THE PROBLEM WITH ISLAM

3-45). "[T]hose that deny Our revelations
shall be punished for their misdeeds" (6:49). "Such are those that are
damned by their own sins. They shall drink scalding water and be
sternly punished for their unbelief" (6:70). "Could you but see
the wrongdoers when death overwhelms them! With hands outstretched,
the angels will say: 'Yield up your souls. You shall be
rewarded with the scourge of shame this day, for you have said of
God what is untrue and scorned His revelations" (6:93). "Avoid the
pagans. Had God pleased, they would not have worshipped idols....
We will turn away their hearts and eyes from the Truth since they
refused to believe in it at first. We will let them blunder about in
their wrongdoing. If We sent the angels down to them, and caused
the dead to speak to them,... and ranged all things in front of them,
they would still not believe, unless God willed otherwise. . . . Thus
have We assigned for every prophet an enemy: the devils among
men and jinn, who inspire each other with vain and varnished falsehoods.
But had your Lord pleased, they would not have done so.
Therefore leave them to their own inventions, so that the hearts of
those who have no faith in the life to come may be inclined to what
they say and, being pleased, persist in their sinful ways" (6:107-12).
"The devils will teach their votaries to argue with you. If you obey
them you shall yourselves become idolaters. . . . God will humiliate
the transgressors and mete out to them a grievous punishment for
their scheming" (6:121-25). "If God wills to guide a man, He opens
his bosom to Islam. But if he pleases to confound him, He makes his
bosom small and narrow as though he were climbing up to heaven.
Thus shall God lay the scourge on the unbelievers" (6:125).
THIS is all desperately tedious, of course.17 But there is no substitute
for confronting the text itself. I cannot judge the quality of the Arabic;
perhaps it is sublime. But the book's contents are not. On almost
every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise nonbelievers.
On almost every page, it prepares the ground for religious
conflict. Anyone who can read passages like those quoted above and
still not see a link between Muslim faith and Muslim violence
should probably consult a neurologist.
Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised,
has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death. Sayyid Qutb,
one of the most influential thinkers in the Islamic world, and the
father of modern Islamism among the Sunni, wrote, "The Koran
points to another contemptible characteristic of the Jews: their
craven desire to live, no matter at what price and regardless of quality,
honor, and dignity."18 This statement is really a miracle of concision.
While it may seem nothing more than a casual fillip against
the Jews, it is actually a powerful distillation of the Muslim worldview.
Stare at it for a moment or two, and the whole machinery of
intolerance and suicidal grandiosity will begin to construct itself
before your eyes. The Koran's ambiguous prohibition against suicide
appears to be an utter non-issue. Surely there are Muslim jurists
who might say that suicide bombing is contrary to the tenets of
Islam (where are these jurists, by the way?) and that suicide
bombers are therefore not martyrs but fresh denizens of hell. Such
a minority opinion, if it exists, cannot change the fact that suicide
bombings have been rationalized by much of the Muslim world
(where they are called "sacred explosions"). Indeed, such rationalization
is remarkably easy, given the tenets of Islam. In light of what
devout Muslims believe—about jihad, about martyrdom, about paradise,
and about infidels—suicide bombing hardly appears to be an
aberration of their faith. And it is no surprise at all that those who
die in this way are considered martyrs by many of their coreligionists.
A military action that entails sufficient risk of death could be
considered "suicidal" in any case, rendering moot the distinction
between suicide and death in the line of duty for one who would
"fight for the cause of God." The bottom line for the aspiring martyr
seems to be this: as long as you are killing infidels or apostates
"in defense of Islam," Allah doesn't care whether you kill yourself
in the process or not.
Over 38,000 people recently participated in a global survey conducted
by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The
results constitute the first publication of its Global Attitudes Project
entitled "What the World Thinks in 2002."19 The survey included
the following question, posed only to Muslims:
Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence
against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam
from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the
reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally
feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam,
sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?
Before we look at the results of this study, we should appreciate the
significance of the juxtaposed phrases "suicide bombing" and "civilian
targets." We now live in a world in which Muslims have been
scientifically polled (with margins of error ranging from 2 to 4 percent)
as to whether they support ("often," "sometimes," "rarely," or
"never") the deliberate murder and maiming of noncombatant men,
women, and children in defense of Islam. Here are some of the
results of the Pew study (not all percentages sum to 100):

SUICIDE BOMBING IN DEFENSE OF ISLAM
Justifiable?
