Reza Aslan: How to Win a Cosmic War

reprinted as: Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalism (paperback, 2010, Random House)

All page numbers refer to the original hardcover edition, How to Win a Cosmic War.

Prologue (pp. xiii-xiv):

I came to the United States in 1979, at the age of seven, and grew up here during the Iranian hostage crises, the Iran-Iraq War, the Iran-Contra scandal, the bombing of the American barracks in Beirut, two Palestinian intifadas, the first Persian Gulf War. Not once was I made to feel that that promise was being questioned, much less revoked. For three decades I believed in the promise of America. I constructed my identity as an Iranian, as a Muslim, and as an American upon it. And then, one crisp, clear September morning, nineteen men who shared neither my values nor my beliefs hijacked four airplanes and flew them in to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Let me be clear: I did not feel threatened or unsafe after the attacks of 9/11. There were nervous looks on the subway, "random" searches at the airport, sidelong glances in elevators, but these did not bother me. It was all part of "The Change." Everything had changed, people said. I understood that. In fact, I felt doubly aggrieved because both my country and my faith -- the two pillars of my identity -- had been assaulted.

But as the days passed, I was made to realize that lines were being drawn, sides chosen. "Are you with us or with them?" people asked. "Which is it? Time to decide. There is no middle."

"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," President Bush had warned. "In this conflict there is no neutral ground."

(pp. xiv-xv):

The problem with the ideological War on Terror is that "terrorist" is a wastebasket term that often conveys as much about the person using it as it does about the person being described. It can hardly be argued, anyway, that this was a war against terrorism per se. If it were, it would have to included the Basque separatists in Spain, the Christian insurgency in East Timor, the Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist rebels in eastern India, the Jewish Kach and Kahane underground in Israel, the Irish Republican Army, the Sikh separatists in the Punjab, the Marxist Mujahadin-e Khalq, the Kurdish PKK, and so on.

Rather, this was a war against a particular brand of terrorism: that employed exclusively in Islamic entities, which is why the enemy in this ideological conflict was gradually and systematically expanded to include not just the persons who attacked America on September 11, 2001, and the organizations that supported them, but also an ever-widening conspiracy of disparate groups such as Hamas in Palestine, Hizballah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the clerical regime in Iran, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Chechen rebels, the Kashmiri militants, the Taliban, and any other organization that declared itself Muslim and employed terrorism as a tactic. According to the master narrative of the War on Terror, these were a monolithic enemy with a common agenda and a shared ideology. Never mind that many of these groups consider one another a graver threat than they consider America to be, that they have vastly different and sometimes irreconcilable political yearnings and religious beliefs, and that, until the War on Terror, many had never thought of the United States as an enemy in any war. Give this imaginary monolith a made-up name -- say, "Islamofascism" -- and an easily recognizable enemy is created, one that exists not so much as a force to be defeated as an idea to be opposed, one whose chief attribute appears to be that they are not us.

(pp. xvii-xviii):

Despite its fixation on jihad, Global Jihadism is less a religious movement than it is a social movement, one that employs religious symbols to forge a collective identity across borders and boundaries. Social movements arise when relatively powerless people band together under the banner of a collective identity in order to challenge the existing social order. Such movements are, almost by definition, utopian in character, in that they are fervently engaged in reimagining society. This is particularly true of so-called transformative social movements, such as Global Jihadism, which seek to complete upending of the social order through violent revolution, often in anticipation of cataclysmic global change.

As a social movement, Jihadism traces its historical roots not to the Prophet Muhammad but to the Arab anticolonialists of the twentieth century, such as Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. It looks not to the Qur'an for its doctrinal basis but to the writings of the thirteenth-century legal scholar Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah. It has more in common with the Bolsheviks and the French revolutionaries than it does with militant Muslim nationalist groups such as Hamas and Hizballah. To talk about Jihadism as Islamofascism is to misunderstand both Jihadism and fascism. Fascism is an ideology of ultranationalism; Jihadism rejects the very concept of the nation-state as anathema to Islam.

It is ironic that Jihadism is so often viewed as antimodern. Jihadism does not reject modernity; it is a product of modernity. It does, however, reject Westernism, and because "modernity" and "the West" have become inextricably linked (mostly in the West), anyone who rejects one is automatically assumed to reject the other. Jihadism may present itself as an alternative to the modern world, but the ideas upon which it draws are quintessentially modern. To paraphrase the British political philosopher John Gray, Jihadism is "a symptom of the disease of which it pretends to be the cure."

Introduction: Us Versus Them (pp. 5-6):

A cosmic war is a religious war. It is a conflict in which God is believed to be directly engaged on one side over the other. Unlike a holy war -- an earthly battle between rival religious groups -- a cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens. It is, in other words, both a real, physical struggle in this world and an imagined, moral encounter in the world beyond. The conflict may be real and the carnage material, but the war itself is being waged on a spiritual plane; we humans are merely actors in a divine script written by God.

A cosmic war transforms those who should be considered butchers and thugs into soldiers sanctioned by God. It turns victims into sacrifices and justifies the most depraved acts of destruction because it does not abide by human conceptions of morality. What use does the cosmic warrior have for such ethical concerns when he is simply a puppet in the hands of God?

A cosmic war is won not through artifice or strategy but rather through the power of faith. Cosmic warriors need not be burdened with tactical concerns such as force of arms or strength of men. It is enough to align one's will with the will of God, to strike at the enemy with the full force of God's wrath, confident that the end rests not in the hands of men.

