The Crisis of Islam - Essay Example

Islam in Crisis The social revolutionaries, secular nationalists, and radical right of an earlier day have been largely replaced by terrorists promoting religiously inspired agendas, or, to be more precise, militant Islamic ones, that exist often without direct state support. Indeed, one of the most shocking aspects of the attack of September 11 was that this fury of killing was meant to please a deity. This raises an obvious question: what sort of deity would, in the minds of the terrorists, be pleased by the attacks of September 11, 2001? There is a genuine issue of interpretation here. It has become a commonplace among analysts of Al Qaeda and of other Middle Eastern terrorist groups to distinguish between what was identified above as militant Islam or Islamism and the religion practiced by Muslims. This distinction is based not on political correctness but on empirical evidence. Most Muslims, of course, are neither Islamist fundamentalists nor terrorists; many terrorists, however, proclaim they are Muslims — indeed, many proclaim they are the only true Muslims. It is certainly legitimate for Muslims to object to the term Islamic terrorists when no one calls the IRA Christian terrorists or Catholic terrorists. It is also unquestionably true that the complaints should be directed less at analysts or journalists who merely report the self-interpretation of others than at the terrorists themselves for their abuse of Islam. (Lewis, 137) So far as most Westerners were concerned, the killing on the morning of September 11 had nothing to do with God; the killers flew out of nowhere and acted in a manner that was utterly irrational, not to say unintelligible. This is why there were so many simplified attempts, in the fall of 2001, to answer a simple question: Why do they hate us? During the twentieth century, only fourteen terrorist attacks killed more than one hundred people and none killed more than five hundred. Prior to September 11, 2001, about a thousand Americans had been killed by terrorists. (Hoffman, 96) The sheer magnitude of the killing on that day, when in the course of an hour and a half over three times as many people were murdered, was itself extraordinary. However measured, the attacks were unparalleled, and reason enough to understand why the United States has taken steps to reconfigure the architecture of its national security. Prior to the nineteenth century, the only acceptable justification for terrorism was religious ritual, in the sense that religion provided both a motive and a limitation to conduct or behavior that today is identified with terrorism. Given the ritual constraints on Thug murders, their record of killing is astonishing compared to their modern counterparts who have been unable “to achieve anywhere close to the annual average of Thug murders despite more efficacious and increasingly lethal weaponry.” (Hoffman, 272) Moreover, some people — the blind, lepers, women, and Europeans, among others — were immune to attack. Indeed, the prohibition against killing Europeans is what eventually enabled some thirty to forty British administrators to hunt down and remove from circulation about 10,000 of the Thug Brethren. Likewise the behavior of assassins and zealots was conditioned by strict ritual requirements and limits as well as by an elaborate and complex theology. (Lewis, 72) In contrast to this kind of ritual religious killing, which often has been called a precursor to traditional terrorism, it is far from clear that early modern terrorist activity had any internal limitations at all, notwithstanding the external constraints resulting from the relatively low lethality of their methods. In contrast with Islam, Christianity is supremely a religion of adversity. Perhaps more to the point, at least for political science, because Christianity was not concerned initially with founding a political order, from the beginning the allegiance of Christians has been divided. One implication is that the ordinary concerns of diet and hygiene or of politics are not, for Christians, of great spiritual significance. In the words of Bernard Lewis, “In Islam there was no such painful choice [between God and Caesar]. In the universal Islamic polity, as conceived by Muslims, there is no Caesar but only God.” (Lewis, 6-7) In principle the duty of success extended to the whole of humanity. At the center of the theological-political unity was the law, the Sharia, which unified an Islamic civilization that, again in principle, was ecumenic. At the same time, the law unified in the life of each individual Muslim what to a Christian would seem both the trivial and ordinary matters of daily life as well as the most profound aspects of faith. The success in actually spreading Gods message to humanity seemed to confirm the meaning of Islamic history in the course of events, namely, the history of Islamic society and of the Muslim religion. That is, the gap between paradigmatic and pragmatic history or between Augustines two cities seemed to be closing and perhaps even to be closed. For Muslims, God had spoken and told human beings how to live; those who submitted to Gods will and lived the way God said were visibly blessed. The pragmatic triumphs of the Muslim armies were understood as the confirmation and triumph of paradigmatic Islamic history. Pragmatic events thus confirmed a symbolic meaning and then came to be understood as having themselves acquired a symbolic meaning. There are a number of theoretical issues involved in distinguishing between