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 "Striving to Understand 9/11: Religious Dimensions of the Attack"
(Horace Jeffery Hodges/ÇѽŴëÇб³ ¿µ¾î¿µ¹®Çаú ±³¼ö)
Striving
to Understand 9/11:
Some
Religious Dimensions of the Attack*
Humanities
Research Institute Lecture
September
11, 2002
3:30–6:30
Assistant Professor Horace Jeffery Hodges
Hanshin
University
jefferyhodges@yahoo.com
One
year ago on a late Tuesday evening, I finished teaching my
graduate conversation class, caught an Osan bus home,
rocked my two-year-old son to sleep, turned on the
television, and saw a huge passenger plane slam into the
North Tower of the World Trade Center and explode into an
enormous fireball. Within seconds, janitors and
executives, secretaries and managers, waitresses and
cooks, people who had been drinking a cup of coffee or
chatting with a co-worker or mentally preparing for
another work day, were leaping from the flames and
plummeting, some hand in hand, for a thousand feet to the
sidewalks and the streets and certain death. Then, a
second plane, into the South Tower. Another horrendous
fireball. More bodies falling in a gruesome rain.[1]
Then, the thundering collapse of those two massive
skyscrapers. Finally, ashes and silence.
A
year later, we Americans recall that shocked silence, that
moment when we literally did not know what to say, when it
was already more than we could bear.[2]
Perhaps
we still do not know exactly
what to say. I certainly do not, and I must openly
acknowledge that I am speaking today about an exceedingly
complex subject upon which I am far from an expert. To
speak authoritatively, one would need to have mastered at
least the literature on religious fundamentalism,
terrorism, and political violence generally. One would
also need expertise in Islamic history, law, and theology
along with a thorough grounding in studies on the long
record of conflict between Islam and the West. One would
need to be well-read in the daunting mountain of
literature on the rise of modernity and its antimodern
reactions. One would need to know well the history of
Western imperialism and colonialism and the reactions to
these. In short, one would need to know far more than a
single individual can know.[3]
Nevertheless,
I feel compelled to speak now (if only with borrowed
expertise), even as I had to speak one year ago. First,
let me tell you what I said then (and my words will locate
this article somewhere in the liminal space between quiet
scholarship and the loudest public voices).[4]
It was the day after the attack, and Noam Chomsky was
quoting the British journalist Robert Fisk, who had just
written:
[T]his
is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world
will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also
about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes
and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese
ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a
village called Qana and about a Lebanese
militia—paid and uniformed by America¡¯s Israeli
ally—hacking and raping and murdering their way
through refugee camps.[5]
To
which, Chomsky added:
And
much more. Again, we have a choice: we may try to
understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the
likelihood that much worse lies ahead.[6]
These
words related by Chomsky figured in discussions and
arguments across the United States. I participated in a
listserve discussion hosted by the Society of Christian
Philosophers. Here is what I wrote on September 13:
Re[garding]
. . . Chomsky¡¯s words, I am reminded of something
Malcolm X said at the time of President Kennedy¡¯s
assassination:
¡°The
chickens are coming home to roost.¡±
It
was a cold, and chilling, thing to say.[7]
If he were around today, he would probably say it
again—this time, with more accuracy.[8]
When
the events were unfolding on TV, it was late here in
Korea, and I had just gotten my son off to sleep, so I had
to wake my wife from a deep sleep for her to see the news.
We sat horrified, and deeply saddened, by what we saw.
After
watching in silence for some time, I told her, ¡°You
know, this is a consequence of America being the world¡¯s
¡®policeman.¡¯¡±[9]
(Some
might say ¡°the world¡¯s bully,¡± but I consider our
role more complex than that.)[10]
I
lay awake most of the night, the image of those planes
entering the Twin Towers repeating and repeating and
repeating in my mind.
I
think that we Americans need to reflect very carefully
upon how we will respond to this terrorist act. One thing
for us to keep in mind is that Israel¡¯s retaliation
against terrorists has not solved the problem of terror.
It may even have made more terrorists.[11]
I
have no sympathy for terrorists. When I was a 1998-99
Golda Meir Scholar at Hebrew University, my wife survived
(unscathed, thank God) a bombing at the Mahana Yehuda
market. She was only some 50 meters from the explosion and
was pregnant at the time. I heard of the bombing and
realized that she was doing the marketing there, and for
over an hour, I had no idea what had happened to her.
So,
I know what it is like to endure the wait for word of
life.
But
I want to say something that I think has to be said: These
atrocities are NOT the acts of cowards.[12]
These
are people willing to die for their cause. We have to
understand this very well because if we think that we can
frighten that kind of terrorist by retaliating in kind,
then we are fools.[13]
Those
were my words then. Like many commentators, I tried to
understand what manner of grievance had motivated the
terrorists to hijack commercial airliners and slam them
into skyscrapers, and I strongly implied that we had to
understand those grievances. I thought so then, and I
continue to think so.