Lebanon
Ivory Coast
Nigeria
Bangladesh
Jordan
Pakistan
Mali
Ghana
Uganda
Senegal
Indonesia
Turkey
YES
73
56
47
44
43
33
32
30
29
28
27
13
No
2 1
44
45
37
48
43
57
57
63
69
70
73
DK/REFUSED
6
0
8
19
8
23
1 1
1 2
8
3
3
14
If you do not find these numbers sufficiently disturbing, consider
that places like Saudia Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, and
the Palestinian territories were not included in the survey. Had they
been, it is safe to say, the Lebanese would have lost their place at the
top of the list several times over. Suicide bombing also entails suicide,
of course, which most Muslims believe is expressly forbidden
by God. Consequently, had the question been "Is it ever justified to
target civilians in defense of Islam," we could expect even greater
Muslim support for terrorism.
But the Pew results are actually bleaker than the above table indicates.
A closer look at the data reveals that the pollsters skewed their
results by binning the responses "rarely justified" and "never justified"
together, thus giving a false sense of Muslim pacifism. Take
another look at the data from Jordan: 43 percent of Jordanians apparently
favor terrorism, while 48 percent do not. The problem, however,
is that 22 percent of Jordanians actually responded "rarely
justified," and this accounts for nearly half of their "No" responses.
"Rarely justified" still means that under certain circumstances, these
respondents would sanction the indiscriminate murder of noncom126
batants (plus suicide), not as an accidental by-product of a military
operation but as its intended outcome. A more accurate picture of
Muslim tolerance for terrorism emerges when we focus on the percentage
of respondents who could not find it in their hearts to say
"never justified" (leaving aside the many people who still lurk in the
shadows of "Don't Know/Refused"). If we divide the data in this
way, the sun of modernity sets even further over the Muslim world:
SUICIDE BOMBING IN DEFENSE OF ISLAM
Is It Ever justifiable?
Lebanon
Ivory Coast
Nigeria
Jordan
Bangladesh
Mali
Senegal
Ghana
Indonesia
Uganda
Pakistan
Turkey
YES
82
73
66
65
58
54
47
44
43
40
38
20
No
1 2
27
26
26
23
35
50
43
54
52
38
64
DK/REFUSED
6
0
8
8
19
1 1
3
1 2
3
8
23
14
These are hideous numbers. If all Muslims had responded as
Turkey did (where a mere 4 percent think suicide bombings are
"often" justified, 9 percent "sometimes," and 7 percent "rarely"), we
would still have a problem worth worrying about; we would, after
all, be talking about more than 200 million avowed supporters of
terrorism. But Turkey is an island of ambassadorial goodwill compared
with the rest of the Muslim world.
Let us imagine that peace one day comes to the Middle East. What
will Muslims say of the suicide bombings that they so widely
endorsed? Will they say, "We were driven mad by the Israeli occupation"?
Will they say, "We were a generation of sociopaths"? How
will they account for the celebrations that followed these "sacred
explosions"? A young man, born into relative privilege, packs his
clothing with explosives and ball bearings and unmakes himself
along with a score of children in a discotheque, and his mother is
promptly congratulated by hundreds of her neighbors. What will the
Palestinians think about such behavior once peace has been established?
If they are still devout Muslims here is what they must think:
"Our boys are in paradise, and they have prepared the way for us to
follow. Hell has been prepared for the infidels." It seems to me to be
an almost axiomatic truth of human nature that no peace, should it
ever be established, will survive beliefs of this sort for very long.
We must not overlook the fact that a significant percentage of the
world's Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World
Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God, amid "rivers
of purest water, and rivers of milk forever fresh; rivers of wine
delectable to those that drink it, and rivers of clearest honey"
(47:15). These men—who slit the throats of stewardesses and delivered
young couples with their children to their deaths at five hundred
miles per hour—are at present being "attended by boys graced
with eternal youth" in a "kingdom blissful and glorious." They are
"arrayed in garments of fine green silk and rich brocade, and
adorned with bracelets of silver" (76:15). The list of their perquisites
is long. But what is it that gets a martyr out of bed early on his last
day among the living? Did any of the nineteen hijackers make haste
to Allah's garden simply to get his hands on his allotment of silk? It
seems doubtful. The irony here is almost a miracle in its own right:
the most sexually repressive people found in the world today—
people who are stirred to a killing rage by reruns of Baywatch—are
lured to martyrdom by a conception of paradise that resembles
nothing so much as an al fresco bordello.20
Apart from the terrible ethical consequences that follow from this
style of otherworldliness, we should observe just how deeply implausible
the Koranic paradise is. For a seventh-century prophet to say that
paradise is a garden, complete with rivers of milk and honey, is rather
like a twenty-first-century prophet's saying that it is a gleaming city
where every soul drives a new Lexus. A moment's reflection should
reveal that such pronouncements suggest nothing at all about the
afterlife and much indeed about the limits of the human imagination.
