Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (75 page)

The answer in a nutshell is that people don’t simply kill and die for a cause. They kill and die for each other. This work will show how and why this has come about: in human evolution and through the history of humanity; from the jungles of Southeast Asia and the political wastelands of the Middle East, to New York, London, and Madrid.

Many creatures will fight to the death for their close kin. But only humans fight and sacrifice unto death for friends and imagined kin, for brotherhoods willing to shed blood for one another. The reasons for brotherhoods—unrelated people cooperating to their full measure of devotion—are as ancient as our uniquely reflective and autopredatory species. Different cultures ratchet up these reasons into great causes in different ways. Call it love of God or love of group, it matters little in the end. Modern civilizations spin the potter’s wheel of monotheism to manufacture the greatest cause of all, humanity. All the great political isms preach devotion unto death for the sake of humanity. The salvation of humanity is a cause as stimulating as it is impossible to achieve.

Especially for young men, mortal combat in a great cause provides the ultimate adventure and glory to gain maximum esteem in the eyes of many and, most dearly, in the hearts of their peers. By identifying their devotion with the greater defense and salvation of humanity, they commit themselves to a path that allows mass killing for what they think is a massive good. The terrible history of war in the twentieth century is that more than conquest, greed, or even self-defense, all major participating nations justified killing civilian noncombatants on a massive scale to advance or preserve “civilization.” Jihadism is a transnational social and political movement in the same vein.

If so many millions support jihad, why are only thousands willing to kill and die for it? We shall see that young men willing to go kill and die for jihad were campmates, school buddies, soccer pals, and the like, who become die-hard bands of brothers in a tragic and misbegotten quest to save their imagined tribal community from Crusaders, Jews, and other morally deformed, unrepentant, and therefore subhuman beings. It’s in groups that they find the camaraderie of a cause, however admirable or abhorrent, and the courage and commitment that come from belonging to something larger.

Terrorists generally do not commit terrorism because they are extraordinarily vengeful or uncaring, poor or uneducated, humiliated or lacking in self-esteem, schooled as children in radical religion or brainwashed, criminally minded or suicidal, or sex-starved for virgins in heaven. Terrorists, for the most part, are not nihilists but extreme moralists—altruists fastened to a hope gone haywire.

And there is basis for real moral grievance, whether one believes exclusively in secular human rights or in the religious ethics of the house of Abraham. There’s no excuse, “collateral damage” or otherwise, for the killing of innocents in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya, and elsewhere. But a divine justice that rewards the killing of innocents in the name of an eye for an eye, exalting death over life for its own believers, is the will to power of a cruel and sadistic Moloch that would leave the whole world blind.

THE SCIENCE OF UNREASON

I am an anthropologist. In the last three and a half decades, I have traveled to many places and met many kinds of people, and I have never run across anyone—believer, agnostic, or atheist—who isn’t fascinated by religion. I’ve been with would-be martyrs and holy warriors from the Atlantic shore of Morocco to the remote forests of Indonesia, and from Gaza to Kashmir. The accounts of my experiences with aspiring killers for God and martyr wannabes and the empirical studies that come out of these encounters should make you think about terrorism in a new way: less alien and less fearsome. A scientific study of faith, like the scientific study of love, is just beginning. Applied to terrorism—one of the most compelling faith-related issues of our day and one that has largely been immune to serious scientific study because of its passion—science may someday produce downright revelation.

So it is stunning that few scientists have any idea of the progress that has been made in the study of religion. This is especially remarkable among the recent spate of so-called new atheists who believe—as Bertrand Russell (one of my heroes) and Karl Marx before them—that science has a moral duty to relieve society of the baneful burden of religion. The conceit is intellectually silly, but the politics of it isn’t. In the United States, the candidacy for nearly every political high office pivots upon terrorism and how the candidate will handle its menace. Perhaps never in the history of human conflict have so few people with so few actual means and capabilities frightened so many. Even some of our best scientists and philosophers have bought into the hysteria, clamoring for the death of God and the end of faith as the cure for terrorism. It’s not rejection of God but the ignorance of the meaning of God for the history of humanity and the role of faith in human thought and behavior that unsettles me. The atheism of utopian enlightenment, like the godless gulag or guillotine, can be hazardous to others.

In this work I also explore the practical consequences of understanding sacred values. Sacred values differ from the values of the marketplace and from realpolitik by incorporating moral beliefs that drive action in ways out of proportion to prospects for success. Such extreme behaviors as suicide bombings and the atrocities of the seemingly intractable political conflicts in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and beyond are often motivated by sacred values.

These deeper cultural values that are bound up with people’s identity often trump other values, particularly economic ones. But studies of populations in conflict and encounters with their leaders suggest that understanding an opponent’s sacred values may offer surprising opportunities for breakthroughs to peace or at least to lessening violent competition between groups.

Through these practical considerations of how to face terrorism and to deal with seemingly intractable political conflicts, this work is also intended to provide more general insight into the origins and evolution of religion, the epidemics of war, the rise of civilizations, the creation of the concept of humanity, and the limits of reason. Whatever bit of this ambition succeeds makes the effort behind it worthwhile. One caution: I talk to people in the languages that I’ve learned along the way but never formally studied. So I often write things down as I hear them. If there’s a common spelling of a word or phrase in Latin characters I’ll usually go with it (for example, in French-speaking countries, the English
sh
is rendered ch, so it’s Rashid in Palestine but Rachid in Morocco), though sometimes I try to standardize (for example, Koran, instead of Quran, Qur’an; Islamiyah instead of Islamiya, Islamiyya, Islamiyyah, Islamiyyeh, Islamia; and so on).

And finally, I’m mostly used to writing dry things for scientific audiences. Should my efforts to be closer to the general reader sometimes seem too raw and personal or overly practiced because I thought there was a ring in the phrasing of an idea, I ask for your indulgence. The subject matter is more deserving.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1: SULAWESI

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CHAPTER 2: TO BE HUMAN

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CHAPTER 3: THE MOORS OF MEZUAK

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