Understanding
grievances, however, does not entail exaggerating them, as
Chomsky did in the opening words to his article:
In
terms of number of victims[, those of September 11] . . .
do not reach the level of many others, for example,
Clinton¡¯s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext,
destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably
killing tens of thousands of people.[14]
A
suitable response to this was penned by David Horowitz,
who himself considers Clinton¡¯s decision to launch the
missile ¡°ill-conceived¡±:
Clinton¡¯s
decision to launch a missile into the Sudan [in reaction
to the blowing up of two of . . . {America¡¯s} African
embassies] . . . was not remotely comparable to the World
Trade Center massacre. It was . . . precisely the
opposite[,] . . . . designed . . . to prevent the loss of
innocent life. The missile was fired at night, so that no
one would be in the building when it was hit. The target
was selected because the best information available
indicated it was not a pharmaceutical factory, but a
factory producing biological weapons.[15]
As
for casualties, according to one ABC news report, ¡°the
U.S. missile strike . . . injured 10 people,¡±[16]
far from Chomsky¡¯s claim about tens of thousands killed.
This does not justify the missile strike, and even the
U.S. government has since concluded that the strike was
based on wrong intelligence data,[17]
but if we are going to look for terrorists¡¯ motives, we
should not exaggerate.[18]
Moreover,
if we intend to understand grievances, we should go
directly to the statements of the terrorists themselves.
Here are Bin Laden¡¯s own words explaining his fatwah of February 1998:[19]
The
call to wage war against America was made because America
has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation,
sending tens of thousands of its troops to the land of the
two Holy Mosques.
America[,
in its support for Israel,] heads the list of aggressors
against Muslims. . . . For over half a century, Muslims in
Palestine have been slaughtered and assaulted and robbed
of their honor and of their property.[20]
Concerning
those targeted in the fatwah,
Bin Laden adds:
We
do not have to differentiate between military or civilian.
As far as we are concerned, they are all targets, and this
is what the fatwah
says.[21]
To
summarize Bin Laden¡¯s views, American military and
civilians are targets because America has troops stationed
in Saudi Arabia and has a foreign policy that supports
Israel. On the face of it, this would seem enough to
explain the September 11 attack on the Pentagon and the
World Trade Center. For this reason, I do not agree with
Horowitz¡¯s claim that ¡°This is not a war about land in
the Middle East or the structure of a Palestinian state,
or a U.S. military presence in the Arabian peninsula.¡±[22]
The attack by Al-Qaeda cannot be understood without
understanding their stated grievances, whether we accept
those grievances as justifiable or not. I thought this one
year ago, and I still think so.
As
I recently explained my thoughts to a fellow scholar also
interested in understanding the attack on the World Trade
Center:
I
tend to disagree with Horowitz on one point, namely, that
American foreign policy has no role in explaining the WTC
attacks. Two points: 1) While the radical Islamists are
active agents and do have an agenda, they—like
everybody—also react to their historical context,
and we cannot merely factor out of the equation American
support of Israel or American troops in Saudi Arabia or
the American-led sanctions on Iraq, aside from the issue
of the rightness or wrongness of such American actions; 2)
America acts in the world not only through being motivated
by its moral vision (and it has one) but also through
being motivated by its self-interest.[23]
My
fellow scholar acknowledged: ¡°Both of your points seem
right.¡±[24]
My
thinking, therefore, recognizes that we have to
acknowledge the specific historical context of the
attacks. However, fully grasping what happened encompasses
more than just trying to understand the expressed
grievances behind the attacks. The flaw in an approach
limited to this sort of analysis is that it makes the
actions of the other purely reactive, as if Newton¡¯s
third law of motion applied to political or religious
movements, as if the other were not an active agent in
world history.[25]
As I told my wife, ¡°Al-Qaeda didn¡¯t order the Taliban
to destroy the Bamyan Buddhist statues because they hate
America.¡±[26]
In fact, they hate everybody who is not Muslim (and
probably everybody who is not specifically their
kind of Muslim).[27]
To understand radical Islamists like those of Al-Qaeda, we
have to investigate not just their stated grievances but
also how they make use of their cultural background,
namely, their use of their Islamic heritage,[28]
to condone and legitimate acts of extreme violence in the
name of, and for the sake of, religion. This approach
will, I recognize, constitute a study of an Islam only
partially perceived,[29]
so having acknowledged that, let us begin this
investigation by noting the contentious words of Samuel P.
Huntington concerning the Islamic world¡¯s borders:
In
Eurasia the great historic fault lines between
civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly
true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic
bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia.
Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and
Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in
India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the
Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.[30]
What
are some of the possible epochal reasons for these bloody
borders? By this question, I mean to indicate something
other than the specific historical context to which
particular, militant Muslims or their sometimes equally
militant enemies react. Specifically, I mean to suggest
the larger, arguably religiously inspired imperial
motivations that, at least in principle, characterize the
Islamic world as an expansive, active agent over the long
duration of historical time, for the authoritative
religious texts expounding these motivations are the
sources within Muslim tradition that modern militant
Islamic groups such as Al-Qaeda appeal to for
justification and, very probably, even draw upon for
inspiration.[31]
In
this respect, it is relevant to understand that Muslim
theologians and jurists have traditionally divided the
world into the House of Islam and the House of War, with
the ultimate aim of extending Islamic rule and law over
all of the House of War, either through peaceful means or
through military jihad.[32]
Although the legal rules defining this division stem from
Islamic law compiled during the 8th through 11th centuries
C.E.,[33]
its origins supposedly lie in the reputed actions of
Muhammad himself. One should note that according to the
early Muslim traditions known as hadith
(report), Muhammad was not just a religious leader but the
founder of a new religion,[34]
the head of a theocratic state, and a military leader who
personally led his forces into battle, such as during the
Battle of Badr in March 624, a decisive victory for the
early Muslim community of Medina in their conflict with
the pagan Meccans. As described by Kenneth Cragg in his
reading of the sources:
Under
the Prophet¡¯s own skillful military leadership some
three hundred Muslims dispersed a thousand Meccans, losing
only fourteen slain to some fifty of the Meccans . . . .
Muslim history regards the Battle of Badr as crucial.
Certainly the sword was unleashed . . . . The Jihad,
or appeal to battle, had been irrevocably invoked.[35]
A
year later, however, the Muslims nearly lost another
battle with the Meccans and ¡°were only rallied in a
desperate effort by the Prophet himself¡±[36]
in his reportedly active role as the Muslims¡¯ supreme
military leader.
The
Meccans, perhaps sensing Muslim weakness, later (in 627)
besieged Medina in what Muslim historians refer to as
¡°The Battle of the Ditch¡± but withdrew without success
when the weather became too cold. The Meccan withdrawal
left their presumed allies, a Jewish tribe by the name of
Banu Quraizah, to face Muhammad¡¯s response. According to
the sources, says Cragg:
The
whole tribe was dispossessed and after suing for clemency,
the women and children were enslaved, while the men,
traditionally numbered at seven hundred, were executed
beside long trench graves.[37]
As
described by the respected French Semitics scholar Maxime
Rodinson in his reading of the sources:
The
Jews were led out tied together in groups, and beheaded,
one by one, on the edge of the trenches and thrown in.[38]
Rodinson
adds that according to these same Muslim sources, Muhammad
¡°took a concubine for himself, the lovely Rayhana, the
widow of one of those who had been executed.¡±[39]
Doubtless,
Muhammad would have felt his movement threatened by those
he perceived as enemies,[40]
and his reported treatment of the Banu Quraizah
demonstrates an apparent willingness to deal ruthlessly
with such enemies. We see this as well in traditional
reports of his seeming acquiescence in violence against
his critics when his power in Medina was beginning to
grow. After an elderly Medinan man named Abu Afak had been
killed by a Muslim because he had written poetry that
satirized Mohammad, a female poet named Asma¡¯ Bint
Marwan wrote an angry, even shocking poem to criticize
some of the clans and tribes of Medina for following
Muhammad:
Fucked
men of Malik and of Nabit
And of ¡®Awf, fucked men of Khazraj:
You obey a stranger who does not belong among you . . . .
Do you, when your own chiefs have been murdered, put your
hope in him
Like men greedy for meal soup when it is cooking?
Is there no man of honour who will take advantage of an
unguarded moment
And cut off [Mohammad]?[41]
Let
us clearly and frankly note that Asma¡¯ Bint Marwan fully
intended her words to incite someone to kill Muhammad, and
in the shame-and-honor culture whose values Muhammad and
his enemies shared, poetry could be a powerful medium of
both praise and insult. Bint Marwan¡¯s words had heaped
shame upon Muslims and raised a mortal threat against
Muhammad that would be difficult for him to leave
unanswered.
For
his part, Muhammad would appear to have taken that threat
seriously. Rodinson, again drawing upon Muslim sources,
describes what is reported to have occurred:
[Muhammad]
said aloud: ¡°Will no one rid me of this daughter of
Marwan?¡± There was a man present who belonged to . . .
[her] clan. His name was ¡®Umayr bin ¡®Adi . . . . That
very evening, he went to . . . [her] house. She was
sleeping with her children about her. The youngest, still
at the breast, lay asleep in her arms. He drove his sword
through her, and in the morning he went to Muhammad.
¡°Messenger
of Allah,¡± he said, ¡°I have killed her!¡± ¡°You have
done a service to Allah and his Messenger, ¡®Umayr,¡±
was the reply. Then ¡®Umayr asked: ¡°Shall I have to
bear any penalty on her account, O Messenger of Allah?¡±
He answered: [¡°Two goats won¡¯t butt their heads about
her.¡±][42]
. . . Then
¡®Umayr returned to his own clan which was in a great
uproar that day on account of the daughter of Marwan. She
had five sons. ¡®Umayr said: ¡°Banu Khatma! I killed the
daughter of Marwan. Decide what is to be done with me, but
do not keep me waiting.¡±
No
one moved. The [Muslim] chronicler continues:
That
was the day when Islam first showed its power over the
Banu Khatma. ¡®Umayr had been the first among them to
become a Muslim. On the day the daughter of Marwan was
killed, the men of the Banu Khatma were converted because
of what they saw of the power of Islam.