Jihad and the Power of the Atom
For devout Muslims, religious identity seems to trump all others.
Despite the occasional influence of Pan-Arabism, the concept of an
ethnic or national identity has never taken root in the Muslim world
as it has in the West. The widespread support for Saddam Hussein
among Muslims, in response to the American attack upon Iraq, is as
good a way as any of calibrating the reflexivity of Muslim solidarity.
Saddam Hussein was, as both a secularist and a tyrant, widely despised
in the Muslim world prior to the American invasion; and yet the reaction
of most Muslims revealed that no matter what his crimes against
the Iraqi people, against the Kuwaitis, and against the Iranians, the
idea of an army of infidels occupying Baghdad simply could not be
countenanced, no matter what humanitarian purpose it might serve.
Saddam may have tortured and killed more Muslims than any person
in living memory, but the Americans are the "enemies of God."
It is important to keep the big picture in view, because the details,
being absurd to an almost crystalline degree, are truly meaningless.
In our dialogue with the Muslim world, we are confronted by people
who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which
therefore cannot even be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs
that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us.
It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims
pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little
possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed
with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties
be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom
and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United
States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or
less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an
Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of
paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is
any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads
are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to
rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such
a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a
nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an
unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent
civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action
available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an
unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the
Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a
genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make
it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war
with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat
of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just
described a plausible scenario in which much of the world's population
could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on
the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns.
That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the
sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen.
Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith
enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly
likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are
every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get
their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in
particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent
it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say
that time is not on our side.
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 infelicitous
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 civilization."
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 Davidians,
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 risible.
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 political
ascendancy. Of course, Islam is not uniquely susceptible to undergoing
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 common
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 result—least 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 diagnosis,
and Muslims themselves regularly assert that Western imperialism
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 instance—a man who
has by no means distinguished himself as a liberal—recently proposed
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 Muslims
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 tyrants—in
Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere—has been despicable.
We have done nothing to discourage the mistreatment and outright
slaughter of tens of thousands of Muslims by their own
regimes—regimes 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 culpability
on this front must be bracketed by the understanding that
were democracy to suddenly come to these countries, it would be little
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 currently
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 middle
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 education.
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 persuade
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 religious
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 cognitive 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 substance
to say against the actions of the September 11 hijackers, apart
from the ubiquitous canard that they were really Jews.30 Muslim discourse
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 totalitarianism—of
the left and the right, East and West—and observed that it invariably
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 unreason
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 government
and defense industry for warmongering. As Berman suggests,
the same forces of wishful thinking and self-doubt have been gathering
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 Palestinian
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 civilians,
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 suicidal
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 civilization
ever since the calamities of the First World War."36 The distinction
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
world—the lack of curiosity that allowed us to suppose that totalitarianism
had been defeated, even as totalitarianism was reaching
a new zenith. We have needed handsome doses of wishful
thinking—the kind of simpleminded faith in a rational world
that, in its inability to comprehend reality, sparked the totalitarian
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 lack—every 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, ignorance,
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 encourage
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 reasonableness
from a society's discourse, but Islam is undoubtedly one
of the best we've got.
SECULARISTS tend to argue that the role of Islam, or religion in general,
is secondary to that of politics in determining the character of
a society. On this account, people are motivated by their political
interests first and find a religious rationale to suit the occasion. No
doubt there are numerous examples of political leaders' invoking
religion for purely pragmatic, and even cynical, reasons (the tenure
of Pakistan's Zia ul-Haq seems a good example). But we should not
draw the wrong lesson here. A lever works only if it is attached to
something. Someone, after all, must believe in God, for talk of God
to be politically efficacious. And I take it to be more or less selfevident
that whenever large numbers of people begin turning themselves
into bombs, or volunteer their children for use in the clearing
of minefields (as was widespread in the Iran-Iraq war),38 the rationale
behind their actions has ceased to be merely political. This is not
to say that the aspiring martyr does not relish what he imagines will
be the thunderous political significance of his final act, but unless a
person believes some rather incredible things about this universe—
in particular, about what happens after death—he is very unlikely to
engage in behavior of this sort. Nothing explains the actions of Muslim
extremists, and the widespread tolerance of their behavior in the
Muslim world, better than the tenets of Islam.
