The End of Faith (33 page)

13 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, xxviii. 14 Ruthven, Islam in the World, 137. 15 Yosuf Islam, in his wisdom, had this to say in a written response to those

who were shocked by his apparent endorsement of Khomeini's fatwa:

Under Islamic Law, the ruling regarding blasphemy is quite clear; the person found guilty
of it must be put to death. Only under certain cir- cumstances can repentance be
accepted.... The fact is that as far as the application of Islamic Law and the
implementation of full Islamic way of life in Britain is concerned, Muslims realize that
there is very little chance of that happening in the near future. But that shouldn't stop
us from trying to improve the situation and presenting the Islamic viewpoint wherever and
whenever possible. That is the duty of every Muslim and that is what I did.

(See catstevens.com/articles/00013). If even a Western educated ex- hippie was talking
this way, what do you think the sentiments were on the streets of Tehran?

16 K. H. Pollack, “The Crisis of Islam': Faith and Terrorism in the Muslim World,” New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2003.

17 As Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote, “I must say, it is as toilsome read- ing as I ever
undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations,
longwindedness, entanglement . . . insupportable stu- pidity, in short! Nothing but a
sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran!” Cited in Ruthven, Islam in the World, 81-82.

NOTES TO PAGES 123-133 263

Cited in P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 68.

www.people-press.org. Christopher Luxenberg (this is a pseudonym), a scholar of ancient

Semitic languages, has recently argued that a mistranslation is responsi- ble for
furnishing the Muslim paradise with “virgins” (Arabic hur, transliterated as “houris”literally “white ones”). It seems that the pas- sages describing
paradise in the Koran were drawn from earlier Christian texts that make frequent use of
the Aramaic word hur, meaning “white raisins.” White raisins, it seems, were a great delicacy in the ancient
world. Imagine the look on a young martyr's face when, finding himself in a paradise
teeming with his fellow thugs, his seventy houris arrive as a fistful of raisins. See A.
Stille, “Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran,” New York Times, March 2, 2002.

S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

E. W. Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” Nation, Oct. 4, 2001. E. W. Said, “Suicidal Ignorance,” CounterPunch, Nov. 18, 2001. For an alarming look at the rising political influence of Christianity in

the developing world, see P. Jenkins, “The Next Christianity,” Atlantic

Monthly, Oct. 2002, pp. 53-68. 1 From the United Nations' Arab Human Development Report 2002, cited

in Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 115-17. ' See R. D. Kaplan, “The Lawless Frontier,” Atlantic Monthly, March

2000, pp. 66-80. ' S. Atran, “Opinion: Who Wants to Be a Martyr?” New York Times, May

5, 2003. Atran also reports that a Pakistani relief worker interviewed nearly 250 aspiring
Palestinian suicide bombers and their recruiters and concluded, “None were uneducated,
desperately poor, simple-minded or depressed. . . . They all seemed to be entirely normal
members of their families.” He also cites a 2001 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center
for Policy and Survey Research indicating “that Palestinian adults with 12 years or more
of education are far more likely to support bomb attacks than those who cannot read.”

1 B. Hoffman, “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Atlantic Monthly, June 2003, pp. 40-47.

' Indeed, this may be happening in Iran. Having truly achieved a Muslim theocracy, the
Iranian people now have few illusions that their problems are the result of their
insufficient conformity to Islam.

30 Zakaria, future of Freedom, cites a CNN poll (Feb. 2002) conducted across nine Muslim countries. Some 61 percent of
those polled said they do not believe that Arabs were responsible for the Sept. 11
attacks. No doubt the 39 percent who thought otherwise represent millions who wish the
Arab world would take credit for a job well done.

31 It would be impossible to do justice to the richness of the Muslim imag- ination in the
context of this book. To take only one preposterous exam- ple: it seems that many Iraqis
believe that the widespread looting that occurred after the fall of Saddam's regime was
orchestrated by Americans and Israelis, as part of a Zionist plot. The attacks upon
American soldiers were carried out by CIA agents “as part of a covert operation to justify
prolonging the U.S. military occupation.” Wow! See J. L. Anderson, “Iraq's Bloody Summer,” New Yorker, Aug. 11, 2003, pp. 43-55.

