Taming the Gods

by Ian Buruma

  Khan not only found religion, he found a revolutionary cause. Marrying a woman outside his Barelvi tribe was an act of defiance on Khan’s part. But so was his extreme Islamism. His family actually tried to steer him away from his radical path by appealing to their own cultural tradition. A traditional religious man, a pir, was asked to talk sense to him. It didn’t work. By the time Khan committed murder and suicide with two other boys from Beeston by planting bombs on the subway train, he had severed all his family ties. As Butt explains: “When you’re cut off from your family, the jihadi network then becomes your family. It becomes your backbone and support.”5

  Conrad described the type beautifully in novels such as The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes: the angry young man buried in the anonymous masses of our great cities, waiting to blow himself and others up in a final act that will wipe out his confusion; violent death as the balm to a wounded sense of personal inadequacy. An act of revenge against the indifference of the outside world. In the cases of Mohammed Bouyeri and Mohammad Sidique Khan, they justified their acts by embracing a peculiar and above all modern vision of Islam.

  Since the holy warriors in Europe are linked, however tenuously, to a world wide web of revolutionary Islamist fury, they must be taken seriously as a security threat. Their networks should be monitored, infiltrated, and crushed. Apart from the global scale, and the lethal possibilities of modern technology, there is little new about this. The use of terror, as propaganda or as a tactic of violent fantasists, has always been there. The fact, however, that in this case it is inspired by revolutionary Islam complicates matters. It has led many people to conflate the threat of political extremism with customs and traditions associated with the religion that do not conform to the conventions of modern liberalism: Islam as a threat to the Enlightened West, as the Trojan horse that will “Islamize” Europe.

  Discussion of the Enlightenment in newspaper columns, political speeches, and so forth is something new. Until the perception took hold that the West was under siege, the Enlightenment was an academic subject. It is no longer. Historically, the Enlightenment consisted of many things: the anti-clericalism of Spinoza’s early Enlightenment, the rationalism of the French philosophes, the pragmatism of the Scottish and English Enlightenment. Some philosophers were religious, some actively anti-religious. If Voltaire, Diderot, and Locke were men of the Enlightenment, then so was the Marquis de Sade, who took the destruction of Christian morality to its logical conclusion. If there is no God to prescribe for us the difference between good and evil, then why should the free-spirited individual not act on his desires, no matter how violent or perverted? Anything short of that would be hypocritical, and besides, nothing, no matter how depraved, in individual human behavior can ever be as wicked as the cruelty inflicted by political regimes claiming to be blessed by God.

  Sade is not whom most modern defenders of Enlightenment values have in mind. I suspect that some of the same people who now wish to defend the Enlightened West against the threat of Islam would, a century ago, have spoken of Christendom. There are traces of this even among commentators who used to rank themselves among the Left. Melanie Phillips, for example, has become one of the clearest voices in Britain advocating vigilance against Islam. Her widely read book Londonistan is a chronicle of the ways in which Muslim organizations in Britain, aided and abetted by non-Muslim “appeasers,” have undermined the national identity. What is this national identity? Phillips: “At the heart of this unpicking of national identity lies a repudiation of Christianity, the founding faith of the nation and the fundamental source of its values, including its sturdy individualism and profound love of liberty.”6 And the strategy of Al-Qaeda?: “Dethrone Christianity, and the job of subjugating the West is halfway done.”7

  This view is not shared by all European defenders of Enlightenment values, some of whom believe that these include anti-religious or atheist values. In France, the Muslims are actually paying the price for the long domination of the Catholic Church. Voltaire’s écrasez l’infame—“wipe out the dangerous nonsense!”—was aimed at the authority of Catholic priests. It is now invoked against women who wear headscarves in public schools. It was, in any case, certainly not meant as a defense of Christendom.