Given what many Muslims believe, is genuine peace in this world
possible? Is the relative weakness of Muslim states the only thing
that prevents outright war between Islam and the West? I'm afraid
that encouraging answers to such questions are hard to come by. The
basis for liberalism in the doctrine of Islam seems meager to the point
of being entirely illusory. Although we have seen that the Bible is
itself a great reservoir of intolerance, for Christians and Jews alike—
as everything from the writings of Augustine to the present actions
of Israeli settlers demonstrates—it is not difficult to find great swaths
of the Good Book, as well as Christian and Jewish exegesis, that offer
counterarguments. The Christian who wants to live in the full presence
of rationality and modernity can keep the Jesus of Matthew sermonizing
upon the mount and simply ignore the world-consuming
rigmarole of Revelation. Islam appears to offer no such refuge for one
who would live peacefully in a pluralistic world. Of course, glimmers
of hope can be found in even the shadiest of places: as Berman points
out, the diatribes of Muslim orthodoxy are predicated upon the fear
that Western liberalism is in the process of invading the Muslim
mind and "stealing his loyalty"—indicating that Muslims, like other
people, are susceptible to the siren's song of liberalism.39 We must
surely hope so. The character of their religious beliefs, however, suggests
that they will be less susceptible than the rest of us.
For reasons we have already begun to explore, there is a deep bias
in our discourse against conclusions of this sort. With respect to
Islam, the liberal tendency is to blame the West for raising the ire of
the Muslim world, through centuries of self-serving conquest and
meddling, while conservatives tend to blame other contingent features
of Middle East, Arab, or Muslim history. The problem seems
to have been located everywhere except at the core of the Muslim
faith—but faith is precisely what differentiates every Muslim from
every infidel. Without faith, most Muslim grievances against the
West would be impossible even to formulate, much less avenge.
Leftist Unreason and the Strange Case of Noam Chomsky
Nevertheless, many people are now convinced that the attacks of
September 11 say little about Islam and much about the sordid career
of the West—in particular, about the failures of U.S. foreign policy. The
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard gives these themes an especially
luxuriant expression, declaring that terrorism is a necessary consequence
of American "hegemony." He goes so far as to suggest that we
were secretly hoping that such devastation would be visited upon us:
At a pinch we can say that they did it, but we wished for it. . . .
When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent,
when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in
the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of
thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic
situational transfer. It was the system itself which created the
objective conditions for this brutal retaliation. . . . This is terror
against terror—there is no longer any ideology behind it. We
are far beyond ideology and politics now. . . . As if the power
bearing these towers suddenly lost all energy, all resilience; as
though that arrogant power suddenly gave way under the
pressure of too intense an effort: the effort always to be the
unique world model.40
If one were feeling charitable, one might assume that something
essential to these profundities got lost in translation. I think it far
more likely, however, that it did not survive translation into French.
If Baudrillard had been obliged to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban,
would he have thought that the horrible abridgments of his
freedom were a matter of the United States's "effort always to be the
unique world model" ? Would the peculiar halftime entertainment at
every soccer match—where suspected fornicators, adulterers, and
thieves were regularly butchered in the dirt at centerfield—have
struck him as the first rumblings of a "terroristic situational transfer"
? We may be beyond politics, but we are not in the least "beyond
ideology" now. Ideology is all that our enemies have.41
And yet, thinkers far more sober than Baudrillard view the events
of September 11 as a consequence of American foreign policy. Perhaps
the foremost among them is Noam Chomsky. In addition to
making foundational contributions to linguistics and the psychology
of language, Chomsky has been a persistent critic of U.S. foreign policy
for over three decades. He has also managed to demonstrate a
principal failing of the liberal critique of power. He appears to be an
exquisitely moral man whose political views prevent him from making
the most basic moral distinctions—between types of violence, and
the variety of human purposes that give rise to them.
In his book 9-11, with rubble of the World Trade Center still piled
high and smoldering, Chomsky urged us not to forget that "the U.S.
itself is a leading terrorist state." In support of this claim he catalogs
a number of American misdeeds, including the sanctions that the
United States imposed upon Iraq, which led to the death of "maybe
half a million children," and the 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals
plant in Sudan, which may have set the stage for tens of
thousands of innocent Sudanese to die of tuberculosis, malaria, and
other treatable diseases. Chomsky does not hesitate to draw moral
equivalences here: "For the first time in modern history, Europe and
its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of atrocity
that they routinely have carried out elsewhere."42
Before pointing out just how wayward Chomsky's thinking is on
this subject, I would like to concede many of his points, since they
have the virtue of being both generally important and irrelevant to
the matter at hand. There is no doubt that the United States has much
to atone for, both domestically and abroad. In this respect, we can
more or less swallow Chomsky's thesis whole. To produce this horrible
confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the
Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with
our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the
Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots
and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights
records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to
taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol
for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to
submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court.
The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly,
we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have
written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or
as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may
be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular,
should pay reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds
over the years has undermined our credibility in the international
community. We can concede all of this, and even share
Chomsky's acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis
of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral
blindness.
