The Enemy At Home (26 page)

Thus the liberal doctrine that the war against terrorism is a battle of two opposed forms of religious fundamentalism is false. This is not why the Islamic radicals are fighting against America. From the perspective of bin Laden and his allies, the war is between the Muslim-led forces of monotheism and morality against the America-led forces of atheism and immorality.

CONSERVATIVES ARE JUST
as embarrassed as liberals by the charge that America is an atheist society hostile to Islam. For more than a decade, leading figures on the right have insisted that America is one of the most religious countries in the world. In a recent book, Senator Rick Santorum cites polls showing that 90 percent of Americans profess a belief in God, and nearly 50 percent go to church every week. Santorum observes that, unlike in Europe, where the cathedrals are empty, “More people are in church in any given week in America than are in the stands at all professional sporting events in a year.” Conservatives like to point out that the religious faith of Americans seems to translate into a politics of traditional values that is unknown in other Western countries. Certainly the overt religiosity of President Bush, who does not hesitate to quote the Bible or declare Jesus Christ the most important figure in his life, is virtually unthinkable for a European head of state. There are no groups in Europe that are remotely similar to the Christian Coalition or Focus on the Family. Abortion and homosexuality are accepted without controversy in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and London. There is no German version of Jerry Falwell, no French counterpart to Pat Robertson. In this sense, American “exceptionalism” appears to be largely a product of American Christianity.
¹¹

But the notion that America is the world’s most religious nation is a fallacy. The World Values Survey, which measures the intensity of religious beliefs throughout the world, lists Nigeria as the most religious, followed by countries such as Uganda, the Philippines, El Salvador, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and Mexico. The United States ranks twentieth. Moreover, the conservative claim that America is more religious than Europe would hardly impress most Muslims, who know that Europe is not religious at all. No civilization seems to have generated within its boundaries as much unbelief. Only one in ten people in Britain, France, and Germany attend church on a regular basis, and surveys such as the Gallup Millennium study reveal that most Europeans regard God as irrelevant to their lives. It might even be accurate to say that Europeans are characterized by their animus toward religion. In drawing up the Constitution of the European Union, the drafters acknowledged the continent’s extensive debt to Greece but refused to mention its equally significant debt to Christianity.
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French hostility to religion, rooted in the anticlericalism of the French Revolution, seems especially notorious. Consequently when Muslim schoolgirls in France wanted to wear Islamic headscarves, the French said no, pointing out that, in the name of fairness, they would not permit Christians to wear crosses either. French justice, in this view, is defined by discriminating equally against all religions.

If Europe is resolutely secular, America seems to be, at best, half Christian. About 30 million Americans never attend church and have no formal ties to religion. This number has almost doubled in the past decade, suggesting that the ranks of the nonreligious are rapidly expanding.
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Moreover, tens of millions of Americans—even some who are nominally religious—live their lives as if religion did not matter and God did not exist. In comparison with Muslim societies, America is not very religious and conservatives seem to have exaggerated the religiosity of the American people.

While American society has become more secular over time, Muslims throughout the world have become more devout. Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, “There exists in the Islamic world today the widely-prevalent desire to preserve a religious and cultural identity, to reapply the divine law, to draw the various parts of the Islamic world together, and to reassert the intellectual, cultural and artistic traditions of Islam. These wishes must not be identified as fundamentalism. Most people who share these ideals are traditional Muslims.” Even in the West, Tariq Ramadan writes, there is a “silent revolution” in the Muslim community so that “more young people and intellectuals are actively looking for a way to live in harmony with their faith.”
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That’s why you see Muslim students wearing Islamic dress even on progressive American campuses.

Moreover, no amount of surveys about the religious convictions of the American people would convince Muslims, since this is not what Muslims mean when they charge that America is an atheist society. What they mean is that the public life of America—its government, laws, and policies—is intentionally divorced from religion. One influential Islamic writer argues that America has embraced “doctrines which banish religion from practical life and restrict it to a tiny corner of man’s conscience so that it has no bearing whatsoever on society and its active life.”
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In the view of many Muslims, this is unacceptable, even unthinkable, because God is the ruler both of heaven and earth. Moreover, God is primarily a lawgiver, and it is the duty of a Muslim society to live by God’s laws. For a society to forgo divine rules to the point of excluding any consideration of them from its institutions of government—this is the very definition of atheism.

Islamic radicals allege that their dictators, such as Musharraf in Pakistan, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Mubarak of Egypt, are responsible for importing secularism to the Muslim world. In a December 2004 statement bin Laden theatrically asks, “Is a Muslim supposed to rid himself of his religion to become a good citizen?”
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Islamic radicals argue that Muslims should not abide despotism with their usual forbearance. The traditional Muslim approach to a despotic ruler has been “Yes, he is a scoundrel, but at least he is our scoundrel. He is a poor excuse for a Muslim, but at least he is a Muslim. Allah put him there. Let us put up with him and obey his rules, because even bad laws are better than anarchy.” Sunni Islam, which is the most widely practiced form of Islam, is based on this combination of acquiescence and realism. The Islamic radicals, however, contend that this approach does not apply to dictators like Musharraf and Mubarak. As the radicals see it, these men are not just flawed Muslims, they are unbelievers! They are puppets who are being held in place by the greatest power of global atheism, which is America. They are pagans in disguise who are doing the Devil’s work. In exchange for America’s promise to keep them in power, these wolves in Muslim clothing are actually working to achieve America’s objective of destroying Islam from within. Therefore jihad against these Little Satans and their foreign sponsor, the Great Satan, is not only permitted but mandated.

