Violent Faith
by Kelton Cobb
Chapter seven from the book September 11: Religious Perspectives on the Causes and Consequences (2002), edited by Ian Markham and Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi', reprinted with permission from Oneworld Publications.
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I must begin with a confession. I am a Christian. I believe in a loving and just God who created all things, cares for all things, and is the destiny of all things. I also believe that religions are good for us. They teach us how to live, how to recognize the humanity in each other, how to properly respect all of creation, how to cope with the passing of all that we love, and ultimately with our own deaths. I am partial to monotheistic religions, and for that reason consider myself a descendent of Abraham--along with Jews and Muslims. These three faiths share at the most fundamental level the conviction that the God who reached out to Abraham, Sarah and Hagar is the origin and destiny of all reality, and is to be trusted.
It is important for me to state these convictions up front because everything that follows will sound, and is, critical of religion.
But I am trying to understand some things. The argument in this chapter is that religion lends itself to violence. Before I enter this argument and lift the curtain on such an unpleasant piece of news, it is important for me to say that religion also inspires peace and good will. In fact, the record of religions for instructing human beings in the personal, social, and global conditions that are necessary for peace, and for infusing us with the good will to pursue peace, dwarfs the record of religions for inspiring violence. And, to come at it another way, the record of conscientiously non-religious leaders and movements for attaining the peaceable kingdom is not encouraging. Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot are responsible for 100 million deaths in the last century. Standing at the beginning of the 21st century we have the benefit of hindsight with these several large scale non-religious social experiments--each driven by a vision of justice for society--that have now run their miserable courses to sober us up regarding how wonderful life might be if we could rid our social orders of religious principles, prohibitions and hopes.
In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, there has been much good coverage in the news stressing the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are as horrified by the actions of the terrorists as everyone else. Their moral outrage and bewilderment is genuine, and arises not only from whatever innate moral sense that human beings have been given, but beyond that, and intensifying their horror, by the ethical universe in which they live as the result of having been shaped by all the values, writings, prophets, and prayers of Islam. It is as incomprehensible to Muslims as it is to Christians and Jews that a good God would not release his hand to divert these hijacked jets, or to soften the hearts of the hijackers.
Many times in the last months, I have heard the Qur'an quoted to the effect of saying that the murder of one innocent person is equivalent to the destruction of all humanity, and that this terrorist attack has nothing to do with true Islam. This distancing of violence from the heart of Islam is an essential point to emphasize at this moment, given that many Americans equate Islam with the taking of hostages and terrorist bombings, with no remainder.
But I have to admit that my own response to this is yes, and no. If Islam does not condone such violent acts, why do they occur? How are we to account for the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the student-held hostages in Iran and Lebanon, the fatwa against Salmon Rushdie, the 1993 World Trade Center truck bomb, the 1997 ambush of tourists in Egypt, the amputations of limbs, destruction of ancient Buddhist statues, and persecution of women under the Taliban regime, and now the body count from the attacks of September 11th? If Islam does not lend support to such actions, on what grounds do members of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Jihad identify themselves as dedicated Muslims who follow in the footsteps of Muhammad and his Companions?1 The perpetrators of these crimes certainly believe about themselves that they are devout Muslims carrying out the will of God in designing and executing these acts of terror, that their actions are sanctioned by Islamic law.2 They are readers of the Qur'an and followers of recognized mullahs, scholars and jurists, some with credentials from the most respected institutions in the Muslim world.3 We can presume they observe the five pillars of Islam--bearing witness to God and Muhammad as God's prophet, daily prayers, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage. Communities out of which suicide bombers have come regard them as martyrs who have now found their place in paradise. To be sure, these clerics, communities, and ways of reading the Qur'an occupy a place on the edges of Islam. But are these edges so remote that we are justified in viewing them as having nothing to do with true Islam, that they are as remote from Islam as is feng-shui or the art of the samurai?
The letter that was discovered in Muhammad Atta's car found parked at Logan Airport, which contained final instructions for how the hijackers should conduct themselves immediately before and during the operation, was a document on spiritual direction. The hijackers were instructed to read and meditate on surahs eight and nine of the Qur'an, the traditional war chapters that excoriate unbelievers and command the followers of the Prophet to "strike terror into the enemy of God and your enemy," to "arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them," and to trust that those who fight for God's cause have been promised "gardens of eternal bliss where they shall dwell forever." The letter coaches them to pray through the night, purify their souls, read Qur'anic verses into their hands and then rub their hands on their clothes, knives, and passports to bless them, to shout "Allahu Akbar!" (God is greater) when the hijacking begins "because this strikes fear into the hearts of the non-believers," and to end their own lives by praying in the "seconds before the target…'There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His messenger.'" In short, they are admonished to get spiritually prepared to fight this battle for the sake of God. No other motives are named.4
Clearly, those involved presumed they were being good Muslims--in fact, that they were being the best of Muslims, the most devoted to the teachings of their faith. That doesn't mean they were right. In fact, I believe they were wrong--both in their overall understanding of Islam, and in their high esteem for themselves. But that is not to say that they are not real Muslims. Certainly they don't represent the golden mean of historical Islam, nevertheless this particular letter, and an abundance of lengthier and more substantial writings that stand behind it and argue for jihad against the West to protect the lives and honor of Muslims, and seek to return Islam to world supremacy through whatever means necessary, falls within the boundaries of Islam.5 In the months following the attacks there have been worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and websites that advocate jihad are flourishing on the Internet. It must be faced that there is a movement among a significant minority of Muslims defending the extremist groups. On what basis can it be said that they are not true Muslims and that their Islam is not true Islam? What is true Islam? For that matter, what is true Christianity? Or true Judaism? We're all divided up within our traditions into factions, and issuing bulls of excommunication to each other has seldom clarified the "true" center of any faith. More often it engenders bitterness and clarifies nothing.
Indeed, every religion has its heresies, and heresies must be marked and remembered as out of bounds. But heresies are always children of the religion from whence they come--rogue children, but genetic heirs nonetheless. Heresies are usually borrowed elements of their parent religions, but elements that are broken off and isolated from counter elements that moderated them. Better than charging these "Islamists"--as they've come to be called6--with not being true Muslims would be to ask questions like: What components of this faith lend themselves to these distortions? What counter elements that might keep them in check are being neglected? What dangerous traps lie hidden in its scriptures? What responsibility do the bearers of a religious tradition have for the distortions in its transmission?
The Islam of these terrorists does not do justice to the magnificent, civilized, and peace-loving past of Islam, but it has to be recognized as a “real strand” of Islam. Every religion is like a rope, woven from many strands. Christianity is a weave of the teachings of Jesus, the theology of Paul, the neo-platonism of Augustine, Constantine's conversion, the Little Flowers of St. Francis, the icononography of the Copts, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the piety of the Puritans, the Ku Klux Klan, the Civil Rights movement, Jerry Falwell, and Archbishop Romero. I don't like several of these strands, but when I study them I discover that they contain fibers I recognize in my own faith. Inside the racism of the Ku Klux Klan one can find firm beliefs surrounding Elijah's contest with the prophets of Baal, divine election, God's sovereignty over all reality, hatred for the devil, absolute faith in the resurrection of Christ, the importance of purity and righteousness, and the lordship of Jesus Christ. The Klan didn't come out of thin air; it is a development within Christianity which I abhore, but in calling myself a Christian I am complicit and have to answer for it.