A cosmic war partitions the world into black and white, good and evil, us and them. In such a war, there is no middle ground; everyone must choose a side. Soldier and civilian, combatant and noncombatant, aggressor and bystander -- all the traditional divisions that serve as markers in a real war break down in cosmic wars. It is a simple equation: if you are not us, you must be them. If you are them, you are the enemy and must be destroyed.

Such uncompromising bifurcation not only dehumanizes the enemy, it demonizes the enemy, so that the battle is waged not against opposing nations or their soldiers or even their citizens but against Satan and his evil minions. After all, if we are on the side of good, they must be on the side of evil. And so the ultimate goal of a cosmic war is not to defeat an earthly force but to vanquish evil itself, which ensures that a cosmic war remains an absolute, eternal, unending, and ultimately unwinnable conflict.

Of course, if a cosmic war is unwinnable, it is also unlosable. Cosmic wars are fought not over land or politics but over identity. At stake is one's very sense of self in an indeterminate world. In such a war, losing means the loss of faith, and that is unthinkable. There can be no compromise in a cosmic war. There can be no negotiation, no settlement, no surrender.

(p. 9):

Almost within moments of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, that transformation had begun in America.

These are not normal times. The popular Christian minister and co-writer of the Left Behind series, Tim LaHaye, whose influence over evangelicals is immeasurable, gave voice to millions of Americans when he declared September 11 to be "the focal point of end-time events."

This is not a normal war. Our very identity as a nation was at stake. The world had been cleft in two, with good on one side and evil on the other, and victory would come, George W. Bush promised, only when we "rid the world of evil."

This is not a normal enemy. "This is a transcendent evil that wants to destroy everything we stand for and believe in," declared Senator John McCain. It is an enemy that the president told us "think[s] the opposite of the way we think." Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the man who had been charged with hunting down bin Laden, was more specific. "Our enemy is a spiritual enemy because we are a nation of believers," he told an evangelical congregation in Oregon. "His name is Satan. . . . Satan wants to destroy us as a nation and he wants to destroy us as a Christian Army."

(p. 11):

This book is, above all else, a proclamation: the War on Terror, conceived by the previous American administration as a cosmic contest between the forces of good and evil for the future of civilization, is over. It is time to strip this ideological conflict of its religious connotations, to reject the religiously polarizing rhetoric of our leaders and theirs, to focus on the material matters at stake, and to address the earthly issues that always lie behind the cosmic impulse.

Part One: The Geography of Identity

1. The Borderless Self (p. 21):

The truth is that secular nationalism was a shaky idea from the start, one born in post-Reformation Europe, cultivated during the European Enlightenment, then systematically imposed upon the rest of the globe through conquest and colonialism. In large parts of the developing world, the nation-state is a foreign concept. The map of the Middle East is a palimpsest, with arbitrary borders, made-up names, and fabricated nationalities often aggressively imposed by colonizers. In this region, nationalism has never been the primary marker of collective identity. Most Sudanese do not refer to themselves as "Sudanese." Rwandan identity is based chiefly on the clan, not the state. Whatever their citizenship, a great many Sikhs will always view their national home to be Khalistan. The Kurds have never been a territorially bounded population, and Iraq is a fictive state built upon the myths and memories of peoples with whom modern-day Iraqis have little in common. In these countries, among these "nations," citizenship is just a piece of paper. And, as Edmund Burke noted a century ago, "men are not tied to one another by papers and seals [but] by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies."

2. A Land Twice Promised: Israel/Palestine, of course. Starts with a visit to the Temple Mount, a bit of history on Herod, a sketch of the Dreyfus affair (pp. 39-41):

It is no accident that the rise of anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Europe coincided with the rise of nationalism. Nationalism, you will recall, presupposes a measure of ethnic or cultural homogeneity within a nation-state -- something to bind a population together under a single collective identity. But the Jews represented a conspicuously alien culture that, despite centuries of living and thriving in every corner of Europe, had, in the minds of many, yet to sufficiently assimilate into European society (at least not enough to have disappeared altogether). The secret trial and false conviction of Alfred Dreyfus was a human tragedy. But the affair also raised much broader issues of national identity among the French. The right-wing newspaper editor Édouard Drumont captured the sentiment of many French nationalists when he declared that Dreyfus's betrayal was the inexorable destiny of his race. The Jews were a nation within a nation; it was inconceivable to think that their loyalties would be to France. [ . . . ]

Half a century before that abominable event, however, a number of leading Jewish intellectuals had already come to the realization that assimilation into European culture was futile. They believed they would never share in the imaginary cultural homogeneity being constructed in the burgeoning nation-states of Europe and thus would never find a home on the continent. Drumont was right, they thought. The Jews were a nation within a nation. Only by extricating themselves from Europe and establishing their own nation-state could they be truly free of persecution.

(pp. 43-44):

The problem was that a significant population of indigenous Arabs had already been living in Palestine for more than twelve centuries. A sizable number of Palestinian Jews also lived side by side with the Arabs, but the overwhelming majority of the population was Arab: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. Not only was the land already settled and under the suzerainty of the Ottoman caliph, who, as one might imagine, was not exactly receptive to the idea of turning it over to Europe's Jews, but Palestine, and Jerusalem in particular, was as sacred to the Arabs as it was to the Jews. When Vienna's rabbis sent a fact-finding mission to determine the feasibility of Herzl's idea, the mission sent back a cable reading "The Bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man."