The
move had succeeded. . . . [This a]ssassination . . . is
listed by [Muslim] chroniclers among Muhammad¡¯s
[military] ¡°expeditions.¡±[43]
If
this Muslim chronicle is accurate, then Muhammad would
seem to have (correctly) understood Asma¡¯ bint Marwan¡¯s
words as a threat to his life and mission, and the fact
that the earliest Muslim sources report this and other
assassinations that were traditionally considered to have
been approved by Muhammad suggests that they shared this
assessment of the threat.[44]
With
the power of the early Islamic community growing,
Muhammad¡¯s confidence in the larger success of his
mission would also appear to have grown. Cragg, alluding
to early Muslim tradition, reports that Muhammad¡¯s
¡°clearly growing aspirations for the expansion of the
faith into northern regions ... [were] indicated in
letters summoning several potentates in the Christian
world to Islamize.¡±[45]
Early Muslim tradition also holds that as Muhammad lay on
his deathbed, he expressed the desire that ¡°Two
religions should not co-exist within the Arabian
peninsula.¡±[46]
Many modern scholars question the authenticity of these
actions and words attributed to Muhammad, but an expanded
military jihad
did begin shortly after Muhammad¡¯s death. As the
historian Bat Ye¡¯or describes this:
The
Prophet¡¯s successor, Abu Bakr, . . . . unif[ied] . . .
the peninsula . . . [and] carried the war (jihad)
beyond Arabia. The jihad
provided non-Muslims with an alternative: conversion or
tribute; refusal forced the Muslims to fight them till
victory. Arab idolaters had to choose between death or
conversion; as for Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, if
they paid tribute and accepted the conditions of conquest,
they could buy back their right to life, freedom of
worship, and security of property.[47]
This
was the early jihad
of a rapidly expanding Islamic power that by 732, only
one-hundred years after Muhammad¡¯s death, had
established an empire stretching from the border of India
in the east to Spain in the west and from the Arabian
peninsula in the south to Armenia in the north.[48]
Jihad
is a term that can be—and has been—variously
translated. Among moderate Muslims living in the West, the
term is understood solely in the correspondingly moderate
sense of striving inwardly against sin. This is not
generally the case for much of Islamic history. As the
distinguished scholar of Islamic studies Bernard Lewis
explains:
The
Arabic word literally means ¡°striving¡± and is often
followed by the words . . . ¡°in the path of God.¡±
Until fairly recent times it was usually, though not
universally, understood in a military sense. It was a
Muslim duty . . . to fight in the war against the
unbelievers. In principle, this war was to continue until
all mankind either embraced Islam or submitted to the
authority of the Muslim state. Until this purpose was
achieved there could theoretically be no peace, though
truces were permitted.[49]
According
to the contemporary, conservative Syrian Islamic scholar
Muhammad Sa¡¯id Ramadan al-Buti, jihad
has always been an offensive, not defensive warfare:
The
Holy War, as it is known in Islamic Jurisprudence, is
basically an offensive war. This is the duty of Muslims in
every age when the needed military power becomes available
to them. This is the phase in which the meaning of Holy
War has taken its final form. Thus the apostle of God
said: ¡°I was commanded to fight the people until they
believe in God and his message.¡±[50]
The
contemporary, liberal Muslim scholar Fazlur Rahman appears
to acknowledge this as well:
The
Qur¡¯an calls upon believers to undertake jihad
. . . i.e., to establish the Islamic socio-moral order . .
. . So long as the Muslims were a small, persecuted
minority in Mecca, jihad
as a positive organized thrust of the Islamic movement was
unthinkable. In Medina, however, the situation changed and
henceforth there is hardly anything . . . that receives
greater emphasis than jihad[51]
. . . . The most unacceptable [interpretation of jihad]
on historical grounds . . . is the stand of those modern
Muslim apologists who have tried to explain the jihad
of the early [Muslim] community in purely defensive terms.[52]
As
a military strategy, argues Ye¡¯or, the early sources
allow that jihad:
provides
for the destabilization at the frontiers of the dar
al-harb [i.e., the House of War] by irregular
forces—burn villages, take hostages, or pillage and
massacre in order to drive out the inhabitants and
facilitate the army¡¯s advance by gradual territorial
encroachment.[53]
Given
this Muslim view of the House of Islam¡¯s relations with
the House of War, Huntington¡¯s observation that ¡°Islam
has bloody borders¡± would seem to be grounded not only
in present-day geography but also in earlier Islamic
history.