In this chapter, I will be examining the bloodier strands of two of the religions that have been inspired by Abraham--Judaism and Islam. I will approach them in two ways: first, I will consider the role that a selective use of founding stories plays in the interpretation of present conflicts; second, I will examine the mechanism of sacrifice that is at work in religion.
With equal vigor and justification a parallel case could be made with respect to any of several violent strands within Christianity, such as the anti-semitism which it sustains like an obstinate weed. Christianity has always had its violent activists who have persecuted Jews, attacked Muslims, and declared holy war against all manner of offenders. During the Crusades, Christian warriors descended on the Holy Land to claim it for the Church and to empty it of all infidels, i.e., all Muslims and Jews. In the words of Pope Urban II, who issued the first call for a military expedition to Jerusalem in 1095: "Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre, wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. The land which, as the Scripture says, 'flows with milk and honey,' was given by God into the possession of the Children of Israel." Christians, of course, were the rightful "Children of Israel." As the waves of Crusades progressed, the idea arose that killing any Jew was a merit-worthy act, and pogroms began occurring in Europe. While the Church hierarchy disapproved of these attacks on Jews, it was not hard for rank and file Christians to find sufficient justification for these massacres in the Gospels and the writings of Paul. The Jews are clearly depicted in the New Testament as having rejected Jesus as their messiah and conspiring to put him to death. This amounted to deicide--they had rejected and killed God--a crime of unimaginable monstrousness and ingratitude. Their culpability in this murder was reinforced everytime the Mass was performed. For this they have been cursed until the end of time, and deserve to be dispersed, oppressed, humiliated and treated as outcasts. After the Crusades, pogroms periodically erupted in response to various calamaties that swept through Europe, e.g., the plague, tax riots in Paris, schisms in the Church, wars, and economic depressions. This crested, of course, in the 20th century with the Holocaust. It could be argued that among the Abrahamic faiths, Christianity has generated the greatest amount of suffering through its violent strands--if only because it has wielded more power than Islam and Judaism for the last three hundred years. 7
The Role of Founding Myths
Our scriptures are full of wars, great bloody conflicts between those whom God has elected and those whom God has rejected. In their details, these chronicles of holy war present a variety of precipitating causes, motivations, surrounding circumstances and strategies. These records of conflicts provide every subsequent generation of the faithful with a repertoire of war scripts, e.g., the crossing of the Red Sea, the battle of Jericho, David and Goliath, the Babylonian invasion, the Battle of the Trench, Armageddon. There are huge defeats and glorious victories, there are battles that achieve peace and battles that breed other battles, and there is every mixture of human heroism and divine intervention to explain the outcomes. To this day, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as we stumble our way through both our personal lives and our geopolitical lives, have the scripts of these archetypal conflicts playing and guiding our discernment whenever we meet a threatening situation. Much rests on the battle we select as most analogous to our present crisis. In summoning it up, we settle into a pattern of strategies and expectations that will determine the history to follow.
I'm not suggesting that in the war rooms of the great powers of today our leaders are openly discussing or even conscious of these scriptural contests. But I am suggesting that these archetypal hostilities are engrained in our cultures, and at the deepest level influence the sense we make of unfolding crises.
For the moment, however, I'll make the more obvious case that with respect to Zionism and Islamism, isolated founding stories have been used to justify the worst aspects of our present conflicts.
Zionism
Secular Zionism
In 1896, Theodor Herzl, a journalist writing from Paris for a Viennese newspaper, wrote a pamphlet he called, "The Jewish State," in which he laid out a plan for the return of Jews dispersed around the world to Palestine to create a Jewish nation state of Israel. The return, he proposed, should be gradual, stretched over several decades. "The poorest will go first and cultivate the soil. They will construct roads, bridges, railways, and telegraph installations, regulate rivers, and provide themselves with homesteads, all according to predetermined plans. Their labor will create trade, trade will create markets, and markets will attract new settlers--for every man will go voluntarily, at his own expense and his own risk. The labor invested in the soil will enhance its value….the emigrants standing the lowest in the economic scale will be gradually followed by those of the next grade. Those now in desperate straights will go first."8 There were at that time movements of Jews colonizing land in both Argentina and Palestine, fleeing the latest wave of pogroms in Europe and Russia. But Herzl recognized that for the mass migration he envisioned, of such numbers that the creation of a sovereign state would be viable--a state in which Jews might "live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die"9--required the ancestral pull of the "Promised Land." Therefore he favored Palestine. He was aware that this would necessitate some displacement of the "native populace." But he was confident that once a Jewish majority was in place, and the wealth and expertise of the Jewish professional classes began developing the land and its resources, this local resistance would happily acquiesce. "We could offer the present authorities enormous advantages," he wrote, "assume part of the public debt, build new thoroughfares, which we ourselves would also require, and do many other things. The very creation of the Jewish State would be beneficial to neighboring lands, since the cultivation of a strip of land increases the value of its surrounding districts."10
Indeed, the early Zionists believed their cause overlapped with the interests of the local Arabs. Arab lives could only be improved by having brothers in arms against the corrupt Ottomans, and later the imperialist British, as well as the brains and capital of the Jews to develop the land. But the Arab reception of the growing influx of Jews was instead that of resistance, and eventually armed resistance. This gradually wore many Zionists down until they could conceive of their goal only in opposition to Arabs. This was clarified further in the 1930's when, as their ideals for a pluralist society were fading, they began to feel pressure from another front--Jews fleeing the Holocaust. This intensified the basic Zionist conviction that Jews needed a Jewish state if they were to survive as a people--a conviction with ample supporting evidence from history. Mass immigration and colonization of Arab lands in Palestine, in violation of quotas on Jewish immigrants established by the British mandate, became the strategy of the the Zionist organizations. Vladimir Jabotinsky, a leader of various Zionist parties and organizations, was adamant about this, and in 1937 testified openly about it in London before the Peel Commission, the body whose charge it was to find a way beyond the impasse that had been reached between Arabs and Jews. He pushed the idea of a population transfer, relocating Palestinian Arabs to existing Arab nations in order to open land to Jewish settlers. "I fully understand that any minority would prefer to be a majority," he testified, it is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab State No.4, No.5, or No.6--that I quite understand; but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation. No tribunal has ever had the luck of trying a case where all the justice was on the side of one party and the other party had no case whatsoever.11
In answer to a question from the Chairman of the Commission suggesting that these recommendations would drag Britain into armed conflict with "world Islam," Jabotinsky denied that this would necessarily follow. He proposed this "compromise":
Tell the Arabs the truth, and then you will see the Arab is reasonable, the Arab is clever, the Arab is just; the Arab can realize that since there are three or four or five wholly Arab States, then it is a thing of justice which Great Britain is doing if Palestine is transformed into a Jewish State. Then there will be a change of mind among the Arabs, then there will be room for compromise, and there will be peace.12
David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, carried this concept forward after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Transferring the Arab population was imperative, given their refusal to assimilate to the new Jewish state. The colonization of Jews alongside Arabs was a temporary measure. Taking a long view, the Arabs had to go. "It is clear," he wrote in 1954, "that England belongs to the English, Egypt to the Egyptians and Judea to the Jews. In our country there is room only for Jews. We will say to the Arabs: 'Move over'; if they are not in agreement, if they resist, we will push them by force."13
Had the state of Israel not been born in circumstances where all of its neighbors wanted to destroy it, a full-bodied pluralist state may have stood a better chance. But it did not have this good fortune. Nevertheless, Israel was a nation that needed to be born, given the number of perennially displaced Jews who needed a safe place to live, and the particular gravity of the moment due to the Holocaust. It deserves to be recognized, furthermore, that there is historical legitimacy in their claim to Palestine. And, theologically, given the constant theme in scripture of God blessing Israel with the land of their ancestor Abraham, it is not out of the question to suggest that the return to this land was an act of divine providence.
