Krauthammer: The Enemy Is Not Islam. It Is Nihilism

EUROPE'S GREAT RELIGIOUS WARS ended in 1648. Three and a half centuries is a long time, too long for us in the West to truly believe that people still slaughter others to vindicate the faith.

Thus in the face of radical Islamic terrorism that murders 6,000 innocents in a day, we find it almost impossible to accept at face value the reason offered by the murderers. Yet Osama bin Laden could not be clearer. Jihad has been declared against the infidel, whose power and influence thwart the triumph of Islam, and whose success and example--indeed, whose very existence--are an affront to the true faith. As a leader of Hamas declared at a rally three days after the World Trade Center attack, "the only solution is for Bush to convert to Islam."

To Americans, who are taught religious tolerance from the cradle, who visit each other's churches for interdenominational succor and solidarity, this seems simply bizarre. On September 25, bin Laden issues a warning to his people that Bush is coming "under the banner of the cross." Two weeks later, in his pre-taped post-attack video, he scorns Bush as "head of the infidels."

Can he be serious? This idea is so alien that our learned commentators, Western and secular, have gone rummaging through their ideological attics to find more familiar terms to explain why we were so savagely attacked: poverty and destitution in the Islamic world; grievances against the West, America, Israel; the "wretched of the earth"--Frantz Fanon's 1960s apotheosis of anti-colonialism--rising against their oppressors.

Reading conventional notions of class struggle and anti-colonialism into bin Laden, the Taliban, and radical Islam is not just solipsistic. It is nonsense. If poverty and destitution, colonialism and capitalism are animating radical Islam, explain this: In March, the Taliban went to the Afghan desert where stood great monuments of human culture, two massive Buddhas carved out of a cliff. At first, Taliban soldiers tried artillery. The 1,500-year-old masterpieces proved too hardy. The Taliban had to resort to dynamite. They blew the statues to bits, then slaughtered 100 cows in atonement--for having taken so long to finish the job.

Buddhism is hardly a representative of the West. It is hardly a cause of poverty and destitution. It is hardly a symbol of colonialism. No. The statues represented two things: an alternative faith and a great work of civilization. To the Taliban, the presence of both was intolerable.

The distinguished Indian writer and now Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, who has chronicled the Islamic world in two books ("Among the Believers" and "Beyond Belief"), recently warned (in a public talk in Melbourne before the World Trade Center attack), "We are within reach of great nihilistic forces that have undone civilization." In places like Afghanistan, "religion has been turned by some into a kind of nihilism, where people wish to destroy themselves and destroy their past and their culture . . . to be pure. They are enraged about the world and they wish to pull it down." This kind of fury and fanaticism is unappeasable. It knows no social, economic, or political solution. "You cannot converge with this [position] because it holds that your life is worthless and your beliefs are criminal and should be extirpated."

This insight offers a needed window on the new enemy. It turns out that the enemy does have recognizable analogues in the Western experience. He is, as President Bush averred in his address to the nation, heir to the malignant ideologies of the 20th century. In its nihilism, its will to power, its celebration of blood and death, its craving for the cleansing purity that comes only from eradicating life and culture, radical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism. The destruction of the World Trade Center was meant not only to wreak terror. Like the smashing of the Bamiyan Buddhas, it was meant to obliterate greatness and beauty, elegance and grace. These artifacts represented civilization embodied in stone or steel. They had to be destroyed.

This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image of brutalized Muslims shown in various poses of victimization, followed by glorious images of desecration of the infidel--mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Throughout, the soundtrack endlessly repeats the refrain "with blood, with blood, with blood." Bin Laden appears on the tape to counsel that "the love of this world is wrong. You should love the other world...die in the right cause and go to the other world." In his October 9 taped message, al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith gloried in the "thousands of young people who look forward to death, like the Americans look forward to living."

Once again, the world is faced with a transcendent conflict between those who love life and those who love death both for themselves and their enemies. Which is why we tremble. Upon witnessing the first atomic bomb explode at the Trinity site at Alamogordo, J. Robert Oppenheimer recited a verse from the Hindu scripture "Bhagavad Gita": "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." We tremble because for the first time in history, nihilism will soon be armed with the ultimate weapons of annihilation. For the first time in history, the nihilist will have the means to match his ends. Which is why the war declared upon us on September 11 is the most urgent not only of our lives, but in the life of civilization itself.

Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

The problem with that entertaining rant was that a solid half of it was simply false as a matter of history. I take them case by case -

"The Arabic countries were ahead of the west in the sciences and Art, until the scourge of Islam"

False. The Arabs were a mostly illiterate bunch of desert nomads wandering around Arabia with their sheep, with a small urban class of merchants based on the profits of caravan trade from Yemen to Syria, which formed one link of the long distance trade from India to Byzantium. Most of the people were extremely poor. They had no science, no literature, and certainly no empire. Mohammad himself was probably not literate. They were divided into dozens of tribes and religions.

They did not become backward because of Islam, they were backward to begin with. They became an empire because of Islam, and developed a rather flourishing civilization in its first five hundred years. They had internal political problems within 300 years, and haven't seen political unity since. After about 500 years the Mongols smashed most of their remaining power as an empire. They stagnated after that, both because of political disunity and for cultural reasons, including innovations within Islamic thought that downplayed the authority of reason compared to literalism about revelation. Also, they were by then not ruled by Arabs, but by Turks, who came from the same place as the Mongols.

Pretending the religion laid waste everything it touched from the get go might seem convienent for polemics, but it fails as history for rather obvious reasons. Nobody today would have the allegiance to it they do, had that been the case. Instead, there was a Moslem "golden age", and especially an Arab one, decidedly less golden than the modern age for Christendom, but recognizably better than what they came from, and in many respects compared to where they went afterward.

Most of the Arabs only gained independence from Turkish rulers in WW I. The fundamentalists think of themselves as trying to revive golden age that predated both Turkish rule and the rise of the west. The nutjob terrorists among them think that destroying the west is the way to recreate it. Misunderstanding these real motives does not help us. And those real motives are incomprehensible in your falsified history.

"Europe came out of the dark ages with the separation of Church and State"

Um, no. First of all most mean by the dark ages the period down to about 1000 or 1100, and exclude from it the high middle ages (the time of Acquinas, Dante, etc). But taking it loosely to mean the whole medieval period, it still isn't true. In the sense relevant here, church and state were quite united throughout much of the early modern period, in the sense that governments enforced a single religious outlook by the sword. Catholic sovereigns did, and so did Luther, Calvin, and most of the other great Protestant reformers (except Quakers).

The principle of religious tolerance, aka the freedom of conscience, was not recognized until the 17th century. Before then, to disobey the state in a religious matter was a crime. Ask an Irishman when the British started tolerating religions they didn't believe themselves; he won't tell you "back at the end of the dark ages".

Milton for some Protestants, Fenelon for some Catholics, Spinoza for some Jews, stated the principle (Fenelon "a conversion obtained by force is not a conversion"), usually with reservations and always without it being uniform practice. Whigs drew the line at "Papists", wanting tolerance among Protestants only, but not for Catholics or Jews, to say nothing of Muslims. But the same period saw the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France (ending religious tolerance for Hugenots, itself no more than a truce in a civil war), the English conquest of Ireland by Cromwell's puritans, who did not exactly tolerate "papists", and the continued operation of the Inquisition by Spain. By the 17th century religious tolerance had become something fought over and disputed in Europe, but not something established.

William Penn in Quaker Pennsylvannia was the first to actually impliment religious tolerance as a matter of formal legal right. Rhode Island broke away from intolerant Massachusetts (where Quakers were hung as "blasphemers", supposedly convicted on the authority of a literal reading of Leviticus, but in fact despised for the principle of tolerance), to try freedom of conscience instead. From the end of the 17th to the mid 18th century it made its slow spread, along with the enlightenment. Jefferson made it uniform policy in this country, well after the Revolution, not before it, by leading a campaign to enact state laws in favor of it. Before then, the union had renounced establishment of religion and religious tests to hold national office, but the states had not.

It was a rather more difficult and more recent development than in your falsified history. And it was not accomplished merely by transfering religious authority to the state (the early modern development), nor to the people (the Whig doctrine, but not for catholics who were said to reject the principle). Nor did regarding the people as infallible work any better when it became doctrine in France during the revolution - the "infallible" people responded by calling for all bishops to be lynched.

