Blind Faiths

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
New York Times, January 6, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

The Suicide of Reason
Radical Islam’s Threat to the Enlightenment
By Lee Harris
Basic Books, 290 pages

Lee Harris considers the very worst possibility — the destruction of the West by radical Islam. There is a sense of urgency in his writing, a desire to shake awake the leaders of the West, to confront them with their failure to understand that they are engaged in a war with an adversary who fights by the law of the jungle.

Harris distinguishes between two kinds of fanaticism. The first is Islamic fanaticism, a formidable enemy in the struggle for cultural survival. In Harris’s view, this fanaticism has acted as a defense mechanism, shielding Islam from the pressures of the changing world around it and allowing it to expand.

Harris attempts to make the case that the entry of Islam into another culture produces changes on every level: “Wherever Islam has spread, there has occurred a total and revolutionary transformation in the culture of those conquered or converted.”

Harris views Islamic imperialism as a single-minded expansion of the religion itself; the empire that it envisions is governed by Allah. In this sense, the idea of jihad is less about the inner struggle for peace and justice and more about a grand mission of conversion.

The expansion of Islam is perhaps more potent than the expansion of the Christian empires because the concept of separating the sacred from the profane has never been acceptable in Islam the way it has been in Christianity.

Harris argues that the Muslim world, since it is governed by the law of the jungle, makes group survival paramount. This explains in part the willingness of Muslims to become martyrs for the larger community, the umma. According to Harris, this sense of solidarity is sustainable only with the weapon of fanaticism, which obligates each member of the umma to convert infidels and to threaten those who attempt to leave with death.

The second fanaticism Harris calls a fanaticism of reason. Reason blinds Western leaders to the true nature of Islamic-influenced cultures. Westerners see these cultures merely as different versions of the world they know, with dominant values similar to those espoused in their own culture. Harris argues this is a fatal mistake.

Liberals and conservatives alike share this misperception. While left and right may disagree on the causes and the remedies, they both overlook the fanaticism inherent in Islam itself. Driven by their blind faith in reason, they interpret the problem in a way that is familiar to them.

Harris argues that fanaticism is the basic principle in Islam. The collective is emphasized above the individual and his freedoms. A good Muslim must forsake all: his property, family, children, even life for the sake of Islam. Boys are taught to be dominating and merciless, which has the effect of creating a society of holy warriors.

By contrast, the West has cultivated an ethos of individualism, reason and tolerance, in which every actor, from the individual to the nation-state, seeks to resolve conflict through words. The entire system is built on the idea of self-interest. This ethos rejects fanaticism.

The West has variously tried to convert, to assimilate and to seduce Muslims into modernity. Harris says none of these approaches have succeeded. But his arguments are not entirely sound. His use of the term “reason” is faulty.

Enlightenment thinkers argued that human reason is fallible. They understood that reason is a process of trial and error, the ability to learn from past mistakes. The Enlightenment cannot be fully appreciated without a strong awareness of just how frail human reason is.

Harris takes a Darwinian view of the struggle between clashing cultures, criticizing the West for an ethos of selfishness, and he follows Hegel in asserting that where the interest of the individual collides with that of the state, it is the state that should prevail. This is why he attributes such strength to Islamic fanaticism. Each Muslim is a slave, first of God, then of the caliphate.

Harris extols American exceptionalism together with Hegel as if there were no contradiction between the two. But what makes America unique, especially in contrast to Europe, is its resistance to the philosophy of Hegel with its concept of a unifying world spirit. It is the individual that matters most in the United States. And it is individuals who make cultures and who break them.

I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have traveled with them. And the multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

Harris is correct that many Western leaders are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason.

Both the Romantic movement and organized religion share a hostility to modernity. Moral and cultural relativism are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands.

It is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism. My reasons for reproaching today’s Western leaders are that I see them squandering a great opportunity to compete with the agents of radical Islam for the minds of Muslims. But to do so, they must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.

To argue that children born and bred in superstitious cultures that value fanaticism and create phalanxes governed by the law of the jungle is to ignore the lessons of the West’s own past. Many of the Westerners who were born into the law of the jungle have since become acquainted with the culture of reason and have adopted it. They are even willing to die for it.


Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and author of Infidel.
 