For Herzl, the solution was self-evident, if a bit problematic. "We must expropriate gently the private property," he wrote in his diary in June 1895, "[and] spirit the penniless population across the border." As the Israeli historian Benny Morris has argued, given that "the vast majority of Palestine's Arabs at the turn of the century were 'poor,' Herzl can only have meant some form of massive transfer of most of the population."

That is precisely what Herzl meant. The calculus was inescapable. The Zionist ideal could be realized only through the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the only way the population of such a state could have a Jewish majority was to remove its non-Jewish inhabitants. The argument was made more succinctly by the true architect of the Jewish state, David Ben-Gurion. "The Arabs will have to go," Ben-Gurion wrote to his son in 1937. The Zionists, it seems, had learned a constructive lesson from European nationalism: unity is always effected by means of brutality.

(p. 54):

Yet, as undeniably dreadful as the plight of the Palestinians may be, for the Jihadists, Palestine is a mere abstraction, a symbol whose sole purpose is to draw Muslims to their cause. It is not the Palestinian struggle for statehood that animates most Jihadists. As a global ideology, Jihadism is totally detached from such nationalist concerns. Jihadist fighters do not travel to Palestine to fight alongside the militants of Hamas (they would not be welcome if they did). Jihadist ideologues have not formulated any specific plans to address the Palestinian situation, save pushing Israel into the sea (a silly and, as even the Jihadists themselves admit, hopeless notion). It is true that Jihadist leaders such as bin Laden and Zawahiri frequently rail against Israel and the United States for allowing the Palestinians to suffer under Israeli occupation. But such complaints, though legitimate, must be read as part of a much broader catalog of Jihadist grievances, some of which are so random, so mind-bogglingly unfocused, that they should be recognized less as grievances per se than as popular causes to rally around. There are, for instance, protests about the United States' unwillingness to sign on to the International Criminal Court and anger at America's role in global warming.

Part Two: God Is a Man of War

3. Zeal for Your House Consumes Me Starts with Bush's famous "This crusade; this war on terrorism" quote (p. 60):

"Crusade" means "holy war"; it was the Crusades that originated the term. This is no simple word but an emblem for an era when the cross of Christ was brandished as a sword by one barbaric, theocratic empire against another barbaric, theocratic empire. As [James] Carroll notes, the Crusades were not just a series of military campaigns, they were the defining event that shaped "a cohesive western identity precisely in opposition to Islam, an opposition that survives to this day."

(p. 61):

The Crusades have long loomed large in the Arab imagination, though, interestingly, not until some eight hundred years after they began, during the colonial era, when the image of cross-marked knights riding out to cleanse the Holy Land of heathen Muslim hordes became the most potent symbol of the imperialist aspirations of the West: a kind of shorthand for Christian aggression against Islam. "The Crusader spirit runs in the blood of all Westerners," wrote Sayyid Qutb, the twentieth century's most influential Islamist thinker.

The connection between crusade and colonialism -- and, more broadly, between Christianity and Western imperialism -- has since been etched into the Arab psyche. In large parts of the Arab and Muslim world, it is still the principal frame of reference through which relations with the West are viewed.

(pp. 62-63):

The Crusades were the quintessential expression of cosmic war: a divine conflict thought to be taking place simultaneously on earth and in the heavens. On a purely material level, the Crusades functioned first and foremost as an expression of papal authority over external (Jews, Muslims) and internal (heterodox Christians, disobedient princes) enemies of the Church. The intricate web of papal indulgences, donations, subsidies, and taxes that funded the entire crusading enterprise -- "the practical business of the cross," as one historian calls it -- created a wholly new financial relationship between the Church and the royals by centralizing wealth and military power in the hands of the pope. Those who took part in the campaigns were offered not only forgiveness of sins but also forgiveness of debts, immunity from prosecution, even promises of booty seized from Muslim lands.

(pp. 63-64):

Urban was not the first pope to offer salvation to those who fought on behalf of the Church; similar promises had been made by Popes Leo IV and John VIII two hundred years earlier. In fact, the Crusades were part of a long and steady process of Christian militarization that had begun with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine around 313 C.E. Almost overnight, the provincial religion inspired by an itinerant Jew from the Galilee became an imperial religion, and the cross of Christ was turned into a banner of war. This sudden transformation radically altered the perception of Christians when it came to the notion of war and violence. The early followers of Jesus, living in a state of constant persecution and political weakness, had focused their ideas of war on the apocalyptic plane -- Christ would one day return as "a warrior on a white horse," his eyes "like a flame of fire," his vestments "dripping with blood," his tongue "a sharp-edged sword" with which he would "strike down the nations" with vengeance (Revelation 19:11-15). But with the merging of Rome and Christianity, the Church's spiritual enemies became indistinguishable from Rome's political enemies. By the time the first Crusades breached the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, four years after Urban had dispatched them to liberate the Holy Land, Christianity was no longer the secret Jewish sect whose members, along with the rest of the Jews, had been forced out of the Holy Land by Rome a thousand years before, in 70 C.E. It was Rome: rich, mighty, thirsty for blood. The chronicles of Raymond of Agiles, who rode with the knights of God during the First Crusade, bear witness to the almost unimaginable violence unleashed upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem: the Crusaders cut off the heads of Muslims and Jews, shot them with arrows, tortured them by casting them into fires. Piles of heads, hands, and feet littered the cobblestoned streets. The Crusaders rode in blood up to their bridle reins, slashing their way through the bodies of the dead -- men, women, and children -- until they arrived at the Temple Mount, which they soaked in blood. "This day," declared an exultant Raymond, "marks the justification of all Christianity in the humiliation of paganism; our faith is renewed."