Religious Zionism
For the first fifty years of the Zionist movement, its champions were defiantly secular; more sympathetic with Marx than Moses. In fact, most religious Jews felt great reluctance toward the state-creating ambitions of the Zionists. The Orthodox viewed Zionism as a heresy. For centuries they had internalized the prophetic admonishment that their exile was a sentence for their sins, for the fact that their ancestors had abandoned the covenant, as Moses had predicted they would, and turned to worship other gods. But they also believed the promise which followed: If they returned to God and obeyed God with all their hearts and souls, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you, gathering you again from all the peoples among whom the Lord your God has scattered you. Even if you are exiled to the ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there he will bring you back. The Lord your God will bring you into the land that your ancestors possessed, and you will possess it; he will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors (Deut.30:1-5).
This promise was reiterated by the prophets, and remained the hope of all praying Jews. But for the Orthodox, the understanding was that this gathering in and return to Zion would come about by means of an obvious act of divine intervention, through the coming of the messiah. Certainly the political maneuverings of the secular Zionists did not qualify as the stirrings of the messiah whose appearance would usher in a new age for all creation. It wasn't until after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 that religious Jews began to reconsider their resistance to Zionism. With the creation of a sovereign homeland, they began to see the hand of God, and the formation of the State of Israel as a penultimate move in the direction of the divine promise.14
In short, the early Zionists were political pragmatists. They recognized their precariousness in the diaspora, and like many others at the turn of the century, desired to attempt a new social experiment--one that would include the Arabs and, they imagined, elevate the conditions of their lives as well. The deep historical pull toward Palestine was strong, but more out of momentum from past generations with their attachment to the region than out of piety. Religiously devoted Jews were suspicious of the movement. It took several decades for the social experiment to fuse with the religious mythos that God was the force behind this return to the Promised Land, and give rise to messianic Zionism.
Messianic Zionism really came into its own following the Six Day War in 1967. In the swiftness with which the "biblical territories" were "reconquered," many saw the hand of God and an approaching messianic redemption. In the 1970's and 1980's a solid bloc of Zionists on the religious right emerged with Meir Kahane and the Kach party, and the Gush Emunim ("the bloc of the faithful"), a movement of aggressive and messianic Zionists that formed in 1974. While Zionism had from the beginning embraced the ideal of a pluralist state (albeit with a few notable exceptions), the new religious right pursued a policy of cleansing the Promised Land of all Arabs and non-Jews as a biblical imperative. Kahane promoted the deportation of all Palestinians. "God wants us to live in a country of our own," he claimed, "isolated, so that we live separately and have the least possible contact with what is foreign, and so that we create as far as possible a pure Jewish culture based on the Torah."15
The Gush Emunim view it as imperative that the biblically-defined land mass of Israel, and particularly the West Bank (which they refer to by its biblical names "Judea and Samaria") come fully under Jewish control. Their primary strategies are staging demonstrations, illegally squatting on Palestinian properties, and recruiting Jews in the diaspora to immigrate and join them--actions that frequently descend into violence and require intervention by the Israeli military. There is also an underground unit of the Gush Emunim that has conducted terrorist actions, including car bombings of Arab mayors and a foiled attempt to blow up the Dome of the Rock. The Intifada is the Arab response to their activities. Joshua, the successor of Moses and military commander who engineered Israel's conquest of Canaan, is a pivotal figure for the Gush. Journalist Ellen Cantarow sheds light on this biblical patron of the settlers, observing that Joshua "is the prototype of the powerful Jew bringing redemption with the sword, taking back what is rightfully his, consigning forever to the past the shtetl Jew cowering in his stibl while peasants and soldiers come to make pogroms."16 Given their conviction that God has given this land to the Jews, the Gush are unapologetic about their aim to empty Israel of Arabs. One Gush activist in Kiryat Arba explained to Cantarow:
There were Arabs living here. By what right did we throw them out? And we did throw them out. We threw them out of Jaffa. We threw them out of Haifa. Of course there were excuses. We threw them out because there was a war. Or we threw them out because we bought land. It’s a very nasty story, isn’t it, from the moral point of view? All the stuff about socialism, about national redemption may be true, but that’s only one part. The fact is, we returned here because the Eternal gave us the land. It’s ridiculous, stupid, simplistic, but that’s what it is. All the rest is superficial. We came back here because we belong.17
Mark Juergensmeyer describes a visit he made in 1995 to Baruch Goldstein's grave in Kiryat Arba. Goldstein had gunned down thirty Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994. Paying his respects at the grave was one of the settlers, Yochay Ron. Juergensmeyer initiated a conversation with Ron and pressed him on his attachment to the land and the violent measures that he obviously endorsed to wrest it from the Arabs. Ron explained that the land must be liberated in order for there to be a spiritual liberation--a standard messianic reply. Then he continued, "the biblical lands--specifically the ancient towns and sites on the West Bank--are sacred, and…Jews are under God's requirement to occupy them."18 For Ron and other Zionists on the religious right, Juergensmeyer explains, the war with the Arabs "goes back 'in biblical times'…indicating that the present-day Arabs are simply the modern descendents of the enemies of Israel described in the Bible for whom God has unleashed wars of revenge."19
Corroroborative Sacred Narratives
It is in these developments that it becomes clear the extent to which the biblical report of ancient Israel's conquering of Canaan is providing a script for the present. After the exodus from Egypt the tribes of Israel wandered through the wilderness for forty years. Their wanderings brought them to the plains of Moab, on the east bank of the Jordan River. It was here that Moses summoned Joshua and charged him to "go with this people into the land that the Lord has sworn to their ancestors to give them" and to take possession of it. Then Moses addressed the Israelites and said to them, as God had instructed him:
When you cross over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, destroy all their figured stones, destroy all their cast images, and demolish all their high places. You shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given you the land to possess…..But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides; they shall trouble you in the land where you are settling (Numbers 33:51-55).