  A key element of Enlightenment thinking in the eighteenth century was the claim to universal validity. Human reason is not bound by culture, creed, or tradition; it is universal. And so are the fruits of reason, such as scientific inquiry, criticism, and the right to exercise these faculties freely, without political or religious interference. Viewing one’s own culture and society with a critical eye was part of Enlightenment thinking, as was the exploration of, and translation from, other cultures and civilizations. Orientalist scholarship came from the Enlightenment spirit, as did Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare’s plays. It was precisely the universalist claim that made the Enlightenment suspect to many “progressives” in the 1960s and 1970s, who saw it as a neo-colonialist imposition of “Western values” on former colonial subjects in the Third World. One of the many ironies playing through the current debates in Europe is that these same values are now defended ferociously against Islam by the very same former progressives.8

  Enlightenment values are often interpreted as Western values, not only by their erstwhile critics but by their current defenders. The main enemy is not just Islam, or Islamism, but the Western appeasers, who have undermined the West by their promotion of moral relativism and multiculturalism.

  Like any idea, when it becomes dogma, multiculturalism is often misguided. A dogmatic moral relativist refuses to criticize the moral values of other cultures, especially non-Western cultures, because they are all equally valid in their own time and place. Anyone who disagrees with this view is swiftly denounced as a racist. Multiculturalism, as an ideology, is based on the same idea. Immigrants must be encouraged to stick to the traditions of their ancestors, which are not only as valid as those of the West but in fact usually superior. At best this is deeply condescending. Melanie Phillips mentions the case of education authorities in London trying to prevent ethnic minority children from watching the Queen Mother’s funeral on television because “it wouldn’t mean anything to them.”9

  Multiculturalism has been particularly strong in former imperial powers, where the postcolonial intelligentsia were prone to feelings of guilt when dealing with the non-Western world. Anti-imperialism and anti-racism survived as the main currents of the postwar European Left, even as the appeal of Marxist ideology slowly faded. Gilles Kepel, the French author of many books on Islam, has argued that British and Dutch multiculturalism echo old colonial practices of indirect rule through organized religious and ethnic communities. One could argue with equal justice that colonial rule echoed the multireligious and multiethnic nature of Britain and the Netherlands. At any rate, this “communal” approach, he says, prevents successful integration of Muslims and other immigrants in Europe because they are treated as distinct cultural groups. France, where every citizen is theoretically treated equally as an individual and communal identities are not officially recognized, does not appear to have this problem.

  In fact, as the periodic bursts of serious violence in immigrant areas of large French cities show, France does have a problem. Insisting that collective identities should play no role in the public sphere hides the problems of minorities but does not solve them, and possibly makes them worse. Colonial guilt sticks to the French just as much as to the Dutch or British. But the pretense that collective identities, with their own histories and sensitivities, don’t count serves as a kind of camouflage, a bit like the claim of former East Germans that since they were all “anti-fascists” they were untainted by the Nazi past. And the Nazi past, no less than memories of colonial conquest, still haunts European debates about culture and race.

  Anti-racism, as an attitude, stems not only from colonial guilt but also from the ghastly fate of the European Jews under German occupation. As a rhetorical device, the Third Reich is
often invoked against those suspected of racism. People who complain about the social habits of immigrant neighbors (loud calls to prayer, unaccustomed food smells, and so forth) or about rising crime in immigrant areas are told that such xenophobic, or “Islamophobic,” attitudes lead straight to the gas chambers.

  But memories of the war can also be turned in the opposite direction. Efforts to accommodate Muslims, to find common ground, to tolerate views that do not necessarily conform to modern liberal values, are akin to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler—or worse, comparable to collaboration with the Nazis. To those who fear the “Islamization” of Europe, it is forever 1938. One alarmist author, an American living in Europe, wrote ominously about Europe’s “Weimar Moment.”10 Melanie Phillips was compared in a New York newspaper to “the few who spoke out in Britain against appeasing Hitler in the 1930s.”11 The West is at war not only with Islamist revolutionaries but with “Islamo-fascism.” As Olivier Roy observed about the rather too glib use of Munich 1938, “many who take themselves for Churchill write like Celine, without his style.”12

  Phillips believes, like Tocqueville, and indeed like the Muslims she opposes, that moral values collapse without religion: “secular humanism had opened Pandora’s Box.”13 But Christianity, or Judeo-Christianity, is not the only way to define the West.