(pp. 69-70):

The most celebrated model of biblical zeal is Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron (Moses' brother). In those days, a plague festered among the Israelites as God's anger burned against his Chosen People. In direct violation of God's law, the Jews had been engaging in sexual acts with neighboring Moabite women, and even sacrificing to Moabite gods. In a jealous fit, God instructs Moses, as leader of the community, to take all the Jews who had violated their sexual purity and "impale them in the sun before the Lord, in order that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel" (Num. 25:4). But before Moses can follow through on God's command, the young Phinehas decides to take up God's call, on his own and without guidance. [ . . . ]

Phinehas's example of spontaneous, individual action as an expression of God's jealous anger and as atonement for the sins of the Jewish nation became the model of personal righteousness in the Bible. When Elijah slaughtered the priests of God's Canaanite rival, Baal, he did so because he was "zealous for the Lord" (1 Kings 19:10). When King Jehu massacred every inhabitant of Samaria, it too was to demonstrate his "zeal for the Lord" (2 Kings 10:15-17). Most pious Jews in the first century C.E. revered these biblical heroes and strove to emulate their zeal, each in his or her own way. But for the Zealots, zeal was more than just a doctrine. It was a symbol of collective identity and a call to collective action.

(pp. 74-75):

It took many years for the Zealots to convince the Jews in 66 C.E. to rise up against Rome. And though this revolt lasted longer than the revolt of Judas the Galilean, it too was eventually quashed, and without mercy. The war fought against what the Rabbinate of the time referred to as the "Evil Kingdom" lasted all of three years.

When, in 70 C.E., the Romans recaptured Jerusalem, they razed the Temple and defiled its ashes. Anyone with ties to the rebellion was executed, down to the last child. Every Jew -- including the Christian Jews -- was forced out of the holy city into permanent exile. A small band of the most ardent revolutionaries escaped to the desert and hunkered down inside an impenetrable mountain fortress west of the Dead Sea called Masada. There they waited out a Roman siege for three long, agonizing years. When the Romans finally breached Masada's walls, they found everyone inside the fortress dead. The last of the Zealots -- husbands, wives, children, nearly one thousand souls -- had committed collective suicide, taking turns killing one another with knives and swords rather than surrender to Rome. Cosmic warriors do not surrender.

4. An Army of Believers (pp. 78-79):

Rabbi Goren could hardly be blamed for such apocalyptic fervor. By the end of what came to be known as the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel had captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights -- the totality of biblical Israel. Its external enemies had been laid to waste, and with ease. Who could deny God's hand in the victory? For a great many Jews, Israel's war with the Arab armies was understood not in the earthly context of governments and political affairs but in the cosmic context of good fighting evil, darkness defeating light. The Jewish David had smitten the Arab Goliath. The prophecy had been fulfilled. The End of Days was at hand!

Even the most secular Israelis could not fail to be moved by the thought that the war was divine providence. Within hours of the army's taking of the Temple, bulldozers began destroying Palestinian homes in front of the Wailing Wall, making it accessible for the Jews for the first time in centuries. Within months, the first settlers, mostly Religious Zionists from Goren's own village, Kfar Hasidim, and its sister village, Kfar Etzion, began settling the West Bank. With the victory of 1967 and the occupation of Palestinian lands, Secular Zionism, once anathema to many Orthodox Jews, was gradually being framed as merely a transient stage in God's master plan for the Jewish people -- a precursor to the reestablishment of the Kingdom of David.

The notion that the state of Israel was just a placeholder for the eventual rule of God was not new. It was, in fact, the core belief of Religious Zionism. The idea emerged in the teachings of a charismatic rabbi named Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook (1865-1935). Rabbi Kook and his disciples thought of the state as "an external shell that would later be replaced by a messianic future, whose overt purpose was the reinstatement of the religious ritual on [the Temple Mount]."

In 1921, Rabbi Kook established an institute in Jerusalem dedicated to rebuilding the Temple. "Our faith is firm," he said, "that days are coming when all the nations shall recognize that this place, which the Lord has chosen for all eternity as the site of our Temple, must return to its true owners, and the great and holy House [the Temple] must be built thereon."

Of course, rebuilding the Temple would mean razing the Dome of the Rock. A story is told about Rabbi Goren: After blowing the ram's horn, the rabbi ran up to General Uzi Narkiss, the commander of the Israel Defense Forces, and urged him to blow up the Dome of the Rock -- now, before things settled, before the politicians and the peacemakers appeared. General Narkiss brushed Goren off, and control over the Temple Mount was returned to Jerusalem's Muslim authorities. But the dream of the Religious Zionists to seize control of the Temple Mount is preparation for the coming of the Messiah never diminished.