Shortly after this, Moses died and Joshua led Israel across the Jordan to the the city of Jericho. Following God's instructions, they marched around the city for seven days, at the end of which the priests blew trumpets, the people shouted, and the walls of Jericho fell. Then Joshua's army set upon all inhabitants of the city--men, women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys--and killed them. This was in accord with the instructions that had been given to Moses regarding how the military campaign in Canaan was to be pursued: "you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God" (Deut. 20:16-18). Thus began the campaign to take possession of Canaan. Next on their route, moving up the Jordan Valley, was the city of Ai. Here Joshua divided his army into two units, and with one lured the inhabitants of Ai out of the city to do battle, while the other entered the city and set it on fire. As with Jericho, all the citizens of Ai were slaughtered and their king was hanged, but the livestock were taken as booty.
City by city, the Israelites moved through Canaan defeating its inhabitants and dividing up the land into territories for each of its tribes. Subsequent assaults were not always as thorough as Jericho and Ai, as the Canaanites organized themselves against the invading armies of Israel and put up a better fight. Moreover, Israel entered alliances with some of the towns, and learned to live with them as neighbors, trading partners, and as a peasant class.20 Many years later, when the vigorous period of the conquest was over and Joshua was an old man, he summoned the elders of the tribes to meet with him to remind them what God had done for them. "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel," he told them,
I brought your ancestors out of Egypt…you lived in the wilderness for a long time. Then I brought you to the land of the Amorites, who lived on the other side of the Jordan; they fought with you, and I handed them over to you, and you took possession of their land, and I destroyed them before you….I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant. Now therefore revere the Lord (Joshua 24:7-8, 13-14).
With this recitation of God's activity on their behalf, the elders of Israel renewed their covenant, and Joshua then sent them away "to their inheritances."
In short, the land God had promised to Abraham and his descendents was not a pristine, unpopulated place that was ready for these immigrants to simply show up and inhabit. It never was--not when Abraham first settled there, nor when the exiles from Egypt arrived, nor, later, when the Jews returning from the Babylonian exile found their way back. Each time the land had to be reconquered and recolonized, and this required all manner of intrigue, espionage, diplomacy, divine intervention, military cunning, and faith.
Each phase of return and settlement in biblical Israel provides archetypes for how Zionists might attempt to understand their present situation. A multitude of approaches to this can be found in the biblical accounts--ranging from absolute holy war, taking no prisoners, to gradual absorption and assimilation. The Zionism of groups such as the Kach Party and the Gush Emunim have taken Joshua's campaign as their plotline for how to conquer and settle "Judea and Samaria." They are bound by God to occupy this sacred land and to "create as far as possible a pure Jewish culture based on the Torah." Certain civilizational restraints prevent them from a full application of God's command to "not let anything that breathes remain alive," but they are nevertheless pursuing a strategy of purification based on religious identity.
All nations and civilizations have bloody histories. They come into existence by way of migrations, invasions and armed struggle. Indigenous populations are either decimated, expelled, or absorbed. This is the way of the world; this is the history of the U.S., a history which has borne me into existence, and which I seldom second-guess. It is also a way of behaving that is contrary to the sense of egalitarian justice that, ironically, has entered human consciousness through the Jewish scriptures. As the covenant is clarified in the Torah and the writings of the prophets, Israel is commanded to set the oppressed free, to shelter the homeless and share bread with the hungry, to never shed innocent blood, and, always reminded of their own experience as exiles in a strange land, to act justly and show mercy toward strangers. Nevertheless, there is this deep and not unimportant archaeological layer of stories in the Bible which stands in tension with the Bible itself. Both of these injunctions--cleanse the land of its native inhabitants and act with justice toward resident aliens--are found unambiguously in scripture as divine commands. Moral discernment which holds itself answerable to the Bible requires finding a point of balance between these two. Most Jews, even most Zionists, have sought a position of compromise between these poles.
Islamism
Grievances
Among the grievances against the U.S. that have been identified as motivating the recent actions of radical Islamists are the way the U.S. meddles in the governments of the Islamic world against the will of the people and on the side of tyrants,21 the perception that our foreign policy, corporations, and culture industries are the apotheosis of arrogant power, the belief that we are indifferent to the suffering of Muslims, and the unravelling effects of U.S. led globalization, which inspires social mobility and cosmopolitan loyalties, on traditional societies. Osama bin Laden, in a 1998 interview that appeared on PBS's Frontline, made the following charges:
They rip us of our wealth and of our resources and of our oil. Our religion is under attack. They kill and murder our brothers. They compromise our honor and our dignity and dare we utter a single word of protest against the injustices, we are called terrorists….The leaders in America and in other countries as well have fallen victim to Jewish Zionist blackmail. They have mobilized their people against Islam and against Muslims…We are a nation whose sacred symbols have been looted and whose wealth and resources have been plundered. It is normal for us to react against the forces that invade our land and occupy it.22
The U.S. has plundered the wealth, denied the political self-determination, and defiled the sacred symbols and dignity of Muslim peoples--all under the influence of the Jews.
