The cartoon controversy should not be taken as evidence that we in the West believe in free speech and they in the Muslim world do not. What it showed was that Westerners have become inured to Christianity being mocked and therefore are surprised to see Muslims react so strongly when Islam is mocked. Yet Western civilization has its own sacred cows that enjoy protected status—only they are all secular. Traditional Muslims saw the whole episode as evidence of the atheism that is characteristic of the once-Christian West. Moreover, the cartoon controversy confirmed the suspicion of many Muslims that throughout the West there is a systematic hostility to Islam. From this premise, it is easy to conclude that the “war against terrorism” is a continuation of the “war against Islam.” As one Muslim scholar put it, “Ultimately, it is not possible to eradicate Islam from the hearts of the Muslims. It is possible only to annihilate the Muslims themselves.”3
RADICAL ISLAM’S MOST serious charge is that there is a war against Islam being waged by America, the fountainhead of atheism. It is this accusation—and this accusation alone—that explains why Muslims would fly planes into buildings or blow themselves up in suicide attacks against American targets. Only when people perceive their deepest beliefs to be under attack are they willing to take extreme measures of this sort. “It is our duty to preserve Islam,” Khomeini wrote in his book Islam and Revolution. “This duty is more necessary than prayer and fasting. It is for the sake of fulfilling this duty that blood must sometimes be shed.”4
In his first public statement after 9/11, bin Laden described America as “the modern world’s symbol of paganism.” Bin Laden regularly refers to Americans as “devils” or “helpers of Satan.” The manifestos of radical Islam regularly describe America as the “house of unbelief” and the “enemy of God.” It is because of this atheism, Muslim fundamentalists charge, that America will stop at nothing to destroy Islam. Islamic radicals justify terrorism as a legitimate response to this American enterprise. As Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman put it, “We must terrorize the enemies of God, who are our enemies too.” The blind sheikh and others have pointed to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as representing the Tower of Babel, and they celebrate 9/11 as a kind of divine retribution that brought down this modern symbol of paganism.5
The charge that America is an atheist society waging war against Islam is a profound embarrassment to both liberals and conservatives. It is an embarrassment to liberals because it confounds the central premise of the liberal understanding of the war against terrorism. In the liberal view, the war is a clash of opposed fundamentalisms. Liberals typically define the conflict as one between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Many liberals consider these two groups as essentially equivalent, “kindred spirits,” in the words of novelist William Styron. Al Gore finds in President Bush “the American version of the same fundamentalist impulse that we see in Saudi Arabia.” According to Richard Dawkins, the dogmatic beliefs of each side lead to violent enmities that “fuel their tanks at the same holy gas station.” In her book The Mighty and the Almighty, Madeleine Albright frets that “hardliners can find in the Koran and the Bible justifications for endless conflict.” So, in the view of the left, Christian and Muslim religious fanatics are once again fighting each other, as they have done in the past. As Jim Wallis puts it in God’s Politics, there is a close parallel between Islam’s holy war against the West and Bush’s holy war against Islamic terrorism.6 From the perspective of the left, the best solution is for liberals to stand up for the principles of secularism and oppose both Muslim fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism.
The liberal understanding is superficially supported by bin Laden’s rhetoric declaring a religious war of civilizations. Bin Laden speaks of the world being divided into the “region of faith” and the “region of infidelity.” At times bin Laden defines the clash as one between the Muslims and the Crusaders. But the context of bin Laden’s arguments clearly shows that bin Laden is not speaking of a religious war between Islam and Christianity. In the same videotaped remarks where bin Laden posits these conflicts, he praises Christianity and observes that Islam respects the prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam “without distinguishing among them.”7
In the classical Muslim understanding, there is a fundamental distinction between Jews and Christians on the one hand and polytheists and atheists on the other. According to Islam, Judaism and Christianity are incomplete but genuine revelations. As monotheists, Jews and Christians have historically been entitled to Muslim respect and even protection. In every Islamic empire, Jews and Christians were permitted to practice their religion and in no Muslim regime has it ever been considered legitimate to kill them. By contrast, polytheists and atheists have always been anathema to Islam. The Koran says, “Fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and, “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them.” These passages, which bin Laden frequently quotes, do not refer to Christians, because Christians are not considered pagans or idolaters. Rather, they refer to those, like the bedouins of ancient Arabia, who worship many gods or no god. Muslims are commanded to fight these unbelievers, especially when they threaten the House of Islam.
