Why did Islam blow its lead and fail to have an Age of Reason, an Enlightenment, and a Humanitarian Revolution? Some historians point to bellicose passages in the Koran, but compared to our own genocidal scriptures, they are nothing that some clever exegesis and evolving norms couldn’t spindoctor away.
Lewis points instead to the historical lack of separation between mosque and state. Muhammad was not just a spiritual leader but a political and military one, and only recently have any Islamic states had the concept of a distinction between the secular and the sacred. With every potential intellectual contribution filtered through religious spectacles, opportunities for absorbing and combining new ideas were lost. Lewis recounts that while works in philosophy and mathematics had been translated from classical Greek into Arabic, works of poetry, drama, and history were not. And while Muslims had a richly developed history of their own civilization, they were incurious about their Asian, African, and European neighbors and about their own pagan ancestors. The Ottoman heirs to classical Islamic civilization resisted the adoption of mechanical clocks, standardized weights and measures, experimental science, modern philosophy, translations of poetry and fiction, the financial instruments of capitalism, and perhaps most importantly, the printing press. (Arabic was the language in which the Koran was written, so printing it was considered an act of desecration.)256 In chapter 4 I speculated that the Humanitarian Revolution in Europe was catalyzed by a literate cosmopolitanism, which expanded people’s circle of empathy and set up a marketplace of ideas from which a liberal humanism could emerge. Perhaps the dead hand of religion impeded the flow of new ideas into the centers of Islamic civilization, locking it into a relatively illiberal stage of development. As if to prove the speculation correct, in 2010 the Iranian government restricted the number of university students who would be admitted to programs in the humanities, because, according to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, study of the humanities “promotes skepticism and doubt in religious principles and beliefs.” 257
Whatever the historical reasons, a large chasm appears to separate Western and Islamic cultures today. According to a famous theory from the political scientist Samuel Huntington, the chasm has brought us to a new age in the history of the world: the clash of civilizations. “In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame,” he wrote. “This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations, from the bulge of Africa to Central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.”258
Though the dramatic notion of a clash of civilizations became popular among pundits, few scholars in international studies take it seriously. Too large a proportion of the world’s bloodshed takes place within and between Islamic countries (for example, Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s, and its invasion of Kuwait in 1990), and too large a proportion takes place within and between non-Islamic countries, for the civilizational fault line to be an accurate summary of violence in the world today. Also, as Nils Petter Gleditsch and Halvard Buhaug have pointed out, even though an increasing proportion of the world’s armed conflicts have involved Islamic countries and insurgencies over the past two decades (from 20 to 38 percent), it’s not because those conflicts have increased in number. As figure 6–12 shows, Islamic conflicts continued at about the same rate while the rest of the world got more peaceful, the phenomenon I have been calling the New Peace.
Most important, the entire concept of “Islamic civilization” does a disservice to the 1.3 billion men and women who call themselves Muslims, living in countries as diverse as Mali, Nigeria, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. And cutting across the divide of the Islamic world into continents and countries is another divide that is even more critical. Westerners tend to know Muslims through two dubious exemplars: the fanatics who grab headlines with their fatwas and jihads, and the oil-cursed autocrats who rule over them. The beliefs of the hitherto silent (and frequently silenced) majority make less of a contribution to our stereotypes. Can 1.3 billion Muslims really be untouched by the liberalizing tide that has swept the rest of the world in recent decades?
Part of the answer may be found in a massive Gallup poll conducted between 2001 and 2007 on the attitudes of Muslims in thirty-five countries representing 90 percent of the world’s Islamic population.259 The results confirm that most Islamic states will not become secular liberal democracies anytime soon. Majorities of Muslims in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Bangladesh told the pollsters that Sharia, the principles behind Islamic law, should be the only source of legislation in their countries, and majorities in most of the countries said it should be at least one of the sources. On the other hand, a majority of Americans believe that the Bible should be one of the sources of legislation, and presumably they don’t mean that people who work on Sunday should be stoned to death. Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy. Like Americans’ commitment to the Bible, most Muslims’ commitment to Sharia is more a symbolic affiliation with moral attitudes they associate with the best of their culture than a literal desire to see adulteresses stoned to death. In practice, creative and expedient readings of Sharia for liberal ends have often prevailed against the oppressive fundamentalist readings. (The Nigerian woman, for example, was never executed.) Presumably that is why most Muslims see no contradiction between Sharia and democracy. Indeed, despite their professed affection for the idea of Sharia, a large majority believe that religious leaders should have no direct role in drafting their country’s constitution.
FIGURE 6–12. Islamic and world conflicts, 1990–2006
Source: Data from Gleditsch, 2008. “Islamic conflicts” involve Muslim countries or Islamic opposition movements or both. Data assembled by Halvard Buhaug from the UCDP⁄ PRIO conflict dataset and his own coding of Islamic conflicts.