Rabbi Kook's son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, founded the settler movement, Gush Emunim, before dying in 1982 (pp. 80-81):

Like their Zealot predecessors, Gush Emunim and like-minded Religious Zionists insist on a state governed wholly by religious law, one in which the land is cleansed of its "foreign" inhabitants so as to hasten the return of the Messiah; non-=Jews, and even secular Jews, have no place in the divine Israel imagined by the Gush. Indeed, just as zeal provided a symbol of spontaneous individual action that united the various revolutionary groups in first-century Palestine across regional, religious, and social boundaries, so now does it united a broad coalition of Religious Zionists, ultra-Orthodox haredim, ideological settler groups (residents of Itamar, Rahelim, Yitzhar, Shalhevert Ya, Amona, Har Bracha, and dozens of other mostly illegal settlements dotting the West Bank), and yeshiva students, who together have formed what the French scholar of religions Gilles Kepel terms a "re-Judaization movement" in Israel. By carving out a distinct and separate collective idenity for themselves that is beyond the control of both the secular authority of the Israeli state and the religious authority of Israel's Rabbinical Council, these modern-day Zealots are actively engaged in supplanting the secular Zionism that has defined Israel's political identity since its inception with a messianic Zionism whose ultimate goal is the dismantling of the secular state altogether.

(pp. 81-83):

It was one of these Jewish radicals, Yigal Amir, who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after he had signed the Oslo Peace Accords, which promised to return lands seized in 1967 to the Palestinians as a first step toward a lasting peace. Amir's actions single-handedly derailed the peace process and put an end to the Oslo Accords -- just as he had intended. Asked why he would commit such a heinous crime and under whose orders, Yigal Amir replied that he had acted alone and without guidance from anyone save God -- just like Phinehas. His actions, he argued, had been justified both by Jewish law and by precedent. "According to the Halacha [Jewish law] you can kill the enemy," he told the magistrate at his trial. "My whole life, I learned Halacha. When you kill in war, it is an act that is allowed." It was quite simple, really: Rabin was giving away God's land in return for peace. He had therefore forfeited his identity as a Jew. He was now "the enemy," a traitor, an apostate. His sin was a blight upon the whole of the land; it had to be wiped away. By killing Rabin, Amir believed he was saving Israel from God's judgment. He was, according to his wife, sacrificing himself for the sake of God's people.

When Pat Robertson, America's premier evangelical preacher, heard about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, he was convinced it was part of God's master plan for the region. "This is God's land," Robertson declared, "and God has strong words about someone who parts and divides His land. The rabbis put a curse on Yitzhak Rabin when he began cutting up the land." [ . . . ]

Like Israel's religious Zionists, America's Christian Zionists believe that the Jews must rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem in order to usher in the return of the Messiah. Of course, as Christians, they believe that the Messiah is Jesus Christ and that when he returns to earth the Jews will have to either convert to Christianity or be damned. But remarkably, the last act of this cosmic drama seems not to matter much to either the Jews or the Christians in this messianic coalition. That is because what binds these two very different religious communities together under a single, transnational, collective identity is not a shared theology but a common cosmic worldview and, more important, a common cosmic foe. "The line between the political and the biblical is disappearing," explained Josh Reinstein, the director of the Israeli Parliament's Christian Allies Caucus, whose purpose is to create a covenantal relationship between Israel's Religious Zionists and America's evangelical Christians. "Around the world, we see the rise of radical Islam come against our Judeo-Christian values, and we must meet it with a well organized response." Islam is a cosmic enemy that, as the evangelical writer Hal Lindsey, the author of the apocalyptic blockbuster The Late Great Planet Earth, has written, "seeks not only to destroy the state of Israel, but also the overthrow of the Judeo-Christian civilization -- the very foundation of our western civilization." For Lindsey and his fellow Christian cosmic warriors, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is not a political problem to be diplomatically resolved but "Ground Zero in the end time events." In their imagination, the armies of Good and Evil are already gathering in the Holy Land in preparation for that final battle, when this valley of gently sloping hills and gnarled olive groves will be filled with the machines of war, with blood, and with the bodies of the fallen. Yet while these Christian Zionists believe that final battle on earth will begin in Jerusalem, the attacks of 9/11 and the War on Terror have, in their minds, expanded the theater of conflict and shifted the epicenter of the cosmic war to "God's New Israel": America.

(pp. 83-85):

The truth is Americans have always had a sense of divine destiny. The Puritans who settled this untamed land were convinced they were reliving the story of the Exodus in the New World. "We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people," Herman Melville wrote, "the Israel of our time." Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century fire-and-brimstone preacher best known for his phlegmatic sermon "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God," liked to describe America as "the new Canaan," declaring that "America has received the true religion of the old continent." [ . . . ]

That is not to say that the United States was founded as "a Christian nation." This is fantasy constructed primarily upon the pseudohistorical musings of Rousas John Rushdoony, whose best-selling books The Messianic Character of American Education and Intellectual Schizophrenia launched the Christian nationalist movement in the 1960s. Yet in throwing off the yoke of an institutional church, the new nation gradually developed into a kind of church itself. Patriotism became a form of religious devotion. The flag was transformed into a totem. The Declaration of Independence was cast as a covenant between God and his new chosen people. The Constitution took on the patina of divine scripture.

From Manifest Destiny to the War on Terror, the American experience has always been infused with a sense of sacred purpose, a conviction that America's values were God's values, meant for the whole of the world. If, after all, the principles upon which the country was founded are not just universal but self-evident, granted by God to all men yet established in only one nation, then it must be the task of that nation to deliver those principles to all other nations; to, in effect, carry out God's will on earth -- by force if necessary. "America," preached the nineteenth-century Congregational minister Lyman Beecher, "is destined to lead the way in the moral and political emancipation of the world."

