The Sept. 11 Canon: Week 1
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StumbleUponI agree: Armstrong's book is an appetizer, an unsatisfying dish that makes you hungry for more. That's the nature of such a short book on such a large topic, and I found myself wishing that she had narrowed her focus. As you note, too much of the book reads like an encyclopedia entry, crammed with facts but difficult to wade through. Having said that, I turned to this book soon after Sept. 11 because of the "short" promise of its title. I wanted breadth and not depth, and I wanted it fast. In that sense, the book succeeds.
You complain that Armstrong focuses too much on politics, but that reflects the theme of her book, the idea she continually revisits to tie the "one damn fact after another" together: To Muslims, the political is sacred, history is sacramental, and the (impossible) dream of a perfect Islamic state is the equivalent of the Christian yearning for the coming of the Kingdom of God. To Muslims, Armstrong writes, "state affairs were not a distraction from spirituality but the stuff of religion itself," and politics was "the theatre of their religious quest."
Armstrong didn't intend this, but in the aftermath of Sept. 11, in some ways that's as nightmarish as anything in Germs. I was scared whenever I came across sentences like these (emphasis mine):
"If state institutions did not measure up to the Quranic ideal, if their political leaders were cruel or exploitative, or if their community was humiliated by apparently irreligious enemies, a Muslim could feel that his or her faith in life's ultimate purpose and value was in jeopardy."
The "quest for an ideal form of Muslim government should not be viewed as aberrant but as an essentially and typically religious activity."
Is this a holy war? I hope not. But Armstrong's book—quite unintentionally—makes it clear why some (or even many) Muslims might view it as one. If the political is sacramental, any war can be construed as a holy war. Victory provides evidence that God was on your side. (It's not an outrageous concept. Kurt Warner seems to believe that Jesus Christ wants the St. Louis Rams to win the Super Bowl. It seems less ridiculous to believe that God wants you to prevail in a conflict that takes place off the football field.)
Perhaps recognizing the dangers in such an inherently political theology, Armstrong prescribes as much as she describes. She's sympathetic to the virtues of religion (as am I), and she wants Islam to promote the virtues she favors. She emphasizes the Quranic ideals of social justice and religious tolerance. She notes that the Quran grants women the rights of inheritance and divorce. She pooh-poohs more restrictive traditions that arose a few generations after Muhammad's death. She insists that the Islamic ideal of tawhid—the divine unity of the personal and the social—doesn't preclude secular governments.
Maybe so. But there's still enough in Armstrong's book to keep you up at night. Bernard Lewis notes, in a book we'll discuss later, that it took centuries of bloody religious warfare for Christendom to recognize the value of the separation of church and state. Let's hope Islam doesn't need as much convincing.
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Notes From The Fray Editor:
Jamal Thalji calls for books by Arabic authors. ADAS says that "the charge of excessive attention to 'politics' is thrown at all established religions…[and] is, of course, usually true…To say that Islam's success is knotted to its politics is just to say that it was successful." BML looks at Islamic history here, while Uno Who is reading Tom Clancy, and wondering who else is.
Comments:
Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult, tried to use biological agents in a terror attack in some of Japan's most densely populated cities. The cult's membership included technicians and other people with graduate-school-level training in biochemistry, biology, etc. They were nonetheless unable to deliver their weapons, so they opted instead for sarin gas (which they also basically botched).
While I do believe that some of the biowar doomsday scenarios are plausible and worth taking extreme measures to guard against, I also think that it is perhaps more difficult to deliver these weapons than is popularly portrayed. During World War I, one of the earliest uses of chemical weapons backfired heavily when the wind shifted and the chlorine gas blew back toward the Germans.
Finally, I think that a suicide "bio-bomber" may be less of a threat than a hijacker for psychological and religious reasons. Dying in an instant of fire is a much more "religiously" appealing way to go. Dying slowly of a self-induced plague doesn't seem quite so, well, glamorous, and probably not as impressive to God.
--Ananda Gupta
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The U.S. abandoned its biological warfare program because of its difficulty in use as a controllable weapons system and as a public relations exercise to improve the U.S.'s image during the Vietnam War. Nixon said at the time that he was unconcerned about the U.S. not having such weapons systems since they would nuke anyone that used such weapons against the U.S. During the Gulf War the U.S. government warned Iraq that it would retaliate massively (the implication being the use of nuclear weapons) if the Iraqis used chemical or biological weapons.
The tragedy of U.S. policy is that they have spent a tremendous amount of money on weapons systems for wars which it will probably never fight, but did so little to protect Americans from much more likely terrorist scenarios including biological terrorism. There are many clever, sophisticated, well-funded and ruthless people in the world who can and will develop the technology to use these weapons. New Missile Defense is a complete waste of money since it is beyond belief that any government will ever launch these weapons against the U.S., but horrific bio-terrorism is almost a certainty in the future.
--Martin Kannengieser
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(11/8)