Muslim radicals could repudiate the entire Islamic tradition and argue that Christians and Jews are no different from atheists and deserve the same treatment. But this claim would undoubtedly alienate traditional Muslims. Sheikh Muhammad Tantawi, head of Al Azhar University, argues the traditional view that “Islam is not and will never be at war with Christianity.” For bin Laden to declare war against Christianity would even divide the radical Muslim camp. The influential radical sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi has said that as Muslims, “We believe in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Our Islamic faith is not complete without them.” Over the past several years films like The Last Temptation of Christ have generated controversy in America because of their blasphemous portrayal of Jesus. Qaradawi’s supporters have pointed out that only in the Muslim world were these films actually banned. (The Da Vinci Code is most likely headed for the same fate.) Even the hostility of Muslims to Israel, Qaradawi says, is “not about matters of faith” but entirely because “they seized our land.” While Islam has theological differences with Christianity and Judaism, these are differences among people who worship the same God and are “not like atheism.”8
Islamic radicals make their case against America and the West on the grounds that these cultures have abandoned Christianity. In his May 2006 letter to President Bush, Ahmadinejad faulted America not for being Christian, but for not being Christian enough. Many years earlier, Sayyid Qutb made the same point. The main reason for the West’s moral decay, Qutb argued, is that in the modern era “religious convictions are no more than a matter of antiquarian interest.” Other radicals today echo these arguments. The influential Pakistani scholar Khurshid Ahmad, leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami, argues, “Had Western culture been based on Christianity, on morality, on faith, the language and modus operandi of the contact and conflict would have been different. But that is not the case. The choice is between the divine principle and a secular materialistic culture.”9
Even though Christianity has eroded, Muslim radicals contend that the ancient crusading spirit now infuses the pagan culture of the West. When bin Laden calls America a Crusader state, he means that America is on a vicious international campaign to impose its atheist system of government and its pagan values on Muslims. In this way, bin Laden argues, America is hell-bent on destroying Islam. It is the West’s campaign against Islam that provides the religious and political basis for radical Islam’s call to violent jihad. As Sheikh Muhammad al-Qaysi told his Baghdad congregation, urging them to fight the Americans in Iraq, “This war is no different than that of the polytheists against the Prophet.”10 Bin Laden holds the same view. In his 1998 declaration bin Laden called on Muslims to “launch attacks against the armies of the American devils” and to kill Americans, whom he identified as the “helpers of Satan.” In a 2003 sermon, bin Laden
praised the September 11 hijackers and compared the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to the idols in the Kaaba that the Prophet Muhammad destroyed in the year 630 upon his victorious return to Mecca.
Thus the liberal doctrine that the war against terrorism is a battle of two opposed forms of religious fundamentalism is false. This is not why the Islamic radicals are fighting against America. From the perspective of bin Laden and his allies, the war is between the Muslim-led forces of monotheism and morality against the America-led forces of atheism and immorality.
CONSERVATIVES ARE JUST as embarrassed as liberals by the charge that America is an atheist society hostile to Islam. For more than a decade, leading figures on the right have insisted that America is one of the most religious countries in the world. In a recent book, Senator Rick Santorum cites polls showing that 90 percent of Americans profess a belief in God, and nearly 50 percent go to church every week. Santorum observes that, unlike in Europe, where the cathedrals are empty, “More people are in church in any given week in America than are in the stands at all professional sporting events in a year.” Conservatives like to point out that the religious faith of Americans seems to translate into a politics of traditional values that is unknown in other Western countries. Certainly the overt religiosity of President Bush, who does not hesitate to quote the Bible or declare Jesus Christ the most important figure in his life, is virtually unthinkable for a European head of state. There are no groups in Europe that are remotely similar to the Christian Coalition or Focus on the Family. Abortion and homosexuality are accepted without controversy in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and London. There is no German version of Jerry Falwell, no French counterpart to Pat Robertson. In this sense, American “exceptionalism” appears to be largely a product of American Christianity.11
But the notion that America is the world’s most religious nation is a fallacy. The World Values Survey, which measures the intensity of religious beliefs throughout the world, lists Nigeria as the most religious, followed by countries such as Uganda, the Philippines, El Salvador, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and Mexico. The United States ranks twentieth. Moreover, the conservative claim that America is more religious than Europe would hardly impress most Muslims, who know that Europe is not religious at all. No civilization seems to have generated within its boundaries as much unbelief. Only one in ten people in Britain, France, and Germany attend church on a regular basis, and surveys such as the Gallup Millennium study reveal that most Europeans regard God as irrelevant to their lives. It might even be accurate to say that Europeans are characterized by their animus toward religion. In drawing up the Constitution of the European Union, the drafters acknowledged the continent’s extensive debt to Greece but refused to mention its equally significant debt to Christianity.12 French hostility to religion, rooted in the anticlericalism of the French Revolution, seems especially notorious. Consequently when Muslim schoolgirls in France wanted to wear Islamic headscarves, the French said no, pointing out that, in the name of fairness, they would not permit Christians to wear crosses either. French justice, in this view, is defined by discriminating equally against all religions.