In
the first two hundred years as Islam expanded in this way,
it also had to develop a legal system to govern relations
among Muslims and between Muslims and those non-Muslims,
known as dhimmis,
who were allowed to practice legitimate religions. Given
the usual policies of imperial powers, we should not find
ourselves surprised to learn that dhimmis
were second-class subjects in the imperial Muslim state
and that their inferior status was encoded within the shariah,
the Islamic legal system based upon the Qur¡¯an and the hadith (report). For instance, ¡°all litigation between a Muslim
and a dhimmi was
under the jurisdiction of Islamic legislation, which did
not recognize the validity of the oath of a dhimmi
against that of a Muslim,¡± a legal state of affairs
reportedly based upon Muhammad¡¯s own words, according to
hadith.[54]
Although the dhimmi
were given legal status to practice their own religions,
there were significant restrictions. According to the
putative Pact of Omar, a treaty reputed to date to the
seventh century, Christians were to be prevented from
building new churches or repairing existing ones.[55]
Moreover, half of the existing churches in newly conquered
Christian territory were to be ceded to Muslims, who would
use them as mosques.[56]
As Ye¡¯or notes, Jewish places of worship were treated
similarly.[57]
Beyond this, the mere right of dhimmi
to practice their religion depended upon payment of a tax
known as the jizya,
the justification for which was grounded in the Qur¡¯an,
Surah 9:29, which also called for Christians and Jews to
be ¡°utterly subdued.¡±[58]
The legal inferiority of dhimmi
and superiority of Muslims thus seems to stem from the
earliest Islamic period.
In
a sense, the superiority of Muslims was no legal
fiction—if I be allowed an abusive usage of this
expression—for Muslims ¡°created a world
civilization [that was] polyethnic, multiracial,
international, one might even say intercontinental.¡±[59]
It was the greatest military power on earth, the foremost
economic power in the world, and the most highly developed
in the arts and sciences that the world had ever seen.[60]
Then, suddenly, this all began to change. Lewis notes:
Even
before the Renaissance, Europeans were beginning to make
significant progress in the civilized arts. With the
advent of the New Learning, they advanced by leaps and
bounds, leaving the scientific and technological and
eventually the cultural heritage of the Islamic world far
behind them.[61]
This
fact escaped the Muslims for a long time and only began to
come to their attention as the Islamic world began to
suffer one military defeat after another in confrontations
with European powers.[62]
These
defeats and the overall decline of the Islamic world led
to an inevitable question: What went wrong?[63]
For Muslims, such a question had theological significance
since Islam had supposedly been intended by Allah as a
religious civilization to supersede all other
civilizations and to bring the final, uncorrupted divine
revelation to all of humanity. The Islamic world
was—in principle if not always in fact—a
theocratic system ruled by the will of Allah as
systematized in the shariah.
In principle, this system favored by Allah should have
continued to succeed culturally, economically, and
militarily.[64]
The question of what went wrong was thus a particularly
anguished one for Muslims—especially given that
Islamic culture is a shame-and-honor culture.[65]
Lewis holds that the answers can go in either of two
directions, depending upon how the question is intended.
If the question is understood as ¡°Who did this to us?¡±
then the answers are often no more than conspiracy
theories. But if the question is understood to mean
¡°What did we do wrong?¡± then it can lead to yet
another question: ¡°How do we put it right?¡± Lewis
thinks that this question holds ¡°the best hopes for the
future,¡± for the right answers can help to make ¡°the
Middle East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and in
the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization.¡±[66]
Well,
perhaps, but this depends upon the answers given to these
latter two questions. Moreover, there is a false dilemma
being posed here. The question ¡°What went wrong?¡± can
mean—and very often does mean—both ¡°Who did
this to us?¡± and ¡°What did we do wrong?¡± Radical
Islamists surely understand it to mean both, for they
point to what they see as the antagonism of the West (but
not only the West) and to what they see as the corruption
of the Islamic world itself. Their answers to both of
these questions are thus not very reassuring, for they
exhort Muslim society to re-Islamize within and to pursue jihad
without. Even the attempts at re-Islamization can take the
path of a militant jihad,
as the case of Algeria demonstrates.
The
ultimate aim of radical Islamists such as Al-Qaeda is the
worldwide dominance of Islam through military jihad,[67]
as their own spokesmen state:
The
Entire Earth Must Be Subjected to Islam[:] ¡°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 . . . . [and] that the [divine] rule is
that the entire earth must be subject to the religion of
Allah . . . ?¡±
¡°As
long as this Muslim knows and believes in these facts, he
will not—even for a single moment—stop
striving to achieve it.¡± . . .
¡°The
religious arguments . . . [for] Jihad
against the Americans . . . are many.¡±[68]
Such
a view would be partly grounded in their understanding of hadith such as the following:
Narrated
Abu Huraira: Allah¡¯s Apostle said, ¡°I have been
ordered (by Allah) to fight the people till they say:
¡®None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.¡¯¡±[69]
But
it would also be grounded in their use of portions of a
number of Qur¡¯anic verses, such as the following ones:
Fight
for the cause of God. (2:244)
[S]lay
the idolaters wherever you find them. (9:5)
Fight
against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given as
believe in neither God nor the Last Day. (9:29)
When
you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off
their heads. (47:4)[70]
Moreover,
for those who die in military jihad,
paradise is the reward promised by Al-Qaeda (and other
radical Islamists), as based upon their application of the
following Qur¡¯anic verse:
Those
that . . . fought and were slain: I shall forgive them
their sins and admit them to gardens watered by running
streams, as a recompense from God. (3:195)[71]
Radical
Islamists such as Al-Qaeda, perhaps ignoring textual[72]
or historical context and certainly ignoring even the
usual Muslim distinction between combatants and
noncombatants,[73]
interpret such hadith
and verses with what one might well call a hermeneutics of
violence.