Take the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant: according
to Chomsky, the atrocity of September 11 pales in comparison
with that perpetrated by the Clinton administration in August 1998.
But let us now ask some very basic questions that Chomsky seems to
have neglected to ask himself: What did the U.S. government think it
was doing when it sent cruise missiles into Sudan? Destroying a
chemical weapons site used by Al Qaeda. Did the Clinton administration
intend to bring about the deaths of thousands of Sudanese
children? No. Was our goal to kill as many Sudanese as we could? No.
Were we trying to kill anyone at all? Not unless we thought members
of Al Qaeda would be at the Al-Shifa facility in the middle of the
night. Asking these questions about Osama bin Laden and the nineteen
hijackers puts us in a different moral universe entirely.
If we are inclined to follow Chomsky down the path of moral
equivalence and ignore the role of human intentions, we can forget
about the bombing of the Al-Shifa plant, because many of the things
we did not do in Sudan had even greater consequences. What about
all the money and food we simply never thought to give the
Sudanese prior to 1998? How many children did we kill (that is, not
save) just by living in blissful ignorance of the conditions in Sudan?
Surely if we had all made it a priority to keep death out of Sudan for
as long as possible, untold millions could have been saved from
whatever it was that wound up killing them. We could have sent
teams of well-intentioned men and women into Khartoum to ensure
that the Sudanese wore their seatbelts. Are we culpable for all the
preventable injury and death that we did nothing to prevent? We
may be, up to a point. The philosopher Peter Unger has made a persuasive
case that a single dollar spent on anything but the absolute
essentials of our survival is a dollar that has some starving child's
blood on it.43 Perhaps we do have far more moral responsibility for
the state of the world than most of us seem ready to contemplate.
This is not Chomsky's argument, however.
Anudhati Roy, a great admirer of Chomsky, has summed up his
position very well:
[T]he U.S. government refuses to judge itself by the same moral
standards by which it judges others. . . . Its technique is to position
itself as the well-intentioned giant whose good deeds are
confounded in strange countries by their scheming natives,
whose markets it's trying to free, whose societies it's trying to
modernize, whose women it's trying to liberate, whose souls it's
trying to save. . . . [T]he U.S. government has conferred upon
itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people
"for their own good."44
But we are, in many respects, just such a "well-intentioned giant."
And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky
and Roy, fail to see this. What we need to counter their arguments
is a device that enables us to distinguish the morality of men like
Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush
and Tony Blair. It is not hard to imagine the properties of such a tool.
We can call it "the perfect weapon."
Perfect Weapons and the Ethics of "Collateral Damage"
What we euphemistically describe as "collateral damage" in times of
war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of
our technology. To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any
of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect
weapons—weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or
to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming
others or their property. What would we do with such technology?
Pacifists would refuse to use it, despite the variety of monsters currently
loose in the world: the killers and torturers of children, the
genocidal sadists, the men who, for want of the right genes, the right
upbringing, or the right ideas, cannot possibly be expected to live
peacefully with the rest of us. I will say a few things about pacifism
in a later chapter—for it seems to me to be a deeply immoral position
that comes to us swaddled in the dogma of highest moralism—but
most of us are not pacifists. Most of us would elect to use weapons of
this sort. A moment's thought reveals that a person's use of such a
weapon would offer a perfect window onto the soul of his ethics.
Consider the all too facile comparisons that have recently been
made between George Bush and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin
Laden, or Hitler, etc.)—in the pages of writers like Roy and Chomsky,
in the Arab press, and in classrooms throughout the free world.
How would George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with
perfect weapons? Would he have targeted the thousands of Iraqi
civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs ? Would he have
put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers?
Whether or not you admire the man's politics—or the man—there is
no reason to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death
of even a single innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein or
Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have
done? They would have used them rather differently.
It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage
of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of
course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies
have equal material resources. We might even conceive of our moral
differences in just these terms: not all societies have the same degree
of moral wealth. Many things contribute to such an endowment.
Political and economic stability, literacy, a modicum of social equality—
where such things are lacking, people tend to find many compelling
reasons to treat one another rather badly. Our recent history
offers much evidence of our own development on these fronts, and
a corresponding change in our morality. A visit to New York in the
summer of 1863 would have found the streets ruled by roving gangs
of thugs; blacks, where not owned outright by white slaveholders,
were regularly lynched and burned. Is there any doubt that many
New Yorkers of the nineteenth century were barbarians by our present
standards? To say of another culture that it lags a hundred and
fifty years behind our own in social development is a terrible criticism
indeed, given how far we've come in that time. Now imagine
the benighted Americans of 1863 coming to possess chemical, biological,
and nuclear weapons. This is more or less the situation we
confront in much of the developing world.
