(plus suicide), not as an accidental by-product of a military operation but as its intended outcome. A more accurate picture of Muslim tolerance for terrorism emerges when we focus on the percentage of respondents who could not find it in their hearts to say "never justified" (leaving aside the many people who still lurk in the shadows of "Don't Know/Refused"). If we divide the data in this way, the sun of modernity sets even further over the Muslim world:
SUICIDE BOMBING IN DEFENSE OF ISLAM
Is It Ever Justifiable?
Country Yes No Don't know / Refused
Lebanon 82 12 6
Ivory Coast 73 27 0
Nigeria 66 26 8
Jordan 65 26 8
Bangladesh 58 23 19
Mali 54 35 11
Senegal 47 50 3
Ghana 44 43 12
Indonesia 43 54 3
Uganda 40 52 8
Pakistan 38 38 23
Turkey 20 64 14
These are hideous numbers. If all Muslims had responded as Turkey did (where a mere 4 percent think suicide bombings are "often" justified,9 percent "sometimes," and 7 percent "rarely"), we would still have a problem worth worrying about; we would, after all, be talking about more than 200 million avowed supporters of terrorism. But Turkey is an island of ambassadorial goodwill compared with the rest of the Muslim world.
Let us imagine that peace one day comes to the Middle East. What will Muslims say of the suicide bombings that they so widely endorsed? Will they say, "We were driven mad by the Israeli occupation"? Will they say, "We were a generation of sociopaths"? How will they account for the celebrations that followed these "sacred explosions"? A young man, born into relative privilege, packs his clothing with explosives and ball bearings and unmakes himself along with a score of children in a discotheque, and his mother is promptly congratulated by hundreds of her neighbors. What will the Palestinians think about such behavior once peace has been established? If they are still devout Muslims here is what they must think: "Our boys are in paradise, and they have prepared the way for us to follow. Hell has been prepared for the infidels." It seems to me to be an almost axiomatic truth of human nature that no peace, should it ever be established, will survive beliefs of this sort for very long.
We must not overlook the fact that a significant percentage of the world's Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God, amid "rivers of purest water, and rivers of milk forever fresh; rivers of wine delectable to those that drink it, and rivers of clearest honey" (47:15). These men-who slit the throats of stewardesses and delivered young couples with their children to their deaths at five hundred miles per hour-are at present being "attended by boys graced with eternal youth" in a "kingdom blissful and glorious." They are "arrayed in garments of fine green silk and rich brocade, and adorned with bracelets of silver" (76:15). The list of their perquisites is long. But what is it that gets a martyr out of bed early on his last day among the living? Did any of the nineteen hijackers make haste to Allah's garden simply to get his hands on his allotment of silk? It seems doubtful. The irony here is almost a miracle in its own right: the most sexually repressive people found in the world today-people who are stirred to a killing rage by reruns of Baywatch -are lured to martyrdom by a conception of paradise that resembles nothing so much as an al fresco bordello.20
Apart from the terrible ethical consequences that follow from this style of otherworldliness, we should observe just how deeply implausible the Koranic paradise is. For a seventh-century prophet to say that paradise is a garden, complete with rivers of milk and honey, is rather like a twenty-first-century prophet's saying that it is a gleaming city where every soul drives a new Lexus. A moment's reflection should reveal that such pronouncements suggest nothing at all about the afterlife and much indeed about the limits of the human imagination.
Jihad and the Power of the Atom
For devout Muslims, religious identity seems to trump all others. Despite the occasional influence of Pan-Arabism, the concept of an ethnic or national identity has never taken root in the Muslim world as it has in the West. The widespread support for Saddam Hussein among Muslims, in response to the American attack upon Iraq, is as good a way as any of calibrating the reflexivity of Muslim solidarity. Saddam Hussein was, as both a secularist and a tyrant, widely despised in the Muslim world prior to the American invasion; and yet the reaction of most Muslims revealed that no matter what his crimes against the Iraqi people, against the Kuwaitis, and against the Iranians, the idea of an army of infidels occupying Baghdad simply could not be countenanced, no matter what humanitarian purpose it might serve. Saddam may have tortured and killed more Muslims than any person in living memory, but the Americans are the "enemies of God."
It is important to keep the big picture in view, because the details, being absurd to an almost crystalline degree, are truly meaningless. In our dialogue with the Muslim world, we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot even be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us.
It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United
States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime-as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day-but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side.