Osama
bin Laden himself—speaking of those who hijacked the
planes and slammed them into the World Trade
Center—claims that the attackers and their actions
are justified by Islamic jurisprudence:[74]
Those
youth who conducted the operations . . . accepted the fiqh
[Islamic jurisprudence] that the prophet Muhammad brought.[75]
Furthermore,
he considers them as having spoken through their deeds in
a way that the entire world could understand:
Those
young men . . . said in deeds, in New York and Washington,
speeches that overshadowed all other speeches made
everywhere else in the world. The speeches are understood
by both Arabs and non-Arabs–even by Chinese.[76]
Indeed,
Bin Laden believes that the attacks actually advanced the
cause of Islam among the unbelievers:
[I]n
Holland, at one of the centers, the number of people who
accepted Islam during the days that followed the
operations were more than the people who accepted Islam in
the last eleven years. I heard someone on Islamic radio
who owns a school in America say: ¡°We don¡¯t have time
to keep up with the demands of those who are asking about
Islamic books to learn about Islam.¡± This event made
people think (about true Islam) which benefited Islam
greatly.[77]
Bin
Laden¡¯s words concerning his view of the attack¡¯s
religious effect recall the words of that Muslim
chronicler who described the men of the Banu Khatma as
having ¡°converted because of what they saw of the power
of Islam¡± in reaction to the assassination of Asma¡¯
Bint Marwan.[78]
Obviously,
not all Muslims think as Bin Laden does. Clearly, most
Muslims themselves live quite peaceful lives. Indeed, I
would hold that the vast majority of Muslims truly oppose
violence. Our collective predicament—and I include
here both non-Muslims and the peaceful majority of
Muslims—is that because Islam is a religion of about
one billion believers, then even a small percentage of
radical Islamists can factor out as a large number. If
Daniel Pipes¡¯s estimate were correct, then Americans
would face ¡°confrontation with 10 to 15 percent of the
vast populations of the Muslim world.¡±[79]
These percentages would indicate some 100 to 150 million
potential mujahadin
(i.e., holy warriors), and this sounds highly exaggerated
to me. Yet even assuming that these numbers must have been
vastly overestimated—and Pipes does not cite any
strong sources for his statistics[80]—there
are surely a relatively
large number of hardcore radical Islamists who would be
willing to heed Bin Laden¡¯s call to jihad.
Crucially, such Islamists would be very hard to dissuade
from their radical views, for Islam is a founder religion
with a founder who, according to some hadith
and certain passages of the Qur¡¯an, would appear to have
taught, exhorted, and himself practiced military jihad.
Indeed,
as one might expect of a founder religion, Islam presents
Muhammad as a universal exemplar, one about whom even the
smallest points become significant.[81]
Cragg notes that even the great, eleventh-century Muslim
scholar Al-Ghazali stated:
Know
that the key of happiness is following the Sunna
[Muhammad¡¯s actions] and imitating God¡¯s Apostle in
all his goings out and comings in, in his movements and
times of quiescence, even in the manner of his eating, his
deportment, his sleep and his speech. . . . [God] said:
¡°What the Apostle has brought you, receive . . .
(59:7).¡±[82]
Thus
if radical Islamists strongly believe that the traditional
sources are correct in portraying Muhammad as having
brought a call to militant jihad
and also as having practiced it, then many of them will
feel pressure to respond faithfully to that call. And we
see that some do so—sometimes to the point of
perhaps distorting traditional practices of even militant jihad.
For
his part, Bin Laden is quite open and unapologetic about
linking his understanding of militant jihad to acknowledgements of his use of terrorism.[83]
In a video released to Qatar¡¯s al-Jazeera television
station in December 2001, Bin Laden stated:
Our
terrorism against the United States is blessed, aimed at
repelling the oppressor.[84]
In
an earlier video, Bin Laden declared:
[W]hat
we are practising is the good terror.[85]
Perhaps
Bin Laden would propose to justify his ¡°good terror¡±
by trying to apply Qur¡¯anic verses such as
8:59–60:
Let
not the unbelievers think that they can ever get away. . .