(pp. 85-86):

The half-century Cold War that followed World War II effectively shifted this cosmic duality onto an ideological plane, wherein the conflict was not so much between God and Satan as between God and godlessness. When Ronald Reagan, who regularly invited evangelicals such as Hal Lindsey, Jerry Falwell, and Mike Evans to the White House to tutor him on scripture and prophecy, first labeled the Soviet Union "The Evil Empire" in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, he was using coded language that his audience would have implicitly understood. Reagan was not decrying any particular Soviet action as evil. This was evil as a metaphysical force: nameless, primal, omnipresent. The opposite of good. The opposite of us.

Such brazen use of Christian rhetoric in support of war is, as wel have seen, a legacy of the Crusades, which not only solidified the notion that physical combat against "the enemies of Christ" could be a valid expression of Christian faith but altered the very language of Christianity.

(p. 93):

Bush's religiously charged rhetoric had a profound effect on the way a great many Americans cane to construe the War on Terror. For evangelical leaders such as Mike Evans, 9/11 was "a dress rehearsal for Armageddon." The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq quickly took on the tenor of a cosmic conflict against demonic forces: "While we do have a real enemy who seeks our destruction, we are not defenseless," Charles Stanley of the Southern Baptist Convention said. "We have the strength and the energy given to us by Christ Himself. Nothing is stronger than this. The same power God used to raise His Son from the grave -- resurrection power -- is ours."

In the minds of some evangelicals, Bush even took on a messianic aura, as Lieutenant General William G. Boykin suggested in his speech at the Good Shepherd Church. "Ask yourself this," Boykin asked the congregation. "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning, he's in the White House because God put him there for such a time as this. God put him there to lead not only this nation but to lead the world, in such a time as this."

The Near and the Far (pp. 104-105):

Over the centuries, numerous fatwas, or religious declarations, have been issued by Muslim clerics denouncing the practice of takfir as a usurpation of God's judgment (the practice has no basis in the Qur'an). In 2005, one hundred seventy of the world's leading clerics and religious scholars, representing every sect, schism, and school of law in Islam, gathered in Amman, Jordan, to issue a joint fatwa "to reaffirm that there is no [such thing as] takfir" and that no Muslim is allowed to label any other Muslim an apostate for any reason. The response from the Jihadists was to proclaim everyone who took part in the Amman conference an apostate deserving of death. Almost four months to the day in which the declarations against takfir was issued, four suicide terrorists, sent from Iraq by Zarqawi, blew themselves up in a series of coordinated attacks in Amman, killing sixty people, most of them Muslims.

(pp. 121-122):

Yet whatever military success the United States and its allies have had in disrupting al-Qa'ida's operations and destroying its cells have been hampered by their utter failure to confront Global Jihadism as a social movement. Ultimately, the War on Terror is an ideological battle aimed not at seasoned militants but at a broad array of young, mostly middle-class, politically active, and socially conscious Muslims who, while they may view the conflict with the United States as a cosmic war against Islam, and while they may consider militant groups like al-Qa'ida to be the only forces in the Muslim world giving voice to their grievances, are nevertheless unlikely to actually take up arms and join the jihad (though, as we shall see, with the right mixture of incentive and indignation, they can be coaxed into action).

For the Jihadist militants of al-Qa'ida, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become central fronts in what bin Laden calls a "Third World War, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation." But while these wars, and the human rights abuses at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, have provided Jihadist ideologues with an invaluable recruiting tool, one perhaps on a par with the occupation of Palestine, for those Muslim youths who identify with Global Jihadism as a social movement there is no central front to the War on Terror because their identity cannot be confined to any territorial boundaries. Rather, theirs is a transnational identity linked together not by language, ethnicity, or culture but by a set of grievances -- both local and global, real and imagined -- that has created a shared narrative of oppression and injustice at the hands of the West. The threat of terrorism from Jihadist groups like al-Qa'ida may never fully dissipate. As is the case with any international criminal conspiracy, it may take years, perhaps decades, of cooperation among the military, intelligence, and diplomatic apparatuses of nation-states around the globe to put an end to Jihadist militancy. But to adequately confront the social movement that Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri inspired a decade ago will require more than military might. It will require a deeper understanding of the social, political, and economic forces that have made Global Jihadism such an appealing phenomenon, particularly to Muslim youth. This battle will take place not in the streets of Baghdad or in the mountains of Afghanistan but in the suburbs of Paris, the slums of East London, and the cosmopolitan cities of Berlin and New York. It is a battle that will be waged not against men with guns but against boys with computers, a battle that can be won not with bullets and bombs but with words and ideas.

Part Three: The End of the War as We Know It

6. Generation E Aslan introduces this by talking about the Liberation Theology movement in Central America, which soon tangled with US-backed death squads and in some cases responded violently (pp. 138-139):

But though violence can be an integral part of a social movement, if taken too far, it can become a liability, as we have seen with Jihadism. On the one hand, violence can create the perception that change is possible, thus convincing people with similar grievances to align themselves with the movement one way or another. And as certain tactics, such as suicide bombing, begin to show success, they are picked up by other members of the movement. On the other hand, violence can lead to even greater repression by the state, which in turn can further radicalize the movement and thus frighten away sympathizers and invalidate the movement's grievances. This is the great paradox of social movements, whether religiously inclined or not: the more violent the reaction to the movement,t he more violent the movement may become. What ultimately led to the deradicalization of the Liberation Theology movement -- or, for that matter, the environmental movement, the antiglobalization movement, the feminist movement, the black power movement, and so on -- was the gradual co-option of their members' grievances into mainstream society. Indeed, when it comes to dealing with a social movement, society has only two options: either it can address the members' grievances, thereby making the movement irrelevant, or it can deflect those grievances and further radicalize the movement. Or as Sidney Tarrow puts it, "actions that begin in the streets [can be] resolved in the halls of government or by the bayonets of the army." The challenge facing many European governments when it comes to dealing with Global Jihadism is whether to pursue greater force or greater accommodation. Which approach they choose will dictate whether the Jihadism in Europe gradually becomes insignificant or instead festers within Europe's immigrant communities long enough to explode into full-scale revolution.

