16. There existed a clear parallel in Western society. The religious transformation of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was still perceived in two quite distinct ways three centuries later, depending entirely upon whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant. For a Protestant, winning the liberation of human souls from the antique shackles of a tyrannical, decrepit papacy was a war worth fighting. For a Catholic, the negative consequences of this sundering of Christendom far outweighed any benefits. This unbridgeable void continued through the nineteenth century, and on into the twentieth. The Catholic Church eventually evolved its own response to modernity and democracy. In sanctioning popular Catholic action (Christian democracy) Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum of 1891 (on the right and duties of labor and capital), declared: “It will be easy for Christian working men to solve it aright if they will form associations, choose wise guides, and follow on the path which with so much advantage to themselves and the common weal was trodden by their fathers before them.” In accommodating to modernity, the church assimilated what it needed, and then ignored the rest.
17. Professor Carol B. Stapp first drew my attention to the long persistence of non-Darwinian science teaching in Tennessee. “The Butler Act forbidding the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools was not repealed until 1967 … The issue was not long dormant, however. In 1973 the state legislature passed an ‘equal time’ law which legitimised the use of the bible as a scientific reference. The law was challenged in state and federal courts by civil liberties and teachers groups, and was overturned by the Federal Court of Appeals.” See “The History of Evolution in Tennessee,” http://fp.bio.utk.edu/darwin/essays/history.html (November 9, 2003). In the U.S. Supreme Court the case of Loving v. the State of Virginia of 1967 overturned the conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving under a 1922 Virginia statute that “if any white person intermarry with a colored person or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony.” The Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison, suspended provided they left the state. Thirty states had passed similar laws, and sixteen were still in force at the time of the Supreme Court decision.
18. David Kelley suggests how this sometimes persists into the twenty-first century in the United States. See “The Party of Modernity,” Cato Policy Report XXV, no. 3 (May-June 2003).
19. Conversely, those who did not turned to social resistance. The rural minority adopted anarchism in Andalucia, vagabondage and armed resistance in southern Italy. See T. Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia 1868–1903, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977; Stuart Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change, London: Methuen, 1979; John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999.
20. Charles Kurzman depicts modernism as “the imperialist expansion of Christian Europe, which threatened Islam in at least five registers,” that is, militarily, economically, cognitively, politically, culturally. See Charles Kurzman (ed.), Modernist Islam 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 6–7. His introduction (pp. 3–27) to the collection of texts is an excellent, succinct statement of the issues.
21. The Islamic modernists used lectures, newspapers, and the burgeoning periodical press to publicize their ideas, rather than the scholarly texts, replete with citations and authorities of the traditional literature of argument and dispute. See ibid., pp. 14–16.
22. Hodgson, Venture, 3:274–5. For another view, see Elie Kedourie’s sardonic squib Afghani and ‘Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam, London: Frank Cass, 1966, reissued 1997.
23. The most readable source remains Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939, Cambridge, 1970. Two valuable collections of material in translation by a wide range of thinkers are edited by Charles Kurzman. Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. On an earlier period, Modernist Islam: A Sourcebook 1840–1940, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
24. For a brief statement of these ideas, see Understanding the Evil of Innovation: Bid’ah, Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House, 1997.
25. This was much more akin to Christian traditions of disputation and argument, as in the Spanish debates over the Moriscos in the sixteenth century.
26. See Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power: The Politics of Islam, London: Faber, 1982, pp. 113–7.
27. See Emad Eldin Shahin, Through Muslim Eyes: M. Rashid Rida and the West, Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1993.
28. See Dilip Hiro, Holy Wars: The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism, London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 60–87.
29. Cited in John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 135.
30. See Johannes Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East, New York: Macmillan, 1986, p. 193.
31. Johannes J. G. Jansen, “Tafsir, Ijma and Modern Muslim Extremism,” Orient 27, no. 4 (1986).
32. Jansen stated in an interview: “I don’t know when it was written: probably in the spring preceding the murder of Sadat. Five hundred copies were printed. The group started to distribute and sell the book, but then realized that the Egyptian secret police would be able to locate the group by tracing these copies. So they burned 450 copies. Fifty copies survived, and photocopies of these are bound in libraries all over the world. After the murder of Sadat, the prosecutor added the document to the case file, so the lawyer of the accused also got a copy. He gave it away to an Egyptian newspaper, Al Ahram, which printed it. The article appeared in December 1981. It was sold out within hours and was never reprinted in that form. If people are sentenced to death, the Egyptian State Mufti has to condone the sentence. The Mufti gave a long fatwa explaining why the murderers of Sadat were wrong. But as a footnote to this fatwa, he added the full text of the document The Neglected Duty. That appeared in a series of thousands of pages, but the fascicule in which that document was reprinted sold out quicker than the rest of the volume. Then there was a third edition which was made probably in Jordan or Israel: it made use of the newspaper text, but left out a number of things that may have seen sensitive in the context of an Islamic kingdom, as Jordan is.” Religioscope, P.O. Box 83, 1705 Fribourg, Switzerland, February 8, 2002.
