The Enemy At Home (25 page)

When Osama bin Laden champions the veil and denounces America as morally corrupt, he is appealing not only to traditional Muslims but also to traditional people around the world who support the idea of the patriarchal family. When Americans attack the Muslim family for being hierarchical, backward, and oppressive, many traditional folk in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East view their cherished values and institutions as being attacked. A good deal of bin Laden’s support comes from non-Western people who see him as defending a traditional social order. It is an article of faith on the cultural left that Bush’s policies, such as his invasion of Iraq and the use of torture, are fueling Muslim hostility. The irony is that it is the cultural imperialism of human rights groups and the left that is the deeper source of Muslim rage. In attempting to “liberate” Muslim cultures from patriarchy, the cultural left has provoked a cultural blowback that has strengthened the hand of America’s enemy.

SEVEN

A Secular Crusade

Yes, There Is a War Against Islam

W
HEN THE DANISH
newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
in September 2005 published a dozen cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad and linking him to terrorism, the editors believed they were making a point about free speech. The cartoons were provocative—one showed Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb, another showed him turning away suicide volunteers with the admonition “Stop, stop, we’re running out of virgins.” Even so, they were relatively mild by the standards of Western religious caricature. The Danish newspaper wanted to affirm that Islam, like Christianity, should not be above public criticism.

To the consternation of its editors, the newspaper provoked an avalanche of anger and protest throughout the Muslim world. Islamic clergy from Morocco to Malaysia condemned the cartoons. There were boycotts of Danish goods throughout the Middle East. Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark. The Jordanian parliament condemned the drawings. Demonstrators in Pakistan burned effigies of the Danish prime minister and cried, “Death to the West. Death to America.” To counter the chilling effect such protests might have on freedom of the press, dozens of European and even a few American newspapers reprinted the cartoons. The editors wanted to show their solidarity with the embattled Danes and affirm their commitment to press freedom. These actions provoked an even more intense explosion of Muslim rage. Western embassies in Syria, Lebanon, Indonesia, and Iran were attacked. In Khartoum, fifty thousand enraged marchers chanted, “Strike again, bin Laden. Strike again.”
¹

To many in the West, the cartoon riots were utterly incomprehensible, a seeming confirmation of the unbridgeable gulf between Western civilization and Islamic civilization. For most Western commentators, the issue was simple: freedom of expression. Many in the West pointed out that newspapers routinely lampoon religion, which is considered a legitimate target. As
France-Soir,
a newspaper that reprinted the cartoons, editorialized, “We have the right to caricature God.” A German publication championed “the right to blaspheme.”
Jyllands-Posten
announced that it would demonstrate its fairness by printing a series of caricatures of Christ. The Bush administration accused “extremists” of exploiting the controversy and fanning the fires of anti-Western prejudice.

This was a charge to which the Islamic radicals would happily plead guilty. As Sheikh Nayef Rajoub, a leader of Hamas, told
The New Yorker,
the caricatures were “a weapon of the Western Crusaders.” Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah pledged to demonstrators in Beirut, “We will defend our Prophet with our blood.” The controversy was a godsend for radical Islam, because it corroborated a point that Islamic radicals have been making for two decades: there is a war against Islam. Pointing to the cartoons, radical mullahs were able to say, “Look, this is what they think of our Prophet in the West. This is what they mean by freedom of speech. This is the kind of society that the West wants to bring to the Muslim world—a society that permits and even approves of blasphemy against our religion.” This argument found a receptive ear among traditional Muslims. Most traditional Muslims conducted peaceful protests. But except for the usual suspects—Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie—no Muslims could be located by the Western media to defend the cartoons. For traditional Muslims, free speech was not the issue. The newspaper may have a right to publish the cartoons, but it should not have exercised that right. During the controversy, a prominent Muslim leader declared at an international conference on Islam, “The demonization of Islam and the vilification of Muslims, there is no denying, is widespread within mainstream Western society.” The speaker was Malaysian prime minister Abdullah Badawi, a traditional Muslim who is widely considered a moderate.
²