Consider the horrors that Americans perpetrated as recently as
1968, at My Lai:
Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by
helicopter. Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people
and animals. There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion
and no shot was fired at Charlie Company all day, but they carried
on. They burnt down every house. They raped women and
girls and then killed them. They stabbed some women in the
vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps.
Pregnant women had their stomachs slashed open and were left
to die. There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with
bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens of people at a time,
including old men, women and children, were machine-gunned in
a ditch. In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed.45
This is about as bad as human beings are capable of behaving. But
what distinguishes us from many of our enemies is that this indiscriminate
violence appalls us. The massacre at My Lai is remembered
as a signature moment of shame for the American military.
Even at the time, U.S. soldiers were dumbstruck with horror by the
behavior of their comrades. One helicopter pilot who arrived on
the scene ordered his subordinates to use their machine guns against
their own troops if they would not stop killing villagers.46 As a culture,
we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture
and murder of innocents. We would do well to realize that much
of the world has not.
Wherever there are facts of any kind to be known, one thing is certain:
not all people will discover them at the same time or understand
them equally well. Conceding this leaves but a short step to hierarchical
thinking of a sort that is at present inadmissible in most liberal
discourse. Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important
questions, there will be better or worse ways to get those answers, and
better or worse ways to put them to use. Take child rearing as an
example: How can we keep children free from disease? How can we
raise them to be happy and responsible members of society? There are
undoubtedly both good and bad answers to questions of this sort, and
not all belief systems and cultural practices will be equally suited to
bringing the good ones to light. This is not to say that there will
always be only one right answer to every question, or a single, best
way to reach every specific goal. But given the inescapable specificity
of our world, the range of optimal solutions to any problem will generally
be quite limited. While there might not be one best food to eat,
we cannot eat stones—and any culture that would make stone eating
a virtue, or a religious precept, will suffer mightily for want of nourishment
(and teeth). It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches
to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be
objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of "better"
we might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very
real differences in human happiness.
Any systematic approach to ethics, or to understanding the necessary
underpinnings of a civil society, will find many Muslims
standing eye deep in the red barbarity of the fourteenth century.
There are undoubtedly historical and cultural reasons for this, and
enough blame to go around, but we should not ignore the fact that
we must now confront whole societies whose moral and political
development—in their treatment of women and children, in their
prosecution of war, in their approach to criminal justice, and in their
very intuitions about what constitutes cruelty—lags behind our
own. This may seem like an unscientific and potentially racist thing
to say, but it is neither. It is not in the least racist, since it is not at
all likely that there are biological reasons for the disparities here,
and it is unscientific only because science has not yet addressed the
moral sphere in a systematic way. Come back in a hundred years,
and if we haven't returned to living in caves and killing one another
with clubs, we will have some scientifically astute things to say
about ethics. Any honest witness to current events will realize that
there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized
democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine
violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim
governments. Chomsky seems to think that the disparity either
does not exist or runs the other way.
Consider the recent conflict in Iraq: If the situation had been
reversed, what are the chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard,
attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac, would have
taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualties? What
are the chances that Iraqi forces would have been deterred by our
use of human shields? (What are the chances we would have used
human shields?) What are the chances that a routed American government
would have called for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide
bombers ? What are the chances that Iraqi soldiers would have wept
upon killing a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint unnecessarily?
You should have, in the ledger of your imagination, a
mounting column of zeros.
Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference
between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to
produce on its parents (we call this "terrorism"), and inadvertently
killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer
(we call this "collateral damage"). In both cases a child has died,
and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators,
be they individuals or states, could hardly be more distinct.
Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life of a child in
jeopardy is unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a principle
we can follow. The makers of roller coasters know, for instance, that
despite rigorous safety precautions, sometime, somewhere, a child will
be killed by one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know
this as well. So do makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags,
swimming pools, chain-link fences, or nearly anything else that could
conceivably contribute to the death of a child. There is a reason we do
not refer to the inevitable deaths of children on our ski slopes as "skiing
atrocities." But you would not know this from reading Chomsky.
For him, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.
We are now living in a world that can no longer tolerate wellarmed,
malevolent regimes. Without perfect weapons, collateral
damage—the maiming and killing of innocent people—is unavoidable.
Similar suffering will be imposed on still more innocent people
because of our lack of perfect automobiles, airplanes, antibiotics, surgical
procedures, and window glass. If we want to draw conclusions
about ethics—as well as make predictions about what a given person
or society will do in the future—we cannot ignore human intentions.
Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.47
A Waste of Precious Resources
Many commentators on the Middle East have suggested that the
problem of Muslim terrorism cannot be reduced to what religious
Muslims believe. Zakaria has written that the roots of Muslim violence
lie not in Islam but in the recent history of the Arab Middle
East. He points out that a mere fifty years ago, the Arab world stood
on the cusp of modernity and then, tragically, fell backward. The
true cause of terrorism, therefore, is simply the tyranny under
which most Arabs have lived ever since. The problem, as Zakaria
puts it, "is wealth, not poverty."48 The ability to pull money straight
out of the ground has led Arab governments to be entirely unresponsive
to the concerns of their people. As it turns out, not needing
to collect taxes is highly corrupting of state power. The result is just
what we see—rich, repressive regimes built upon political and economic
swampland. Little good is achieved for the forces of moder
nity when its mere products—fast food, television, and advanced
weaponry—are hurled into the swamp as well.
According to Zakaria, "if there is one great cause of the rise of
Islamic fundamentalism, it is the total failure of political institutions
in the Arab world."49 Perhaps. But "the rise of Islamic fundamentalism"
is only a problem because the fundamentals of Islam are a
problem. A rise of Jain fundamentalism would endanger no one. In
fact, the uncontrollable spread of Jainism throughout the world
would improve our situation immensely. We would lose more of
our crops to pests, perhaps (observant Jains generally will not kill
anything, including insects), but we would not find ourselves
surrounded by suicidal terrorists or by a civilization that widely
condones their actions.
Zakaria points out that Islam is actually notably antiauthoritarian,
since obedience to a ruler is necessary only if he rules in
accordance with God's law. But, as we have seen, few formulas for
tyranny are more potent than obedience to "God's law." Still,
Zakaria thinks that any emphasis on religious reform is misplaced:
The truth is that little is to be gained by searching the Quran for
clues to Islam's true nature.... The trouble with thundering declarations
about "Islam's nature" is that Islam, like any religion, is
not what books make it but what people make it. Forget the rantings
of fundamentalists, who are a minority. Most Muslims' daily
lives do not confirm the idea of a faith that is intrinsically anti-
Western or anti-modern.50
According to Zakaria, the key to Arab redemption is to modernize
politically, economically, and socially—and this will force Islam
to follow along the path to liberalism, as Christianity has in the
West. As evidence for this, he observes that millions of Muslims live
in the United States, Canada, and Europe and "have found ways of
being devout without being obscurantist, and pious without embracing
fury."51 There may be some truth to this, though, as we have
seen, Zakaria ignores some troubling details. If, as I contend
throughout this book, all that is good in religion can be had elsewhere—
if, for instance, ethical and spiritual experience can be cultivated
and talked about without our claiming to know things we
manifestly do not know—then all the rest of our religious activity
represents, at best, a massive waste of time and energy. Think of all
the good things human beings will not do in this world tomorrow
because they believe that their most pressing task is to build another
church or mosque, or to enforce some ancient dietary practice, or to
print volumes upon volumes of exegesis on the disordered thinking
of ignorant men. How many hours of human labor will be devoured,
today, by an imaginary God ? Think of it: if a computer virus shuts
down a nation's phone system for five minutes, the loss in human
productivity is measured in billions of dollars. Religious faith has
crashed our lines daily, for millennia. I'm not suggesting that the
value of every human action should be measured in terms of productivity.
Indeed, much of what we do would wither under such an
analysis. But we should still recognize what a fathomless sink for
human resources (both financial and attentional) organized religion
is. Witness the rebuilding of Iraq: What was the first thing hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi Shiites thought to do upon their liberation?
Flagellate themselves. Blood poured from their scalps and backs as
they walked miles of cratered streets and filth-strewn alleys to converge
on the holy city Karbala, home to the tomb of Hussein, the
grandson of the Prophet. Ask yourself whether this was really the
best use of their time. Their society was in tatters. Fresh water and
electricity were scarce. Their schools and hospitals were being looted.
And an occupying army was trying to find reasonable people with
whom to collaborate to form a civil society. Self-mortification and
chanting should have been rather low on their list of priorities.
But the problem of religion is not merely that it competes for time
and resources. While Zakaria is right to observe that faith has grown
rather tame in the West—and this is undoubtedly a good thing—he
neglects to notice that it still has very long claws. As we will see in
the next chapter, even the most docile forms of Christianity currently
present insuperable obstacles to AIDS prevention and family
planning in the developing world, to medical research, and to the
development of a rational drug policy—and these contributions to
human misery alone constitute some of the most appalling failures
of reasonableness in any age.
What Can We Do?