33. Osama bin Laden extended the doctrine still further in his pronouncement of February 1998. “These crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger and Muslims. And ulema [Muslim scholars] have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad [holy war] is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries.
“On that basis, and in compliance with God’s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims.
“The ruling is to kill the Americans and their allies is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it, in order to liberate the Al Aqsa mosque [Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [Mecca] … This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God … We call on every Muslim who believes in God and wished to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”
Bin Laden’s interpretation is false and misleading. The tradition of jihad is as a collective and not an individual duty, to be imposed only through proper authority. Even then it has to be carried out within limits so as to be lawful. His interpretation sets aside all limits and constraints.
34. For a thoughtful (but controversial) view of “Islamism” see Francis Fukuyama and Nadav Samin, “Can Any Good Come of Radical Islam? A Modernizing Force? Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2002.
35. December 8, 1986.
36. “Satan” and Shaitan sound the same but their meaning is not identical. See The Light of Islam: The Infallibles, chapter 4, at http://home.swipnet.se/islam/imamsajjad.htm (November 9, 2003).
37
. Khomeini had always viewed his revolution as pan-Islamic, transcending Sunni-Shi’i historical divergences, directed against the common enemy—namely, the twin forces of modernity and secularization and their nominally Muslim admirers, the “Westoxicated” (gharbzada in Persian; mustaghribun in Arabic). Hopes for such a pan-Islamic revolution were high in Tehran at the beginning of the 1980s. See Emmanuel Sivan, “The Holy War Tradition in Islam,” Orbis, spring 1998.
38. English, German, Hebrew, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, and Russian.
39. See MEMRI Special Dispatch Series no. 486, March 25, 2003.
40. See MEMRI Special Report no. 10, September 26, 2002, “Friday Sermons in Saudi Mosques: Review and Analysis.”
41. To say nothing about the vicious insults that, say, militant Protestants use about Catholics, or how mainstream Muslims attack Islam’s schismatics.
42. Jefferson wrote to the Virginian George Wythe, who held the first chair of law in the United States, on August 13, 1786, “Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people.” See Gordon C. Lee (ed.), Crusade Against Ignorance: Thomas Jefferson on Education, New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
43. Pastor Dino Andreadis, the senior pastor of Park Road Church, Ontario, at http://www.brokenhearted.org/india.html (November 9, 2003).
44. He is based at the First Church of the Gospel Ministry, Wooster, Ohio.
45. The outreach of the Victory Network may be found at http://www.victorynetwork.org (November 9, 2003).
46. Le Roy Finto on Jerris Bullard’s India. This site has moved and reconstituted. On November 9, 2003, it was to be found at http://www.manassaschurch.org/india_6.htm.
47. I have deliberately chosen examples that related the modern idea of “crusade” to both Hindu and Muslim communities.
48. Bernard Lewis, “Jihad vs. Crusade: A Historian’s Guide to the New War,” Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001. See http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95001224 (November 9, 2003). Here, as he often does, Lewis begins with the combative statement, and then goes in a more contemplative vein. However, the printed responses to his piece, which reflected a wide range of differing opinions, did not suggest any acceptance of his view that crusades were now only “a vigorous campaign in a good cause.”
49. At Princeton University in April 1999, the president of the university Christian group, Phil Belin, was widely quoted as saying: “We know the negative connotations associated with crusades turns people away from associating with us and listening to the gospel message.” The context of Belin’s observation was reported in Yale Daily News, April 8, 1999. The Yale chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ had changed its name to Yale Students for Christ. The reason, as its president, Dave Mung, observed, was “We wanted to have a name that more accurately reflected the nature of our group. Sometimes the CCC name connotes preconceived negative notions.” Belin was commenting on this change.
50. There is good reason for this. In Indonesia and elsewhere, civil strife between Muslims and Christians is often termed a jihad by Muslim groups, even though its causes are largely political and economic.
51. The term “fundamentalism” is often used in a very broad sense, but I believe it should be applied only to those Christian communities and communicators that root their thinking in the literal truth of the Bible. It derives from the twelve short books, collectively entitled The Fundamentals, which were published between 1910 and 1915. Each had a print of 3 million copies, with a free copy sent to every pastor, teacher of Christian religion, and theology student in the United States. Many more were sold to the public. See Nancy T. Ammerman, “North American Protestant Fundamentalism,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Fundamentalisms Observed, Fundamentalism Project vol. 1, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
52. In 1919, the World Christian Fundamentals Association was founded to advance the cause of a pure biblical Christianity. One of its progenitors was A. C. Dixon, an editor of The Fundamentals. Like the new jihadists, the Christian fundamentalists (a term which they applied to themselves after 1920) were connected by a chain of personal connections, discipleship, and institutions like Bible colleges, Bible study institutes, seminaries, and “crusades.” The name was coined by Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Baptist Watchman-Examiner. Details of current crusades may be found via http://www.christianitytoday.com.
