The Mullah

By Andrew Sullivan
The New Republic, March 19, 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11
By Dinesh D'Souza
Doubleday, 352 pages

Dinesh D'Souza believes that the defining new distinction in American politics is no longer between the economic right and the economic left. He holds that the real divide in the new century is between authority and autonomy, between faith-based politics and individual freedom. And in this struggle, D'Souza chooses his own side. He is at war with the modern West.

D'Souza argues that there are only two choices for a human being to make now with respect to core beliefs: traditional morality and what he calls liberal morality. Traditional morality, in D'Souza's view, "is based on the notion that there is a moral order in the universe, which establishes an enduring standard of right and wrong. All the major religions of the world agree on the existence of this moral order." Liberal morality consists in the right of the individual to choose for him- or herself what morality is. It is about "autonomy, individuality, and self-fulfillment as moral ideals."

The Enemy at Home is an exploration of what theoconservatism really requires. It demands that individual autonomy be sacrificed for obedience to the external moral order. Theoconservatism refuses to accept the notion that government can be neutral with respect to morality.

For D'Souza, America has become a country dedicated to the values of "secularism, feminism, homosexuality, prostitution, and pornography." Guided by the cultural left, America is increasingly seen as "a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill."

D'Souza believes that cultural globalization is the last chance for theoconservatism in its death match with liberal modernity. If a majority of Americans do not support a system of government resting on an external and divine moral order, then the obvious next move is to enlist the billions of fundamentalist believers in the developing world to forge a global alliance. If you combine the premodern patriarchs among the Christians of Africa and Asia and the Muslims of the Middle East and pit them against the degenerate, declining individualists in the West, a global theoconservative victory is possible.

D'Souza asks how "we" can use the war on terror to win the culture war. He praises Islamism as a global ideology. Wahhabi Islam "is not a breeding ground of Islamic radicalism," he instructs. "It is a breeding ground of Islamic obedience. The essence of the Wahhabi doctrine is doctrinal and social conservatism." From D'Souza's point of view, what's not to like?

D'Souza finds much to admire in the Islamist critique of the West. Islamists "stress that if the West has solved the economic problem, it has not solved the moral problem. Although Islam may not be relevant in creating prosperity or military success, it is relevant in showing human nature the way to justice, goodness, and happiness." He cites Islamists as arguing that "Islam is best understood not in terms of obedience but rather in terms of voluntary submission to a divinely established moral order."

The separation of church and state is particularly vexing for D'Souza, as it is for the Christianist right in general. And when he looks at traditional Islamic societies, he sees a model for how America should be properly understood. Islamist societies are paragons of social meaning and cohesion. Women know their place; homosexuals are invisible; blasphemy is illegal; pornography is banned; modesty is enforced.

What D'Souza admires in particular is the absence of any space between the individual and the community's religious faith. He objects to the notion of a conscience that is somehow independent of an externally imposed moral code — that is more than a means for obedience. He quotes Bernard Lewis favorably: "Most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian."

For D'Souza, the great blessing of Islamic society is that liberalism as a political force does not exist. By liberalism, he means such doctrines as that men and women should have the same roles in society, or freedom of expression includes the right to publish material that is sexually explicit or blasphemous, or government should not seek to promote religion or legislate morality.

There is no mention in the book of the pathological anti-Semitism that currently accompanies these traditional Islamic societies. D'Souza is equally unperturbed by the fanatical hatred of homosexuality in traditional Islam. "The Koran describes homosexuals as people of the wrath of Allah,' and most Muslims find the notion of legitimizing what they perceive as sinful conduct to be disgusting and unspeakable," he writes. D'Souza routinely lists homosexual orientation alongside such acts as rape, adultery, and abortion.

In all of this, D'Souza is saying nothing that has not already been said on the theoconservative right. The Christianist base of the Republican Party strongly believes that the law can never attempt to be morally neutral; it believes passionately in fixed gender roles and the patriarchy of the traditional family; it opposes blasphemy and legal pornography; it wants no legal protections for gay couples.

Moreover, Islamism removes the separation of church and state that D'Souza sees as the fons et origo of America's moral pollution. He quotes Khaled Abou El Fadl, a distinguished Islamic thinker in Los Angeles: "A case for democracy presented from within Islam must accept the idea of God's sovereignty. It cannot substitute popular sovereignty for divine sovereignty but must instead show how popular sovereignty ... expresses God's authority, properly understood."

D'Souza is rehearsing the mainstream view of the religious right with respect to the notion of separating church and state. They oppose it, and so does he. But with what a twist! Where he differs from the religious right is in his willingness to find the proper political authority, the proper models of political virtue, in Islam. Islam and Christianity together: that is D'Souza's dream. He does not seem especially interested in God. His interest is in the uses of religion for social control.

The members of the Christianist right in America believe that Islam is a false faith, opposed to their own. Their awkward belief in the exclusive truth of their own revelation will certainly get in the way of their supporting an alliance of moral parity, or even an alliance of convenience, with a rival faith.

Similarly, most secular conservatives have understood the war on terror as in part a war against the more violent rigidities of Islam. Many such conservatives see the way in which women are treated in Muslim society as repulsive; they find the Nazi-like antisemitism evil, and the reflexive comfort with violence and lack of religious freedom in much of the Muslim world appalling.

