The Case for God (51 page)

It is important to emphasize this early enthusiasm for modernity, because too many Westerners regard Islam as inherently fundamentalist, atavistically opposed to democracy and freedom, and chronically addicted to violence. But Islam was the last of the three monotheisms to develop a fundamentalist strain; it did not do so until the late 1960s, after the Arabs’ catastrophic defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, when the Western ideologies of nationalism and socialism, which had little grassroots support, appeared to have failed. Religion seemed a way of returning to the precolonial roots of their culture and regaining a more authentic identity. Western foreign policy has also hastened the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East. The coup organized by the CIA and British Intelligence in Iran (1953) that displaced the nationalist, secular ruler Muhammad Mosaddeq (1880–1967) and put the exiled shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi (1878–1944) back on the throne left Iranians with a sense of bitter humiliation, betrayal, and impotence. The failure of the international
community to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians has led others to despair of a conventional political solution. Western support for such rulers as the shah and Saddam Hussein, who denied their people basic human rights, has also tarnished the democratic ideal, since the West seemed proudly to proclaim its belief in freedom while inflicting dictatorial regimes on others. It has also helped to radicalize Islam, since the mosque was often the only place where people could express their discontent.

The rapid secularization of some of these countries has often taken the form of an assault on religion. In Europe and the United States, secularism developed gradually over a long period, and the new ideas and institutions had time to trickle down naturally to all members of the population. But many Muslim countries had to adopt the Western model in a mere fifty years or so. When KemalAtatürk (1881–1938) secularized Turkey, he closed down all the madrassas and abolished the Sufi orders. The shahs made their soldiers go through the streets tearing off women’s veils with their bayonets and ripping them to pieces. These reformers wanted their countries to
look
modern, even though only a small elite sector was familiar with the Western ethos. In 1935, Shah Reza Pahlavi ordered his soldiers to shoot at a crowd of unarmed demonstrators who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress in Mashhad, one of the holiest shrines in Iran. Hundreds of Iranians died that day. In such a context, secularism does not appear a liberating option.

Sunni fundamentalism developed in the concentration camps in which President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70) interred thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood without trial. Many of them had done nothing more incriminating than handing out leaflets or attending a meeting. In these vile prisons they were subjected to mental and physical torture and became radicalized.
⁹
Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) entered the camp as a moderate, but as a result of his imprisonment—he was tortured and finally executed—he evolved an ideology that is still followed by Islamists today.
¹⁰
When he heard Nasser vowing to confine Islam to the private sphere, secularism did not seem benign. In his landmark book
Milestones
, we see the paranoid vision of the fundamentalist who has been pushed too far: Jews, Christians, communists, capitalists, and imperialists were all in league against Islam. Muslims had a duty to fight against the barbarism
(
jahiliyyah
) of their day, starting with so-called Muslim rulers like Nasser.

This was an entirely new idea. In making
jihad
, understood as armed conflict, central to the Islamic vision, Qutb had distorted the faith that he was trying to defend. He was not the first to do so; he had been influenced by the writings of the Pakistani journalist and politician Abu Ala Mawdudi (1903–79), who feared the effects of Western imperialism in the Muslim world.
¹¹
In order to survive, Mawdudi believed, Muslims must be prepared for revolutionary struggle. This
jihad
could take many forms: some would fight with the pen, others would engage in politics, but in the last resort every able-bodied Muslim must be prepared for war. No major Muslim thinker had ever made “holy war” a central tenet of the faith before; Mawdudi was well aware that he was making a highly controversial claim but was convinced that this radical innovation was justified by the present political emergency. Qutb took the same view: when asked how he could reconcile his hard line with the emphatic warning in the Qur’an that there must be no compulsion in matters of religion,
¹²
he explained that Qur’anic tolerance was impossible when Muslims were subjected to such violence and cruelty. There could be toleration only
after
the political victory of Islam and the establishment of a truly Muslim
ummah.
¹³

This
jihadi
ideology was not returning to the “fundamental” ideas of Islam, even though Qutb in particular based his revolutionary program on a distorted version of the life of Muhammad. He was preaching an Islamic liberation theology similar to that adopted by Catholics fighting brutal regimes in Latin America. Because God alone was sovereign, no Muslim was obliged to obey any ruler who contravened the Qur’anic demand for justice and equity. In rather the same way, when the revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89) declared that only a
faqih
, a cleric versed in Islamic jurisprudence, should be head of state, he was breaking with centuries of Shiite tradition, which since the eighth century had separated religion and politics as a matter of sacred principle. It was as shocking to some Shiite sensibilities as if the pope should abolish the Mass. But after decades of secularism as interpreted by the shahs, Khomeini believed that this was the only possible way forward. Khomeini also preached a modern third-world theology of liberation.
Islam, he declared, was “the religion of militant individuals who are committed to freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism.”
¹⁴

Many forms of what we call “fundamentalism” should be seen as essentially political discourse—a religiously articulated form of nationalism or ethnicity. This is clearly true of Zionist fundamentalism in Israel, where extremists have advocated the forcible deportation of Arabs and the illegal settlement of territories occupied during the 1967 war. On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a follower of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who had advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, shot twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron; and on November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, a religious Zionist, assassinated Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin for signing the Oslo Accords. Islamic fundamentalism is also politically motivated. The Palestinian party Hamas began as a resistance movement, and developed only after the secular policies of Yassir Arafat and his party, Fatah, appeared to have become both ineffective and corrupt. Hamas’s reprehensible killing of Israeli civilians is politically rather than religiously inspired, and its goals are limited. Hamas is not attempting to force the entire world to submit to Islam, has no global outreach, and targets only Israelis. Any military occupation is likely to breed resistance, and when an occupation has lasted for over forty years, this resistance is likely to take a violent form.