The Treacherous Jew
Developing his incriminations against the Jews, bin Laden continues,
We believe that this [Clinton] administration represents Israel inside America. Take the sensitive ministries such as the Ministry of Exterior [sic] and the Ministry of Defense and the CIA, you will find that the Jews have the upper hand in them. They make use of America to further their plans for the world, especially the Islamic world. American presence in the Gulf provides support to the Jews and protects their rear. And while millions of Americans are homeless and destitute and live in abject poverty, their government is busy occupying our land and building new settlements and helping Israel build new settlements in the point of departure for our Prophet's midnight journey to the seven heavens. America throws her own sons in the land of the two Holy Mosques for the sake of protecting Jewish interests.23
And what are these Jewish interests, what is it that the Jews want? According to bin Laden, it is to reconquer the entire Arabian Penninsula in an "expansion of what is called the Great Israel":
We know at least one reason behind the symbolic participation of the Western forces and that is to support the Jewish and Zionist plans for expansion of what is called the Great Israel. Surely, their presence is not out of concern over their interests in the region. ... Their presence has no meaning save one and that is to offer support to the Jews in Palestine who are in need of their Christian brothers to achieve full control over the Arab Peninsula which they intend to make an important part of the so called Greater Israel.24
Perhaps more striking than the grievances listed against the U.S. in much of the Islamist proclamations is this persistent accusation that Israel and the Jews are behind the scenes, pulling the levers of a full-fledged war against Islam. For bin Laden, Jews use the U.S. government as an instrument to achieve control of the Arabian Penninsula. In Pakistan in the weeks following the September 11 attacks, word spread through the madrassas that it was, in fact, Jews who piloted the planes. According to one journalist, who was in Pakistan at that time, the head of one madrassa in Peshawar, Al-Sheikh Rahat, assured him of this. "'The Jews have done this,' he said, calling the attacks a plot by Israel to draw the world into war. It is repeated madrassa by madrassa, the company line of the militants and the poorer classes from which they come, spreading out from the student body to the shops and foot traffic." Some of the teachers explained that "even though the Jews flew the planes into the towers, it was Allah's will. Allah, the teachers said, put the idea in the minds of the Jews. Allah, in his wisdom, knew that the Muslims would perhaps be briefly discredited, the students said, but that when the truth comes out, it would ultimately destroy the Jews."25
While astonishing in the credulity this displays for James Bond caliber conspiracy theories, it is a view not limited to isolated madrassas in South Asia. The Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Al-Gamei'a, who served until November as the representative of Al-Azhar University to the U.S. and as the Imam of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York City, was interviewed three weeks after September 11th by an unofficial University website. In the interview he reports back to his Egyptian audience that most Americans know or suspect that "the Jews were behind these ugly acts," but they won't admit to it in public because "the Zionists control everything--political decision making, the big media organizations, and the financial and economic institutions." The American public lacks the courage to speak out against this array of power. With Jews occupying all the key position of power in the U.S., he claims, this attack was not so difficult to stage. In a like manner, he goes on, the Jews have always ridden on the back of the world powers. "These people always seek out the superpower of the generation and develop coexistence with it. Before this, they rode on the back of England and on the back of the French empire." Moreover, he goes on, it is the Jews who are everywhere "disseminating corruption, heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs. Because of them there are strip clubs, homosexuals, and lesbians everywhere. They do this to impose their hegemony and colonialism on the world." He also tosses into this laundry list his having learned that some Jewish doctors are known to have poisoned sick Muslim children.26
While the hatred for the U.S. is formidable in Islamist circles, the hatred for Jews is monumental. When explanations are offered for it, they drift backward to the Jewish tribes in the Arabian Penninsula during the life of Muhammad. Typical of this would be an editorial that appeared in an Iranian newspaper associated with Seyed Ali Khamenei and the Council of Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, saying, "The history of the beginnings of Islam is full of Jewish plots against the Prophet Muhammad and of murderous attacks by the Jews…unequivocal verses in the Qur'an speak of the hatred and hostility of the Jewish people agains the Muslims."27
In one of the most influential tracts of the Islamist movement, The Neglected Duty, the Egyptian writer Abd al-Salam Faraj argues for a literal view of jihad (the power of the sword) as what was intended in the Qur'an and Hadith. Faraj draws on both of these ancient sources, as well as on important medieval jurists, to make his case for the religious duty of overthrowing corrupt regimes who fail to govern according to Shari'a. The actions of Muhammad and the first generation of his followers are treated as archetypes for how present political realities are to be interpreted and responded to. In three key sections, Faraj refers to Muhammad's dealings with the Jews. Twice he recounts how the Qurayzah (a Jewish tribe in Medina) had incited unbelievers against the Prophet and cooperated with an assault on Medina--an assault which ultimately failed due to the cunning of the Muslim command. The Qurayzah were seditious but cowardly and not very smart. The third reference is to the Nadir, another tribe of Jews in Medina, whom Muhammad suspected were plotting to kill him and promptly banished them from the oasis. They resisted, withdrew into their fortress, and only complied after Muhammad began burning down their date trees--which was a tremendous source of wealth in Arabia. Again, the Jews were treacherous, but no match for Muhammad.28
Another significant ideologue for the Islamists, Sayyid Qutb, after claiming that the Western imperialist states have been fighting against Islam for centuries, also ultimately points his finger at the Jews of Medina:
And let us not forget the role of worldwide Zionism in the plot against Islam and in uniting the forces against it both in the Crusaderist imperialist world and in the materialist communist world. It is the continuing role that the Jews have always played since the Hijrah of the Apostle to Medina and the founding of the Islamic state.29
Similarly, bin Laden, in his 1996 Declaration of War, recalls yet a third tribe of Jews in Medina, the Qainuqa, who had humiliated a Muslim woman and in response Muhammad broke his treaty with the tribe, and banished them also from the city. Bin Laden cites this story as the grounds for viewing any treaty as dissolvable given sufficient reasons. In his 1998 interview, he remarks: "The enmity between us and the Jews goes far back in time and is deep rooted. There is no question that war between the two of us is inevitable." He assures his listeners that Islam will prevail over the Jews, "as the Messenger of Allah has promised us in an authentic prophetic tradition when He said the Hour of Resurrection shall not come before Muslims fight Jews and before Jews hide behind trees and behind rocks."30
Corroroborative Sacred Narratives
As with the Zionist settlers and the script they have found in the story of ancient Israel's conquest of Canaan, it appears the Islamists have found a script in the Qur'an and Hadith for their present hostility toward Jews. What is this story?31
After emigrating from Mecca in 622 to Medina during the hijra, Muhammad and his Companions entered treaties with the inhabitants of the oasis of Medina, promising them freedom in faith and property in exchange for a joint military pact. Medina consisted of a mixture of Arabs and Jews, and the Jews were organized into three large tribes--the Qaynuqa, Nadir, and Qurayzah--who resided in separate quarters of the oasis. At first the Jews adopted a tolerant, if not entirely friendly, attitude toward the new arrivals. Muhammad hoped that they would accept him as a prophet within their own tradition of monotheism--he even pointedly warned them to do so--but they refused and made it known that the age of the prophets was over, and that his appropriation of their history and forebears was illegitimate. The Jews, like some other inhabitants of Medina, were also threatened by the diminishment of their political position in the oasis with the arrival of the charismatic Muhammad and his Companions.
The first incident between Muhammad and the Jews occurred two years after the hijra in the bazaar of the Qaynuqa quarter, when a Jewish goldsmith furtively pinned the skirt of a squatting Muslim customer to her upper garment so that when she stood she was exposed. A fight broke out on the scene and both a Jew and a Muslim were killed. Muhammad arrived to arbitrate the dispute, but the Jews refused, withdrew behind the walls of their sector, and attempted to conspire with their Arab allies to join them in a rebellion against Muhammad. Their allies refused, and they found themselves alone and besieged by the forces of Muhammad. After two weeks they surrendered, Muhammad banished them from the oasis, and they migrated north and settled with other Jews on the Syrian border and along the way.32
The second incident happened two years later and involved the Nadir tribe.33 Muhammad had been warned by God that the Jews of Nadir intended to drop a rock on his head from a rooftop to kill him as he rested outside against the wall of one of their houses. He stood up from this spot, returned home, and sent an emissary to the Nadir notifying them that because of their treachery in plotting to kill him, his treaty with them was over, and they must leave the oasis. While they contemplated their response, one of Muhammad's Arab enemies in Medina met with them and offered his support (along with his forces). The Nadir then refused Muhammad's ultimatum and hunkered down in their stronghold waiting for their allies to make a move. This never happened, and after two weeks of the siege on the Nadir, Muhammad ordered his men to cut down and burn their date trees--a primary source of their tribal economy. With this the Nadir surrendered, and Muhammad banished them from Medina. They loaded their camels with as much as they could carry and migrated north to the existing Jewish settlement of Khaybar. Some travelled further to Syria.
