Fields of Blood (74 page)
Authors: Karen Armstrong
These freelance terrorists have very little knowledge of the
Quran, and so it is pointless to attempt a debate about their interpretation of scripture or to blame “Islam” for their crimes.
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Indeed,
Marc Sageman, who has talked with several of them, believes that a regular religious education might have deterred them from lawless violence. They are, he
has found, chiefly motivated by the desire to escape a stifling sense of insignificance and pointlessness in secular
nation-states that struggle to absorb foreign minorities. They seek to fulfill the age-old dream of military glory and believe that by dying a heroic death, they will give their lives meaning as local heroes.
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In these cases, suffice it to say, what we call “Islamic
terrorism” has been transformed from a political cause—inflamed with pious exhortations contrary to Islamic teachings—into a violent expression out of youthful rage. They may claim to be acting in the name of Islam, but when an untalented beginner claims to be playing a Beethoven sonata, we hear only cacophony.
One of
Bin Laden’s objectives had been to draw Muslims all over the world to his vision of
jihad. Though he did become a charismatic folk hero to some—a kind of Saudi Che—in this central mission he ultimately failed. Between 2001 and 2007, a Gallup poll conducted in thirty-five predominantly Muslim countries found that only 7 percent of respondents thought the 9/11 attacks were “completely justified”; for these people, the reasons were entirely political. As for the 93 percent who condemned the attacks, they quoted Quranic verses to show that the killing of innocent people could have no place in Islam.
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One might well wonder how much more unanimously opposed to terror the Muslim world might have become, but for the course the
United States and its allies took in the wake of 9/11. At a time when even in
Tehran there were demonstrations of solidarity with America, the
Bush and
Blair coalition lashed out with its own violent rejoinder, a drive that would culminate in the tragically misbegotten Iraq invasion of 2003. Its most decisive result was to present the world with a new set of images of Muslim suffering in which the West was not only implicated but for which it was, this time, directly responsible. When considering the tenacity of
al-Qaeda, it is well to remember that such images of Muslim suffering, more than any expansive theory of jihad, were what had drawn so many young Muslims to the camps of
Peshawar in the first instance.
We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God, but we cannot claim the high moral ground if we dismiss the suffering and death of the many thousands of civilians who die in our wars as “collateral damage.” Ancient religious mythologies helped people to face up to the dilemma of state violence, but our current nationalist ideologies seem by contrast to promote a retreat into denial or hardening of our hearts. Nothing shows this more clearly than a remark
of
Madeleine Albright’s when she was still
Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the
United Nations. She later retracted it, but among people all around the world, it has never been forgotten. In 1996, on CBS’s
60
Minutes,
Lesley Stahl asked her whether the cost of international sanctions against
Iraq was justified: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more than died in
Hiroshima.… Is the price worth it?” “I think this is a very hard choice,” Albright replied, “but the price, we think the price is worth it.”
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On October 24, 2012,
Mamana Bibi, a sixty-five-year-old woman picking vegetables in her family’s large open land in northern Waziristan, Pakistan, was killed by a U.S. drone aircraft. She was not a terrorist but a midwife married to a retired schoolteacher, yet she was blown to pieces in front of her nine young grandchildren. Some of the children have had multiple surgeries that the family could ill afford because they lost all their livestock; the smaller children still scream in terror all night long. We do not know who the real targets were. Yet even though the U.S. government claims to carry out thorough poststrike assessments, it has never apologized, never offered compensation to the family, nor even admitted what happened to the American people. CIA director
John O. Brennan had previously claimed that drone strikes caused absolutely no civilian casualties; more recently he has admitted otherwise while maintaining that such deaths are extremely rare. Since then,
Amnesty International reviewed some forty-five strikes in the region, finding evidence of unlawful civilian deaths, and has reported several strikes that appear to have killed civilians outside the bounds of law.
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“Bombs create only hatred in the hearts of people. And that hatred and anger breed more
terrorism,” said Bibi’s son. “No one ever asked
us
who was killed or injured that day. Not the
United States or my own government. Nobody has come to investigate nor has anyone been held accountable. Quite simply, nobody seems to care.”
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“Am I my brother’s guardian?”
Cain asked after he had killed his brother,
Abel. We are now living in such an interconnected world that we are all implicated in one another’s history and one another’s tragedies. As we—quite rightly—condemn those terrorists who kill innocent people, we also have to find a way to acknowledge our relationship with and responsibility for Mamana Bibi, her family, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have died or been mutilated in our modern wars simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
W
e have seen that, like the weather, religion “does lots of different things.” To claim that it has a single, unchanging, and inherently violent essence is not accurate. Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action. In the Hebrew
Bible, the Deuteronomists and the Priestly authors all meditated on the same stories, but the Deuteronomists turned virulently against foreign peoples, while the Priestly authors sought reconciliation. Chinese Daoists, Legalists, and military strategists shared the same set of ideas and meditative disciplines but put them to entirely different uses.
Saint Luke and the
Johannine authors all reflected on
Jesus’s message of love, but Luke reached out to marginalized members of society, while the Johannines confined their love to their own group.
Antony and the
Syrian boskoi both set out to practice “freedom from care,” but Antony spent his life trying to empty his mind of anger and hatred, while the Syrian monks surrendered to the aggressive drives of the reptilian brain.
Ibn Taymiyyah and
Rumi were both victims of the
Mongol invasions, but they used the teachings of Islam to come to entirely different conclusions. For centuries the story of Imam
Husain’s tragic death inspired
Shiis to withdraw from political life in principled protest against systemic injustice; more recently it has inspired them to take political action and say no to tyranny.