The Clash
Samuel Huntington has famously described the conflict between Islam and the West as a "clash of civilizations." Huntington observed that wherever Muslims and non-Muslims share a border, armed conflict tends to arise. Finding a felicitous phrase for an infelicitous fact, he declared that "Islam has bloody borders."21 Many scholars have attacked Huntington's thesis, however. Edward Said wrote that "a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization."22 Said, for his part, maintained that the members of Al Qaeda are little more than "crazed fanatics" who, far from lending credence to Huntington's the
sis, should be grouped with the Branch Davidians, the disciples of the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana, and the cult of Aum Shinrikyo: "Huntington writes that the world's billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.' Did he canvas 100 Indonesians,200 Moroccans,500 Egyptians and fifty Bosnians? Even if he did, what sort of sample is that?" It is hard not to see this kind of criticism as disingenuous. Undoubtedly we should recognize the limits of generalizing about a culture, but the idea that Osama bin Laden is the Muslim equivalent of the Reverend Jim Jones is risible. Bin Laden has not, contrary to Said's opinion on the matter, "become a vast, over-determined symbol of everything America hates and fears."23 One need only read the Koran to know, with something approaching mathematical certainty, that all truly devout Muslims will be "convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power," just as Huntington alleges. And this is all that his thesis requires.
Whether or not one likes Huntington's formulation, one thing is clear: the evil that has finally reached our shores is not merely the evil of terrorism. It is the evil of religious faith at the moment of its political ascendancy. Of course, Islam is not uniquely susceptible to undergoing such horrible transformations, though it is, at this moment in history, uniquely ascendant.24 Western leaders who insist that our conflict is not with Islam are mistaken; but, as I argue throughout this book, we have a problem with Christianity and Judaism as well. It is time we recognized that all reasonable men and women have a common enemy. It is an enemy so near to us, and so deceptive, that we keep its counsel even as it threatens to destroy the very possibility of human happiness. Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself.
While it would be comforting to believe that our dialogue with the Muslim world has, as one of its possible outcomes, a future of mutual tolerance, nothing guarantees this result-least of all the tenets of Islam. Given the constraints of Muslim orthodoxy, given the penalties within Islam for a radical (and reasonable) adaptation to modernity, I think it is clear that Islam must find some way to revise itself, peacefully or otherwise. What this will mean is not at all obvious. What is obvious, however, is that the West must either win the argument or win the war. All else will be bondage.
The Riddle of Muslim "Humiliation"
Thomas Friedman, a tireless surveyor of the world's discontents for the New York Times, has declared that Muslim "humiliation" is at the root of Muslim terrorism. Others have offered the same diagnosis, and Muslims themselves regularly assert that Western imperialism has offended their dignity, their pride, and their honor. What should we make of this? Can anyone point to a greater offender of Muslim dignity than Islamic law itself? For a modern example of the kind of society that can be fashioned out of an exclusive reliance upon the tenets of Islam, simply recall what Afghanistan was like under the Taliban. Who are those improbable creatures scurrying about in shrouds and being regularly beaten for showing an exposed ankle? Those were the dignified (and illiterate) women of the House of Islam.
Zakaria and many others have noted that as repressive as Arab dictators generally are, they tend to be more liberal than the people they oppress. The Saudi Prince Abdullah, for instance-a man who has by no means distinguished himself as a liberal-recently proposed that women should be permitted to drive automobiles in his country. As it turns out, his greatly oppressed people would not stand for this degree of spiritual oppression, and the prince was forced to back down. At this point in their history, give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedoms by the root. We should not for a moment lose sight of the possibility that they would curtail our freedoms as well, if they only had the power to do so.
There is no doubt that our collusion with Muslim tyrants-in Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere-has been despicable. We have done nothing to discourage the mistreatment and outright slaughter of tens of thousands of Muslims by their own regimes-regimes that, in many cases, we helped bring to power. Our failure to support the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, which we encouraged, surely ranks among the most unethical and consequential foreign policy blunders of recent decades. But our culpability on this front must be bracketed by the understanding that were democracy to suddenly come to these countries, it would be little more than a gangplank to theocracy. There does not seem to be anything within the principles of Islam by which to resist the slide into sharia (Islamic law), while there is everything to encourage it. This is a terrible truth that we have to face: the only thing that currently stands between us and the roiling ocean of Muslim unreason is a wall of tyranny and human rights abuses that we have helped to erect. This situation must be remedied, but we cannot merely force Muslim dictators from power and open the polls. It would be like opening the polls to the Christians of the fourteenth century.