The third incident involved the Qurayzah tribe five years after the hijra. The Meccans and their allies were marching to Medina with the intention of dealing the Muslims a decisive blow. Muhammad caught wind of it, and realizing his forces were outnumbered he instructed the umma to dig a long and deep trench on the northern edge of the oasis. This trench gave Medina an advantage because it inhibited a charge of the enemy's cavalry. The Meccans settled for a siege of the city, which they attempted to intensify by persuading the Qurayzah, who occupied the southern flank of the city, to conspire with them and invade Medina from within. Through some very clever espionage, Muhammad undermined this pact, and with a change in the weather, the Meccan confederacy went home. It was then clear to all that the Qurayzah had betrayed the umma and now had no allies to come to their rescue. Muhammad ordered a siege, the Qurayzah were surrounded, and after a month they opened negotiations with the Muslims, sending word that they were willing to leave Medina and never return, just as had been the arrangement with the Qaynuqa and Nadir tribes, and then they surrendered. The Muslim forces entered the fortress, handcuffed all the men, and isolated the women and children. Allies of the Muslims, the al-Aws, who had formerly been allied with the Qurayzah pleaded with Muhammad for leniency. Muhammad agreed to let one of the al-Aws pass judgment on the Qurayzah, and they sent for one of their elders who had recently been wounded at the Battle of the Trench. When he arrived he announced, "The men should be killed, the property divided among the Muslim warriors, and the women and children taken as captives." Muhammad pronounced that he had judged rightly, ordered that trenches be dug in the main bazaar of Medina, had the men brought out in batches, beheaded them, and buried them in the trenches.34 Between six and seven hundred Qurayzah men were thus killed, and, in the words of Muhammad's biographer Saifur Rahman al-Mubarakpuri, the "hot beds of intrigue and treachery were thus exterminated once and for all." Medina had been emptied of the last of its three powerful Jewish tribes, although smaller groups of Jews did remain and lived there in peace.
A final incident occurred the following year. About seventy miles north of Medina was the oasis of Khaybar, with rich soil, flourishing date groves, fruit orchards and seven fortresses. Khaybar was predominantly Jewish, and many of the Qaynuqa and Nadir who fled Medina had settled there. It was, according to Mubarakpuri, "a hotbed of intrigue and conspiracy" against the umma; in fact, in the estimation of Mubarakpuri, "the continual afflictions that the Muslims had sustained were primarily attributable to the Jews" in Khaybar. Following the Hudaybiyah Peace Treaty, which had dispirited many Muslims because it prohibited them from entering Mecca that year, Muhammad decided it was time to take an army of six hundred men up to Khaybar and settle his affairs with the Jews who lived there, eliminating the Jewish influence in the Arabian Penninsula once and for all. When Muhammad arrived, the Jews withdrew to their fortresses, "too cowardly to meet the Muslims in open fight," according to Mubarakpuri, "but rather hurled a shower of arrows and stones on the attackers." The Muslims finally gained entry to the first fortress through the use of battering rams, whereupon "the Jews were put to rout and fled in all directions leaving behind their women and children." The siege of Khaybar lasted one month, the forts falling one by one. Many of the Jewish men were killed when the forts were breached, and the women were captured and divided up among the Muslim warriors, who were prohibited by Muhammad from having intercourse with those who were pregnant. During the latter stages of the siege, when it was clear they could not win, the remaining Jews surrendered and asked Muhammad if they might be allowed to stay and continue farming the land on the condition that half of their date crop be given to the Muslims. Muhammad agreed to these terms. He took possession of the oasis of Khaybar, allowed the Jews to remain as sharecroppers, and left them with the provision that "if we wish to expel you we will expel you."
This was an important turning point for the umma. The spoils taken at Khaybar and the sharecropping arrangement resulted in a new and ongoing affluence for the Muslims.35 It also marked the end of any political threat that the Jews of Arabia had posed. Within a few years, the Jews that were left in Khaybar emigrated out of the Penninsula. It is true that small communities of Jews remained in Arabia, on relatively friendly terms with the Muslim majority. They stopped conspiring and Muhammad and his Companions stopped besieging them.
Contemporary Islamists like bin Laden, Faraj, and Qutb draw many lessons from these ancient stories. Taken together, they portray Jews as condescending, wealthy, quarrelsome, breachers of treaties, treacherous conspirers, inept and cowardly warriors, and corrupters of divine revelation. In the sequence of incidents narrated above, Muhammad is seen to adopt different methods of dealing with politically powerful Jews who behaved in these ways. They can be put under siege, their means of production can be destroyed, they can be forced into exile, massacred, or dispossessed and turned into sharecroppers. Those who convert can be assimilated. Those who refuse to convert but do relinquish any ambition to political power can be tolerated and allowed to practice their faith, if they pay an additional tax.
Bernard Lewis has observed that historically, by and large, Jews have received better treatment in Muslim lands than in Christian lands. He argues that this has much to do with the fact that Muslims know that their founder won his battle against the Jews and humiliated them. In the Qur'an and Hadith there are an abundance of passages describing the Jews as hostile and malevolent. But their hostility was ineffective and they were put in their place. Consequently, until relatively recently, the prevailing opinion of Muslims towards Jews had to do with their unimportance in the great scheme of things--they were "weak and ineffectual--an object of ridicule, not fear."
The establishment of a Jewish state on land that had been in the hands of Muslims since the seventh century (except for the ninety years when it was controlled by the Crusaders) forced a reassessment of this long-held belief in the political impotence of the Jews. Coming to terms with this has brought these otherwise submerged stories of Muhammad's dealings with the Jews of Medina and Khaybar bobbing back up to the surface as crucial acts of statecraft by the founder. Whereas for centuries these stories served as reminders that Jews were no longer a force to be reckoned with, they have now resurfaced as stories about the threat that Jews eternally pose to the umma. And they are now functioning as archetypes for the Islamists as they seek to know their enemy and how this enemy is to be vanquished.
Sacrifice
In his book, Terror in the Mind of God, Mark Juergensmeyer argues that the causal relationship between religion and violence can move in either direction. Religion can give rise to violence; violence can revive interest in religion.37 In the two accounts offered above, it is my sense that it is violence that has reached out to religion for support. In both cases, founding myths were identified which have served to justify and intensify the resolve of those committing the violence, and to recruit others to the cause. The messianic Zionists discovered in their scriptures a justification for their claim on a Promised Land cleansed of all non-Jewish elements, and a spectrum of militant means to accomplish this. The radical Islamists discovered in their scriptures a justification for their suspicion that the Jews are behind the failure of their aspirations to build a Shari'a-governed state, and a spectrum of militant means to overcome this. Those same founding myths have been available to Jews and Muslims for centuries, but have not, until now, found an audience prepared to use them as weapons. They are very violent narratives, sanctioning deportations and genocide, but they rested until circumstances stirred them from their slumbers. It is not fair to say religion is the driving force behind the violence of these particular movements, but it is fair to say that genuine, and quite dangerous, elements of Judaism and Islam have been appropriated to justify the wars these groups are waging, and quite effectively.