FOR MANY AMERICANS,
the notions that there is a “war against Islam” and that secularism is a disguised form of atheism may seem both disturbing and implausible. Moreover, the Muslim solution, which is the rule of sharia, appears cruel and offensive. In the American mind, sharia conjures up fearsome images of Christians and Jews being persecuted, accused criminals having their limbs cut off, and homosexuals and “fallen women” being publicly whipped and stoned. It is hard for many Americans to see how a society based on sharia can be condoned, even if that is what the Muslims want for themselves. In order to see if this American belief is reasonable, we need to understand better the Islamic perspective on religion and government.

Islam is not simply a different religion from Christianity. Islam involves a different conception of the meaning of religion, and the place of religion in society. Sayyid Qutb writes that “the basis of the Islamic message is that one should accept
sharia
and reject all other laws. There is no other meaning of Islam.”
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This may seem like a radical view, but it is shared by many traditional Muslims. The sharia is not simply a canon law but also a constitutional, commercial, and civil law. It covers religious teachings as well as interest rates, business practices, inheritance, and divorce. Essentially sharia covers not only the domain of religion but also the domain of morality. All of life falls under God’s laws and commandments.

To Americans, the notion of a comprehensive holy law enforced by the state seems frighteningly reminiscent of “theocracy.” In a literal sense, this term means rule by divine authority of the priesthood or clergy. But until the Khomeini revolution, Islam has never had a governing priestly class. Rather, the caliph or sultan ruled as God’s representative on earth. The closest regime to a theocracy is the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the mullahs do rule. Even candidates for parliament are screened by the clergy, and parliamentary laws can be vetoed by a religious council. In Iran, however, the power of the state and of the mullahs is limited by the specific rules set forth in the Koran and the Islamic tradition. The rulers themselves are bound by these laws. Khomeini once said that if the Koran establishes the penalty for prostitution as one hundred lashes, he did not have the power to reduce or increase the penalty by even one lash. If he did, he would be going against God’s law, and Muslims would have not only the right but the duty to resist.
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Although traditional Muslims concede the stringency of their moral code, they emphasize that its rules are voluntarily embraced by those who practice Islam. While many in the West believe that Islam allows forced conversion, the Koran says “there is no compulsion in religion.” Muslims have traditionally distinguished between conquering a country and bringing it under the rule of Islam—this is allowed—and forcing a person to accept Islam: this is not allowed. While Islam allows freedom for those who choose to convert in, however, Islam does not permit one who is a Muslim to convert out. That’s why the government of Afghanistan was getting ready to try Abdul Rahman for converting to Christianity when American protest convinced the regime to drop the charges. Apostasy in Islam is less a matter of “wrong beliefs” or heresy and more a matter of treason, of betraying the Muslim community.
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In the Salman Rushdie case, for example, Muslims didn’t care about his differences with traditional Islamic theology. They were outraged at the way a fellow Muslim mocked the Prophet Muhammad and his followers. Rushdie compared Muhammad to the Devil, envisioned him having sex with all the women of the world, gave his wives’ names to prostitutes, and called Muhammad’s companions “scum and bums.” Rushdie denies any intention to offend. The insults he directed against the Prophet Muhammad, his wives, and his companions were, according to Rushdie, an ingenious literary device. In fact, Rushdie insisted, he was
defending
Islam. “Central to my purpose,” he wrote, “is the process of reclaiming language from one’s opponents.”
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Most Muslims regarded this as a pathetic and cowardly defense, and they were right. In fact, it was amusing to see the liberal iconoclast Rushdie set about his usual business of slaughtering sacred cows only to end up whimpering, to save his hide, that he was really a subtle advocate for sacred cows. Rushdie could be considered brave if he had said, “Yes, I did blaspheme Islam, but I don’t deserve to die for it.” Since Muslim holy law establishes the penalty for apostasy as death, Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie was entirely in line with Islamic teaching, and even traditional Muslims could not disagree with the ayatollah’s verdict. Muslim disagreement with Khomeini was confined to issues of procedure. “Yes, but has Rushdie been given a judicial hearing in which the charges were established in a court of law? Yes, but shouldn’t the execution be carried out by a legitimate authority rather than leaving it to any fortune seeker who is going after the financial bounty?” And so on.

The Rushdie case seemed to confirm the extreme religious intolerance of Islam. So did the infamous incident in which the Taliban dynamited the statues of the Bamiyan Buddhas, which had stood for two thousand years. Oddly enough, Islam was historically far more tolerant than Christianity. Medieval Christians had no place in their society for those who did not follow their faith. Jews in Catholic Spain had three choices: convert to Catholicism, leave the country, or be killed. By this standard, Muslim empires were beacons of tolerance. The Mughals in India ruled over a predominantly Hindu society, yet they allowed the Hindus to go to temple, celebrate their festivals, and follow their dietary rules. Under the Ottoman regime, Jews went to synagogue and Christians went to church. The Ottomans established a
millet
system in which each religious group lived in its own neighborhood, had its own leaders, operated its own schools, and administered its own laws. Only in the case of disputes involving Muslims, or intramural disputes between Jews and Christians, did the Islamic judge, or
qadi,
get involved.