Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (11 page)

The popularization of Protestantism through the printing press compelled papal authorities to institute the Holy Inquisition to regain control by brutally forcing the genie of free and critical inquiry back into the bottle. Tortures such as breaking bodies on the rack and water-boarding (pouring water down a person’s gullet until he felt he was drowning) were favorite techniques to enforce literal belief in God’s word, as the Church chose to interpret it. Smart men—like Italy’s Galileo, France’s René Descartes, and England’s Thomas Hobbes—granted that God’s word is always true but only if never taken literally.

After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the religious wars in Europe, it was resolved that every king or prince could choose the religion to follow in his own kingdom. In 1685, the “Sun King,” France’s Louis XIV, ruler of Europe’s most powerful and populous country, declared Protestantism illegal. This did not rekindle the wars of religion, but hundreds of thousands of Protestants fled. The exodus of the French Huguenots, especially to England and Holland, coincided with the rise of scientific thinking and experiment, such as Isaac Newton’s explanation of the heavens and Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microorganisms. From Holland, which published about half of Europe’s books, French exiles delighted in freewheeling attacks on church and monarchy, particularly through humor and, for the first time in Christian Europe, through pornography. A ceaseless flow of tracts wound back to France calling for religious tolerance and disdain for dogma, removal of royalty from national affairs, and admiration for science, reason, and the practical achievements of industrial technology. Soon Voltaire and the French philosophes were urging the public to read Newton, chuck the Bible, and think for itself.

In the West, particularly in science-minded circles, God was on His way to becoming a sort of lazy couch potato. Having set the world in motion, He then withdrew to watch. This distant deity would become the official Supreme Being of the French Revolution and also of Thomas Jefferson’s Unitarian religion. But a lazy God left a moral void that science and reason could never seem to fill, even to our day. Science, for example, is not particularly well suited to deal with people’s existential anxieties—death, deception, sudden catastrophe, loneliness, or longing for love or justice—for which there is either no reasonable or no definitive solution. It cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do. Our culture is still trying to come to grips with how to bridge the moral chasm between the two. Until fairly recently, much of the Muslim world had no such worry.

CHAPTER 5
SUBMISSION: ISLAM

From faith is acceptance of what Allah has ascribed to Himself in the scripture as well as what the Messenger ascribed to Him. [This creed] prevents any attempts at altering the sacred texts, and rules out stripping Allah of his tributes or asking questions concerning their modality, ascribing a “howness” or attempting to understand them analogically. Indeed: “There is nothing like unto Allah; He is the All-Hearing and All-Seeing One” (Koran 42:11)…. Do not seek to explain His attributes or compare them with those of his creatures.

—TAQI AD-DIN AHMAD I? N TAYMIYAH.
AL-’AQEEDATUL WAASITIYAAH

We will see Saladin carrying his sword, with the blood of unbelievers dripping from it.

—OSAMA BIN LADEN

I
n 1902, the American naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan coined the term
Middle East.
Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, whose lands were known as the Near East (or
Proche Orient
in French), Middle East was generally adopted by American and British scholars and governments to cover the area between Turkey and India, from the Caspian Sea to the Sudan, with occasional reference to all of Muslim North Africa as well. Most of the region is arid, except for Egypt’s Nile Delta, the area between Mesopotamia’s Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the narrow fringe of cultivable land known as the Fertile Crescent, which skirts the northern edge of the Arabian Desert and links Egypt to Mesopotamia.

Civilization first sprang from the great irrigation projects that channeled the waters of the Euphrates and Nile into intensive agriculture. Perennial conflict ensued between these settled peasant societies and tribes of nomadic herdsmen that issued from steppes and deserts to the east and south. Nowhere was this conflict more constant and intense than along the short and narrow strip of fertile land between the mountains of Lebanon and the Sinai Desert, the biblical Armageddon at its center. Here, monotheism was born among the Hebrew hill tribes struggling to survive atop the thin rim between the Judean Desert and the Mediterranean coast, surrounded by rivals as ruthless as the Israelites themselves: Canaanites, Amorites, Perizites, Girgashites, Jebusites, Edomites, Amalekites. Uncompromising faith kept the Hebrew tribes from drowning under a continuous flow of more powerful invaders from the south (Egyptians), east (Assyrians, Babylonians), north (Hittites, Phoenicians), and west (Philistines, Greeks, Romans).

In the sixth century, Byzantium and the Sasanids of Persia vied to manage the Arab desert tribes as buffer states, granting them gold, titles, and trading privileges. In the seventh century, Mohammed united the tribes under Islam and brought Persia under Arab rule. By the eighth century, Muslim armies were rapidly eating away at Constantinople’s control of the Eastern Roman Empire and gnawing at the emergent Holy Roman Empire in the West. Iberia (Spain and Portugal) soon fell to Muslim forces and the Mediterranean, once a Roman lake, became largely Arab.

Islam burst onto the world stage with a form of monotheism uncluttered with the arcane theological disputes of Christendom—like the conflict over the divine versus dual (divine and human) nature of Christ, an argument that provoked sectarian warfare and piles and piles of Christian corpses. In the House of Islam, there was greater religious tolerance of the other monotheistic faiths, Judaism and Christianity. As in Judaism, Muslim rituals were based mostly on hygiene and health. Emphasis was on civic virtues of courage, charity, and hospitality. One theological innovation was that soldiers who fell in battle to defend Islam, the holy warriors
(mujahedin)
of holy war
(jihad),
would go straight to a paradise vastly more colorful and chock full of sensual delights than Christianity’s chaste and cerebral heaven.

