Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  The most extreme and widespread acts of violence today are committed mainly by radical Muslim men. These thugs believe that they are entitled to impose their absolute truth claims on Muslims who do not agree with their brand of Islam as well as on those who dare to practice another faith or to abjure belief in any god. Yet many in the Western world, for a variety of reasons, refuse to see that such truth claims and forced conversion are central to the terrorist enterprise—that religious domination is not only a means to a political end but an end in itself. There are secular as well as religious liberals who simply cannot comprehend the kind of blind faith that makes vicious young men believe they are doing God’s work when they cut off the heads of people who do not agree with them.

  Some religious believers do not wish to acknowledge the violence inflicted in the name of God by their ancestors (in a metaphoric and sometimes literal sense), before secular law stopped privileging one form of faith over others. This is a peculiar form of thin-skinned religious sensibility, since modern Christians do not in fact bear any more responsibility for atrocities committed by medieval crusaders than, say, modern Egyptians do for their ancient forebears’ charming religious custom of entombing living slaves along with their dead noble masters. They do, however, bear responsibility for trying to sanitize their own history in order to pretend that “true” religion never has, never can instigate violence.

  Secular liberals, by contrast, tend to emphasize “tolerance.” Because freedom of conscience is such a deeply held secular value, some well-meaning but intellectually confused secular thinkers have trouble separating legitimate criticism of fanatical religion from “hate speech.” The easiest course for anyone—religious or secular—who is uncomfortable criticizing any aspect of religion is to avoid making careful distinctions, pretend that this violence has a purely political or economic explanation, and deny that crazed faith—perish the thought—has anything to do with such terrible acts. It is undeniable that extreme fundamentalist forms of religion, with their emphasis on martyrdom and rewards in the afterlife, tend to flourish in societies affording little opportunity in this life, but it is equally undeniable that retrograde religion itself fosters social, educational, and economic deprivation in a vicious cycle.

  The most disgusting statement after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was made by Osama bin Laden himself, who, in a videotaped message, declared, “Let the whole world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of al-Andalus should be repeated.” But the best of al-Andalus, stripped of hagiography, represented exactly the sort of society hated by Bin Laden and his ilk—hated for its promiscuous mingling of cultural customs, its exchange of ideas, its emphasis on secular as well as religious knowledge. The medieval Muslim translators of Greek classics into Arabic, who played a critical role in making the Renaissance possible, would have been slaughtered by men like Bin Laden. What the violent religious lunatics hate most of all, as they always have, is the idea that human beings have the right to use their own minds to determine their own beliefs. For Bin Laden to talk about the Convivencia as if he were its heir was a genuine sacrilege (as opposed to the promiscuous use of the adjective “sacrilegious” to describe any belief with which a fanatic disagrees). The Christian Bin Ladens of the late Middle Ages destroyed al-Andalus, as the Muslim Bin Ladens today wish to destroy any fruitful, free intermingling of Islam with modernity.

  •

  Permit me, for the special benefit of those—including President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush—who maintain that “terrorism has nothing to do with Islam,” to restate my position on this matter. Bush and Obama have understandable political reasons for their position—they do not want American action against a terrorist minority to be seen as a war on an entire faith—but they are wrong to pretend that the terrorists’ behavior has nothing to do with their idea of the Muslim religion. It is as ridiculous to say that modern terrorism has nothing to do with Islam as it would be to say that the murder of Hypatia in the fifth century had nothing to do with the violent side of early Christianity, that the Crusades and the Inquisition had nothing to do with Roman Catholicism, or that the executions of Michael Servetus and countless Anabaptists had nothing to do with John Calvin and Calvinism or with Martin Luther and early Lutheranism.

  Some apologists for religious correctness argue that the very phrase “religious violence” is at best a misnomer, at worst a libel, because religion has always been entangled with politics—and politics is the real driver of what is called religious violence. The works of Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun who passed through a brief period of atheism and now writes immensely popular books stressing the good in all religions, epitomize the view of faith as a largely innocent actor in tribal and nationalist violence. In an interview filled with wishful rewriting of just about every religion’s history as well as comical errors of fact, she declares:

  The prophets of Israel, for example, were deeply political people. They castigated their rulers for not looking after the poor; they cried out against the system of agrarian injustice. Jesus did the same, Mohammed and the Quran do the same. Sometimes, religion permeates the violence of the state, but it also offers the consistent critique of that structural and martial violence.3