what is modern and what is Western. To begin with, both terms are ambiguous. However, because it is far from certain that, even if the terms could be clarified sufficiently, they might serve as concepts in political science; the results would hardly be worth the effort. Accordingly, for present purposes it is sufficient to illustrate rather than analyze the problem: Bernard Lewis observed that a Muslim man in a suit embodied modernization, but a woman in a suit was an example of Westernization. (Lewis, 75) More broadly speaking, modernism meant both what we now call technology and liberal constitutionalism. As certainly became true toward the end of the twentieth century, technology was understood chiefly in terms of hardware that could be bought either on the open or on the black market. It is probably fair to say that the link between science, technology, free enquiry, and secularism, which is to say, technology as a way of thinking, has not been well thought through by Muslim modernist thinkers. The logic of the two worldly realms, the realm of war and the realm of submission, certainly accords a central place, if not primacy, to jihad. For Islamists, the issue is simple: in Muslim terms, the five pillars of Islam (profession of faith, prayer, and the fast of Ramadan, pilgrimage, and charity) amount to a spiritual preparation for war against the enemies of God. More important, for purposes of this analysis, the index of spiritual movement has shifted from striving to live in accord with Gods will or striving to understand Gods law to striving militarily against some very worldly enemies. That is, the limitations on what can be achieved by worldly action or on what that worldly action may mean, which is established by the world-transcendent dimension of Muslim spirituality, tends to be eclipsed. Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was a prominent Muslim leader of the modern world.. Qutb was an enthusiastic proponent of modernizing Egypts educational system, but much to his regret his plans were not accepted by his superiors. During World War II he objected to the influence of the British in Egypt, and afterward he grew even more bitter over the Jewish immigration to Palestine. He came to the attention of the Egyptian authorities, but instead of being sent to jail he was sent to the United States on a commission to study American post-secondary pedagogy and curricula. It became a defining event in his life. Lewis added that Qutb also quoted the Kinsey Reports “to document his description and condemnation of universal American debauchery” and suggested that Qutbs evaluation may help explain why Islamist terrorists have targeted dance halls and nightclubs such as the Sari Club on Bali, which was bombed in October 2002. (Lewis, 79) For good measure, Qutb also hated football, jazz, American social etiquette, and American barbers. In this respect, Qutb looks like so many whose resentments toward America and the West, as Ajami observed, were born of an unacknowledged attraction to it. (Ajami, 165) Whether an appeal or a consolation, suicidal martyrdom introduces additional variables into the understanding of terrorist motives and adds new complexities to counterterrorism. There are two distinct aspects of the new attitude. The most obvious practical consequence of undertaking terrorist acts with a high probability of getting killed is that antiterrorist measures would have to change in response. Changes in the practical business of delivering terrorist violence as well as counterterrorist measures are, of course, important. Most of these attacks were undertaken by Islamic Jihad; Hezbollah disavowed its complicity but praised the results and benefited politically. The chief ethical and theological problem with such attacks is that they involved, not premeditated killing, but premeditated suicide, intihar, which is necessarily premeditated. And intihar is usually considered a grievous sin. Following a thorough analysis of the relevant passages in the Koran, Rosenthal concluded, in an authoritative study undertaken many years before the advent of suicidal terrorist attacks: “it may be said that there is no absolutely certain evidence to indicate that Muhammad ever discussed the problem of suicide by means of a divine revelation, although the possibility remains that Qurân 4.29(33) contains a prohibition of suicide. It is, however, certain that from the early days of Islam on this and some other passages of the Qurân were considered by many Muslims as relevant to the subject.” If one looks to the hadiths rather than the Koran, one finds that the Prophet many times is recorded as having said that a person who commits suicide will never enter Paradise but, on the contrary, will repeat his suicidal agony in the flames of Hell. Moreover, the canonical literature containing the fatwas of judges also indicates that suicide is unlawful. Thus, the Shiite teaching that suicide bombers go to paradise with the six privileges of a martyr is simply “a perversion.” (Lewis, 153-54) For one reason or another, therefore, the ulama had to confront the issue of suicide bombers. Fadlallah was the cleric who provided the most extensive analysis of the problem. Initially he denied that his organization was terrorist at all. He argued that the suicide attacks of Islamic Jihad should be abandoned because they were ineffective. In the event, however, they proved highly effective — after all, the infidels left Lebanon — so he had to confront and deal with the basic theological question. For a time, he resisted