by Eboo Patel
When a pipe bomb exploded outside the New York office of the Soviet airline Aeroflot, presumably planted by JDL associates, Yossi felt a surge of pride. “I was thrilled,” he wrote. “Nobody could dismiss us now. We were just like the anti-Vietnam movement: serious.” His friends were mostly other young people involved in the JDL, several of them on a first-name basis with Kahane and increasingly responsible for the organization’s acts of violence. When they heard of an attack on Jews, they drove to the victims’ home and stood there in military fashion. Moish, one of Yossi’s school friends, played the role of sniper, setting up across the street from the house with a shotgun.
Yossi craved what the JDL offered: “Kahane was telling us, young American Jews, that our comfortable lives were an aberration, a meaningless interlude between times of persecution, and that by confronting New York cops and risking beating and arrest we could reenter Jewish history and experience its menacing intensity.”
Like Hasib Hussain, the July 7, 2005, London Tube bomber who had become obsessed with Muslim oppression in Britain and abroad, Yossi’s fears were partially true. The Holocaust was gut-wrenchingly horrible; anti-Semitism is a persistent strain across human history; Jewish kids were chased and beaten in New York’s boroughs in the 1960s and 1970s. Both had immigrant parents who lived in ethnicreligious cocoons, expressing a peculiar combination of disgust and gratitude toward their adopted homeland, unable to provide their kids with a religious identity relevant to their time and place. Hasib Hussain felt guilty that he had not experienced suffering like the Palestinians or Bosnians, that he had not been part of the mujahideen battling the Soviets in the 1980s. Yossi felt guilty that he had not suffered through the Holocaust or battled Arab armies to help secure the state of Israel in 1948. They both craved a place in the historical drama of their tribes. They both felt that mainstream religious institutions ignored their passion. They were both unremarkable, middle-class kids with no particular pathology outside of a teenager’s inherent sense of urgency. In both cases, religious extremists skillfully channeled their teenage intensity into a totalitarian identity and violent action.
If suicide bombing had been a standard tactic of religious extremism in the early 1970s, Yossi and his friends might have lined up to accept Kahane’s blessing and a belt loaded with bombs.
Who does not understand violence? Who has not experienced suffering and wanted to inflict it twice over in return? Who has not felt the heat and thunder of anger rise up in him or her? Who has not known the total release of fury bursting forth?
I still remember the time I got burned on a fly pattern during a pickup football game in junior high. David caught the ball, Jerry Rice style, over his left shoulder, did a dance in the end zone, said a few choice words to me, and trotted across the field. Five minutes went by. Ten minutes. The sting remained. David was about ten feet away. He had his back turned, talking and laughing with his teammate. Were they mocking me? I felt the rage rush up, and it was almost as if I couldn’t help myself. I got a running start, aimed my shoulder into the small of his back, and rammed into him with all the force I could muster. His body crumpled under the weight of mine, and I felt a sense of total resolution.
A few years later, when I saw the movie Lawrence of Arabia, I had a deep understanding of the scene where Lawrence describes the first time he killed a man. The problem, he says, was not just the act. It was that he liked it.
We humans know violence well. It is a part of each of us. It is precisely the reason I was drawn to religion in the first place. Somehow, the religious people I admired overcame the human desire to hurt others. Tibetan Buddhist masters talked about their struggle to love their Chinese tormentors. Mahatma Gandhi spent his time in a South African prison making sandals for his jailer. Pope John Paul II met with the man who tried to assassinate him, and forgave him.
Dorothy Day once said that she created the Catholic Worker because she wanted a place where people could be better. It was one of the key reasons I spent so much time there as a college student. I wanted to overcome those parts of me that would tackle somebody from behind. I wanted to be good.
It was in Islam that I found the clearest articulation of this inner struggle. The story goes like this: As a victorious Muslim army was celebrating its triumph in battle, the Prophet Muhammad told the men they had won only the “lesser jihad.” Now, he said, they had to move on to the “greater jihad”—the jihad al-nafs, the struggle against their lower selves. The first time I read that, I felt as if the Prophet was speaking directly to me, as if he could see the thousands of times in my life that my lower self had won, as if he was personally returning Islam to my consciousness.
There is another event in the history of Islam that, for me, defines the religious spirit in the world, and the meaning of lasting victory. It is the signing of the Treaty of Hudaybiyah and the Prophet’s peaceful return to Mecca. After years of defending himself and his fellow Muslims in Medina against aggressive military assaults by the Quraysh, a powerful tribe based in Mecca, Muhammad decided to launch a religious peace offensive. In the year 628, he announced to the Muslim community in Medina that he was going to make a holy pilgrimage to the Ka’aba, the black shrine in Mecca that Abraham built to God. Against the advice of his closest companions, who were convinced that the Quraysh would take this chance to murder him, Muhammad refused to carry arms. He set forth dressed in the simple, white, two-piece outfit still worn by Muslims making the hajj today, uttering the cry “Labbayk Allahuma Labbayk” (Here I am, O God, at Your service). A thousand Muslims accompanied him, many questioning the wisdom of making a religious pilgrimage in the direction of an enemy that wanted war.
