too overworked to engage in any political action, these men were no threat to anyone.

  When the foreign workers failed to go home, contrary to expectation, some European governments allowed them to bring over their families. The arrival of large numbers of migrants in old working-class areas inevitably caused tensions with the locals. But complaints were usually dismissed by lazy bureaucrats, anxious politicians, or ideological social workers as marks of European racism. It was easier to ignore the problems and cloak passivity in anti-racist, anti-colonialist, multiculturalist rhetoric.

  That the habits of new immigrants often clashed with prevailing norms of mainstream society, however, hardly constituted a threat to the continued existence of liberal democracy, let alone Western civilization. The real threat comes from a radical fundamentalist ideology, especially in the violent form of holy war. But the new wave of fundamentalism—a trend that is far from unique to Islam—is not the expression of a traditional culture or civilization but a modern, global phenomenon. The same goes for the revolutionary holy war. As Olivier Roy, the most astute European scholar of modern Islam, explains: “[Neofundamentalism] thrives on the loss of cultural identity: the young radicals are indeed perfectly ‘Westernized’. Among the born-again and the converts (numerous young women who want to wear the veil belong to these categories), Islam is seen not as a cultural relic but as a religion that is universal and global and reaches beyond specific cultures, just like evangelicalism or Pentecostalism.”3

  Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, was born and raised in Amsterdam. His father came from Morocco in the 1960s. Mohammed was not interested in religion when he grew up. His knowledge of Islam was rudimentary. He preferred to get high and chase girls. Like many young people, he was sensitive to slights and rejections. As a member of a widely despised minority, he was perhaps more than usually sensitive. Alienated from the village culture of his parents, ill at ease in the country of his birth, he was ripe for the seduction of a new identity promising purity, moral superiority, and power. Radical Islamism came to him first from a roaming preacher exiled from Syria, and then from the Internet. Much of what Mohammed knows about his faith, a purist, brutal version of Islam, he downloaded from various Web sites, mostly in English, catering to the disaffected and resentful in search of a common cause. If he had been a Russian in the early twentieth century, he might have been an anarchist. If he had been German in the 1970s, he could easily have joined the Red Army Faction. Since he was a “Moroccan” in twenty-first-century Holland, he was born again as a holy warrior for an Islamic utopia.

  The story of Mohammad Sidique Khan, ringleader of the 7/7 bomb attack in the London underground, off
ers an even better illustration of Olivier Roy’s account. Born in Leeds in 1974, he grew up in Beeston, a rundown suburb with a large immigrant population, many of whom came from the same tribal area of Pakistan. Drug addiction was ravaging an already isolated and impoverished community. When a number of young men, including Khan, formed a group called the Mullah Boys to combat crime and drug addiction, older people welcomed the initiative, even if some of them were alarmed by the type of militant Islam adopted by the group.

  Khan, known as “Sid” to his classmates, was not a natural hater. He had white friends and, like his Dutch namesake, Mohammed Bouyeri, was full of ideas on how to better the lot of his community. After finishing school, he studied for a business degree at Leeds Metropolitan University, where he met his future wife, a Muslim of Indian origin. He married her (“out of tribe,” as it were) against the wishes of his parents. Again like Bouyeri, he was an active mentor of troubled youths, hence his interest in the Mullah Boys. It was through them that he became interested in Wahhabism, the sectarian, fundamentalist faith sponsored by Saudi Arabia.

  The great attraction of Wahhabism for dislocated people everywhere is its purism, its lack of roots in any particular culture or tradition. The Urdu-speaking preachers of his parents’ generation didn’t appeal to Khan because he barely spoke Urdu, and because, as a Yorkshire lad, he had only a shallow connection with the tribal culture they came from. Wahhabism is promoted, on the Internet and elsewhere, in English. It holds out the promise of a purely Islamic state. In its most militant form, this brand of political Islam has a revolutionary ideology that appeals for social or political reasons perhaps more than theological ones. In the words of Hassan Butt, a former recruiter in Britain for holy warriors: “Here come the Islamists and they give you an identity . . . you don’t need Pakistan or Britain. You can be anywhere in the world and this identity will stick with you and give you a sense of belonging.”4