efforts to get him to provide a decisive ruling or explicit judgment, a fatwa, and instead reflected on the plight of Muslims and the need to fight, even using “unconventional” methods. This was, of course, fair enough as a political complaint, but it did not address the theoretical or theological issue of suicide. As Martin Kramer said, “One could not simply argue extenuating circumstances to a constituency devoted to the implementation of Islamic law.” (Kramer, 145) Finally, Fadlallah denied that the commonsensical difference between suicide and martyrdom is valid: “There is no difference between dying with a gun in your hand or exploding yourself. In a situation of struggle or holy war, you have to find the best means to achieve your goals.” (Ranstorp, 55) On another occasion, he asked, rhetorically: “what is the difference between setting out for battle knowing you will die after killing ten [of the enemy], and setting out to the field to kill ten and knowing you will die while killing them?” (Kramer, 146) More recently still he has been quoted as condemning suicide bombers. (Ruthven, 101) Whatever his inconsistencies, there is a significant difference between setting out for battle knowing you will die after killing ten of the enemy and knowing you will die while killing them. First of all you can never know that you will die after killing ten of the enemy; you might kill nine or eleven or you might be killed first. Second, from the perspective of the military commander, he does not know who will be killed in battle, though he knows some will die; the dispatcher of a suicide bomber knows both that his “soldier” will die and precisely who it will be. Accordingly, such an individual cannot absolve himself of personal responsibility for the bombers death by appealing to the will of God, fate, statistics, or luck. The reason, moreover, is obvious: even within the context of jihad as armed struggle against unfavorable odds, there is an important difference between risking ones life in the service of religious truth in such a way that one may or may not become a martyr, and blowing oneself up. There is, to be blunt, no risk in blowing oneself up, only the certainty of death. By any commonsensical understanding, such an act is suicidal. For purposes of this analysis, the significant point is not that a collection of ulama invented a new doctrine, istishad, and defended it with a torturous theology that contradicted all the evidence of Muslim scripture as well as common sense, but that any argumentation at all ceased to be necessary once suicide bombing (whether described as self-martyrdom or anything else) became a more or less normal practice. In 1988, the suicide-bombing campaign in Lebanon was abandoned for tactical, not theological, reasons — the opportunity for success ended with the withdrawal of the troops of the Multilateral Peacekeeping Force. It has never fallen from favor among Hamas and Islamic Jihad, terrorists operating against Israel, and was revived in a spectacular fashion with the attacks on New York and Washington. As we shall see, by the time bin Laden was involved, the distinction between suicide and martyr had become meaningless. He sent his terrorists on martyrdom operations with the same equanimity a mother would send her child on an errand to fetch yoghurt. The Palestinian suicide bombers have all been Muslims, notwithstanding the sizeable Christian Palestinian population and the fact that, during the 1970s and 1980s, many of the PLO terrorists were Christians. The most obvious reason for this is because Hamas and Islamic Jihad have stated that suicide bombing is a religious duty. Secular Palestinian nationalists, until recently, with the formation of the Al-Aqsa Brigade, affiliated with Fatah, have not used suicide bombers. The introduction of the Al-Aqsa Brigade, moreover, has made the problem of controlling suicide bombers and ensuring they would be politically effective more difficult. From the point of view of Hamas, the newcomers, who were also the first to use women and the elderly, look like undisciplined freelancers simply solving their personal problems. The majority of suicide bombers, however, are dispatched by religious Islamists, and their main motive is revenge for acts committed by Israelis, a revenge that will be known and celebrated in the Islamic world. Both aspects are important: because there are other ways to take revenge than by blowing oneself up, the actual act must be sufficiently spectacular that it will be noticed, remembered, and celebrated by the community from which the suicide bomber comes. When one adds in the appeal of instilling fear in the Israeli audience, the assertiveness, indeed the power, of the act is obvious. