Islamist rhetoric as Crusader logic

Crusades are reciprocal warfare: Crusader logic is matched by Islamist, or Islamic extremist, rhetoric. Islamists claim to speak on behalf of eternal Qu'ranic values, even though they do not speak for all Muslims, nor do they speak in unity. Militant Muslims are a fractious minority. The sine qua non of Islamic belief is "No god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God." Once a person has made that affirmation with total sincerity, he or she becomes a Muslim. For most Muslims, the very next obligations after professing faith are peaceful: prayer, fasting, almsgiving and perhaps pilgrimage. Islamic observance is a rigorous daily regimen, yet for the militant minority of Muslims, it is not enough to say "No god but God." For the militant Muslim minority, the necessary sequel to professing the faith is defending the faith. Instead of daily prayer, almsgiving, fasting or pilgrimage, the next step required of all believers in Allah and his last prophet, Muhammad, is to wage war, holy war, or jihad.

Militant Muslims are in effect Crusaders for Allah. They are everything to the Crusaders that the Crusaders are to them: unflinching warriors of the faith. They embrace the term jihad as holy war. They project themselves as holy warriors. Other Muslims contest that definition of jihad as too narrow and bellicose. Yet militant Muslms prize jihad as the flip side of faith. First you believe, and then you fight for what you believe. Holy war must be waged against all unbelievers. This is the model and the legacy of the earliest Muslims. Those who first accepted God's revelation to Muhammad and became Muslims were compelled to wage war against their adversaries. They fought to ensure the toehold of Islam in Arabia. For militant Muslims, there is no separation between 7th century Arabia and 21st century America. Both are marked as realms of ignorance. Both are battlegrounds, pitting good against evil, them against us.

And so the creed of Crusaders - to kill the infidel Saracens - is matched by the creed of militant Muslims - to kill the infidel Christians. Both creeds attract warriors for the faith and each side is willing to preach and to act on behalf of their sacred trust against all enemies. Their enemies are not just outside others; they are also internal dissenters. Indeed, it is the internal dissenters who are the most dangerous. For militant Muslims, as for Christian Crusaders, the first task is to confront co-religionists who claim to be believers but are unwilling to fight for the faith. They are viewed as hypocrites, backsliders, heretics.

If religion is about peace, neither Crusaders nor their Muslim counterparts are religious. They seek war, not peace. The cardinal tenets of apocalypticism are war in the name of God, my faith over your faith, the end of the world in our lifetime. They will not go away soon. And in the aftermath of September11, currents of religious hatred and violence that threaten to engulf our world seem to justify fear of Muslims, and to mark Muslim fanatics as the enemy auguring the end of time

We need to have religion unshackled from dyads and diatribes. We need to move beyond proclaiming the end of the world as certain because God decreed its end, and instead consider making the world a better place for pagans as well as pietists, for Muslims, Jews, and Christians, but also for Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs. Why? Because Mystery is the first and last name of the divine and demanding humility rather than hubris is the litmus test of faith. The true problem is neither Islam nor Christianity; the enemies are not those who identify as Muslims or Christians. The enemies are those who claim religion as the basis for conflict, faith as the motive for violence, and Armageddon as the outcome of war. The enemies are the militant defenders of the faith, at once blinkered and blinded to divine mystery. It is not a mock war, but rather a serious, protracted war, and those on the sidelines need to move beyond their own religious labels and grapple with the militants of both camps, reclaiming a truth, which is also a truce, beyond their grasp.

Beyond Crusades and Crusaders

Since September 11 images of Islam have proliferated in the media in the United States. The very act of bombing the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was theater. Those planes were meant not only to destroy buildings and to kill people, but also to send a message to the largest possible audience through modern media. The message was as stark as it was simple: the United States is the enemy of Islam, and the core of the United States is business that is privileged by the capitalist world system. And so the attack on the United States had to be an attack on its core, its center: the World Trade Center.

The print and TV and cyber media have all dutifully gotten the message. It would be impossible to catalogue all the ways in which Islam has become an evil religion, and Muslims the enemy of the US since September 11. But the most thought provoking essay has come from a leftist turned social critic, Paul Berman. Berman's essay "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror" appeared as the New York Times Magazine's lead story on March 23, 2003. It focused exclusively on the lessons to be learned from a single dissident Egyptian scholar and activist, Sayyid Qutb. According to Berman, the power of Qutb's prose derives from his mixed education, which combined traditional religious training in Egypt with modern secular education, including a stay in the U.S. during the late 40s when he earned his M.A. from the Colorado State College of Education. Berman touches on many issues, but he keeps returning to the central difference between East and West: unlike their US enemies, Muslim zealots have no fear of death; in fact, they welcome death, especially the death of martyrdom. "The death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood," writes Qutb. "Their influence on those they leave behind also grows and spreads. Thus after their death they remain an active force in shaping the life of their community and giving it direction. It is in this sense that such people, having sacrificed their lives for the sake of God, retain their active existence in everyday life. There is no real sense of loss in their death, since they continue to live."