Juergensmeyer also suggests that when individuals feel threatened or belittled at the deepest core of their identity, they are tempted to turn to religion to explain how this has come to pass. Religion provides a cosmology, history, and eschatology to explain their suffering. If they can then sacralize the struggle and come to understand it as reflecting a more encompassing cosmic struggle between forces of good and evil, or between forces of the elect and forces of the scorned, it becomes easier to legitimize violence, even terrorism.38
But it is not so much that religion is violent; it is that we are violent. Human beings are violent. Our religions take account of this and, for the most part, moderate the violence of which we are capable. They channel it into actions that are less destructive, by placing it within a universe of symbols that are, upon inspection, designed to restrain violence. The literary theorist René Girard has written incisively about this. Human beings are creatures who covet--we desire what our neighbor has. This leads to a rivalry for the object we desire because our neighbor intends to keep it for herself, and "will not let someone snatch it away without combat." Consequently, our desire will be thwarted, but in place of accepting this and moving on to another object, "nine times out of ten" our desire will simply become more intent upon acquiring this object. Our neighbor, noting our desire, and thus the desirability of what she has, becomes even more determined to keep it. This results in a spiralling of desire and ultimately in violence. Magnified onto society this becomes what Thomas Hobbes described as the war of all against all.39 But before we all kill each other and the community to which we belong is ripped apart by our aggression, the idea arises to redirect all of our hostility away from each other and onto a third party, a surrogate victim who cannot reciprocate our aggression--a scapegoat. This is the origin of all rituals of sacrifice, according to Girard, and is the unique contribution of religion. It is, in fact, the birth of religion. At an early stage in virtually all religions can be found traces of human sacrifice that served the purpose of transferring onto a single unlucky victim all of "the internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community."40 Over time religions managed to propose substitutes for human victims, replacing them with animal sacrifices, and, at an even later stage of development, with abstract symbols of sacrifice. The great achievement in this was that instead of neighbor murdering neighbor and the endless feuding that would follow, a regulated system of substitutionary sacrifice was developed.
Evidence that Girard cites for this is the pervasiveness of symbols of violence in the central rituals of virtually every religious tradition. Consider the Abrahamic faiths: Jewish Passover recalls the sacrifice of both lambs and Egyptian firstborn on the eve of the Israelites' departure from Egypt; Christian Easter has at its core a crucified, bleeding God, whose body believers consume in every Eucharist; the Ramadan fast of Muslims was instituted to commemorate the battle of Badr, Muhammad's first military victory. The violent sacrifice of life which solidified each community of faith is the subtext of all three. As Girard expresses it, "The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric."41 Moreover, by ritualizing these original sacrifices, the cohesiveness that sacrifice produces does not require an actual ongoing spilling of blood. This is the manner in which religions moderate the violence toward which we humans are inclined.
Nevertheless, this primitive impulse to find surrogate victims onto whom we might transfer our hostilities remains a temptation. When calamity strikes, when social tensions are high, or when one's cultural identity has been insulted, scapegoating is an impulsive response. It was in the attempt to ameliorate tensions between eastern and western Christianity that the idea of launching a Crusade against the Muslims was conceived. During the Crusades, when Christians and Muslims were at war with each other, both sides made it a regular practice to massacre entire villages of Jews. Under the vindictive terms of the armistice following the first world war, Germany sought to alleviate its social turmoil through the genocide of its Jewish population. It was in the weeks following frustrating treaty negotiations with his opponents in Mecca that Muhammad conceived the campaign agains the Jews in Khaybar. In the U.S., every successive wave of immigrants has served as a scapegoat for whatever social crisis was occurring at the time.
In the case of Zionism it is worth contemplating whether longstanding tensions between Christians and Jews in Europe and Russia ultimately resulted in the scapegoating of the Arabs in Palestine. The Christians in Europe and Russia were too formidable an opponent to be taken on directly by the Jews. As Girard explains the scapegoating mechanism: "The real source of victim substitution is the appetite for violence that awakens in people when anger seizes them and when the true object of their anger is untouchable."42 Similarly, the vilification of the Jews that can be seen in Islamist writings may be a scapegoating response arising from the real center of the conflict, which is between a fragmented Islam and Western powers. It is worth making note of the fact that the last day of the Ottoman siege of Vienna was September 11, 1683. On the following day, the Catholic king of Poland, John Sobieski, routed the Turks and permanently reversed the encroachment of Islam into Europe. Many historians mark this as a tidal shift of world dominance between Islamic and Western civilizations. The symbolism of this anniversary is probably significant in our efforts to understand the grievances of the September 11th terrorists.43
Conclusion
The attacks of September 11th are horrific instances of terrorism in the name of religion. Following the twisted logic of the hijackers' minds, it is conceivable that in the minutes before they reached their targets they were praying in the cockpits that the sacrifice they were about to make of thousands of innocent lives would open a door in the firmament through which God would step into the world and restore justice. This is the logic of sacrifice: the shedding of innocent blood pleases the gods and restores order and peace to the community. Islam is not alone in this. There is a violent recessive gene in every religious tradition. Each religion has its militants and its own theological justifications for the use of violence. Each religion preserves a canon of warrior narratives to draw upon when it feels itself cornered or the victim of injustice. To take a sober view, there are times when it is appropriate to rehearse these narratives. An honest look at history cannot escape the fact that the best, most extensively humane periods of social order and civilization have required some passage either through war or the threat of war. But it is dangerous to rehearse these warrior narratives, and to make use of them as archetypes for our own behavior, in isolation from conflicting narratives of divine mercy and common grace. It must be remembered that with each cycle of violence a new cohort of victims is created. While we cannot close our eyes to the multiple accounts in both the Bible and the Qur'an that the God of Abraham reportedly authorized the slaughter and humiliation of whole cities of both Canaanites and Jews, this same God took an intense and abiding interest in the innocent victims of history and in teaching us the conditions that allow for peace to flourish and "justice to roll down like the waters" on behalf of all victims. We must pick our way through these incongruous scripts and injunctions, and rely on our faith that God is, indeed, good, just, and trustworthy.
ENDNOTES
1. It is worth pointing out that while Hamas (the "Islamic Resistance Movement") was founded by Muslims, it is now composed of both Muslims and Christians who share the goal of securing rights for Palestinians. Thanks to my colleague Professor Jane Smith for drawing this to my attention.
2. In the words of Osama bin Laden, from a 1998 interview: "Our call is the call of Islam that was revealed to Muhammad. It is a call to all mankind. We have been entrusted with good cause to follow in the footsteps of the Messenger and to communicate his message to all nations….Allah created us to worship Him and to follow in his footsteps and to be guided by His Book. I am one of the servants of Allah and I obey his orders. Among those is the order to fight for the word of Allah ... and to fight until the Americans are driven out of all the Islamic countries….It is also our duty to send a call to all the people of the world to enjoy this great light and to embrace Islam and experience the happiness in Islam. Our primary mission is nothing but the furthering of this religion." See "Interview Osama bin Laden," May 1998 <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html> (cited 2 January 2002).
3. E.g., Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, who is described as Osama bin Laden's "spiritual mentor." He was born in the West Bank in 1941, received a Ph.D. in Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, taught in the 1970's at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and subsequently moved to Pakistan to further the cause of the jihad movement in Afghanistan. He is the author of Join the Caravan (1987), a book that inspired Muslims from around the world to fight on behalf of Afghanistan. Other clerics of the movement include Sheikh 'Abd al-Rahman, the mufti of the Egypt-based Tanzim al-Jihad; the Egyptian Sheikh Ahmad Isma'il; Sheikh Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, associated with Hizbullah in Lebanon; and Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, the founder of Hamas. See R. Scott Appleby, ed., Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
4. "Full Text of Notes Found After Hijackings," New York Times, September 29, 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/ 09/29/national/29SFULL-TEXT.html> (cited 20 December 2001).
5. I have in mind here various treatises and pamphlets written by Rashid Rida, Maulana Maudoodi, Sayyid Qutb, Abd al-Salam Faraj, and Abdullah Azzam.
6. Throughout this chapter the term "Islamist" will be used to refer to Islamic Fundamentalism, Radical Islam, or Islamic Extremism, as it is variously called. This is intended to give a name to an association of movements that identify themselves as Islamic and have a common ideology, e.g., to recast the social order along the lines of the Islamic Shari'a, bringing all areas of life under its rule, to overthrow regimes in Muslim countries that do not do so, to return to a purity of faith and practice that reflects the period of Muhammad and his Companions, and to resist Western influence and particularly its political, economic, and moral ideals and practices.
7. See Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World (New York: Anchor Doubleday Books, 1991); Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (New York: W.W.Norton, 1999); and Rodney Stark, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
8. Theodor Herzl, "The Jewish State," in The Zionist Idea, edited by Arthur Hertzberg (New York: Atheneum, 1959), 221.
9. Ibid., 225.
10. Ibid., 222.
11. Vladimir Jabotinsky, "Evidence Submitted to the Palestinian Royal Commission," in Hertzberg, 562.
12. Ibid., 569.
13. Quoted from Ben-Gurion's The History of the Haganah, in Colin Chapman, Whose Promised Land? (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1989), 49.
14. This interpretation of the provisional role of the state of Israel in the divine scheme of redemption is generally attributed to Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935).
15. Meir Kahane, quoted in Karen Armstrong, Holy War, 306.
16. Ellen Cantarow, "Gush Emunim: The Twilight of Zionism?" Media Monitors Network, February 27, 2001 <http://www.mediamonitors.net/cantarow1.html> (cited 18 December 2001).
17. Ibid.
18. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 52.
19. Ibid., 153.
20. Whether the indigenous people of Canaan were defeated or revolutionized into an egalitarian society by the appearance of Israel is debated by biblical historians and archaeologists. See Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh : A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B. C. E. (Maryknoll, N.Y. : Orbis Books, 1979). But on the face of it, the Bible records it as a clear defeat of the idolatrous peoples of Canaan. It is this mythological portrayal of what occurred, more than any historical reconstructions, that is relevant to my argument here.
21. E.g., the 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadeh government in Iran; support of Israel in 1967 war; opposition during the cold war to Islamic nationalism; support of repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt; and sanctions on Iraq following Gulf War.
22. Interview Osama bin Laden, Frontline.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Rick Bragg, "Shaping Young Islamic Hearts and Hatreds," New York Times, 14 October 2001, sec.A, p.1.
26. Interview dated October 4, 2001, translated from Arabic by the IMRA (IndependentMedia Review Analysis) <http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3> (cited 15 December 2001). According to Bernard Lewis, the word on the street is even more colorful and disturbing. Stories circulate through the Muslim world of Israelis deliberately infecting girls with AIDS and syphilis and packing them off to Egypt to spread the diseases. "They are also accused of supplying Egyptian women with hyper-aphrodisiac chewing gum which drives them into a frenzy of sexual desire, while at the same time selling hormonally altered fruit that kills male sperm." They are likewise charged with exporting carcinogenic shampoos and cucumbers. A French convert to Islam, Roger Garaudy, in his book, The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, offers a debunking of the founding myths that prop up Israel in the eyes of the West: the myth of Chosen People and Promised Land; the myth of Holocaust; and the myth of the modern Israeli miracle. He has been feted by governments and literary circles in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iran, and Egypt, including receiving the Egyptian Writers Award. See Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 265-268.
27. Jumhuri-I Islami (8 January 1998), quoted in Lewis, 265.
28. Abd al-Salam Faraj, The Neglected Duty, §108, 116, 117, 126. Translated by Johannes J.G. Jansen, in The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat's Assassins and the Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East (New York: MacMillan, 1986).
29. Sayyid Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, §8.74. Translated by William E. Shepard, in Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical Analysis of Social Justice in Islam (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 288.
30. Osama bin Laden, "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places," August 1996 < http://www.azzam.com/html/articlesdeclaration.htm> (cited 12 December 2001).
31. Narration of the following events is a compilation of materials drawn from A. Guillaume's The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah (London: Oxford University Press, 1955); Karen Armstrong's Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992); Muhammad Husayn Haykal, The Life of Muhammad, translated by Isma'il Razi A. al-Faruqi <http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/books/MH_LM> (cited 3 January 2002); and Saifur Rahman al-Mubarakpuri, The Sealed Nectar: Memoirs of the Noble Prophet, translated by Issam Diab <http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Books/SM_tsn> (cited 3 January 2002).
32. Surah 5 was revealed during the period of the Qaynuqa uprising, and much of this surah serves as an interpretation of the Jews refusal to recognize Muhammad as an apostle of God, just as their predecessors had failed to grasp the prophethood of Moses, and had subsequently confounded the teachings he had given them. Moreover, the Jews, according to this surah, had refused to believe and had put to death many of God's messengers before Muhammad. In the depiction of Jews here the emphasis is on their stubborness and treachery, and their habit of making "a jest and a pastime" of true religion.
33. Surah 59 was written in reference to this episode.
34. Surah 33 contains the revelations to Muhammad that pertain to this event. "He brought down from among their strongholds those who had supported them from among the People of the Book and cast terror into their hearts, so that some you slew and others you took captive. He made you masters of their land, their houses, and their goods, and of yet another land on which you had never set foot before" (33:26-27).
35. Surah 48 contains references to the Khaybar campaign, such as "God has promised you rich booty, and has given you this with all promptness. He has stayed your enemies' hands, so that He may make your victory a sign to true believers" (48:20).
36. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 129.
37. Juergensmeyer, 161.
38. Ibid., 162f.
39. René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, translated by James G. Williams (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2001), 8.
40. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 7.
41. Ibid., 8.
42. Girard, Satan, 156.
43. Juergensmeyer suggests that there is this dramatic aspect to terrorism--anniversaries are crucial to understanding the message of the action: "To capture the public's attenion through an act of performance violence on a date deemed important to the group perpetrating the act, therefore, is to force the group's sense of what is temporally important on everyone else." See Juergensmeyer, 133.