. Muster against them all the men . . . at your command,
so that you may strike terror
into the enemy of God and your enemy.[86]
Or
perhaps Bin Laden would be vaguely alluding to a hadith from Bukhari:
Allah¡¯s
Apostle said, ¡°I have been made victorious with terror.¡±[87]
However,
take careful note here that although the Qur¡¯anic verse does speak of terrorizing the enemy during military jihad,
it says nothing explicitly about terrorist action, and the
hadith from
Bukhari provides no clarifying context at all.[88]
These two sources may mean nothing more than that Allah
Himself brings the enemy into a state of terror during
battle, as is explicitly stated in the Qur¡¯an 8:13,
where Allah—exhorting the believers to
battle—says:
¡°I
[i.e., Allah] shall cast terror
into the hearts of the infidels.¡±[89]
Not
without enormous hermeneutic effort by Al-Qaeda ideologues
could these sources be made to justify the largescale
terrorism of our technological age, since for
seventh-century Arabia, terror accomplished by slamming
commercial airliners into skyscrapers was thoroughly
unimaginable.[90]
Whatever
the Qur¡¯anic or traditional sources that Bin Laden
claims to be referring to when he distinguishes his
terrorism as ¡°good terrorism,¡± we have to note very
clearly that Al-Qaeda¡¯s antagonism to America stems from
more than a reaction to American foreign policy
(regardless of what its militants, or even we, may think
of that policy). According to one of Al-Qaeda¡¯s own
spokesmen:
America
is the head of heresy in our modern world, and it leads an
infidel democratic regime that is based upon separation of
religion and state and on ruling the people by the people
via legislating laws that contradict the way of Allah and
permit what Allah has prohibited.[91]
From
this perspective, a terrorist attack upon any democratic
country would be justified. Al-Qaeda does not hate
democratic countries merely for what they do
but for what they are.[92]
Is
there then no hope? Even a scholar so learned and
knowledgeable about Islam as Lewis, who tries to hope for
the best, fears the very worst, and speaking specifically
of the Arabic Muslim world, cautions:
If
the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present
path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the
whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward
spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and
oppression.[93]
So
far (at the time of this writing), too few prominent
Islamic religious leaders in the Middle East have
condemned suicide bombings. The Palestinians who blow
themselves up to kill Israelis are seen as
martyrs—or as Ivan Strenski characterizes both them
and the Al-Qaeda hijackers, ¡°sacrifice (not suicide)
bombers.¡±[94]
Certainly, Muslims cannot legitimately allow themselves to
recognize the bombers as committing suicide since killing
oneself is forbidden by the Qur¡¯an, Sura 4:29, which
states: ¡°Do not kill yourselves.¡±[95]
Perhaps
some hope lies here if only moderate Muslims, in large
numbers, would begin to speak out against the violence.
There are other possible sources within Islam that one
might try to draw upon. For instance, there is the Qur¡¯an,
Sura 2.256:
There
shall be no compulsion in religion.¡±[96]
In
principle, that should preclude the use of force.
Traditionally, it has not had this effect because of the
principle of abrogation (mansukh), expressed in Sura 2:106:
If
We abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten, We will
replace it by a better one or one similar.[97]
Thus,
orthodox Islam has generally maintained that the so-called
¡°sword verse¡± of Sura 9:5[98]
¡°annuls the 124 verses that originally encouraged
tolerance.¡±[99]
Those hadith stating that Muhammad himself led Muslims in battle and
forcibly converted the Meccans when he finally conquered
the city would, moreover, tend to support the usual
position that the Medinan sword verse abrogates the early
Meccan verse of tolerance.
We
can, however, raise a fundamental question about this. Can
we know for certain that the early history of Islam was so
violent as many of the hadith
portray? These traditions were collected some 200 years
after Muhammad¡¯s death, more than enough time for false
traditions to have been invented.[100]
Bukhari and other compilers recognized this and
established principles intended to distinguish authentic
from inauthentic traditions by reviewing the reliability
of the isnad
(i.e., chain of narrators). Yet, the existence of
¡®authentic¡¯ hadith
that contradict each other suggests that new principles
are needed, as many scholars have already argued. For
instance, one might apply a principle used in Biblical
scholarship, the principle of dissimilarity, which holds
that a tradition is likely authentic if it is dissimilar
to what the early church might have invented. If we apply
this principle to early, imperialistic Islam, then those hadith
that report violence and military jihad
on Muhammad¡¯s part are questionable since they could
easily have been invented to justify the imperial conquest
by which Islam spread so rapidly and the unequal status
that imperial Islam accorded to Muslims and non-Muslims.
Ye¡¯or acknowledges this same point:
Those
hadith
[concerning jihad ideology and the dhimmi
rules] were composed during the period of the Islamic
conquest in the eighth or ninth century, at a time of
strong military confrontation between Christianity and
Islam, giving them a militant orientation.[101]
Even
the very conservative Muslim apologist Ruqaiyyah Maqsood[102]
recognizes that many false hadith
are in wide circulation among Muslims:
It
is commonplace to read numerous very weak and highly
suspect hadith
in countless Muslim articles and publications, often
copied from one modern article to the next, without the
least concern for scholarship or the veracity of the hadith.[103]
Maqsood,
nevertheless, accepts the traditional ¡°rules for
deciding whether a hadith
was sahih (authentic), da¡¯if
(weak), or maudu¡¯
(doubtful),¡±[104]
but if contemporary Muslims use hadith
without concern for their authenticity, then early Muslims
probably did the same, and we have already noted that the
principles applied for establishing the authenticity of an
isnad have not
eliminated contradictory hadith.