The principle of religious tolerance is not merely a question of where among men to place a certain power. It is a matter of removing all claims to just exercise of certain powers, as inherently tyrannical no matter who exercises them. Which was something recognized by classical liberalism in its fully developed form, not in its antecedents. Getting the principle half right, being partially in sympathy with it, like some Protestant denominations or the Whig party, was not sufficient. Ask an Irishman.

Why does this matter? Because it is urgent that we explain this principle and how we developed it to the contemporary Islamic world. Pretending we never had to develop it will not help. Falsifying the history of our own development of the principle of freedom of conscience will not help them establish that principle among themselves. It will tend to convince them that half measures are sufficient, or that we don't have anything to teach them about it by making it look like a bit of hypocrisy rather than an essential part of justice. Getting Muslims to be as open minded as Calvinists of colonial Massachusetts will not solve our problems. Getting them to be as open minded as Catholic Ultramontanes of even the late 19th century will probable not do the trick. Pretending we have always been religiously tolerant is ruinous, because it is a lie about the very thing they most need to learn from us.

So, speaking of dumbing down our education, it is not acceptable or sufficient to substitute contemporary apologetic revisionism, meant to white-wash less savory aspects of our own history or to favor one party or school of thought in the retelling, for the history of what really happened in the west, to establish the principle of freedom of conscience.

And no, it was not the Christians "who defeated Islam last time". They broke apart internally because they never solved the problems of legitimate succession and loyalty and unity of the army. Then the Mongols smashed them. Then they stagnated, because they adopted internal cultural innovations - skeptical and literalist ones - that removed authority from human reason. Spain rolled them back here, they advanced on Austria there. Then western powers (like Britain and France) propped them up for a while (especialyl to check Russia), and then fought with one faction in the Islamic world against another one (Arabs against Turks in WW I). After WW II, the Russians and the Americans backed rival parties and states, and fought by proxy throughout the Islamic world.

Falsifying our past relations with the Islamic world, pretending it was united, a monolithic enemy that the west fought and defeated, is at least as ruinous as lies about the history of religious toleration. Because the nutjobs over there want to blame the present powerlessness and division of the Islamic world on direct political action by the west. You practically endorse this attitude when you proclaim that they were in the past defeated by "Christians", and presumably should be again. They will never think the source of their problems is anything but our own power, as long as they agree with that proposition. And so long as they wrongly think the source of all of their ills is our power, they will try to destroy our power.

The truth of the matter is they haven't been united politically for a millenium because they did not themselves solve the problems of political justice, and not because of outside influences. It is important that they see this, because that is the only way they are going to see how much they have to learn about government from the west - about consitutions, republics, or limited monarchies.

And it is important that they understand that their cultural stagnation from the high middle ages to the modern period, was due to internal cultural forces, and especially to denigrating the role and authority of human reason, including its role in theology, compared to literalist revelation. Only a higher authority for human reason in theological matters will enable them to recognize the principle of freedom of conscience.

Because that principle is definitely reasonable, but it is not as ancient as their received religious writings, so they will never find it in literalism. They are not being literalist about the Sermon on the Mount, they are being literalist about the doings of a successful warrior chieftan of the 7th century. Unless they put the authority of reason over that of a sacred text, they aren't going to arrive at the principle of religious tolerance.

All of the above may seem unduly harsh to your rant, which I am sure you meant sincerely enough. When I speak of "lies" in apologetic history, I am not speaking of your own but of much older ones you have probably received third hand. I have written forcefully because I consider it critical to get this stuff right.

To reform the contemporary Muslim world, we have to understand the real basis of the superiority of our own. Misunderstandings of our own history, especially ones that minimize the task ahead of us, are not helpful in doing that. We learned religious tolerance not as a matter of course, but at the end of a long and difficult period in our own religious and political history.

We can hope they will learn it more easily, with our instruction and our power deployed to encourage it. But for that instruction to help, it has to be an accurate and honest account of how we got here, not apologetics or spin. Because they won't get here following a mere line of spin.

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