If Europe is resolutely secular, America seems to be, at best, half Christian. About 30 million Americans never attend church and have no formal ties to religion. This number has almost doubled in the past decade, suggesting that the ranks of the nonreligious are rapidly expanding.13 Moreover, tens of millions of Americans—even some who are nominally religious—live their lives as if religion did not matter and God did not exist. In comparison with Muslim societies, America is not very religious and conservatives seem to have exaggerated the religiosity of the American people.
While American society has become more secular over time, Muslims throughout the world have become more devout. Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, “There exists in the Islamic world today the widely-prevalent desire to preserve a religious and cultural identity, to reapply the divine law, to draw the various parts of the Islamic world together, and to reassert the intellectual, cultural and artistic traditions of Islam. These wishes must not be identified as fundamentalism. Most people who share these ideals are traditional Muslims.” Even in the West, Tariq Ramadan writes, there is a “silent revolution” in the Muslim community so that “more young people and intellectuals are actively looking for a way to live in harmony with their faith.”14 That’s why you see Muslim students wearing Islamic dress even on progressive American campuses.
Moreover, no amount of surveys about the religious convictions of the American people would convince Muslims, since this is not what Muslims mean when they charge that America is an atheist society. What they mean is that the public life of America—its government, laws, and policies—is intentionally divorced from religion. One influential Islamic writer argues that America has embraced “doctrines which banish religion from practical life and restrict it to a tiny corner of man’s conscience so that it has no bearing whatsoever on society and its active life.”15 In the view of many Muslims, this is unacceptable, even unthinkable, because God is the ruler both of heaven and earth. Moreover, God is primarily a lawgiver, and it is the duty of a Muslim society to live by God’s laws. For a society to forgo divine rules to the point of excluding any consideration of them from its institutions of government—this is the very definition of atheism.
Islamic radicals allege that their dictators, such as Musharraf in Pakistan, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Mubarak of Egypt, are responsible for importing secularism to the Muslim world. In a December 2004 statement bin Laden theatrically asks, “Is a Muslim supposed to rid himself of his religion to become a good citizen?”16 Islamic radicals argue that Muslims should not abide despotism with their usual forbearance. The traditional Muslim approach to a despotic ruler has been “Yes, he is a scoundrel, but at least he is our scoundrel. He is a poor excuse for a Muslim, but at least he is a Muslim. Allah put him there. Let us put up with him and obey his rules, because even bad laws are better than anarchy.” Sunni Islam, which is the most widely practiced form of Islam, is based on this combination of acquiescence and realism. The Islamic radicals, however, contend that this approach does not apply to dictators like Musharraf and Mubarak. As the radicals see it, these men are not just flawed Muslims, they are unbelievers! They are puppets who are being held in place by the greatest power of global atheism, which is America. They are pagans in disguise who are doing the Devil’s work. In exchange for America’s promise to keep them in power, these wolves in Muslim clothing are actually working to achieve America’s objective of destroying Islam from within. Therefore jihad against these Little Satans and their foreign sponsor, the Great Satan, is not only permitted but mandated.
FOR MANY AMERICANS, the notions that there is a “war against Islam” and that secularism is a disguised form of atheism may seem both disturbing and implausible. Moreover, the Muslim solution, which is the rule of sharia, appears cruel and offensive. In the American mind, sharia conjures up fearsome images of Christians and Jews being persecuted, accused criminals having their limbs cut off, and homosexuals and “fallen women” being publicly whipped and stoned. It is hard for many Americans to see how a society based on sharia can be condoned, even if that is what the Muslims want for themselves. In order to see if this American belief is reasonable, we need to understand better the Islamic perspective on religion and government.
Islam is not simply a different religion from Christianity. Islam involves a different conception of the meaning of religion, and the place of religion in society. Sayyid Qutb writes that “the basis of the Islamic message is that one should accept sharia and reject all other laws. There is no other meaning of Islam.”17 This may seem like a radical view, but it is shared by many traditional Muslims. The sharia is not simply a canon law but also a constitutional, commercial, and civil law. It covers religious teachings as well as interest rates, business practices, inheritance, and divorce. Essentially sharia covers not only the domain of religion but also the domain of morality.
All of life falls under God’s laws and commandments.
To Americans, the notion of a comprehensive holy law enforced by the state seems frighteningly reminiscent of “theocracy.” In a literal sense, this term means rule by divine authority of the priesthood or clergy. But until the Khomeini revolution, Islam has never had a governing priestly class. Rather, the caliph or sultan ruled as God’s representative on earth. The closest regime to a theocracy is the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the mullahs do rule. Even candidates for parliament are screened by the clergy, and parliamentary laws can be vetoed by a religious council. In Iran, however, the power of the state and of the mullahs is limited by the specific rules set forth in the Koran and the Islamic tradition. The rulers themselves are bound by these laws. Khomeini once said that if the Koran establishes the penalty for prostitution as one hundred lashes, he did not have the power to reduce or increase the penalty by even one lash. If he did, he would be going against God’s law, and Muslims would have not only the right but the duty to resist.18
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