Terrorism: Is it about religion or not, or not not?

By Martin Amis
The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

America has already suffered a terrorist deployment of weapons of mass destruction. This attack began on September 18, 2001. The cost in blood was five dead and 17 seriously infected. The cost in treasure was over a billion dollars (the cost to the perpetrator was estimated to be as little as $2,500). A third impact was the cost in fear. Anthrax is not contagious, but fear is. The scale of the attack was minuscule, yet for a while the terror filled the sky.

One aircraft dispensing one ton of anthrax spores on a clear calm night over an area of 300 sqare kilometers could kill up to three million people.

September 18 was very cheap, very terrifying, and hideously elusive. It entrained over 9,000 interrogations and 6,000 grand-jury subpoenas, and the case is not yet closed.

Both President Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are religious, were very quick to say that September 11 was "not about religion." It then subsequently emerged that September 11 was about religion — or, at least, was not not about religion. But in the last year or two, it seems, we have gone back to saying that September 11, and March 11 Madrid (2004), and July 7 London (2005), and all the rest, are not about religion.

The two most stimulating international terrorism-watchers known to me are John Gray and Philip Bobbitt. Bobbitt is a proactive and muscular Atlanticist, whereas Gray is almost Taoist in his skepticism and his luminous passivity. Bobbitt is religious and Gray is reconciled to the inexorability of religious belief. They assert, respectively, that international terrorism is "not about Islam" and has "no close connection to religion."

Al Qaedaism, for them, is an epiphenomenon, a dark child of globalization. It is devolved, decentralized, privatized, outsourced and networked. Globalization created great wealth and also great vulnerability. Thus the epiphenomenon is not about religion but about human opportunism and the will to power.

Then what, you may be wondering, was all that talk about jihad and infidels and crusaders and madrasas and sharia and the umma and the caliphate? There are several reasons for hoping that international terrorism isn't about religion — not least of them the immense onerousness of maintaining a discourse that makes distinctions between groups of human beings. Al Qaedaism may well evolve into not being about religion, about Islam. But one's faculties insist that it is not not about religion yet.

Suicide bombing is a cult. Religion may be merely a means of mobilization. Religion is for the footsoldiers, not the masterminds. At some later date we may see that religion provided the dialectical staircase to indiscriminate death and destruction with the idea, for instance, that democracy inculpates every citizen in its nation's policies, or with the ancient heresy of takfir, whereby the jihadi pre-absolves himself of killing fellow Muslims.

We can further expect international terrorism to become much more diffuse in its motivations, reflecting changes in the contemporary self. Gray has identified a vein of "anomic terrorism" inspired by alienation, as evident in the random and serial stabbings in the cities of Japan, or the campus massacres in the U.S. Bobbitt says that the current conflicts reflect a shift in the polities of the West. As the welfare state evolves into the market state, it abandons many of its responsibilities to its citizenry, and concentrates on the provision of opportunities to the individual.

By some accounts it took the Ayatollah Khomeini several nauseous years of war with Iraq before he came to see the theological viability of nuclear fission (and the groundwork was then begun). Osama bin Laden: "It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God."

There is another good reason for wanting international terrorism to stop being about religion. One can think of scenarios of extortion and ransom, but only an eschatological dream could justify the clear calm night and the three million dead. On the other hand, the actors would unquestionably make an impression.
 

AR  I have taken the liberty of editing Martin's prose more drastically than he would like because evidently no-one else now dares to. Trimmed and shorn, his argument is emotively powerful but disquietingly silent about suggesting the robust survivalism we need here. However, I like his rhetorical play with the distinction between the respective assertions of X, not X, and not not X. This distinction is crucial to the intuitionist initiative in logic and the foundations of mathematics, and exercised me greatly some decades ago.