D'Souza is well aware that most on the right will be reluctant to endorse the Muslim version of theoconservatism and so he had to sugar his Islamic medicine. He defends every action of the Bush administration in the war on terror and declares that the real enemy is the domestic left.

The central claim of The Enemy at Home is that American liberals — not Al Qaeda — caused September 11. D'Souza is not making the claim that, in some way, the cultural left was merely indifferent to the crime of September 11, seeing in it a merited blowback from America's foreign policy for the past several decades. D'Souza is making a far graver accusation against a much larger number of people.

D'Souza believes that the cultural left made 9/11 happen: "their actions and their America are responsible for fostering Islamic anti-Americanism in general and 9/11 in particular." American liberals are, in D'Souza's eyes, the real terrorists. Bin Laden is "a religious ideologue who has chosen terrorism as the most effective way to achieve his goals."

D'Souza framed his call for a globalized theoconservatism with this incendiary obscenity for other reasons. First and foremost, he wanted to gin up Pavlovian liberal shock. "Let the debate begin!" screamed the online ads. Alan Wolfe in the New York Times Book Review dutifully obliged, decrying the book's very existence and calling on decent conservatives to disown it. Bingo! It's on the New York Times best-seller list.

William F. Buckley Jr. and George Gilder, titans of the conservative intellectual establishment, united to defend their protégé. Gilder writes: "D'Souza raises the alarm that the anti-religious, sexual liberationist, anti-natalist and feminist thrust of American foreign, cultural, and free-speech global Internet policies threaten and estrange all the traditional cultures of the third world, whether Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Buddhist."

If law cannot be neutral between competing moral ideals, and if it must reflect God's will regardless of the views of religious minorities, then you can see why D'Souza is affronted by Turkey's secularism, and why he sees the Declaration of Independence as an essentially religious document. Any space for non-believers is, in the Islamist and Christianist view, an assault on belief itself. The notion that blasphemy, pornography, or homosexuality should be protected, let alone celebrated, is anathema to Islamists and Christianists alike.

American conservatism is now centrally dedicated to the proposition that secularism is the primary enemy, that the distinction between religion and politics is at heart a false one. Its problem is that it is also dedicated to a war against the most violent form of theocratic politics in recent decades, in the shape of Islamist terror.

D'Souza's book offers the army of the saints a last desperate bid to rescue what is beginning to look like a doomed adventure. The idea of fusing Islamism and Christianism on a global stage is is the obvious logical next step toward severing conservatism from its roots in the post-Enlightenment world and welding it permanently to an older, premodern vision of mankind and religion.
 

The Enemy

By Jonah Goldberg
Claremont Review of Books, March 22, 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11
By Dinesh D'Souza
Doubleday, 352 pages

Dinesh D'Souza's argument is that American licentiousness — not our alliance with Israel, or U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, or any of the other more familiar complaints — is fostering radical Islamic anti-Americanism. It's about the decadent culture that we foist upon the rest of the world.

D'Souza is largely right as far as his argument goes. The problem is that it doesn't go nearly as far as he thinks it does. But let us at least acknowledge that he is surely correct that many Muslims are disgusted by the American spectacle, just as many are fascinated, titillated, and enticed by it — sometimes all at once.

D'Souza tries to dispel competing explanations for jihad. For example, he says several times that Islamists don't hate democracy; in fact they've embraced it. But as he concedes, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah have only called for more democracy because they know "their group can win." Embracing elections so you can gain power and keep it permanently is not quite the same thing as embracing democracy.

Many of D'Souza's arguments are equally problematic. He pooh-poohs President Bush's statement that "they hate our freedoms" and complains that the Islamists aren't "anti-modern." The 9/11 hijackers had considerable technological expertise, he notes. But this is a fairly pinched argument about what constitutes "modernism." Nazi ideologues embraced technology, too, from poison gas and V2 rockets to the Autobahn and the X-ray machine. But they also subscribed to a deeply reactionary vision of the pre-Christian, pre-Enlightenment German soul.

President Bush was right. They do hate our freedom. Indeed, even our support of Israel — which as D'Souza notes baffles many in the Middle East — is in the end the result of our freedom. Free countries support free countries.

The Islamists reportedly proselytize with the slogan "Islam is the solution." For some on the Right the mantra is "Islam is the problem." They will not stomach D'Souza's fine distinctions between good Muslims and bad ones. The use of the word "dhimmi" is a good example. Muslims use this term to describe non-Muslims who agree to live under the yoke of Islamic rule and Sharia law. Some right-wingers have begun using it in much the same way their counterparts in previous eras referred to "collaborators," "Commie symps," or "fellow travelers."

Dinesh D'Souza should be congratulated for starting from the premise that not every Muslim is our enemy simply because he is Muslim. The West can't get rid of Islam, nor should it try to. Unlike Communism, which ran against the traditional grains of the societies it conquered, Islam is the tradition of these societies. Unfortunately, D'Souza's analysis doesn't succeed at finding a defensible middle ground.
 

AR  (2007) I find nothing whatever in D'Souza's arguments that I can sympathize with. Truly a load of ordure.