The Quraysh sent a war party of two hundred cavalry to prevent Muhammad from entering the city. The Prophet steered his companions toward Hudaybiyah, at the edge of the Sanctuary, where all fighting was forbidden, sending a message to the Quraysh that he came in peace. He reminded his companions that they were on a religious quest and as such should prepare to repent and ask God’s forgiveness for their sins. No doubt some of them were confused about why Muhammad was making spiritual preparations instead of war preparations. But Muhammad, guided by revelations from God, knew that ultimate victory for Islam did not mean violently defeating the enemy, but peacefully reconciling with them. Achieving this required an act of personal humility and self-effacement that shocked even his closest companions.
After being convinced that Muhammad was not going to engage them in battle, the Quraysh sent Suhayl, one of their most stridently anti-Muslim leaders, to negotiate a settlement. The two sat together for a long time, finally agreeing to terms that the Muslims felt were deeply unfair but that Muhammad insisted they accept. The Muslims would be allowed to do the holy pilgrimage in peace, but not now. They would have to go back to Medina and wait a whole year before returning. Also, the Muslims would have to repatriate any Meccan who had converted to Islam and immigrated to Medina to be with the Prophet without the permission of his guardian. One source writes that the Prophet’s companions “felt depressed almost to the point of death” when they saw the settlement. Umar, one of the Prophet’s closest associates, said, “Why should we agree to what is demeaning to our religion?” But the greatest shock was still to come.
When it came time to sign the treaty, Suhayl objected to the statement, “This is what Muhammad, the apostle of God, has agreed with Suhayl ibn Amr.” He said that if he recognized Muhammad as the apostle of God, they would not be in a situation of war to begin with. “Write down your own name and the name of your father,” Suhayl instructed the Prophet. To the utter despair of his companions, Muhammad agreed. He told Ali, his son-in-law who would later become the first Shia Imam, to strike the words “apostle of God” from the treaty. Ali could not bring himself to do it. So the illiterate Prophet asked Ali to point to the words on the paper, took the pen, and struck them himself.
On the journey home to Medina, with the bitter taste of humiliation still fresh in the mouths of his comp
anions, the Prophet received a revelation that would come to be known as the Victory Sura, chapter 48 in the Holy Qur’an. In it, God told the Prophet, “Surely We have given thee / a manifest victory.” The sura states that God Himself was involved in the situation: “It is He who sent down the sakina / into the hearts of the believers, that / they might add faith to their faith.” The Arabic term sakina loosely translates as “the peace, tranquillity, and presence of God” and is thought to be related to the Hebrew term shekinah. The sura closes with the following lines: “God has promised / those of them who believe in and do deeds / of righteousness, forgiveness and / a mighty wage.”
The following year, as promised, Muhammad returned with nearly three thousand pilgrims to perform the pilgrimage. His enemies, holding up their end of the bargain, vacated the city and watched the Muslims do the ritual circumambulations around the Ka’aba and run seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah. They were shocked to see Bilal, a black Abyssinian who had been a slave in Mecca before being freed by the Muslims, climbing to the top of the Ka’aba several times a day to give the call to prayer, a position of honor in Islam. Muhammad heard that a woman had recently been widowed and offered to marry her, thus taking her into his protection. He invited his Quraysh enemies to the wedding feast. They refused and told him his three days were up. The Muslims left with the same discipline and grace with which they had entered. It was a powerful image that many Quraysh would not soon forget.
When Muhammad returned to Mecca a year later, those who had taken up arms against him converted to Islam in droves. Muhammad granted a near total amnesty to the Quraysh, despite the fact that many had fought battles against him in the past and regardless of whether they converted to Islam or not. To the surprise of some of his companions, he even gave high office to some of the people who, a short time before, had been his sworn enemies. But Muhammad was not interested in punishment. He was interested in a positive future, and he knew that would be accomplished only by widening the space so that people could enter it.
During this time, God sent Muhammad a revelation about relations between different communities in a diverse society:
O mankind, We have created you
male and female, and appointed you
races and tribes, that you may know
one another. Surely the noblest
among you in the sight of God is
the most righteous.
For me, the Treaty of Hudaybiyah and the peaceful return of Muhammad to Mecca are the defining moments of Islam. They exemplify the genius of the Prophet, the generosity of God, and the bright possibility of a common life together. It is an ancient example of how a religiously inspired peace movement can win a victory not by defeating the enemy, but by turning them into friends.
As I think now of the civil rights marchers in Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, I cannot help but hear the message of “Labbayk Allahuma Labbayk” in their songs. I cannot help but see the Prophet at Hudaybiyah as I reflect on Martin Luther King Jr. staring at his bombed-out home in Montgomery, Alabama, and calming the agitated crowd by saying, “We must meet hate with love.” I cannot help but glimpse the spirit of the Holy Qur’an’s message on pluralism in the lines that King uttered at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott: “We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization … The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community.” I cannot help but believe that Allah’s sakina is a force that has reappeared across time and place whenever righteous people are overcoming the tribal urges of humanity’s lower self with a message of transcendence.