  Of course, a case can be made for just about everything from the Bible and the Quran—as long as one disregards contradictory passages in the same books. As the Duchess says to Alice in Wonderland, “Tut, tut, child! Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” I suppose, if the term is used somewhat loosely, “agrarian justice” might be seen as one concern of certain Hebrew prophets. Moses, after all, began demonstrating the Lord’s power after the pharaoh ordered the Hebrews to make bricks without straw—which could be considered an example of not only agrarian but workplace injustice. And Elijah vanquished the worshippers of Baal and ended the agrarian injustice of a long drought, though it is true that this particular injustice was initiated by God Himself. (For a genuine economic critique, one would do better to fast-forward to 1797 and the decidedly secular Thomas Paine’s influential pamphlet, straightforwardly titled Agrarian Justice, which advocated an estate tax on land to finance old-age pensions.) Somewhat less comical than the vision of Israel’s prophets as advocates for agrarian reform is the assertion that religion offers a consistent critique of state-sponsored martial violence. If there is one challenge that has never been offered by politically dominant religions, it is a critique, consistent or otherwise, of militarism—in ancient or modern states. Whenever and wherever pacifist religions emerged, they were always persecuted minority faiths. Only modern, secular governments recognize the rights of conscientious objectors. But even if one is not a pacifist and accepts the idea that there are some “just wars” (as I do), religions in the pre-modern era opposed militarism only when it threatened believers in their own faith.

  In twentieth-century Europe, in both Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, priests who spoke out and worked against fascist militarism (and the persecution of Jews) were often the objects of ecclesiastical censure emanating from the Vatican, under Popes Pius XI and XII.*3 Heroic anti-fascist, anti-militarist clergy—only some of their names known to history—represented a dissident, not a dominant, strain within both Roman Catholicism and German Protestantism. Both the righteous Gentiles who did everything they could to save Jews, and the clerics, including two popes, who concerned themselves only with the fate of Jews who had converted to Christianity, were part of the “real” Christianity. Or, to be more exact, Christianities. When people say that some atrocity has nothing to do with “real” religion, what they usually mean is that they want to remember only religious good and consign religious evil to a memory hole. Sometimes they also mean that evil committed in the name of God has nothing to do with their own interpretation of a particular religion. The obvious shortcoming of such rationalizations is that real religion is and always has been in the eye of the beholder.

  Those who wish to absolv
e Islamic ideologues of responsibility for terrorism will not even take terrorists at their own word when they use their faith as justification for their acts. Bin Laden, according to Armstrong, “talks about God and Allah and Islam and the infidels and all that, but he had very clear political aims and attitudes towards Saudi Arabia, towards Western involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. The way he talked always about Zionists and crusaders rather than Jews and Christians—these are political terms.”4 First, Zionists and crusaders are not only political (and sometimes neutral historical) terms but can be, and often are, used as code words for anti-Jewish and anti-Christian views. More important, the inseparability of religious from political ideology is precisely what makes extremist religion such a dangerous force in any era. “Thus sayeth the Lord” has always been the most powerful justification offered by conquerors; the melding of religion with nationalism and/or anti-colonialism reinforces rather than reduces the importance of the religious part of the equation. But why take Bin Laden at his word? We Westerners know he didn’t mean all that stuff about infidels and was only speaking politically in his rantings about Zionists.

  The religiously correct also equate Christendom’s crimes in the Middle Ages with the crimes of radical Islamists today—as if today’s Islamic terrorists somehow deserve a pass because Christians once engaged in similar behavior.*4 The heart of true liberalism is belief in the possibility (if not always the attainment) of progress; there is nothing liberal about suggesting that anyone, anywhere in the world, of whatever religious or nonreligious persuasion, should be forced to live in the twenty-first century by the standards of medieval theocracy, for as long as it takes their captors to catch up with the last millennium, give or take a few centuries, of history.

  This does not—I repeat, not—mean that all or most Muslims are terrorists or sympathize with terrorists. But it is a fact that most (though by no means all) terrorists in the world today are Muslims. That the terrorists are Muslims who have been condemned by many other Muslims, and that they have killed and persecuted more Muslims who disagree with them than they have anyone else, is also a fact—and an overwhelmingly important one. The British journalist Sunny Hundal, in an essay published by Al Jazeera, describes the rise of ISIS as “probably the worst event in recent Muslim history since 9/11.” With a bluntness and candor not displayed by enough Western journalists, Hundal—the son of Sikh Indian parents—observes that ISIS has taken aim first at moderate and modernist Muslims. “The Islamic State (ISIS) is a direct descendant of al-Qaeda,” he argues, “but there is one key difference: Its leaders believe fighting ‘apostates’ is more important than fighting non-Muslims for now….The caliphate, say its fighters, will never be truly powerful unless apostates and ‘fake’ Muslims are first weeded out—and their definition of ‘apostate’ expands to include anyone who stands against them.”5 Apostasy is part of the language and history of monotheism and involves—at a minimum—forbidding anyone born into the faith to leave it. In its maximalist form, as Hundal suggests, the definition of apostasy encompasses anyone—of whatever faith—who is so foolish as to oppose those who would control thoughts as well as deeds. This concept remains a philosophical tenet of ultra-conservative factions within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—but it no longer has any secular force except in Islamic societies (whether established states or the spoils of temporary conquest) ruled by Shariah.