Though most Muslims distrust the United States, it may not be out of a general animus toward the West or a hostility to democratic principles. Many Muslims feel the United States does not want to spread democracy in the Muslim world, and they have a point: the United States, after all, has supported autocratic regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, rejected the election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and in 1953 helped overthrow the democratically elected Mossadegh in Iran. France and Germany are viewed more favorably, and between 20 and 40 percent say they admire the “fair political system, respect for human values, liberty, and equality” of Western culture. More than 90 percent would guarantee freedom of speech in their nation’s constitution, and large numbers also support freedom of religion and freedom of assembly. Substantial majorities of both sexes in all the major Muslim countries say that women should be allowed to vote without influence from men, to work at any job, to enjoy the same legal rights as men, and to serve in the highest levels of government. And as we have seen, overwhelming majorities of the Muslim world reject the violence of Al Qaeda. Only 7 percent of the Gallup respondents approved the 9/11 attacks, and that was before Al Qaeda’s popularity cratered in 2007.
What about mobilization for political violence? A team from the University of Maryland examined the goals of 102 grassroots Muslim organizations in North Africa and the Middle East and found that between 1985 and 2004 the proportion of organizations that endorsed violence dropped from 54 to 14 percent.260 The proportion committed to nonviolent protests tripled, and the proportion that engaged in electoral politics doubled. These changes helped drive down the terrorism death curve in figure 6–11 and are reflected in the headlines, which feature far less terrorist violence in Egypt and Algeria than we read about a few years ago.
Islamic insularity is also being chipped at by a battery of liberalizing forces: independent news networks such as Al-Jazeera; American university campuses in the Gulf states; the penetratio
n of the Internet, including social networking sites; the temptations of the global economy; and the pressure for women’s rights from pent-up internal demand, nongovernmental organizations, and allies in the West. Perhaps conservative ideologues will resist these forces and keep their societies in the Middle Ages forever. But perhaps they won’t.
In early 2011, as this book was going to press, a swelling protest movement deposed the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the regimes in Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The outcome is unpredictable, but the protesters have been almost entirely nonviolent and non-Islamist, and are animated by a desire for democracy, good governance, and economic vitality rather than global jihad, the restoration of the caliphate, or death to infidels. Even with all these winds of change, it is conceivable that an Islamist tyrant or radical revolutionary group could drag an unwilling populace into a cataclysmic war. But it seems more probable that “the coming war with Islam” will never come. Islamic nations are unlikely to unite and challenge the West: they are too diverse, and they have no civilization-wide animus against us. Some Muslim countries, like Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia, are well on the way to becoming fairly liberal democracies. Some will continue to be ruled by SOBs, but they’ll be our SOBs. Some will try to muddle through the oxymoron of a Sharia democracy. None is likely to be governed by the ideology of Al Qaeda. This leaves three reasonably foreseeable dangers to the New Peace: nuclear terrorism, the regime in Iran, and climate change.
Though conventional terrorism, as John Kerry gaffed, is a nuisance to be policed rather than a threat to the fabric of life, terrorism with weapons of mass destruction would be something else entirely. The prospect of an attack that would kill millions of people is not just theoretically possible but consistent with the statistics of terrorism. The computer scientists Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young and the political scientist Kristian Gleditsch plotted the death tolls of eleven thousand terrorist attacks on log-log paper and saw them fall into a neat straight line.261 Terrorist attacks obey a power-law distribution, which means they are generated by mechanisms that make extreme events unlikely, but not astronomically unlikely.
The trio suggested a simple model that is a bit like the one that Jean-Baptiste Michel and I proposed for wars, invoking nothing fancier than a combination of exponentials. As terrorists invest more time into plotting their attack, the death toll can go up exponentially: a plot that takes twice as long to plan can kill, say, four times as many people. To be concrete, an attack by a single suicide bomber, which usually kills in the single digits, can be planned in a few days or weeks. The 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed around two hundred, took six months to plan, and 9/11, which killed three thousand, took two years.262 But terrorists live on borrowed time: every day that a plot drags on brings the possibility that it will be disrupted, aborted, or executed prematurely. If the probability is constant, the plot durations will be distributed exponentially. (Cronin, recall, showed that terrorist organizations drop like flies over time, falling into an exponential curve.) Combine exponentially growing damage with an exponentially shrinking chance of success, and you get a power law, with its disconcertingly thick tail. Given the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the real world, and religious fanatics willing to wreak untold damage for a higher cause, a lengthy conspiracy producing a horrendous death toll is within the realm of thinkable probabilities.
A statistical model, of course, is not a crystal ball. Even if we could extrapolate the line of existing data points, the massive terrorist attacks in the tail are still extremely (albeit not astronomically) unlikely. More to the point, we can’t extrapolate it. In practice, as you get to the tail of a power-law distribution, the data points start to misbehave, scattering around the line or warping it downward to very low probabilities. The statistical spectrum of terrorist damage reminds us not to dismiss the worst-case scenarios, but it doesn’t tell us how likely they are.
