When Pope Benedict XVI quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor attributing to Mohammed a command “to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” Muslim and non-Muslim critics alike were quick to point out that the implied criticism of Islam applied equally to Christianity. The Crusades and the Inquisition stand out as obvious examples. It was appropriate to mention the Pope’s own faith, but one could also cite, say, the murderous violence against Muslims by Hindu nationalists in Guajarat, the terrorism of the Stern Gang and other Jewish extremists inspired by visions of the biblical Israel, or Zen Buddhist complicity in twentieth-century Japanese war crimes. From a bird’s-eye level of history at least, it’s easy to undermine the notion that there is any link between Islam and violence that isn’t shared by other major religions.
But it’s not as easy to say just what that link is. Consider two opposing stands. In his bestseller The End of Faith, Sam Harris argues that religion systematically leads to violence because it demands the suspension of reason: for “if history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us.” Further, much text held to be sacred explicitly sanctions violence, e.g. many passages in the Old Testament in which God demands the complete extermination of populations or the stoning to death of various sinners. The Bible also endorses slavery, collective punishment, and mass infanticide. True, most adherents of the major faiths are not violent and do not read their all their scripture literally. But Harris argues that these moderates provide a shield for violent fundamentalists, the real true believers, by insisting on “tolerance.” Tolerance does not allow one to point out the underlying problem – “to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish.†Richard Dawkins’ recent book is in a similar spirit.
On the other hand, it’s been well-argued that people tend to adapt religious belief to whatever nature they already have. On this view, religion is not the real driver even of violent fundamentalists. As Bertrand Russell commented: “Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their belief to exercise cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case.” And William James: “The baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct.” “Tribal” may sound anachronistic. But the fact that religions cluster geographically – so that we have e.g. Christian countries and regions rather than Christians distributed randomly – makes it clear that what usually determines one’s religion is conformity to the community (as Russell elsewhere observed).
When examples are viewed more closely than from bird’s-eye, both these opposing stands can find support. Take the Crusades. It had long been thought that the zeal for crusading was motivated by a desire for land and wealth among Europeans in a rapidly growing society. But according to Eamon Duffy, more recent scholarship shows that the costs of crusading were immense, often requiring financial backing from one’s family and mortgaging land. That makes it more plausible that many of those who responded to Pope Urban’s call to “exterminate this vile race” of Muslim infidels from Asia Minor and Jerusalem really were motivated by religion. But there are other aspects such as the Fourth Crusade, which was first intended as an invasion of Egypt but ended in the pillage of Byzantium, i.e. a conquest by Western Christians of Eastern Christians. The former had long been resentful of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the civilization in which it thrived. (The word “byzantine,” meaning hopelessly complex and obscure, reflects the historical perception of Byzantium by a more ignorant culture.) So here it seems “tribal instinct” more than scripture is at work.
But in general, violent behavior is like anything else in having multiple causes. Let’s turn to the relation between Islam and contemporary terrorism, the mainstream concern underlying Pope Benedict’s remarks. Maybe we can agree with Louise Richardson that “religion is never the sole cause of terrorism; rather religious motivations are interwoven with economic and political factors” and generally the “three R’s”: revenge, renown, and reaction. Picking out one from among multiple causes reflects subjective interest rather than objective reality. As philosopher N. R. Hanson once commented, “There are as many causes of x as there are explanations of x. Consider how the cause of death might have been set out by a physician as ‘multiple hemorrhage’, by the barrister as ‘negligence on the part of the driver’, by a carriage builder as ‘a defect in the brakeblock construction’, by the civic planner as ‘the presence of tall shrubbery at that turning’.”
So rather than continuing to pursue the religion factor, we might consider a different issue: which causes of terrorism should we in the United States take most interest in?