  The most interesting politician to have tapped the popular fear of Islam is the late Dutch populist Pim Fortuyn. Like right-wing demagogues in France, Austria, and other parts of Europe, Fortuyn exploited a sense shared by many people, not just in Europe, of losing their moorings in a global network of multinational corporations and supranational bureaucracies. In some ways, such anxieties mirror those of the young children of immigrants who look for reassurance and a new identity in pure visions of Islam. Fortuyn and other populists led a rebellion against the political and intellectual elites who are blamed for everything that provokes these anxieties: immigration, the European Union, the shifting global currents of money and services.

  What Fortuyn offered was a way back to a cozier, more familiar, more homogeneous land, where the natives were still among themselves, so to speak, undisturbed by odd food smells, strange calls to prayer, unruly street kids with foreign accents, Eurocrats in Brussels, and all the confusions associated with “globalization.” It was a fantasy, of course, of a society that never really existed. And even if it did, there would be no way back.

  But Fortuyn had another, more original, and altogether more modern reason to stoke the fear of Muslims in Dutch society. Unusually for a politician running on an anti-immigration platform, Fortuyn was a public figure who flaunted his homosexuality. Asked why he disliked Muslims, he replied: “What do you mean, dislike Muslims? I go to bed with them.” Like many people who joined the struggle against “Islamo-fascism,” Fortuyn was once a leftist. He also grew up in a strict Roman Catholic family and retained a fondness for the rituals and ceremonies of his church. But the West that he sought to defend against Islam did not conform to the Vatican’s notion of civilization. Nor was it in every respect like his cozy vision of Holland in the 1950s, when families spent their Sundays listening to Christian sermons on the radio. Fortuyn’s notion of the West had a distinct post-1960s flavor: equal rights for women and gays, sexual freedom, and so on. That’s why he said: “I don’t feel like having to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again.”14

  The event that pushed many former multiculturalists, anti-racists, and pro–Third Worldists to join conservatives in their stand against Islam was the burning of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie, born in India, the son of wealthy parents, and educated at Rugby School and King’s College, Cambridge, was himself a prominent figure in the leftist metropolitan intelligentsia, a postcolonial literary hero, happy to denounce Western imperialism in all its forms. His was the cosmopolitan voice of London and Bombay. A non-believer from a well-to-do Muslim family, with a fondness for pagan libertinism, Rushdie is an example of the cultural mélange that has enriched the artistic life of postwar Europe. Instead of reaching for a purist religious identity, Rushdie embraced the freedom to pick and choose from the various cultures at hand. His novel is not so much an attack on Islam as it is on the fanatical fetish of ethnic, cultural, or religious purity. His playful, irreverent treatment of religious texts—verses dictated to the Prophet by Satan—was a worse insult to fanatics than an all-out attack on their faith.

  It wasn’t just religious fanatics who were burning his book, however—often, most probably, without having read a word of it—but the less privileged sons and grandsons of the British Empire, born and raised in bleak concrete suburbs of broken-down industrial cities in provincial England. This came as a great shock to the left-wing intelligentsia. Rushdie was not only “one of us,” but he had been on their side, the side of the poor and oppressed people of the postcolonial world. And here were these coarse provincial youths, their minds inflamed by primitive imams, burning a literary novel and conjuring up images in the minds of horrified liberal intellectuals of storm troopers torching “degenerate” masterpieces in 1933.

  The Rushdie case split the Left, but also the Right, and indeed the Muslims too. Some conservatives, especially religious conservatives, sympathized with the passions of Muslims who felt insulted by what they regarded as Rushdie’s blasphemy. Britain’s blasphemy laws cover only the Anglican faith. When spokesmen for the Islamic Foundation, established in Leicester in 1973 with Saudi funding, demanded an amendment to cover the Muslim faith as well, they received some support from pious Christians, though not from the Anglican archbishop, who was in favor of scrapping the blasphemy law altogether. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, not a religious man at all, declared that he would not “shed a tear, if some British Muslims, deploring Mr. Rushdie’s manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.”15 Other conservatives were as appalled by the attacks on Rushdie as were his liberal friends.