(pp. 140-141):

From Britain to Brussels, one often hears dire warnings about the impending takeover of Europe by these Muslim immigrants. It is a widespread fear fueled by a barrage of bestselling books with histrionic titles such as Londonistan, While Europe Slept, and The West's Last Chance -- the last written by the right-wing journalist Tony Blankley, who warns that "the threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe [today] is every bit as great . . . as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s." It is difficult to take such hysterical comments seriously, considering that Muslims make up 2 to 4 percent of Europe's total population and demographers do not expect that number to rise far beyond 6 percent. Yet research done by sociologist Marc Sageman shows that over the past few years 84 percent of those who have actively participated in the Global Jihadist movement were first- or second-generation immigrants, living mostly in Europe.

(p. 145):

Because Jihadism cannot compete intellectually with the traditional ulama, it is compelled to deny the very authority upon which the law and practice of Islam is founded. This subversive rejection of Islamic law and clerical precedent in favor of a direct, unmediated experience of faith, in which every believer is an imam, is incredibly attractive, especially in Europe, where young Muslims are already distanced from the traditional institutional centers of their religion and where "vernacular" forms of Islam dominate the religious landscape.

7. The Middle Ground (p. 156):

The AUC [American University in Cairo] is also a hub for foreigners studying Arabic abroad. I myself honed my Arabic skills there in the summer after the attacks of 9/11. At the time, the school had become a favorite of American military students who journeyed to Cairo for a crash course in the language of the enemy. Here, close-cropped future soldiers would learn how to introduce themselves to strangers, the proper way to order a falafel and a Coke, how to shout Get out of the car! On your knees! -- and, as I heard practiced over and over again in the halls of my hotel that summer, how to say "freedom" in Arabic: hurriya.

On Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (pp. 158-159):

The Egyptian students at the AUC loved the book, if for no other reason than it seemed to them that Huntington had placed "Islamic civilization" on par with "Western civilization" in his imagined global clash,but also because the thesis appeared to confirm what the Jihadists had been saying for years. "This [clash of civilizations] is a very clear matter," Osama bin Laden told a television reporter for Al Jazeera in October 2001. [ . . . ]

In the United States, Huntington's thesis almost instantly formed the philosophical backbone of the War on Terror. It was as though Americans needed to place the events of 9/11 into an easily accessible drama -- one in which every historical actor had a role to play -- and the drama that seemed most suited to the American psyche at the time began with a classic Sophoclean prologue: two unseen forces -- "Islam" and "the West" hurtling toward each other in a catastrophic yet inevitable collision, determined by the gods long before but hidden from the eyes of men until in an explosion of light and sound, both suddenly appeared on stage.

Few stopped to ask the most basic question of this ill-conceived theory, namely, what is meant by "Islamic civilization" (or, for that matter, "Western civilization")? Does it refer to the cultural traditions of the Arab world, whose inhabitants make up less than 10 percent of the globe's 1.5 billion Muslims? Perhaps it means Persian civilization, which despite dominating much of Islam's early evolution reaches back a thousand years before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad and has little in common with Arab culture? Or maybe it is a reference to the Mongol Empire, which swallowed the whole of the Middle East in the thirteenth century, or the Turkish Ottoman Empire, whose norms, ethics, aesthetics, and ideals prevailed over much of the Muslim world for the seven centuries that followed?

The truth is, none of these distinctive cultures is meant when referring to "Islamic civilization." The term does not signify any specific cultural, societal, or governmental state reached by any group of Muslim peoples in any place or time.It has no meaning at all, save for some exotic abstraction through which an imaginary "Western civilization" can more easily define and contain an equally imaginary "Islamic civilization," setting one in opposition to the other. Indeed, if the phrase "Islamic civilization" means anything at all, it means simply "Islam," just as "Western civilization" has become a kind of shorthand for "Christian civilization." Huntington himself admitted as much. [ . . . ]

No wonder, then, that nearly 80 percent of Muslims around the globe believe that the United States seeks to "weaken and divide the Islamic world," while almost two thirds say that the purpose of the War on Terror is to "spread Christianity in the region."

(pp. 160-161):

It did not have to be this way. When then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice journeyed to Egypt in 2005, she stood before the assembled students and faculty of the American University in Cairo and made a startling admission. "For sixty years," she said, "My country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." This was a remarkable statement, one that flew in the face of half a century of American foreign policy in the Middle East. [ . . . ]

Promoting democracy in the Middle East was neither a new nor an innovative idea. Numerous past administrations had pressed for political and social reforms throughout the region. But what Bush seemed to be suggesting was a transformational project in which the promotion of democracy would form the foundation upon which relations between the United States and the Muslim world would henceforth be based.