THE RETRACTION OF REASON

There was no science in Arab culture when Islam came to it in the seventh century, and there was no science during the initial period of Islamic expansion. But by the mid-eighth century, Muslim conquerors were ordering translations of ancient Greek philosophy texts in order to make Arabic the medium for the whole of intellectual life in their dominion: from the eastern Atlantic, across North Africa and the Middle East, to the far side of the Indian Ocean. The great ninth-century translators, such as Hunyan Ibn Ishaq, expressed excitement at the task of enabling communication among philosophers, geographers, historians, mathematicians, and alchemists from as far apart as Spain and India.

Philosophers like Al Kindi exhorted the Faithful “not to be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes to us…. For him who seeks the truth, there is nothing of higher value than truth itself.”
¹
The mathematician Al Khwarazmi introduced Indian—or so-called Arabic—numerals into calculations. Ibn Abi Usay’bi extolled the Hippocratic Oath as the right way for medicine, rejecting astrology. In the tenth century, Muslims established the world’s first medical school, in Salerno, Italy. And for the first time in history, science became international.
²

Islamic politics in this era was dominated by the rationalist Mu’tazili, who sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the Ash’ari. The Mu’tazili (from
i’tazla,
meaning “withdraw”) interpreted Koranic verses metaphorically, rather than literally, especially if these had anthropomorphic content. Allah’s desires and powers were not concrete things outside or over and above mankind, but resided in the spirit that moved men.

The Mu’tazili called their philosophy Divine Unity and Justice
(Al-Tawhid wa al-’Adl).
Their most eminent thinker was tenth-century Chief Justice Abd al Jabbar ibn Ahmed, who argued that life is a test for beings possessing free will, or
taklif.
Delivering justice requires the ability to understand that people are responsible for good or bad choices they make in life, and legal decisions about whether choices are good or bad should be made on the basis of
ijtihad,
independent interpretation of judicial sources rather than blind tradition.

Reaction to the Mu’tazili was sparked by the tenth-century Muslim theologian Abu al-Hassan Ash’ari, who believed in radically separating Islamic from infidel philosophy. Ash’ari appeared at a time when reason could not be trusted unless it obeyed a moral code. Scientific experiments could proceed only if they served that code. This has also been a recurrent position in Western political thought until today: for example, in Nazi Germany, where biological experiments were permitted only if they demonstrated racial inequality, or in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, where biology was forced to serve an anti-Darwinian moral code that rejected anything inherited or innate.

One of the most influential books ever written was an Ash’ari treatise,
The Incoherence of Philosophers,
because it helped to extinguish the scientific spirit in Islam. Its author, Al Ghazali (who died in 1111) emphasized
taqlid,
obedience and imitation based on authority, over choice and independent judgment. He criticized scientific philosophy as incompatible with faith and morally “incoherent.” Averroës (also known as Ibn Rushd), one of the last rationalist lights in the Islam of that age, attacked Al Ghazali in a book titled
The Incoherence of Incoherence,
which was too pithy for the public and not well received.

Arab civilization was now in retreat. The empires of Islam were no longer expanding, and the defense of acquired gains became paramount for the rulers. In the West, Christian forces were pursuing the reconquest of Spain in earnest: They reached the Tagus in 1085, and Saragossa fell in 1118. In the East, also in 1118, the Seljuk Turks began their final push on southern Persia, after having overrun western Persia, Anatolia, and Syria. The Arab Abbasid Caliphate lost control over much of the former Islamic Empire and declined to a minor state under the loose grip of Turkic warlords and Mamluks, or “White Slaves,” who were initially children captured from Caucasian, Eastern Slavic, and Turkic populations and then raised by the Abbasid Caliphs to become elite cavalry.

Only in the heartland of Arabia and the area stretching from the North African and Levantine littoral to Mesopotamia would Arabic language and culture hold sway, as it still does. But through Islam and the Koran, Arabic cultural mores and language would continue to influence other Muslim peoples, though in less forward-looking ways than before. Islam itself would provide all Muslim societies not only moral and ritual precepts and theological doctrines, but also (unlike Christianity) strong guidelines for government and civil and criminal law. Muslim caliphs and sultans were Caesars
and
emissaries of God.

Even as Muslim armies successfully beat back the Crusades, the Arabs’ missionary drive lapsed and Islamic civilization continued to wane. On October 2, 1187, the Kurdish warrior Saladin (Salah al-Din) recaptured Palestine from the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. His chivalrous relationship with Richard I of England, the “Lionheart,” earned Saladin a place in Dante’s Limbo as a virtuous pagan soul. Saladin’s Ayyubid Sultanate ruled Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and much of the Arabian Peninsula with considerable cultural tolerance for the age. But Arab Islamic thinking was turning inward, becoming more suspicious of conflicts between faith and reason, and more conservative.

Statue of Saladin on his steed by the entrance to the main market of Damascus.

The Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258 by Genghis Khan’s grandson, Hulagu, ranks as a pivotal moment in the decline of Arab civilization. Throughout his long and productive career, historian Bernard Lewis has forcefully argued that the Mongols did not destroy Arab civilization, because it was in advanced decay long before they appeared. Nor, Lewis writes, did they destroy Islamic civilization, which in predominantly Persianized form thrived under their rule.
³
Still, much of the accumulated knowledge of the ages was lost when Baghdad’s Great Library was sacked and burned. Survivors of the pillage saw the waters of the Tigris running black from the huge quantity of ink leached from books thrown in the river. The city’s hospitals, medicines, and medical manuscripts vanished into dust and ash. Mesopotamia’s irrigation infrastructure and network of canals, which had spawned our species’ first civilization, were wrecked.
⁴