Let’s take Richardson’s first “R”, revenge. This past September, a man named Nabeel Jaoura was arrested in Jordan after opening fire on a group of tourists, killing one. According to a senior Jordanian security official, Jaoura was not an Islamist or a member of any terrorist group. But two of his brothers had been killed in a refugee camp in southern Lebanon during Israel’s 1982 invasion, and he had intended to strike back ever since. With children at home to care for, he desisted for many years up through an arrest in Israel for overstaying his visa. Marwan Shehadeh, a specialist on Islamist movements, suggested that Jaoura “probably came out ready to take action. The US occupation of Iraq and Israel are generating anger in every Muslim who has begun to think about revenge. This man could not reach the US, so he targeted the closest thing he could get to.”
The case shows, if it were not already obvious, that revenge can be sufficient motivation with or without religious or other factors. Also obviously, it demonstrates why US elites might be interested in focusing on such other factors (including invented ones, such as “hating our freedoms”) rather than this one. Analyzing revenge means revealing the events that prompted revenge. In this case, we have the US-supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed 20,000 civilians according to the Lebanese government. Following on Shehadeh’s suggestion, the civilian toll of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands according to the Lancet, with a declining but substantial portion (from a third to a quarter over a three-year period) attributable directly to US military strikes. Taking another known grievance, the US was the aggressive and knowing driver of sanctions against Iraq which were a major factor in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children according to several studies. It’s not hard to imagine many people, fundamentalist or not, having motives like Jaoura’s. On the Iraq war’s motivation of terrorists, the latest US National Intelligence Estimate agrees with Shehadeh.
Neutral onlookers might not brush such matters aside. Impressed by the scale of the toll, they might even raise a different question entirely: rather than “What motivates terrorists?”, “What motivates the US?” and not just taking the answer from US official statements and accustomed assumptions. In the case of our occupation of Iraq they might look, for example, at the Pentagon’s longstanding desire to replace military bases in Saudi Arabia with a long-term forward presence in Iraq, applying pressure on Syria and Iran; and the postwar multibillion-dollar construction of massive US bases at Balad, Asad, Tallil, and elsewhere in Iraq, with scant public knowledge.
Nothing of course justifies Jaoura’s or any other terrorism. The point rather is that we ought first to understand our own transgressions because those we have responsibility for and can do something about. That holds whether or not there is “moral equivalence” between our transgressions and theirs. (I’ll discuss the whether or not in a sequel.)
Criticizing ourselves in this way is difficult and unpopular. Anywhere we can go for moral support? Why, yes. Harris’s point about scripture is not that it is uniformly bad, but that you have to cherry-pick the good bits. Let’s finish with a bit on which various religions seem to agree:
Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment that you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:1-5)
Likewise from Hinduism: “The vile are ever prone to detect the faults of others, though they be as small as mustard seeds, and persistently shut their eyes against their own, though they be as large as Vilva fruit” (Garuda Purana 112). From Islam: “Happy is the person who finds fault with himself instead of finding fault with others” (Hadith). And from Buddhism: “Easily seen are others’ faults, hard indeed to see are one’s own. Like chaff one winnows others’ faults, but one’s own one hides, as a crafty fowler conceals himself by camouflage. He who sees others’ faults is ever irritable–his corruptions grow.” (Dhammapada 252-53).
Sources:
Karen Armstrong, Holy War. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
Eamon Duffy, The Holy Terror, New York Review of Books, October 19, 2006.
Hassan Fattah, New Scourge Attacking the West: Personal Anger Compels Killers, New York Times, Sept. 6, 2006.
Joy Gordon, Cool War. Harper’s, November 2002 (and http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html?pg=1).
Charles Hanley, Signs of a Long US Stay Ahead, Boston Globe, March 26, 2006
Sam Harris, The End of Faith, New York, W. W. Norton 2005
Al Seckel, ed., Bertrand Russell on God and Religion. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus.
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Modern Library, 1902.
Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want. New York: Random House, 2006.
Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq, New York Times, April 20, 2003.
Sabrina Tavernise and Douglas G. McNeil Jr., Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says, New York Times, October 11, 2006.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate