The End of Faith (16 page)

The Clash

Samuel Huntington has famously described the conflict between Islam and the West as a
“clash of civilizations.” Huntington observed that wherever Muslims and non-Muslims share
a border, armed conflict tends to arise. Finding a felicitous phrase for an infe- licitous
fact, he declared that “Islam has bloody borders.”21 Many scholars have attacked Huntington's thesis, however. Edward Said wrote that “a great
deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole
religion or civiliza- tion.”22 Said, for his part, maintained that the members of Al Qaeda are little more than “crazed
fanatics” who, far from lending credence to Huntington's thesis, should be grouped with
the Branch Davidi- ans, the disciples of the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana, and the cult of
Aum Shinrikyo: “Huntington writes that the world's billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of
the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.' Did
he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and fifty Bosnians? Even if he
did, what sort of sample is that?” It is hard not to see this kind of criticism as
disingenuous. Undoubtedly we should recognize the limits of generalizing about a culture,
but the idea that Osama bin Laden is the Muslim equivalent of the Reverend Jim Jones is
ris- ible. Bin Laden has not, contrary to Said's opinion on the matter, “become a vast,
over-determined symbol of everything America hates and fears.”23 One need only read the Koran to know, with something approaching mathematical certainty,
that all truly devout Muslims will be “convinced of the superiority of their culture, and
obsessed with the inferiority of their power,” just as Huntington alleges. And this is all
that his thesis requires.

Whether or not one likes Huntington's formulation, one thing is clear: the evil that has
finally reached our shores is not merely the evil of terrorism. It is the evil of
religious faith at the moment of its polit- ical ascendancy. Of course, Islam is not
uniquely susceptible to under- going such horrible transformations, though it is, at this
moment in

history, uniquely ascendant.24 Western leaders who insist that our conflict is not with Islam are mistaken; but, as I
argue throughout this book, we have a problem with Christianity and Judaism as well. It is
time we recognized that all reasonable men and women have a com- mon enemy. It is an enemy
so near to us, and so deceptive, that we keep its counsel even as it threatens to destroy
the very possibility of human happiness. Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself.

While it would be comforting to believe that our dialogue with the Muslim world has, as
one of its possible outcomes, a future of mutual tolerance, nothing guarantees this
resultleast of all the tenets of Islam. Given the constraints of Muslim orthodoxy, given
the penalties within Islam for a radical (and reasonable) adaptation to modernity, I think
it is clear that Islam must find some way to revise itself, peacefully or otherwise. What
this will mean is not at all obvious. What is obvious, however, is that the West must
either win the argument or win the war. All else will be bondage.

The Riddle of Muslim “Humiliation”

Thomas Friedman, a tireless surveyor of the world's discontents for the New York Times, has declared that Muslim “humiliation” is at the root of Muslim terrorism. Others have
offered the same diagno- sis, and Muslims themselves regularly assert that Western
imperial- ism has offended their dignity, their pride, and their honor. What should we
make of this? Can anyone point to a greater offender of Muslim dignity than Islamic law
itself? For a modern example of the kind of society that can be fashioned out of an
exclusive reliance upon the tenets of Islam, simply recall what Afghanistan was like under
the Taliban. Who are those improbable creatures scurrying about in shrouds and being
regularly beaten for showing an exposed ankle? Those were the dignified (and illiterate)
women of the House of Islam.

Zakaria and many others have noted that as repressive as Arab

dictators generally are, they tend to be more liberal than the people they oppress. The
Saudi Prince Abdullah, for instancea man who has by no means distinguished himself as a
liberalrecently pro- posed that women should be permitted to drive automobiles in his
country. As it turns out, his greatly oppressed people would not stand for this degree of
spiritual oppression, and the prince was forced to back down. At this point in their
history, give most Mus- lims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out
their political freedoms by the root. We should not for a moment lose sight of the
possibility that they would curtail our freedoms as well, if they only had the power to do
so.

There is no doubt that our collusion with Muslim tyrantsin Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Iran,
Egypt, and elsewherehas been despica- ble. We have done nothing to discourage the
mistreatment and out- right slaughter of tens of thousands of Muslims by their own
regimesregimes that, in many cases, we helped bring to power. Our failure to support the
Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, which we encouraged, surely ranks among the most
unethical and consequential foreign policy blunders of recent decades. But our cul-
pability on this front must be bracketed by the understanding that were democracy to
suddenly come to these countries, it would be lit- tle more than a gangplank to theocracy.
There does not seem to be anything within the principles of Islam by which to resist the
slide into sharia (Islamic law), while there is everything to encourage it. This is a
terrible truth that we have to face: the only thing that cur- rently stands between us and
the roiling ocean of Muslim unreason is a wall of tyranny and human rights abuses that we
have helped to erect. This situation must be remedied, but we cannot merely force Muslim
dictators from power and open the polls. It would be like opening the polls to the
Christians of the fourteenth century.

It is also true that poverty and lack of education play a role in all of this, but it is
not a role that suggests easy remedies. The Arab world is now economically and
intellectually stagnant to a degree that few could have thought possible, given its
historical role in

advancing and preserving human knowledge. In the year 2002 the GDP in all Arab countries
combined did not equal that of Spain. Even more troubling, Spain translates as many books
into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic since the ninth
century.25 This degree of insularity and backwardness is shocking, but it should not lead us to
believe that poverty and lack of education are the roots of the problem. That a generation
of poor and illiterate children are being fed into the fundamentalist machinery of the madrassas (Saudi-financed religious schools) should surely terrify us.26 But Muslim terrorists have not tended to come from the ranks of the uneducated poor; many
have been mid- dle class, educated, and without any obvious dysfunction in their personal
lives. As Zakaria points out, compared with the nineteen hijackers, John Walker Lindh (the
young man from California who joined the Taliban) was “distinctly undereducated.” Ahmed
Omar Sheikh, who organized the kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street journal reporter Daniel Pearl studied at the London School of Economics. Hezbollah militants who
die in violent operations are actually less likely to come from poor homes than their nonmilitant contemporaries and more likely to have a secondary school educa- tion.27 The leaders of Hamas are all college graduates, and some have master's degrees.28 These facts suggest that even if every Muslim enjoyed a standard of living comparable to
that of the average middle-class American, the West might still be in profound danger of
colliding with Islam. I suspect that Muslim prosperity might even make matters worse,
because the only thing that seems likely to per- suade most Muslims that their worldview
is problematic is the demonstrable failure of their societies.29 If Muslim orthodoxy were as economically and technologically viable as Western liberalism,
we would probably be doomed to witness the Islamification of the earth.

As we see in the person of Osama bin Laden, a murderous reli- gious fervor is compatible
with wealth and education. Indeed, the technical proficiency of many Muslim terrorists
demonstrates that it is compatible with a scientific education. That is why there is no cog-

nitive or cultural substitute for desacralizing faith itself. As long as it is acceptable
for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on earth to live, we will
continue to murder one another on account of our myths. In our dealings with the Muslim
world, we must acknowledge that Muslims have not found anything of sub- stance to say
against the actions of the September 11 hijackers, apart from the ubiquitous canard that
they were really Jews.30 Muslim dis- course is currently a tissue of myths, conspiracy theories,31 and exhortations to recapture the glories of the seventh century. There is no reason to
believe that economic and political improvements in the Muslim world, in and of
themselves, would remedy this.