32 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 153. 33 Also see M. B. Zuckerman, “Graffiti on History's Walls,” U.S. News and

World Report, Nov. 3, 2003, for an account of anti-Semitism in the main-

stream European press. 34 Dershowitz, Case for Israel, 2. 35 This miraculous ascension (mi'raj) is fully described only in the hadith,

though it may be alluded to in the Koran (17:1). The likening of the Israelis to the Nazis
is especially egregious, given that the Palestinians distinguished themselves as Nazi
collaborators during the war years. Their calculated attacks upon Jews in the 1930s and
1940s led to the deaths of hundreds of the thousands of European Jews who would other-
wise have been permitted to immigrate by the British. This result does not appear to have
been inadvertent. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of
the Palestinians throughout the war years, served as an adviser to the Nazis on the Jewish
question, was given a personal tour of Auschwitz by Heinrich Himmler, and aspired to open
his own death camp for the Jews in Palestine once the Germans had won the war. These
activities were well publicized and merely increased his popularity in the Arab world
when, as a war criminal sought by the Allies, he was given asylum in Egypt. As recently as
2002, Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestinian Authority, referred to Husseini as a
“hero.” See Dershowitz, Case for Israel, 56.

36 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 183. 37 Ibid., 206-7. 38 See ibid., 108: "Khomeini whipped up a religious fervor for that kind of

mass deatha belief that to die on Khomeini's orders in a human wave

NOTES TO PAGES I38-I5I 265

attack was to achieve the highest and most beautiful of destinies. All over Iran young
men, encouraged by their mothers and their families, yearned to participate in those human
wave attacksactively yearned for mar- tyrdom. It was a mass movement for suicide. The war
was one of the most macabre events that has ever occurred. . . ."

39 Ibid. 40 J. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. C. Turner (New York: Verso,

2002). 41 It may seem strange to encounter phrases like “our enemies,” uttered

without apparent self-consciousness, and it is strange for me to write them. But there is
no doubt that enemies are what we have (and I leave it for the reader to draw the
boundaries of “we” as broadly or narrowly as he or she likes). The liberal fallacy that I
will attempt to unravel in the present section is the notion that we made these enemies and that we are, therefore, their “moral equivalent.” We are not. An
analysis of their reli- gious ideology reveals that we are confronted by people who would
have put us to sword, had they had the power, long before the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization were even a gleam in the eye
of the first rapacious globalizes

42 N. Chomsky, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 119. 43 P. Unger, Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford:

Oxford Univ. Press, 1996). 44 A. Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), 84-85. 45 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New

Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 58. 46 Ibid., 62. 47 Are intentions really the bottom line? What are we to say, for instance,

about those Christian missionaries in the New World who baptized Indian infants only to
promptly kill them, thereby sending them to heaven? Their intentions were (apparently)
good. Were their actions eth- ical? Yes, within the confines of a deplorably limited
worldview. The medieval apothecary who gave his patients quicksilver really was trying to
help. He was just mistaken about the role this element played in the human body.
Intentions matter, but they are not all that matters.

48 Zakaria, Future of Freedom, 138. 49 Ibid., 143. 50 Ibid., 123. 51 Ibid., 150.

52 Robert Kaplan, “Supremacy by Stealth,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2003, pp.

65-83, has made a strong case that interventions of this sort should be almost entirely covert and will, for the foreseeable future, be the respon- sibility of the United States to
carry out.

53 Glover, Humanity, 140. 54 M. Rees, Our Final Hour (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 42.

5 West of Eden

1 “At a 1971 dinner, Reagan told California legislator James Mills that 'everything is in
place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.' The President has
permitted Jerry Falwell to attend National Security Council briefings and author and
Armageddon-advo- cate Hal Lindsey to give a talk on nuclear war with Russia to top Pen-
tagon strategists.” Cited in E. Johnson, “Grace Halsell's Prophecy and Politics: Militant
Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War,” Journal of Historical Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1986).