Radical Muslims win points with traditional Muslims by showing them incontrovertible evidence of Western hypocrisy. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took exquisite relish in pointing out that while the Muslim world has religious taboos, the West has secular taboos, such as racism and the Holocaust. While this claim was pooh-poohed by Western commentators, it is undoubtedly accurate. Imagine if a reputable American newspaper—say the
Boston Globe
—were to publish a series of cartoons showing, say, Martin Luther King as a pimp, a drug dealer, a drive-by shooter, and a street thug. (If it is within the parameters of acceptable satire to blame Muhammad for the pathologies of radical Islam, why is it not within those same bounds to blame King for the pathologies of inner-city black America?) Surely the publication of the King cartoons would provoke immediate howls of outrage from the African American community and throughout the country. Civil rights activists would fulminate that the cartoons demonstrate the bigotry that is endemic in American society. There would be irresistible pressure on the newspaper to apologize, to fire the responsible parties, and to announce measures to rectify its institutional racism. It is not inconceivable that there would be race riots, and then there would be commissions to study the root causes of the grievance and to propose jobs programs and sensitivity education to prevent such bigotry from rearing its ugly face again. What is the chance that dozens of other American newspapers would reprint the cartoons “in solidarity” with the
Boston Globe
? No way. The entire discussion would focus on racism, on hate speech, on the content of the message. I doubt the First Amendment would even come up.

The cartoon controversy should not be taken as evidence that we in the West believe in free speech and they in the Muslim world do not. What it showed was that Westerners have become inured to Christianity being mocked and therefore are surprised to see Muslims react so strongly when Islam is mocked. Yet Western civilization has its own sacred cows that enjoy protected status—only they are all secular. Traditional Muslims saw the whole episode as evidence of the atheism that is characteristic of the once-Christian West. Moreover, the cartoon controversy confirmed the suspicion of many Muslims that throughout the West there is a systematic hostility to Islam. From this premise, it is easy to conclude that the “war against terrorism” is a continuation of the “war against Islam.” As one Muslim scholar put it, “Ultimately, it is not possible to eradicate Islam from the hearts of the Muslims. It is possible only to annihilate the Muslims themselves.”
³

RADICAL ISLAM’S MOST
serious charge is that there is a war against Islam being waged by America, the fountainhead of atheism. It is this accusation—and this accusation alone—that explains why Muslims would fly planes into buildings or blow themselves up in suicide attacks against American targets. Only when people perceive their deepest beliefs to be under attack are they willing to take extreme measures of this sort. “It is our duty to preserve Islam,” Khomeini wrote in his book
Islam and Revolution
. “This duty is more necessary than prayer and fasting. It is for the sake of fulfilling this duty that blood must sometimes be shed.”
⁴

In his first public statement after 9/11, bin Laden described America as “the modern world’s symbol of paganism.” Bin Laden regularly refers to Americans as “devils” or “helpers of Satan.” The manifestos of radical Islam regularly describe America as the “house of unbelief” and the “enemy of God.” It is because of this atheism, Muslim fundamentalists charge, that America will stop at nothing to destroy Islam. Islamic radicals justify terrorism as a legitimate response to this American enterprise. As Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman put it, “We must terrorize the enemies of God, who are our enemies too.” The blind sheikh and others have pointed to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as representing the Tower of Babel, and they celebrate 9/11 as a kind of divine retribution that brought down this modern symbol of paganism.
⁵

The charge that America is an atheist society waging war against Islam is a profound embarrassment to both liberals and conservatives. It is an embarrassment to liberals because it confounds the central premise of the liberal understanding of the war against terrorism. In the liberal view, the war is a clash of opposed fundamentalisms. Liberals typically define the conflict as one between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Many liberals consider these two groups as essentially equivalent, “kindred spirits,” in the words of novelist William Styron. Al Gore finds in President Bush “the American version of the same fundamentalist impulse that we see in Saudi Arabia.” According to Richard Dawkins, the dogmatic beliefs of each side lead to violent enmities that “fuel their tanks at the same holy gas station.” In her book
The Mighty and the Almighty,
Madeleine Albright frets that “hardliners can find in the Koran and the Bible justifications for endless conflict.” So, in the view of the left, Christian and Muslim religious fanatics are once again fighting each other, as they have done in the past. As Jim Wallis puts it in
God’s Politics,
there is a close parallel between Islam’s holy war against the West and Bush’s holy war against Islamic terrorism.
⁶
From the perspective of the left, the best solution is for liberals to stand up for the principles of secularism and oppose both Muslim fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism.