The Danger of Wishful Thinking

Paul Berman has written a beautiful primer on totalitarianismof the left and the right,
East and Westand observed that it invari- ably contains a genocidal, and even suicidal,
dimension. He notes that the twentieth century was a great incubator of “pathological mass
movements”political movements that “get drunk on the idea of slaughter.”32 He also points out that liberal thinkers are often unable to recognize these terrors for
what they are. There is indeed a great tradition, in Berman's phrase, of “liberalism as
denial.” The French Socialists in the 1930s seem to have had a peculiar genius for this
style of self-deception, for despite the billowing clouds of unrea- son wafting over from
the East, they could not bring themselves to believe that the Nazis posed a problem worth
taking seriously. In the face of the German menace, they simply blamed their own govern-
ment and defense industry for warmongering. As Berman suggests, the same forces of wishful
thinking and self-doubt have been gath- ering strength in the West in the aftermath of
September 11. Because they assume that people everywhere are animated by the same desires
and fears, many Western liberals now blame their own governments for the excesses of
Muslim terrorists. Many suspect

that we have somehow heaped this evil upon our own heads. Berman observes, for instance,
that much of the world now blames Israel for the suicidal derangement of the Palestinians.
Rather than being an expression of mere anti-Semitism (though it is surely this as well),
this view is the product of a quaint moral logic: people are just people, so the thinking
goes, and they do not behave that badly unless they have some very good reasons. The excesses of Pales- tinian suicide
bombers, therefore, must attest to the excesses of the Israeli occupation. Berman points
out that this sort of thinking has led the Israelis to be frequently likened to the Nazis
in the European press.33 Needless to say, the comparison is grotesque. The truth is, as Dershowitz points out, that
“no other nation in history faced with comparable challenges has ever adhered to a higher
standard of human rights, been more sensitive to the safety of innocent civil- ians, tried
harder to operate under the rule of law, or been willing to take more risks for peace.”34 The Israelis have shown a degree of restraint in their use of violence that the Nazis
never contemplated and that, more to the point, no Muslim society would contemplate today.
Ask yourself, what are the chances that the Palestinians would show the same restraint in
killing Jews if the Jews were a powerless minority living under their occupation and
disposed to acts of suici- dal terrorism? It would be no more likely than Muhammad's
flying to heaven on a winged horse.35

Berman also takes issue with Huntington's thesis, however, in that the concept of a
“civilization,” to his mind, fails to pick out the real variable at issue. Rather than a
clash of civilizations, we have a “clash of ideologies,” between “liberalism and the
apocalyptic and phantasmagorical movements that have risen up against liberal civ-
ilization ever since the calamities of the First World War.”36 The dis- tinction appears valid, but unimportant. The problem is that certain of our
beliefs cannot survive the proximity of certain others. War and conversation are our
options, and nothing guarantees that we will always have a choice between them.

Berman sums up our situation beautifully:

What have we needed for these terrorists to prosper? We have needed immense failures of
political courage and imagination within the Muslim world. We have needed an almost
willful lack of curiosity about those failures by people in other parts of the worldthe
lack of curiosity that allowed us to suppose that total- itarianism had been defeated,
even as totalitarianism was reach- ing a new zenith. We have needed handsome doses of
wishful thinkingthe kind of simpleminded faith in a rational world that, in its inability
to comprehend reality, sparked the totalitar- ian movements in the first place.... We have
needed a provincial ignorance about intellectual currents in other parts of the world. We
have needed foolish resentments in Europe, and a foolish arrogance in America. We have
needed so many things! But there has been no lackevery needed thing has been here in
abundance.37

But we have needed one more thing to bring us precisely to this moment. We have needed a
religious doctrine, spread over much of the developing world, that makes sacraments of
illiberalism, igno- rance, and suicidal violence. Contrary to Berman's analysis, Islamism
is not merely the latest flavor of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between
nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms
and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their worldview has been
transfigured by the light of paradise. Given what Islamists believe, it is perfectly
rational for them to strangle modernity wherever they can lay hold of it. It is rational,
even, for Muslim women to encour- age the suicides of their children, as long as they are
fighting for the cause of God. Devout Muslims simply know that they are going to a better place. God is both infinitely powerful and infinitely
just. Why not, then, delight in the death throes of a sinful world? There are other
ideologies with which to expunge the last vapors of rea- sonableness from a society's
discourse, but Islam is undoubtedly one of the best we've got.