Jihad Then and Now

By Lee Harris
Hoover Institution, Oct-Nov 2006

Edited by Andy Ross

The Legacy of Jihad
Edited by Andrew Bostom
Prometheus Books, 759 pages

This book is written with a profound sense of urgency. Bostom, a professor of medicine at Brown who became a passionately committed scholar of Islam after 9/11, expresses the wish that his own children and their children may “thrive in a world where the devastating institution of jihad has been acknowledged, renounced, dismantled, and relegated forever to the dustbin of history by Muslims themselves.”

In our current climate of political correctness, there has been a reluctance even to acknowledge the most obvious facts about the nature of jihad. Just as there are Holocaust deniers, there is a tendency to deny the evidence relating to jihad. The jihad-deniers dispute that there is anything distinctive and peculiar about the Islamic concept of jihad.

Some have argued, for example, that the true meaning of jihad is the struggle within the soul of each Muslim to overcome his own failings and sins. On this view, jihad is a war declared by a Muslim upon himself and not upon infidels. It is a personal campaign akin to the classic and agonizing struggle of the Protestant with his own conscience.

Those who follow a religion are free to adapt its historical traditions. Modernizing revisions of traditional religious concepts can be useful in weaning the followers of a religion away from the primitive ethos out of which many ancient religions arose. For those who wish to see Muslims repudiate the classical tradition of jihad, it may be beneficial to encourage the illusion that jihad has always meant an internal struggle against sin or a fight for a just cause.

Bostom devotes a hundred pages of his book to an anthology of various Muslim commentators. He demonstrates beyond doubt that the historical institution of jihad did not mean a personal and individual struggle against evil or the nonviolent pursuit of a just cause, but rather a violent struggle by the entire Muslim community against those outsiders who were not Muslims.

By European standards, a just war is a war of self-defense or a war fought to preserve a stable balance of power. The concept is dependent on the acceptance of the legitimacy of a pre-existing status quo. What is unjust is any disturbance of this status quo, what is just is the attempt to restore it.

Bostom’s book dispels the notion that jihad is a just war in this sense. Islamic jihad, from its commencement, refused to recognize the legitimacy of any status quo other than that achieved in Dar el-Islam, or the domain of peace. Outside the domain of peace there was only the domain of war, and here no entity could hope to be treated as representing a legitimate order, for no order that was not based on Islamic law could ever be recognized as legitimate in the eyes of Muslims.

The concept of jihad does not fit the clash-of-civilizations paradigm that is so often used to describe the current world situation. In this model, no nation will embark on a course not merely of conquering another nation, but of transforming its culture into a replica of its own. Yet it is precisely the goal of jihad to destroy the status quo of those outside the ambit of Islam in order to expand its realm.

What is most striking about the collective project of jihad has been its immense success. Once Islamic culture sank in, it became virtually impossible for any foreign cultural influence to make any headway against it. Bostom devotes a large segment of his book to accounts of various historical jihads and provides overwhelming evidence of the fanaticism, brutality, and ruthlessness of the Muslim holy warriors.

Hitler’s wars of conquest provide another example of the failure of the clash-of-civilizations paradigm. Hitler was not interested in the balance of power or in preserving the status quo. His aim was to destroy both and to replace the old system with a New World Order. But in the case of jihad, there was always an alternative to subjugation and extermination — you could convert to Islam.

If a conqueror gives the conquered people a choice between becoming one of his kind on the one hand and being subjugated or liquidated on the other, he will gain an enormous advantage over those conquerors who do not offer such a choice. If those who choose to convert are looked upon as members of the community of the faithful and no longer as infidels, then there will be a powerful incentive to convert.

Another ingenious feature to jihad is the policy of offering special treatment to those whom Mohammed dubbed Peoples of the Book. While normal pagans were given the choice to convert or die, Jews and Christians were offered the choice between conversion to Islam and the acceptance of an inferior status within the community of Muslim believers, in which every aspect of public life was under the control of Islam.

The evidence Bostom provides demonstrates that jihad was a devastatingly effective institution. It succeeded in transforming whatever cultural traditions fell before it. Why would Muslims want to abandon jihad so long as it continues to work for them?

The revival of jihad is the essence of radical Islam, and this revival indicates that those who follow the path of radical Islam are by no means ready to dismantle their unique institution. On the contrary, it would appear that they are vigorously working to adjust it to the circumstances of Western modernity.

The spirit of jihad first emerged out of the plundering raids of Arab camel nomads who took whatever they wanted from those who were weaker. Under Omar a new project began. From that point on, the warlike bands lived off the labor of the peasants who had been the support of all the various empires that had emerged in the Levant. Yet the secret of the success of the Arab bands lay less in their own warlike qualities than in the weakness and decadence of the empires they overthrew.