So what of the relationship between religion and violence? Are there not people who chant the name of God while they murder others? Is it not the case that religious texts themselves sometimes call for violence? Undoubtedly, religion is at the center of a vast array of horrible things. But it is clearly not confined only to evil use. Religion, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, is simply a tool, like a knife. When a knife is used to cut bread, it is good. When it is used to cut someone’s throat, it is bad.
A favorite explanation of people who are suspicious of religion in general, or other people’s religions in particular, is that religious texts themselves command violence, and so it should not surprise us when believers obey. This argument is particularly marshaled against Muslims, with Islamophobes and Muslim totalitarians alike circulating papers that cite only the parts of the Qur’an that deal with violence.
I concede that the bin Ladens of the world are not making everything up. There are indeed explicit statements about violence in the scriptures of most major religious traditions. But to think that the statements of a religious text suddenly morph into armed reality is to have a profound misunderstanding of religion. There are several layers of meaning to any religious text: the explicit, the contextual, and the symbolic, to name just a few. A religious text comes to life through its interpreters. Violence committed in the name of a religion is really violence emanating from the heart of a particular interpreter. As the scholar Ignaz Goldziher put it, “It could be said about the Qur’an … everyone searches for his view in the Holy Book.” Or, as the great Muslim legal scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl writes, “The Qur’anic text assumes that readers will bring a preexisting, innate moral sense to the text. Hence, the text will morally enrich the reader, but only if the reader will morally enrich the text.”
Another common theory is that religious violence is a result of oppression, largely based on the policies of the powerful. There is no doubt that far too many people in the world have their freedom restricted by repressive regimes, live in the grip of wrenching hunger, are constantly fearful of the threat of violence, or experience some combination of the three. My personal opinion is that my own government does far too little to help, often exacerbates the problem, and is sometimes one of the chief reasons it exists. But poverty, repression, and fear, as well as the policies that lead to them, do not by themselves arm people. As Jessica Stern writes in Terror in the Name of God, “The same variables (political, religious, social, or all of the above) that seem to have caused one person to become a terrorist might cause another to become a saint.” What counts is how a community responds to a situation. Too often, that response is shaped by people aiming for violence and skilled at recruiting young people to commit it.
I believe that religious violence is the product of careful design, manipulated by human hands. It is more about sociology than scripture, more about institutions than inevitability. The theology of the world’s bin Ladens is influential because they have built powerful institutions that recruit, inspire, and train people to act in hateful and murderous ways. When people respond to oppression by killing their enemies while whispering the name of God, it is because an organization convinced them that doing so is a sacred duty and then gave them everything they needed to carry it out. And so often, their primary targets are young people. As Stern writes, “Holy wars take off only when there is a large supply of young men who feel humiliated and deprived; when leaders emerge who know how to capitalize on those feelings; and when a segment of society—for whatever reason—is willing to fund them.”
But religious extremists do not only speak of humiliation and deprivation. They define the Zeitgeist as reclaiming the historical greatness of a religious tradition and tell their target audience of teenagers that they are the only ones who can achieve it. They juxtapose a people’s current suffering against a mythical alternative and tell young people that it is their destiny to transport their people from the former to the latter. That mythical alternative has both historical and theological dimensions, such as the time of the Prophet for Muslims and the Messiah’s coming for Jews. And it is the responsibility of young people to realize it, whether that means driving America out of Saudi Arabia or establishing settlements in Hebron. Many mainstream religious institutions ignore young people or, worse, think that their role should be limited
to designing the annual T-shirt. By contrast, religious extremists build their institutions around the desire of young people to have a clear identity and make a powerful impact.
Institutions, writes the sociologist Peter Berger, are best understood as programs for human activity. It is a truism that applies to a broad range of sectors. Consider a recent example of how a network of powerful institutions made a set of political ideas dominant. After recovering from the shock of defeat in 2000, Democrats began investigating how Republicans had managed to unseat them after eight years of Clinton-era peace and prosperity. Wasn’t it the case, they asked, that millions of people had voted against their own interests when casting their ballots for George W. Bush? How had this happened? The answer, they found, lay in the superior institution building of the Republican Party. Since Barry Goldwater’s defeat in the 1964 presidential election, a handful of philanthropic foundations had become very strategic about channeling money to a small number of think tanks, which nurtured a core set of ideas that played well in parts of America that were becoming demographically significant. More recently, the “Republican message machine” (which was really just a network of these institutions) became highly effective at recruiting extremely electable candidates, provided them with lavish campaign funding, and offered professional training sessions where they learned to communicate effectively in media-friendly sound bites. The Democrats were left to bleat about how their ideas were actually more popular with Americans on Sunday morning talk shows, while Republicans replaced them in Congress and in the White House.