2 See G. Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), for a lengthy analysis.

3 Ibid., p. 80. 4 “Justic Roy Moore's Lawless Battle,” editorial to New York Times, Dec.

17, 2002. 5 Frank Rich, “Religion for Dummies,” New York Times, April 23, 2002. 6 www.gallup.com. 7 Rich, “Religion.” See also F. Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle

between Theocracy and Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage

Press, 1997). 8 E. Bumiller, "Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues

Abroad,“ New York Times, Oct. 26, 2003. 9 C. Mooney, ”W.'s Christian Nation," American Prospect, June 1, 2003.

Also see the website for Americans United for Separation of Church and

State (www.au.org). 10 One of the concerns with giving federal funds to religious organizations

is that these organizations are not bound by the same equal employment opportunity
regulations that apply to the rest of the nonprofit world. Church groups can ban
homosexuals, people who have divorced and remarried, those who have married interracially,
etc., and still receive federal funds. They can also find creative ways to use these funds
to pros- elytize. Granting such funds in the first place puts the federal govern-

11 12

15 16 17 18 19

ment in the position of deciding what is, and what isn't, a genuine religiona
responsibility that seems fraught with problems of its own. M. Dowd, “Tribulation Worketh
Patience,” New York Times, April 9, 2003.

W. M. Arkin, “The Pentagon Unleashes a Holy Warrior,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 16, 2003.

J. Hendren, “Religious Groups Want Outspoken General Punished,”Los Angeles Times, Oct. 17, 2003.

G. H. Gallup Jr., Religion in America 1996 (Princeton: Princeton Religion Research Center, 1996).

Paul Krugman, “Gotta Have Faith,” New York Times, April 27, 2002. A. Scalia, “God's Justice and Ours,” First Things, May 2002, pp. 17-21.

www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr030519.asp. Mooney, “W.'s Christian Nation.” See Scalia's
dissent to Daryl Renard Atkins, Petitioner, v. Virginia, on

writ of certiorari to the supreme court of Virginia, June 20, 2002. See Scalia's dissent
to John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner, Peti- tioners v. Texas, on writ of certiorari to the court of appeals of Texas, four-

teenth district, June 26, 2003. Ted Bundy claimed, on the eve of his execution, that
violent pornogra-

phy had inscribed certain terrible ideas indelibly into his head. See R. Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), for a discussion of this.

There is a distinction between public and private freedoms that I have glossed over here.
Clearly, there are innumerable behaviors that are blameless in private that we ban in most
public spaces, simply because they pose a nuisance to others. Cooking food on a public
sidewalk, cut- ting one's hair on a commercial aircraft, or taking one's pet snake to the
movies are among the countless examples of private freedoms that do not translate into
public virtues.

Happily, the ruling by the Supreme Court in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas seems to have rendered these laws unconditional (see
www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/26/scotus.sodomy).

Viewing the drug problem from the perspective of health care is instruc- tive: our laws
against providing addicts with clean needles have increased the spread of AIDS, hepatitis
C, and other blood-borne diseases. Since the purity and dosage of illegal drugs remains a
matter of guesswork for the user, the rates of poisoning and overdose from drug use are
unnecessarily high (as they were for alcohol during Prohibition). Perversely, the crimi-
nal prohibition of drugs has actually made it easier for minors to get

NOTES TO PAGES 155-161 267

them, because the market for them has been driven underground. The laws limiting the
medical use of opiate painkillers do little more than keep the terminally ill suffering
unnecessarily during their last months of life.

25 L. Carroll, “Fetal Brains Suffer Badly from the Effects of Alcohol,” New York Times, Nov. 4, 2003.

26 www.drugwarfacts.com.

www.rand.org/publications/RB/RB6010/. 28 These events are described in E. Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs,

and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (New York: Houghton

Mifflin, 2003). 29 Some 51 percent of all violent offenders are released from jail after serv-