53. These details are drawn from the Faith Defenders Web site at http://www.faithdefenders.com (November 9, 2003).
54. It still has a modern resonance. Recently the curse was turned into an art object. It was carved on a large stone and placed in the center of Carlisle, the last city in England before the Scottish border. In the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001, it was publicly suggested that the disease was a result of the ancient curse, and the current archbishop was asked to lift it. The whole curse extends to some 1,500 words. The powerful General Commination remains in the repertoire of the Church of England and is still occasionally pronounced. See http://www.cathtelecom.com/news/111/29.php (November 9, 2003). For the text, see http://www.geocities.com/~betapisces/academy/glasgow.htm (November 9, 2003).
55. In 1989 Monsignor Philip Reilly set up his movement Helpers of God’s Precious Infants, based on peaceful prayerful public witness at the abortion sites—or “Calvary” sites as he calls them. See http://www.iol.ie/~hlii/helpers_of_infants.html (November 9, 2003). Reilly’s movement was nonviolent but for the wider range of activities, violent and nonviolent see http://www.fyleserva.com/cgnews (November 9, 2003). More recently, the Reverend Alan Perkins’s sermon is a typical example of a traditional Christian discourse. “God is not at peace with your sin. He is at war with your sin. And if you choose to abandon the field of battle; if you refuse to engage the enemy of your soul in mortal combat, then the result will be destruction, and not salvation. Do you think that kind of imagery is exaggerated or overblown? Peter didn’t. Listen: ‘Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.’–1 Peter 2:11, NIV. Sin is at war with your soul. That isn’t just rhetoric; it’s reality.” “At War with Sin,” February 9, 2003, http://www.journeychurchonline.org/messages.htm (November 9, 2003).
56. For example Townhall.com, which calls it the Evil Empire speech, but the words were not used in the text. See http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/reagan/speech/empire.html (November 9, 2003).
57. For Ronald W. Reagan speeches see http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/rrpubpap.asp (November 9, 2003).
58. Reagan did quote Schiller—“The most pious man can’t stay in peace if it doesn’t please his evil neighbor”—in his speech to the Bundestag on June 9, 1982. This appears in a footnote in the Public Papers of Ronald Reagan.
59. Many of his misspeakings related to memory, which may well have been the early manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease. Thus he forgot Princess Diana’s name and called her “Princess David.” But when working from a script, he gave reliable performances.
60. The term was first coined of Reagan.
61. He had some connections. In 1970, five members of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship prayed with then California governor Reagan at his home in Sacramento. One, a former Lear executive, was overcome with the Spirit and began to speak in the voice of God. He compared Reagan to a king, and prophesied that Reagan would “reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” if he continued to walk in God’s way. It was suggested that Reagan took the prophesy very seriously. See http://www.pir.org/gw/fgbmfi.txt (June 10, 2002). Clinton had his “spiritual advisers” and was rooted in a Southern Baptist heritage. See http://www.llano.net/baptist/presidentsadvisers.htm (November 9, 2003). During the Monica Lewinsky crisis he turned to the Reverend Jesse Jackson for spiritual support.
62. See Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, “The Spirituality of President Bush,” http://www. pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week421/news.html (November 9, 2003).
63. Bo
b Woodward, Bush at War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002, p. 16.
64. Ibid., p. 38.
65. Washington Post, May 31, 2000.
66. This text subsequently was massaged to change the text as delivered. At a commonly used Web site, Quoteworld, the word “crusade” does not appear in the transcript of the speech; http://www.quoteworld.org/docs/gbrem926.php (November 9, 2003).
67. “This President regards words as unusually binding … The President likes a language of very clear moral meaning. He thought the word evil was the word he wanted to use.” Eddie Mair interview with David Frum, BBC Radio 4, Broadcasting House, June 23, 2002.
68. Presidential News and Speeches, September 16, 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.a.ram (November 9, 2003).
69. The linguistic technique of conversational analysis (CA) suggests that seeking the word in this way indicates that it is problematical. Nowhere else in the conference does Bush use the same pattern of phrasing. On the practice and potential for CA, see Paul ten Have, Doing Conversational Analysis, London: Sage, 1999, pp. 28–34. I am grateful to Bethan Benwell for introducing me to this form of analysis and for helping me through its complexities.
70. See http://whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129–11.html (November 9, 2003).
71. Woodward, Bush, pp. 141–3.
72. Ibid., pp. 52–3.
73. “The Evildoers and the Misled,” December 6, 2001, http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/120601.html (November 9, 2003).
74. Mark 5:9.
75. Bassam Tibi, Islam Between Culture and Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, p. 6.
76. Charles Kurzman (ed.), Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 25.
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