Maqsood herself admits of early Islam that it is ¡°a
well-known fact that false hadith were soon in circulation, however pious the intentions of
those who fabricated them.¡±[105]
The more liberal Muslim Cyril Glassé even asserts:
Hadith
have [sometimes] been invented in order to justify some
legal opinion or school of thought.[106]
Assuming
such a state of affairs—i.e., the existence of hadith recognizably fabricated for juridical purposes and the need
for legal rules applicable to the new conditions of a
rapidly expanding Islamic empire—then a hermeneutics
of suspicion is justified, and one could therefore also
justifiably ask if the sword verse has been illegitimately
used to abrogate the tolerance verse.[107]
Of
course, the radical Islamists who urge military jihad
are unlikely to be swayed through questions of
hermeneutics raised by non-Muslims—probably not even
by those non-Muslims willing to turn a critical eye upon
American foreign policy. Bin Laden, for instance, has
said, ¡°We do not care what the Americans believe,¡±[108]
and he does not qualify this statement. Nevertheless,
there are a few encouraging signs in some parts of the
Muslim world. According to a recent article from Egypt:
The
12 leaders of the militant al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, . . .
Egypt¡¯s bloodiest and most ruthless Muslim group, were
pictured in a popular weekly news magazine voicing remorse
and promising that there would be no return to the
violence of the past 20 years. . . .
They
were quoted as saying that they had misinterpreted the
Islamic concept of jihad to justify killing Christian Egyptians, tourists, and police
officers, and [were also quoted] as renouncing their use
of violence to force women to respect Islamic dress codes.[109]
Some
militants, it seems, can moderate their views, and it
would be interesting to know what changed their minds.
There
is also the case of Iran, which is having second thoughts
about its Islamic radicalism.[110]
As noted by Daniel Pipes, one of radical Islam¡¯s
severest public critics:
Militant
Islam is on the ascendant almost everywhere around the
globe—except in the nation that has experienced it
longest and knows it best. In Iran, it is on the defensive
and perhaps in retreat.[111]
Significantly,
this is occurring not just because a new generation has
grown up that ¡°wants freedom from a regime that bullies
them personally, tyrannizes them politically, depresses
them economically and isolates them culturally¡±[112]
but also because some in the ruling elite itself have
become disillusioned. The Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri, who
had played a role in overthrowing the shah and
establishing the Islamic regime¡¯s intolerance, has
resigned from his important position as prayer leader
because the Islamic Republic has only brought
¡°crookedness, negligence, weakness, poverty and
indigence.¡±[113]
Pipes suggests:
Muslims
who have suffered from the full debilitation inflicted by
militant Islam over a period of decades, it seems, are
immune to the charms of this totalitarianism and prepared
to take on the challenge of finding an alternative vision
to it.[114]
He
attributes this to ¡°a maturation of the Iranian body
politic¡± resulting from the fact that by overthrowing
the Shah, ¡°the Iranian population realized that it had
control over and responsibility over its destiny¡± and
that from this more mature perspective,
it ¡°has looked at its choices and . . . [has]
come . . . down in favor of democracy and a cautious
foreign policy.¡±[115]
Thomas Friedman agrees that the Islamists are losing in
Iran:
because
the young generation in Iran today knows two things: (1)
They've had enough democracy to know they want more of it.
(2) They've had enough theocracy crammed down their
throats to know they want less of it.[116]
Friedman
adds that this younger generation:
will
force a new balance in Iran, involving real democracy and
an honored place for Islam, but not an imposed one.[117]
John
L. Esposito and Ahmed Rashid, among others, would seem
largely to agree with this assessment.[118]
For perhaps similar reasons, it would appear, Pipes agrees
that ¡°there is nothing in Islam that necessarily
contradicts democracy,¡± though he holds that for Muslims
to achieve democracy, they must also secularize—by
which, he seems primarily to mean that Muslims must
separate religion and state and subordinate the former to
the latter.[119]
That,
of course, is a big question: Can the Islamic world, in
this sense, truly secularize? More to the point, can this
huge community that considers itself to have been founded
by a religious leader to replace all previous religions
and civilizations, this community convinced of its own
cultural superiority and obsessed with its great weakness,
this community afflicted with a burning sense of shame and
deeply wounded honor[120]
for the historically superior status that it has
lost—can this
community secularize, especially when the impulse toward
secularization comes from a distrusted West that has
undergone an Enlightenment era that the Muslim world has
never experienced,[121]
a West that has at times used the instrumental, secular
rationality stemming from this Enlightenment to dominate
much of the Islamic world?[122]
And this leads to a second big question: Even if the
Islamic world can secularize, can it succeed in
secularizing the militant mind of radical Islamists? The
fact that millions of evangelical Christians in America
are not comfortably reconciled with secular modernity
strongly suggests that we should not be especially
optimistic about Islam successfully, comprehensively, and
profoundly secularizing itself. We have perhaps even less
reason for optimism given the fact that historically, the
most authoritative Islamic thinkers have never recognized
the genuine legitimacy of an enduring, legal separation
between religion and state.[123]
We thus have considerable reason for concern that at least
some percentage—and therefore potentially a large
number—of radical Muslims will perhaps never come to
satisfactory terms with secular modernity.[124]
If so, then for a fearfully long time, we may have to live
with radical Islamists—and increasingly die with
them.[125]
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