Until the modern period, religion permeated all aspects of life, including politics and warfare, not because ambitious churchmen had “mixed
up” two essentially distinct activities but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance. Every state ideology was religious. The kings of Europe who struggled to liberate themselves from papal control were not “secularists” but were revered as semidivine. Every successful empire has claimed that it had a divine mission; that its enemies were evil, misguided, or tyrannical; and that it would benefit humanity. And because these states and empires were all created and maintained by force, religion has been implicated in their violence. It was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that religion was ejected from political life in the West. When, therefore, people claim that religion has been responsible for
more
war, oppression, and suffering than any other human institution, one has to ask, “More than
what
?” Until the American and
French Revolutions, there were no “secular” societies. So ingrained is our impulse to “sanctify” our political activities that no sooner had the French revolutionaries successfully marginalized the
Catholic Church than they created a new national religion. In the
United States, the first secular republic, the state has always had a religious aura, a manifest destiny, and a divinely sanctioned mission.
John Locke believed that the
separation of church and state was the key to peace, but the nation-state has been far from war-averse. The problem lies not in the multifaceted activity that we call “religion” but in the violence embedded in our human nature and the nature of the state, which from the start required the forcible subjugation of at least 90 percent of the population. As Ashoka discovered, even if a ruler shrank from state aggression, it was impossible to disband the army. The
Mahabharata
lamented the dilemma of the warrior-king doomed to a life of warfare. The Chinese realized very early that a degree of force was essential to civilized life. Ancient Israel tried initially to escape the agrarian state, yet
Israelites soon discovered that much as they hated the exploitation and cruelty of urban civilization, they could not live without it; they too had to become “like all the nations.”
Jesus preached an inclusive and compassionate kingdom that defied the
imperial ethos, and he was crucified for his pains. The Muslim ummah began as an alternative to the jahili injustice of commercial
Mecca, but eventually it had to become an empire, because an
absolute monarchy was the best and perhaps the only way to keep the peace. Modern military historians agree that without professional and responsible armies, human society would
either have remained in a primitive state or would have degenerated into ceaselessly warring hordes.
Before the creation of the nation-state, people thought about politics in a religious way. Constantine’s empire showed what could happen when an originally peaceful tradition became too closely associated with the government; the Christian emperors enforced the
Pax Christiana as belligerently as their pagan predecessors had imposed the
Pax Romana. The
Crusades were inspired by religious passion but were also deeply political:
Pope Urban II let the
knights of Christendom loose on the Muslim world to extend the power of the Church eastward, and create a papal
monarchy that would control Christian Europe. The
Inquisition was a deeply flawed attempt to secure the internal order of
Spain
after a divisive civil war. The
Wars of Religion and the
Thirty Years’ War may have been pervaded by the sectarian quarrels of the
Reformation, but they were also the birth pangs of the modern nation-state.
When we fight, we need to distance ourselves from the adversary, and because religion was so central to the state, its rites and myths depicted its enemies as monsters of evil that threatened cosmic and political order. During the Middle Ages, Christians denounced Jews as child-killers, Muslims as “an evil and despicable race,” and
Cathars as a cancerous growth in the body of Christendom. Again, this hatred was certainly religiously motivated, but it was also a response to the social distress that accompanied early modernization. Christians made Jews the scapegoat for their excessive anxiety about the money economy, and popes blamed Cathars for their own inability to live up to the gospel. In the process they created imaginary enemies who were distorted mirror images of themselves. Yet casting off the mantle of religion did not bring an end to prejudice. A “scientific racism” developed in the modern period that drew on the old religious patterns of hatred and inspired the
Armenian
genocide and
Hitler’s death camps. Secular
nationalism, imposed so unceremoniously by the colonialists, would regularly merge with local religious traditions, where people had not yet abstracted “religion” from politics; as a result, these religious traditions were often distorted and developed an aggressive strain.
The sectarian hatreds that develop within a faith tradition are often cited to prove that “religion” is chronically intolerant. These internal feuds have indeed been bitter and virulent, but they too have nearly
always had a political dimension. Christian “
heretics” were persecuted for using the gospel to articulate their rejection of the systemic injustice and violence of the agrarian state. Even the abstruse debates about the nature of Christ in the Eastern Church were fueled by the political ambitions of the “tyrant-bi
shops.” Heretics were often persecuted when the nation feared external attack. The
xenophobic theology of the Deuteronomists developed when the Kingdom of Judah faced political annihilation.
Ibn Taymiyyah introduced the practice of takfir when Muslims in the Near East were menaced by the
Crusaders from the West and the Mongols from the East. The
Inquisition took place against the backdrop of the Ottoman threat and the
Wars of Religion, just as the
September Massacres and the Reign of Terror in revolutionary
France were motivated by fears of foreign invasion.
Lord Acton accurately predicted that the liberal nation-state would persecute ethnic and cultural “minorities,” who have indeed taken the place of “heretics.” In
Iraq,
Pakistan, and
Lebanon, traditional
Sunni/Shii animosity has been aggravated by nationalism and the problems of the postcolonial state. In the past Sunni Muslims were always loath to call their coreligionists “apostates,” because they believed that God alone knew what was in a person’s heart. But the practice of takfir has become common in our own day, when Muslims once again fear foreign enemies. When Muslims attack churches and synagogues today, they are not driven to do so by Islam. The
Quran commands Muslims to respect the faith of “the people of the book.”
1
One of the most frequently quoted
jihad verses justifies warfare by stating: “If God did not repel some people by means of others, many monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, where God’s name is much invoked, would have been destroyed.”
2
This new aggression toward religious minorities in the nation-state is largely the result of political tensions arising from Western
imperialism (associated with Christianity) and the
Palestinian problem.
3