So how likely are they? What do you think the chances are that within the next five years each of the following scenarios will take place? (1) One of the heads of state of a major developed country will be assassinated. (2) A nuclear weapon will be set off in a war or act of terrorism. (3) Venezuela and Cuba will join forces and sponsor Marxist insurrection movements in one or more Latin American countries. (4) Iran will provide nuclear weapons to a terrorist group that will use one of them against Israel or the United States. (5) France will give up its nuclear arsenal.
I gave fifteen of these scenarios to 177 Internet users on a single Web page and asked them to estimate the probability of each. The median estimate that a nuclear bomb would be set off (scenario 2) was 0.20; the median estimate that a nuclear bomb would be set off in the United States or Israel by a terrorist group that obtained it from Iran (scenario 4) was 0.25. About half the respondents judged that the second scenario was more likely than the first. And in doing so, they committed an elementary blunder in the mathematics of probability. The probability of a conjunction of events (A and B both occurring) cannot be greater than the probability of either of them occurring alone. The probability that you will draw a red jack has to be lower than the probability that you will draw a jack, because some jacks you might draw are not red.
Yet Tversky and Kahneman have shown that most people, including statisticians and medical researchers, commonly make the error.263 Consider the case of Bill, a thirty-four-year-old man who is intelligent but also unimaginative, compulsive, and rather dull. In school he was strong in mathematics but undistinguished in the arts and humanities. What are the chances that Bill plays jazz saxophone? What are the chances that he is an accountant who plays jazz saxophone? Many people give higher odds to the second possibility, but the choice is nonsensical, because there are fewer saxophone-playing accountants than there are saxophone players. In judging probabilities, people rely on the vividness of their imaginations rather than thinking through the laws. Bill fits the stereotype of an accountant but not of a saxophonist, and our intuitions go with the stereotype.
The conjunction fallacy, as psychologists call it, infects many kinds of reasoning. Juries are more likely to believe that a man with shady business dealings killed an employee to prevent him from talking to the police than to believe that he killed the employee. (Trial lawyers thrive on this fallacy, adding conjectural details to a scenario to make it more vivid to a jury, even though every additional detail, mathematically speaking, ought to make it less probable.) Professional forecasters give higher odds to an unlikely outcome that is presented with a plausible cause (oil prices will rise, causing oil consumption to fall) than to the same outcome presented naked (oil consumption will fall).264 And people are willing to pay more for flight insurance against terrorism than for flight insurance against all causes.265
You can see where I’m going. The mental movie of an Islamist terrorist group buying a bomb on the black market or obtaining it from a rogue state and then detonating it in a populated area is all too easy to play in our mind’s eye. Even if it weren’t, the entertainment industry has played it for us in nuclear terrorist dramas like True Lies, The Sum of All Fears, and 24. The narrative is so riveting that we are apt to give it a higher probability than we would if we thought through all the steps that would have to go right for the disaster to happen and multiplied their probabilities. That’s why so many of my survey respondents judged an Iran-sponsored nuclear terrorist attack to be more probable than a nuclear attack. The point is not that nuclear terrorism is impossible or even astronomically unlikely. It is just that the probability assigned to it by anyone but a methodical risk analyst is likely to be too high.
What do I mean by “too high”? “With certainty” and “more probable than not” strike me as too high. The physicist Theodore Taylor declared in 1974 that by 1990 it would be too late to prevent terrorists from carrying out a nuclear attack.266 In 1995 the world’s foremost activist on the risks of nuclear terrorism, Graham Allison, wrote that under prevailing circumstances, a nucle
ar attack on American targets was likely before the decade was out.267 In 1998 the counterterrorism expert Richard Falkenrath wrote that “it is certain that more and more non-state actors will become capable of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons acquisition and use.”268 In 2003 UN ambassador John Negroponte judged that there was a “high probability” of an attack with a weapon of mass destruction within two years. And in 2007 the physicist Richard Garwin estimated that the chance of a nuclear terrorist attack was 20 percent per year, or about 50 percent by 2010 and almost 90 percent within a decade.269
Like television weather forecasters, the pundits, politicians, and terrorism specialists have every incentive to emphasize the worst-case scenario. It is undoubtedly wise to scare governments into taking extra measures to lock down weapons and fissile material and to monitor and infiltrate groups that might be tempted to acquire them. Overestimating the risk, then, is safer than underestimating it—though only up to a point, as the costly invasion of Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction proves. The professional reputations of experts have proven to be immune to predictions of disasters that never happen, while almost no one wants to take a chance at giving the all-clear and ending up with radioactive egg on his face.270
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 55