The End of Faith (15 page)

true believers' (6:23-27). “But if they were sent back, they would return to that which
they have been forbidden. They are liars all” (6:29). “Had God pleased He would have given
them guidance, one and all” (6:35). “Deaf and dumb are those that deny Our revelations:
they blunder about in darkness. God confounds whom He will, and guides to a straight path
whom He pleases.” (6:39) “[T]heir hearts were hardened, and Satan made their deeds seem
fair to them. And when they had clean forgotten Our admonition We granted them all that
they desired; but just as they were rejoicing in what they were given, We suddenly smote
them and they were plunged into utter despair. Thus were the evil-doers annihilated.
Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe!” (6:43-45). “[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 out- stretched,
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 false- hoods. 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 Ara- bic; perhaps it is sublime. But the book's contents are not. On almost every
page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise non- believers. 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 qual- ity, honor, and dignity.”18 This statement is really a miracle of con- cision. While it may seem nothing more than a
casual fillip against the Jews, it is actually a powerful distillation of the Muslim
world- view. 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 rational- ization is remarkably easy, given the
tenets of Islam. In light of what

devout Muslims believeabout jihad, about martyrdom, about par- adise, and about
infidelssuicide 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
coreligion- ists. 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 mar- tyr 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 con- ducted 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 vio- lence 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 “civil- ian targets.” We now live in a world in
which Muslims have been scientifically polled (with margins of error ranging from 2 to 4
per- cent) 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?

YES Lebanon 73

No DK/REFUSED

Ivory Coast Nigeria Bangladesh Jordan Pakistan Mali 32 Ghana 30 57 12 Uganda 29

Senegal 28

69 70 3 73 14

Indonesia Turkey

27 13

21 6 56 44 0 47 45 8

44 37 19 43 48 8

33 43 23

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 sui- cide, 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 indi- cates. A closer look
at the data reveals that the pollsters skewed their results by binning the responses
“rarely justified” and “never justi- fied” together, thus giving a false sense of Muslim
pacifism. Take another look at the data from Jordan: 43 percent of Jordanians appar- ently
favor terrorism, while 48 percent do not. The problem, how- ever, 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 noncom-

57 11 63 8

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 per- centage 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?

YES Lebanon 82

No DK/REFUSED

12 6 Ivory Coast 73 27 0

Nigeria 66 Jordan 65

Bangladesh Mali 54 Senegal 47 Ghana 44 Indonesia Uganda 4 0 Pakistan 38 Turkey 20

26 8 26 8

23 19 35 11 50 3 43 12 54 3 52 8 38 23 64 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 com- pared 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 occupa- tion”? 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 estab- lished? 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 menwho
slit the throats of stewardesses and deliv- ered young couples with their children to
their deaths at five hun- dred miles per hourare 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 Baywatchare 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 implau- sible 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 reac- tion 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 Mus- lims 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 par- ties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyr- dom 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 crimeas it
would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single daybut 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 popula-
tion 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 pre- vent it. Given the
steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side.