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, several accounts of the origin and development of Al Qaeda and biographies of Osama bin Laden have appeared. (Lewis, 15-16) The broad context of bin Ladens intellectual and spiritual formation is familiar: secular, liberal, democratic, Western civilization is devoid of spiritual substance, which makes it the antithesis of Gods final and unambiguous revelation. Because of this ever-present threat, the faithful must resist the West as strongly as possible and destroy the regimes that defend it or are allied with it — especially in the Islamic world. History is the simple story of the waxing and waning of Islamic truth until the last apocalyptic events, which establish a final, ecumenic, and peaceful Muslim world. All the factors that combine to make networks effective — technology, sophisticated design, a capacity to swarm, social capital, and a compelling narrative — were present and emphasized in the Al Qaeda organization. We will deal briefly first with the external aspects of the Al Qaeda network. (Lewis, 111-12) The state is a relatively recent and comparatively rare political order, a geographically limited legal structure created by Europeans at the end of a long series of bloody religious wars. Liberty of conscience within European states developed along with the secularization of government; legitimacy of secular laws was derived from the consent of the governed. For large parts of the Islamic world none of these familiar aspects of Western political practice obtain. There are, of course, many third-world tyrannies and regimes where Islamists view democracy as a one-way road to power “on which there is no return, no rejection of the sovereignty of God, as exercised through His chosen representatives, ” (Lewis, 118) or, as the more brutal observers have put it: one man, one vote, one time. Narrative is important in networks because it explains how essentially militant organizations know “what has to be done.” With respect to Al Qaeda, the basic doctrine is clear: “How can [a Muslim] possibly accept humiliation and inferiority when he knows that his nation was created to stand at the center of leadership, at the center of hegemony and rule, at the center of ability and sacrifice? How can he possibly accept humiliation and inferiority when he knows that the divine rule is that the entire earth must be subject to the religion of Allah — not to the East, not to the West — to no ideology and to no path except for the path of Allah?” (Abu Gheith, 77) For this reason there can be no bargaining with the infidel enemy: God, not the umma, and certainly not Al Qaeda, is the offended party, just as God, not Stinger missiles, brought victory in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. (Ruthven, 202) Nor can there be imperialism when God has decreed that Islam must be ecumenic. (Lewis, 55) Finally, Al Qaeda will win: because they have overcome “the hatred of fighting and the love of the present life” that have “captured the hearts” of many Muslims and have resulted in “catastrophes, subservience and humiliation”; (Benjamin and Simon, 155) and because they never forget: The issue involves different and more radical one interpretation: it is possible to bring to light the leadership attributes of bin Laden by analyzing their texts in order to understand them on their own terms. However, it is one thing to try to understand an author as the author understood himself or herself, but when the author of a text is God, something quite different is involved. A historical-critical study of a text, for example, that Islamic history upholds as “uncreated” (Lewis, 6) in the sense that it is the direct Word of God, is a recipe for conflict, even for war. In other words, to examine the text of the Koran as a product of a particular set of historical or cultural or individual experiences is easily seen by those living Islamic history, whether in accord with “traditional understanding” or in terms of some idiosyncratic ijtihad, as an attack on Islam. Today, for Muslims living within Islamic history, matters are made worse when the inquiring minds are also Western and so doubly damned as both infidel and formerly or neo-colonial. For Westerners derailed by dogmatic postcolonial, postmodern sensibilities, things are no better: there can be no serious distinction between scholarship and polemic for post moderns because there are no inquiring minds. There are only interested minds. Or, as Michel Foucault once put it, there is no knowledge, only power-knowledge. Notwithstanding the unpropitious context for the appearance of a mind inquiring into the text-critical problems of the Koran, or into what the Koran “really says,” a good deal of the traditional understanding has been radically revised by the past generation of scholars — inquiring Muslim and non-Muslim minds working in the area of Middle Eastern studies — to give as neutral a designation as possible. Their concerns, to reiterate a point just made, are not with the perverse interpretations of ijtihad nor of the politics of the Ikhwan, though we shall argue that it has political as well as scholarly significance. Works Cited Abu Gheith, Suleiman. “`Why We Fight America: Al Qaida Spokesman Explains September 11 and Declares Intentions to Kill 4 Million Americans with Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Middle East Media Research Institute Special Dispatch Series no. 388 (June 12, 2002). Ajami, Fouad. The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generations Odyssey. New York: Pantheon, 1998. Benjamin, David, and Steven Simon. The Age of Sacred Terror. New York: Random House, 2002. Hoffman, Bruce. “Holy Terror: The Implications of Terrorism Motivated by a Religious Imperative.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 18 (1995). Kramer, Martin. “The Moral Logic of Hizballah.” In Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, edited by Walter Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Lewis, Bernard. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Ranstorp, Magnus. “Terrorism in the Name of Religion.” Journal of International Affairs 50 (1996). Rosenthal, Franz. “On Suicide in Islam.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 66 (1946). Ruthven, Malise. A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America. London: Granta, 2002. Read More