  The Islamic Foundation formed part of the UK Islamic Mission, whose stated aim was to “establish Islamic social order in the United Kingdom.” The Saudi money and the stated aim are not reassuring. But the Islamic Foundation still sought to promote its cause by democratic means as a pressure group. The Rushdie case gave the Islamic Foundation an opportunity to play a national role, as though it were representing all Muslims. Burning books and violent demonstrations were not their thing, however. This was done by the kind of “tribal Muslims” (the community from which Mohammad Sidique Khan, the 7/7 bomber, sprang) whom the more sophisticated Islamists of the UK Islamic Mission despised. The book-burners were represented by the Bradford Council of Mosques. And they only got going after Muslims in India staged demonstrations for their own reasons (the book was banned first in India). But the most famous exploiter of the case was Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who aspired to be the leader of all Muslims in the world and issued his deadly fatwa against the British author, as though he were an Islamic pope. In the end, Muslims proved to be much too diverse, in and outside Britain, to be unified. The attempt, in Britain, by the late Dr. Kalim Siddiqui, a Pakistani immigrant who started his career as a journalist for the liberal Guardian newspaper, to rally all the protesters against Rushdie’s book and set up a Muslim parliament, ended in failure.16

  Some politicians and intellectuals of the Left remained wedded to their old Third Worldist instincts out of opportunism or conviction. The British Labour Party MP Keith Vaz led a demonstration in Leicester carrying a banner showing Rushdie’s head, sprouting devil’s horns, superimposed on a dog. To the knee-jerk defenders of any non-Western cause, Rushdie had no right to offend the Muslims. Many others, however, rallied round the cause of free speech and began their break away from long-held convictions about the role of the West and the privileged place for different cultures inside its borders.

  This was not just understandable; defending an author’s freedom of expression was right. But the way in which old positions were abandoned sometimes showed the ty
pical zeal of conversion, a zeal compounded by a sour sense of betrayal. The German sociologist Jürgen Habermas has described the current climate in Europe as a Kulturkampf between secularists and multiculturalists. This German term for a European culture war was first coined in the 1870s when Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, unleashed his political assault on the German Catholics, who were wrongly suspected of being instruments of the Vatican under Pope Pius IX, whose reactionary ideas on papal infallibility were regarded as a threat to the secular German Reich. Jesuits were expelled, Catholic orders disbanded, and religious institutions taken over by the state.

  Many contemporary secularists once rebelled against everything they saw as reactionary in Western life: the church of course, but also sexual mores, racial prejudices, capitalism, gender inequalities, and so on. They stood up, in theory at least, for the poor and oppressed, victims of racism at home and imperialism abroad. No matter how oppressive the leaders of the oppressed, they stood by them in solidarity against the vastly more oppressive system, as they saw it, of neo-colonialist Western capitalism.

  Most of those who called for the head of Salman Rushdie had family roots in the Third World. But in many cases, Islam was not their main inspiration. Indeed, many of the angry young men were not religious at all. And the conversion of those who were often came late. Kenan Malik, a British journalist and academic, visited the Bradford Council of Mosques in 1989, a few weeks after the burning of Rushdie’s book. There he ran into Hassan, an old friend and comrade in the Socialist Workers Party, of which both had once been members. Malik and Hassan used to believe in a radical socialist solution for ethnic and economic inequality. Theirs was a secular, universalist, political ideal, a radical echo of Enlightenment philosophy. When this ideal failed to materialize, disillusion beset the socialist, anti-racist ranks. And among children of immigrants, a kind of tribal retrenchment took place, replacing the universal ideal. This tendency was encouraged by a Left which, more and more, abandoned Marxism in favor of identity politics. Anti-racism was no longer interpreted in terms of class warfare but as a claim to separate identities, a protest against cultural oppression.