The liberal understanding is superficially supported by bin Laden’s rhetoric declaring a religious war of civilizations. Bin Laden speaks of the world being divided into the “region of faith” and the “region of infidelity.” At times bin Laden defines the clash as one between the Muslims and the Crusaders. But the context of bin Laden’s arguments clearly shows that bin Laden is not speaking of a religious war between Islam and Christianity. In the same videotaped remarks where bin Laden posits these conflicts, he praises Christianity and observes that Islam respects the prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam “without distinguishing among them.”
⁷

In the classical Muslim understanding, there is a fundamental distinction between Jews and Christians on the one hand and polytheists and atheists on the other. According to Islam, Judaism and Christianity are incomplete but genuine revelations. As monotheists, Jews and Christians have historically been entitled to Muslim respect and even protection. In every Islamic empire, Jews and Christians were permitted to practice their religion and in no Muslim regime has it ever been considered legitimate to kill them. By contrast, polytheists and atheists have always been anathema to Islam. The Koran says, “Fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and, “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them.” These passages, which bin Laden frequently quotes, do not refer to Christians, because Christians are not considered pagans or idolaters. Rather, they refer to those, like the bedouins of ancient Arabia, who worship many gods or no god. Muslims are commanded to fight these unbelievers, especially when they threaten the House of Islam.

Muslim radicals could repudiate the entire Islamic tradition and argue that Christians and Jews are no different from atheists and deserve the same treatment. But this claim would undoubtedly alienate traditional Muslims. Sheikh Muhammad Tantawi, head of Al Azhar University, argues the traditional view that “Islam is not and will never be at war with Christianity.” For bin Laden to declare war against Christianity would even divide the radical Muslim camp. The influential radical sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi has said that as Muslims, “We believe in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Our Islamic faith is not complete without them.” Over the past several years films like
The Last Temptation of Christ
have generated controversy in America because of their blasphemous portrayal of Jesus. Qaradawi’s supporters have pointed out that only in the Muslim world were these films actually banned. (
The Da Vinci Code
is most likely headed for the same fate.) Even the hostility of Muslims to Israel, Qaradawi says, is “not about matters of faith” but entirely because “they seized our land.” While Islam has theological differences with Christianity and Judaism, these are differences among people who worship the same God and are “not like atheism.”
⁸

Islamic radicals make their case against America and the West on the grounds that these cultures have abandoned Christianity. In his May 2006 letter to President Bush, Ahmadinejad faulted America not for being Christian, but for not being Christian enough. Many years earlier, Sayyid Qutb made the same point. The main reason for the West’s moral decay, Qutb argued, is that in the modern era “religious convictions are no more than a matter of antiquarian interest.” Other radicals today echo these arguments. The influential Pakistani scholar Khurshid Ahmad, leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami, argues, “Had Western culture been based on Christianity, on morality, on faith, the language and
modus operandi
of the contact and conflict would have been different. But that is not the case. The choice is between the divine principle and a secular materialistic culture.”
⁹

Even though Christianity has eroded, Muslim radicals contend that the ancient crusading spirit now infuses the pagan culture of the West. When bin Laden calls America a Crusader state, he means that America is on a vicious international campaign to impose its atheist system of government and its pagan values on Muslims. In this way, bin Laden argues, America is hell-bent on destroying Islam. It is the West’s campaign against Islam that provides the religious and political basis for radical Islam’s call to violent jihad. As Sheikh Muhammad al-Qaysi told his Baghdad congregation, urging them to fight the Americans in Iraq, “This war is no different than that of the polytheists against the Prophet.”
¹⁰
Bin Laden holds the same view. In his 1998 declaration bin Laden called on Muslims to “launch attacks against the armies of the American devils” and to kill Americans, whom he identified as the “helpers of Satan.” In a 2003 sermon, bin Laden praised the September 11 hijackers and compared the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to the idols in the Kaaba that the Prophet Muhammad destroyed in the year 630 upon his victorious return to Mecca.