  Some on the religious and secular left are perfectly happy to call violence “religious” as long as the term is applied only to non-Muslims. Dean Obeidallah, a political comedian and contributor to The Daily Beast and MSNBC, excoriates the media for calling Islamic terrorists “Islamic” but failing to call the murderers of abortion doctors “Christian terrorists.”6 I don’t know about anyone else in the media, but I am perfectly comfortable applying the label “Christian terrorists” to the clinic bombers and the killers of doctors who perform abortions, and I have done so many times in speeches. Moreover, to say that they are motivated by their brand of Christianity, as the murderous Muslim fighters are motivated by their brand of Islam, is not to say that the majority of Christians agree with them. The difference is that these Christian terrorists go to jail in the United States, under secular law, for their crimes; American juries have proved completely unsympathetic to the attempts of clinic bombers and assassins of doctors to rationalize their actions on religious grounds. Who will obtain justice for the girls kidnapped from their schools, raped, and sold into slavery in Nigeria by Boko Haram (the group to which Obeidallah referred when he chastised the press for calling Islamic terrorists “Islamic”)?

  Furthermore, it is patronizing to Muslims to suggest that they are too undiscriminating to tolerate the proper identification of terrorists who want to force all Muslims within reach of their violence into the same demented mind-set. Malala Yousafzai, the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, is a Muslim, too, and she nearly died when a member of the Taliban—the Islamic terrorist Taliban—tried to kill her because of her advocacy of education for women. She shared the prize with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian and a Hindu who has campaigned against child labor and child slavery. Would it surprise you to know that the Hindu wing nuts, intent on protecting their women from falling in love with Muslim or Christian men, are uninterested in Satyarthi’s campaign against child trafficking? Who cares if boys and girls are routinely sold into sexual slavery, as long as grown women are forbidden to fall in love with a man of another faith and convert to his religion? Should we not call Malala a Muslim? Or should we simply reserve religious identification for good Muslims and pretend that there are no evil Muslims who want to wipe out the very memory of the cultural cross-fertilization that characterized the best of the Convivencia?

  The Enlightenment bashers on the religious and political right deserve as much contempt for their exploitation of this issue as the religiously correct hypocrites on the left. Suddenly these people—from the textbook censors in Texas to the Fox News pundits—have discovered that Islamic terrorists hate “our” values—secular values such as the separation of church and state, which the political right has persistently tried to eviscerate and write out of American history. And they have discovered that Muslims—all Muslims, not just right-wing terrorists and theocrats—lack respect for women’s rights. Yes, the world would certainly be a paradise for women who want to control their own minds and bodies if the Christian right were in charge and those pesky Muslims would just disappear.

  In much of Europe, reluctance to address forthrightly the religious aspect of terrorism comes from two other sources—guilt about the history of European colonialism in many parts of the Muslim world, and anxiety about the presence of such a large Muslim immigrant population.*5 One favorite way around the juxtaposition of fear created by terrorist acts in Europe and the presence of a significant Muslim population is the contention that terrorism is essentially a political problem created by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (And, yes, there are also Jewish terrorists. One of them, a law student associated with a far-right, ultra-Orthodox group in Israel, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.) The use of Israel to “explain” Muslim terrorism is much less common across the political spectrum in the United States than in Europe, but the argument is advanced on both continents. For the hard right, tarring most Muslims with the terrorist brush is justified by the contention that Muslims hate Israel because they hate Jews. Love for Jews, like concern for women’s rights, is also a recent discovery—roughly forty years old—for the American religious right. It was in the 1970s that right-wing evangelicals discovered common ground with Jewish neoconservatives on the subject of Israel. The Jewish neocons, in embracing the conservative evangelicals on this issue, have simply decided to ignore the main reason why right-wing Christians value the State of Israel so highly. For those who believe in the book of Revelation, modern Israel will be the site of the battle of Armageddon, when every last non-Christian on earth will be left to perish (the ultimate penalty in the fund
amentalist fantasy world for refusing to convert). At the same time, fundamentalist believers will be whisked up to heaven to “rapture”—a word used as both a verb and a noun in the far-out precincts of the Christian right. For the hard political left, by contrast—especially in Europe—the trouble is Israel itself, always seen as a guilty, illegitimate wolf attacking Palestinian lambs.

  But let us suppose, for a moment, that a miracle far more marvelous than the parting of the Red Sea has occurred. Israel has withdrawn from the occupied territories and dismantled the settlements; Hamas and all other Palestinian combatants have recognized the right of Israel to exist; and a secure Palestinian state has been established. And, oh yes, the Israeli government has persuaded its own zealots to give peace a chance and clamped down hard on those who would use violence to nullify any agreement. Education is flourishing in the new Palestine, and skilled advisers from both Israel and the Palestinian diaspora are pouring across the peaceful border to help rebuild a ravaged land. Even in this fairy-tale scenario, I would bet that Islamic—yes, Islamic; yes, Muslim—terrorists would continue to pose a threat to the physical and mental peace of the world. The new target might be anywhere. It could certainly be the new Palestine, which would be a living reproach to those who wish to isolate Muslims and feed the grievances of the dispossessed. I do not expect, however, that I will have to make good on this bet (which would give me no pleasure), because the toxic mixture of religion and politics among both Israelis and Palestinians means that a miracle of Biblical and Quranic proportions would be needed to produce a real peace settlement.