It is also true that poverty and lack of education play a role in all of this, but it is not a role that suggests easy remedies. The Arab world is now economically and intellectually stagnant to a degree that few could have thought possible, given its historical role in advancing and preserving human knowledge. In the year 2002 the GDP in all Arab countries combined did not equal that of Spain. Even more troubling, Spain translates as many books into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic since the ninth century.25 This degree of insularity and backwardness is shocking, but it should not lead us to believe that poverty and lack of education are the roots of the problem. That a generation of poor and illiterate children are being fed into the fundamentalist machinery of the madrassas (Saudi-financed religious schools) should surely terrify us.26 But Muslim terrorists have not tended to come from the ranks of the uneducated poor; many have been middle class, educated, and without any obvious dysfunction in their personal lives. As Zakaria points out, compared with the nineteen hijackers, John Walker Lindh (the young man from California who joined the Taliban) was "distinctly undereducated." Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who organized the kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl studied at the London School of Economics. Hezbollah militants who die in violent operations are actually less likely to come from poor homes than their nonmilitant contemporaries and more likely to have a secondary school education.27 The leaders of Hamas are all college graduates, and some have master's degrees.28 These facts suggest that even if every Muslim enjoyed a standard of living comparable to that of the average middle-class American, the West might still be in profound danger of colliding with Islam. I suspect that Muslim prosperity might even make matters worse, because the only thing that seems likely to persuade most Muslims that their worldview is problematic is the demonstrable failure of their societies.29 If Muslim orthodoxy were as economically and technologically viable as Western liberalism, we would probably be doomed to witness the Islamification of the earth. As we see in the person of Osama bin Laden, a murderous religious fervor is compatible with wealth and education. Indeed, the technical proficiency of many Muslim terrorists demonstrates that it is compatible with a scientific education. That is why there is no cognitive or cultural substitute for desacralizing faith itself. As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on earth to live, we will continue to murder one another on account of our myths. In our dealings with the Muslim world, we must acknowledge that Muslims have not found anything of substance to say against the actions of the September 11 hijackers, apart from the ubiquitous canard that they were really Jews.30 Muslim discourse is currently a tissue of myths, conspiracy theories,31 and exhortations to recapture the glories of the seventh century. There is no reason to believe that economic and political improvements in the Muslim world, in and of themselves, would remedy this.
The Danger of Wishful Thinking
Paul Berman has written a beautiful primer on totalitarianism-of the left and the right, East and West-and observed that it invariably contains a genocidal, and even suicidal, dimension.
He notes that the twentieth century was a great incubator of "pathological mass movements"-political movements that "get drunk on the idea of slaughter."32 He also points out that liberal thinkers are often unable to recognize these terrors for what they are. There is indeed a great tradition, in Berman's phrase, of "liberalism as denial." The French Socialists in the 1930s seem to have had a peculiar genius for this style of self-deception, for despite the billowing clouds of unreason wafting over from the East, they could not bring themselves to believe that the Nazis posed a problem worth taking seriously. In the face of the German menace, they simply blamed their own government and defense industry for warmongering. As Berman suggests, the same forces of wishful thinking and self-doubt have been gathering strength in the West in the aftermath of September 11. Because they assume that people everywhere are animated by the same desires and fears, many Western liberals now blame their own governments for the excesses of Muslim terrorists. Many suspect that we have somehow heaped this evil upon our own heads. Berman observes, for instance, that much of the world now blames Israel for the suicidal derangement of the Palestinians. Rather than being an expression of mere anti-Semitism (though it is surely this as well), this view is the product of a quaint moral logic: people are just people, so the thinking goes, and they do not behave that badly unless they have some very good reasons. The excesses of Palestinian suicide bombers, therefore, must attest to the excesses of the Israeli occupation. Berman points out that this sort of thinking has led the Israelis to be frequently likened to the Nazis in the European press.33 Needless to say, the comparison is grotesque. The truth is, as Dershowitz points out, that "no other nation in history faced with comparable challenges has ever adhered to a higher standard of human rights, been more sensitive to the safety of innocent civilians, tried harder to operate under the rule of law, or been willing to take more risks for peace."34 The Israelis have shown a degree of restraint in their use of violence that the Nazis never contemplated and that, more to the point, no Muslim society would contemplate today. Ask yourself, what are the chances that the Palestinians would show the same restraint in killing Jews if the Jews were a powerless minority living under their occupation and disposed to acts of suicidal terrorism? It would be no more likely than Muhammad's flying to heaven on a winged horse.35