Critics of Islam believe that the cult of murderous martyrdom is endemic in the religion itself. This is not the case. Apart from the brief incident of the so-called assassin movement at the time of the Crusades—for which the Ismaili sect responsible was universally reviled in the Muslim world—it has not been a feature of Islamic history until modern times. The American scholar Robert Pape has made a careful study of suicide attacks between 1980 and 2004, including the al-Qaeda atrocities of September 11, 2001, and concluded:

Osama Bin Laden, for example, cited the presence of American troops in his native Saudi Arabia and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land high on his list of complaints against the West.

Terrorism undoubtedly threatens our global security, but we need accurate intelligence that takes all the evidence into account. It will not help to utter sweeping and ill-founded condemnations of “Islam.” In a recent Gallup poll, only 7 percent of the Muslims interviewed in thirty-five countries believed that the 9/11 attacks were justified. They had no intention of committing such an atrocity themselves, but they believed that Western foreign policy had been largely responsible for these heinous actions. Their reasoning was entirely political: they cited such ongoing problems as Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Western interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries. But the majority of Muslims who condemned the attacks all gave religious reasons, quoting, for example, the Qur’anic verse that states that the taking of a single life is equivalent to the destruction of the entire world.
¹⁶

Since 9/11, Western politicians have assumed that Muslims hate “our way of life, our democracy, freedom, and success.” But when asked what they most admired about the West, the politically radicalized and the moderates both listed Western technology; the Western ethic of hard work, personal responsibility, and the rule of law; as well as Western democracy, respect for human rights, freedom of speech, and gender equality. And, interestingly, a significantly higher percentage of the politically radicalized (50 percent versus 35 percent of moderates) replied that “moving toward greater governmental democracy would foster progress in the Arab/Muslim world.”
¹⁷
Finally, when asked what they resented most about the West, its “disrespect for Islam” ranked high on the list of both the politically radicalized and the moderates. Most see the West as inherently intolerant: only 12 percent of radicals and 17 percent of moderates associated “respecting Islamic values” with Western nations. What could Muslims do to improve relations with the West? Again, among the top responses from both radicals and the moderates was “improve the
presentation of Islam to the West, present Islamic values in a positive manner.”
¹⁸
There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world today; if the 7 percent (91 million) of the politically radicalized continue to feel politically dominated, occupied, and culturally and religiously disrespected, the West will have little chance of changing their hearts and minds.
¹⁹
Blaming Islam is a simple but counterproductive answer; it is far less challenging than examining the political issues and grievances that resonate in so much of the Muslim world.

A form of secular fundamentalism has recently developed in the Western world that in style and strategy is similar to the atheism of Vogt, Buchner, and Haeckel. While physicists have felt comfortable with the unknowing that seems to be an essential component of intellectual advance, some biologists, whose discipline has not yet experienced a major reversal, have remained confident of their capacity to discover absolute truth and some, abandoning the agnostic restraint of Darwin and Huxley, have started to preach a militant form of atheism. In 1972, the French biochemist Jacques Monod (1910–76), Nobel Prize winner and professor of molecular biology at the College de France, published
Chance and Necessity
, which argued for the absolute incompatibility of theism and evolutionary theory. Change is the result of chance and is propagated by necessity. It is therefore impossible to speak of purpose and design in the universe: we must accept the fact that we humans have come into being by accident; that there is no benign Creator, no divine Friend that shapes our lives and values; and that we are alone in the immense and impersonal cosmos. Like Clifford, Monod maintained that it was not only intellectually but also
morally
wrong to accept any ideas that were not scientifically verifiable. But he admitted that there was no way of proving that this ideal of objectivity was in fact true: it was an ideal that was essentially arbitrary, a claim for which there was insufficient evidence.
²⁰
He thus tacitly admitted that even the scientific quest began with an act of faith.

Monod’s ideas were not always accessible to those not steeped in French culture, and some of the first popular expositions of the implications of evolution in the English-speaking world were written, with great brilliance and clarity, by the Oxford biologist Richard
Dawkins. In
The Blind Watchmaker
(1986), he explained that while Paley’s argument for an Intelligent Designer had been perfectly acceptable in the early nineteenth century, Darwin had shown that the
appearance
of design occurred quite naturally in the process of evolutionary development. The “Blind Watchmaker” was natural selection, a blind, purposeless process that could not plan intelligently; nor could it deliberately produce the “contrivance” that Paley had found in nature. For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a “misfiring of something useful”;
²¹
it is a kind of virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive.

Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d’Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this “scientism” have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other “new atheists”—Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist—religion is the cause of all the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.”
²²
They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.