Perhaps for that reason, Bush was roundly ridiculed both in the United States and abroad. Most of the American media dismissed his florid democracy rhetoric as little more than an attempt to legitimize the invasion of Iraq. The Arab press, too, mocked Bush's democracy project as inauthentic and hypocritical -- an excuse to wage unending war throughout the Muslim world under the pretext of spreading "freedom" and "liberty."

Still, the US did promote elections in the region, leading to gains by Islamists throughout the region, including Hizballah in Lebanon, and the shocking triumph of Hamas in Occupied Palestine, while other elections were fixed in favor of the despots; oops (pp. 163-164):

The answer the world had been waiting for came with Secretary Rice's subsequent visit to Cairo the following year, in 2006. Standing next to Mubarak, she praised him for his "democratic" reforms, making no mention of either the canceled elections or the arrests of Mubarak's opponents. Later, after Rice was already on her way back to Washington, Mubarak boasted that she "didn't bring up difficult issues or ask to change anything or to intervene in political reform. . . . She was convinced by the way that political reform and the implementation of democracy are being done in Egypt." In fact, Rice had come to Cairo for only one purpose: to persuade Mubarak to join Europe, the United States, and Israel in cutting off all aid to Hamas as a means of forcing it out of power in Palestine.

The message was clear. By refusing to engage the democratically elected leaders in Lebanon and Palestine, and by looking the other way as its allies in Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia reverted to their despotic behavior, the United States was telling the world that the promise of peaceful political reform through democratic participation was a lie.

(p. 167):

Islamism, in other words, can act as a foil to Jihadism. Unlike Jihadists, whose aims and aspirations rest on a cosmic plane, Islamists have material goals and legitimate ambitions that can be addressed by the state. Whereas Jihadists view political participation as an act of apostasy, Islamist parties throughout the Muslim world have consistently shows that, given firm political rules to abide by and a fair chance to govern, they can evolve into responsible political actors committed to democratic ideals of human rights, women's rights, government accountability, the rule of law, pluralism, and judicial reform. Predictions that electoral victories by Islamist parties would inevitably result in the demise of democracy have thus far proven false. In fact, whenever people in the Middle East have had an opportunity to choose between more moderate and more radical Islamist positions, they have consistently sided with the moderates. (It should be noted that, for all its violent actions and inflammatory rhetoric, Hamas is actually the more moderate and accommodating of the Islamist groups in Palestine, particularly when compared to its bitter rival, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.) Even in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, the base of al-Qa'ida and the Taliban and likely the place where bin Laden and Zawahiri are hiding, elections between hard-core Islamist parties and the moderate Awami National Party have resulted in a rout by the ANP.

Epilogue Barack Obama is elected US president (pp. 172-173):

It is not just that a mixed-raced man born of the union between a Muslim and a Christian has ascended to the highest political office in the world. It is that his ascension is a much-needed reminder to everyone around the world of the promise of America -- already the most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse country on earth, soon to become the only country wherein minorities form the majority. Having traveled throughout the Muslim world, I have experienced firsthand how the idea of America as a sponge that absorbs whatever faith, culture, or ethnicity it comes into contact with can overcome the often irresistible pull of anti-Americanism. I have watched Muslims chant "Death to America!" on the streets of Tehran, then privately beg me to help them get a visa to the United States. Despite the way in which the War on Terror has poisoned America's image across the Muslim world, even America's staunchest critics still recognize that there is no country -- and certainly no Islamic country -- in which Muslims can pursue their religion with more freedom and openness than in the United States.

2009-10-16

Briefly Noted

The New Yorker (May 11, 2009) has a Briefly Noted review of Reza Aslan's book, How to Win a Cosmic War, cited above:

Aslan's thoughtful analysis of America's war on terror argues that the nation's jihadist enemies believe the conflict is taking place on a spiritual, "cosmic" plane and thus cannot be lost. Only by denying the terrorists their good-versus-evil religious narrative can the United States keep the war grounded and winnable. Certainly this is good advice, although, given President Obama's abandonment of his predecessor's Manichaean foreign policy, it may have been overtaken by recent events. Far more interesting is Aslan's agreement with Bush on the question of democracy. He distinguishes Islamist nationalist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah from global jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda, and contends that recognizing the former as legitimate participants in the democratic process will undermine support for unyielding war. It's an appealing, if unproved, claim.

Most likely an interesting book. Given Aslan's previous book on the history and worldly state of Islam (No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam) I would hope that Aslan sorts out the theological underpinnings and limits of Al Qaeda, making the appropriate contrasts with other strains of Islamist politics. I also think it's too early to count on Obama undoing Bush's Global War on Terror shtick: he is still stuck in two wars (one of which he's actively expanding), he still is stuck with popular fealty to Israel and against Iran, he hasn't rocked any boats since becoming CinC of the world's largest imperial gendarmerie. Moreover, one shouldn't go around giving Bush credit for democracy -- something he showed no real grasp of, having picked up what little he knew from Natan Sharansky and Karl Rove. The real case for democracy is simpler and more universal: you don't want to exclude anyone from a peaceable political system, least of all groups who would resort to disruptive violence. Most Islamists would be quite happy with a democratic stake. Moreover, the fear that they might win and turn undemocratic is tied to things that could be changed: one would be to allow secular parties, especially on the left, to develop; another would be for the parties in power to do an effective job of policing their own corruption, which is usually the Islamists' strongest issue. The US has inadvertently become the biggest promoter of Islamism in the Arab world, primarily by working so hard to cripple the left.

posted 2009-05-10