In thinking about Islam, and about the risk it now poses to the West,
we should imagine what it would take to live peacefully with the
Christians of the fourteenth century—Christians who were still eager
to prosecute people for crimes like host desecration and witchcraft. We
are in the presence of the past. It is by no means a straightforward task
to engage such people in constructive dialogue, to convince them of
our common interests, to encourage them on the path to democracy,
and to mutually celebrate the diversity of our cultures.
It is clear that we have arrived at a period in our history where
civil society, on a global scale, is not merely a nice idea; it is essential
for the maintenance of civilization. Given that even failed states now
possess potentially disruptive technology, we can no longer afford to
live side by side with malign dictatorships or with the armies of
ignorance massing across the oceans.
What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where
ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence.
If you live in a land where certain things cannot be said about
the king, or about an imaginary being, or about certain books,
because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or
imprisonment, you do not live in a civil society. It appears that one
of the most urgent tasks we now face in the developed world is to
find some way of facilitating the emergence of civil societies everywhere
else. Whether such societies have to be democratic is not at all
clear. Zakaria has persuasively argued that the transition from
tyranny to liberalism is unlikely to be accomplished by plebiscite.
It seems all but certain that some form of benign dictatorship will
generally be necessary to bridge the gap. But benignity is the key—
and if it cannot emerge from within a state, it must be imposed from
without. The means of such imposition are necessarily crude: they
amount to economic isolation, military intervention (whether open
or covert), or some combination of both.52 While this may seem an
exceedingly arrogant doctrine to espouse, it appears we have no
alternatives. We cannot wait for weapons of mass destruction to
dribble out of the former Soviet Union—to pick only one horrible
possibility—and into the hands of fanatics.
We should, I think, look upon modern despotisms as hostage
crises. Kim Jong II has thirty million hostages. Saddam Hussein had
twenty-five million. The clerics in Iran have seventy million more.
It does not matter that many hostages have been so brainwashed
that they will fight their would-be liberators to the death. They are
held prisoner twice over—by tyranny and by their own ignorance.
The developed world must, somehow, come to their rescue. Jonathan
Glover seems right to suggest that we need "something along the
lines of a strong and properly funded permanent UN force, together
with clear criteria for intervention and an international court to
authorize it."53 We can say it even more simply: we need a world
government. How else will a war between the United States and
China ever become as unlikely as a war between Texas and Vermont?
We are a very long way from even thinking about the possibility
of a world government, to say nothing of creating one. It
would require a degree of economic, cultural, and moral integration
that we may never achieve. The diversity of our religious beliefs
constitutes a primary obstacle here. Given what most of us believe
about God, it is at present unthinkable that human beings will ever
identify themselves merely as human beings, disavowing all lesser
affiliations. World government does seem a long way off—so long
that we may not survive the trip.
Is Islam compatible with a civil society? Is it possible to believe
what you must believe to be a good Muslim, to have military and
economic power, and to not pose an unconscionable threat to the
civil societies of others? I believe that the answer to this question is
no. If a stable peace is ever to be achieved between Islam and the
West, Islam must undergo a radical transformation. This transformation,
to be palatable to Muslims, must also appear to come from
Muslims themselves. It does not seem much of an exaggeration to
say that the fate of civilization lies largely in the hands of "moderate"
Muslims. Unless Muslims can reshape their religion into an
ideology that is basically benign—or outgrow it altogether—it is
difficult to see how Islam and the West can avoid falling into a continual
state of war, and on innumerable fronts. Nuclear, biological,
and chemical weapons cannot be uninvented. As Martin Rees points
out, there is no reason to expect that we will be any more successful
at stopping their proliferation, in small quantities, than we have
been with respect to illegal drugs.54 If this is true, weapons of mass
destruction will soon be available to anyone who wants them.
Perhaps the West will be able to facilitate a transformation of the
Muslim world by applying outside pressure. It will not be enough,
however, for the United States and a few European countries to take
a hard line while the rest of Europe and Asia sell advanced weaponry
and "dual-use" nuclear reactors to all comers. To achieve the necessary
economic leverage, so that we stand a chance of waging this war
of ideas by peaceful means, the development of alternative energy
technologies should become the object of a new Manhattan Project.
There are, needless to say, sufficient economic and environmental
justifications for doing this, but there are political ones as well. If oil
were to become worthless, the dysfunction of the most prominent
Muslim societies would suddenly grow as conspicuous as the sun.
Muslims might then come to see the wisdom of moderating their
thinking on a wide variety of subjects. Otherwise, we will be obliged
to protect our interests in the world with force—continually. In this
case, it seems all but certain that our newspapers will begin to read
more and more like the book of Revelation.