For the Arab philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun, when a civilization becomes too sedentary, it becomes ripe for conquest by those who are still warlike and driven by a fanatical sense of mission. Superior wealth and superior civilization were no guarantee that those who possessed them could hold on to them in the face of small but determined bands of fanatics united by a sense of what he called group feeling.

If jihad were being used simply as a means of conducting Clausewitzian warfare, it would be a relic of the past. If Muslim civilization only decided to clash with ours, we could clash back, and with overwhelming military force. But the jihadists are not interested in winning in our sense of the word. They can succeed simply by making the present world order unworkable.

Consider the fall of the Weimar Republic. The Nazis elected to follow a policy designed to make the Weimar system incapable of governing through normal political channels. Before long a situation would be created in which liberal politics was no longer an option and the people, in desperation, would seek an alternative to the clogged and deadlocked machinery of the parliamentary system. For the Nazis, the politics of nihilism made perfect sense. Hating the system itself, they had no qualms about destroying it.

It is tempting to call this approach the crash of civilization. Those who take it want to destroy the status quo, and there is nothing those who represent and benefit from the status quo can do to bribe them or tempt them or seduce them away from pursuing their goal. Hitler refused to be paid off with anything less than appointment as chancellor of Germany.

It does not take a modern, sophisticated army to bring down a fragile and delicately balanced political order. The German army could easily have crushed the Nazi movement if it had been a question merely of brute force. But those who controlled the army did not want to risk the perilous descent into chaos that such a move would inevitably have entailed. Those who wished to overthrow the status quo were hoping for precisely such a descent into chaos.

The chief strength of any established order is order. It is always in the interest of the established order to avoid risking disorder. In the crash-of-civilization paradigm, the enemy of a particular established order needs only to make the established order reluctant to act out of fear. This fear of anarchy can be used to paralyze the political process.

On the clash-of-civilization model, the revival of jihad would not be threatening, but on the crash-of-civilization model things look quite different. The jihadists do not need to win a battle against the West. It is enough if they can force the West to choose between a dreaded plunge back into the law of the jungle and submission.
 

Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology

By Lee Harris
Hoover Institution, Aug-Sept 2002

Edited by Andy Ross

On September 11, 2001, Americans were confronted by an enigma so baffling that even nomenclature posed a problem. Was it a disaster, a criminal act, an act of war? Words failed, and all that was left behind was the bleak set of numbers, 9-11.

The common identification of 9-11 as an act of war arises from a deeper unquestioned assumption: An act of violence on the magnitude of 9-11 can only have been intended to further some kind of political objective. Surely people do not commit such acts unless they are trying to achieve some kind of recognizably political purpose.

Clausewitz defined war as politics carried out by other means. The whole point of war, on this reading, is to get other people to do what we want them to do.

But is this the right model for understanding 9-11? In what follows, I would like to pursue a line suggested by a remark by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in reference to 9-11: his much-quoted comment that it was "the greatest work of art of all time."

Stockhausen grasped a big truth: 9-11 was the enactment of a fantasy.

To an outside observer, the fantasist is clearly attempting to compensate by means of his fantasy for the shortcomings of his own present reality. But the fantasist often exercises great and terrible power precisely by virtue of his fantasy.

This power of the fantasist is entirely traceable to the fact that, for him, the other is always an object and never a subject. A subject, after all, has a will of his own. And anyone who is aware of this fact is automatically put at the disadvantage of knowing that other people have minds of their own and are not merely props to be pushed around.

Fortunately, the fantasizing individual is normally surrounded by other individuals who are not fantasizing or at least who are not fantasizing in the same way, and this fact puts a limit on how far most of us allow our fantasy world to intrude on reality.

But what happens when it is not an individual but an entire group — a sect, or a people, or even a nation? There is no doubt that for most of history such large-scale collective fantasies appear on the world stage under the guise of religion.

The theme of reviving ancient glory is an important key to understanding fantasy ideologies, for it suggests that fantasy ideologies tend to be the domain of those groups that feel that they are under attack from forces which, while more powerful perhaps than they are, are nonetheless inferior in terms of true virtue.

For us, belief is a purely passive response to evidence presented to us — I form my beliefs about the world for the purpose of understanding the world as it is. But this is radically different from what might be called transformative belief — the secret of fantasy ideology. For here the belief is not passive, but intensely active, and its purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it.

The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted as a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation — in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street.

The purpose of 9-11 was not to create terror in the minds of the American people but to prove to the Arabs that Islamic purity, as interpreted by radical Islam, could triumph. The terror is a by-product. Likewise, what al Qaeda and its followers see as central to the holy pageant of 9-11 — namely, the heroic martyrdom of the 19 hijackers — is interpreted by us as incidental to a larger strategic purpose, Clausewitzian war carried out in this case by suicide.

But in the fantasy ideology of radical Islam, suicide is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Seen through the distorting prism of radical Islam, the act of suicide is transformed into that of martyrdom — martyrdom in all its transcendent glory and accompanied by the panoply of magical powers that religious tradition has always assigned to martyrdom.

Acts of terror can be used to pursue genuine Clausewitzian objectives in precisely the same way that normal military operations are used, as was demonstrated during the Algerian war of independence. But this requires that the acts of terror be deployed with the same kind of strategic logic that applies to normal military operations. If you attack your enemy with an act of terror, you must be prepared to follow up on it immediately.

The symbolic drama enacted by al Qaeda on 9-11 was a great ritual demonstrating the power of Allah, a pageant designed to convey a message not to the American people, but to the Arab world. A campaign of smaller-scale acts of terror would have no glamour in it, and it was glamour — and grandiosity — that al Qaeda was seeking in its targets.

If this interpretation is correct, then it is time that we reconsider some of our basic policy in the war on terror. First, if our enemy is motivated purely by a fantasy ideology, it is absurd for us to look for the root causes of terrorism in poverty, lack of education, a lack of democracy, etc. Such factors play no role in the creation of a fantasy ideology.

Equally absurd is the notion that we must review our own policies toward the Middle East in order to find ways to make our enemies hate us less. There is no political policy we could take that would change the attitude of our enemies — short, perhaps, of a massive nationwide conversion to fundamentalist Islam.

Second, we need to reconsider the term "war" as it is currently deployed in this case. In the case of the war begun at Pearl Harbor, all the parties knew exactly what was at issue, and there was no need for media experts to argue over the "real" objective behind the attack. This was not remotely the case in the aftermath of 9-11. The issue facing the U.S. was not whether to accept or to reject al Qaeda's political demands.

We are fighting an enemy who has no strategic purpose — whose actions have significance only in terms of his own fantasy ideology. If they were at war with us, they would be compelled to start thinking realistically, in terms of objective factors such as overall strategic goals, war aims, and so forth. But because they are operating in terms of their fantasy ideology, such a realistic assessment is impossible for them. It matters not how much stronger or more powerful we are than they — what matters is that God will bring them victory.

The fantasy ideology of radical Islam is a form of magical thinking. Our "real" world is utterly secular, a concatenation of an endless series of cause and effect. But the "real" world of radical Islam is different — its fantasy ideology reflects the same philosophical occasionalism that pervades so much of Islamic theology. Event B does not happen because it is caused by a previous event A. Instead, event A is simply the occasion for God to cause event B, so that the genuine cause of all events is God. If God is willing, the United States and the West could collapse at any moment.

This element of magical thinking does not make al Qaeda any less dangerous. For it is likely that in al Qaeda's collective fantasy there may exist the notion of an ultimate terror act, a magic bullet capable of bringing down the United States at a single stroke — for example the detonation of a very unmagical nuclear device.

In the initial aftermath of 9-11, President Bush continually spoke of al Qaeda not as terrorists, but as "evildoers" — a term for which he was widely derided by those who found it offensively simple-minded and childish. Evildoers, after all, are characters out of fairy tales, not real life.

Bush's critics were right in observing the fairy-tale provenance of the phrase "evildoer" but wrong in denouncing Bush's use of it. For, whether by instinct or by cunning, Bush struck exactly the right note. Bush instinctively saw 9-11 as the acting out of demented fantasy. When confronted with the enigma of 9-11 he was able to avoid the temptation of trying to interpret it in terms of our own familiar categories and traditions.

Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers' point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You behave with them as you would deal with a fatal epidemic — you try to wipe it out.


Lee Harris lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia. After years spent pursuing diverse interests, including a stint at divinity school, several years writing mystery novels and a career as a glazier, he began writing philosophical articles that captured the imagination of readers all over the world.