|
Published in The Muslim World Book Review,
25:2 (Winter 2005); pp. 6-17. |
Faith beyond the Messianic Violence
of
Terror and Empire
The unspeakable
horrors of 9/11 and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ have put a big question mark
on the future of Islam’s dialogue with modernity. The total collapse of moral
order in the gruesome chain of kidnappings and decapitations in Fallujah and
the annulment of war ethics and sanctioning of sadistic savagery in Abu-Ghuraib
are hardly likely to promote further conversation. Any Muslim reflection on
modernity as a universal insight into the human condition has therefore little meaning
in a world where the Muslim has to run constantly for cover. Modernity’s claim
for authority has now been eclipsed by the imperial demands for compliance and
acquiescence – not only politically but also ideologically, not only militarily
but also morally. What cogency then can an Islamic critique of modernity have,
when the authority of modernity now simply reads as the power of Empire?
True enough, for the
radical Islamist, there never was any moral calling worthy of summoning the
intellectual resources of his faith for the envisioning of a political future within
the regime of modernity. And yet, the tragedy is that he/she too is a child of
modernity. The radical Islamist’s politics of terror and suicide are only
possible in a world without transcendence, in a consciousness where God is
dead, and where history alone remains. Terror, in other words, is a gift of
modernity, not of Islam. It is a fact which even outsiders have not failed to
acknowledge. ‘The logic of violence’, one analyst admits, ‘does not have it
roots in what goes by the name of terrorism. Rather, the opposite is the case:
“Terrorism” has its roots in the logic of violence!’
For Muslim conscience,
then, the only cogent reading of contemporary violence in the merciless world
of Fallujah and Abu Ghuraib is that the nihilistic logic of modernity has
triumphed over the demands of faith and humanity. Even for the zealots of Islam,
history and politics have precedence over spirituality and transcendence. If we
have to defeat this nihilism with an Islamic face, if we are not to be made
hostages to the dysfunctional logic of violence and counter-violence, if we are
not be become prisoners to the Manichaean rhetoric of Empire and Terror, a
dialogue with modernity on the pivotal issue of transcendence must go on. Islam
means peace and the Muslim community of today must move beyond the violence of
Terror and Empire both. It is for this reason that we examine here some works
that deal with the problem of terror and violence as it appears in the mirror
of modernity.
Works Discussed in this Essay
War and Modernity. By
Hans Joas. Polity Press,
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People. By Jonathan Schell. Metropolitan Books, 2003
(www.henryholt.com). Pp. 433. ISBN 0-8050-4456-6
Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and
Jacques Derrida. By Giovanna
Borradori. The
AL-QAEDA and what it means to be Modern. By John Gray. Faber and Faber Ltd, 2003 (www.faber.co.uk). Pp. 145. ISBN
0-571-21980-2
Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11. By Bruce Lincoln. The
Pp. 142. ISBN 0-226-48195-6
When Religions Become Evil. By Charles Kimball. Harper Collins, 2002 (www.harpercollins.com). Pp. 237.
ISBN0-06-050653-9
Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. By Thomas L. Pangle. The John Hopkins
University Press, 2003 (www.press.jhu.edu).
Pp. 285. ISBN 0-
8018-7328-2
Does modernity’s claim
for authority inevitably translate into the logic of Empire, or, like any other
universal vision of the human condition, is modernity plagued too by its own
unresolved tensions and inner contradictions? Is modernity inherently an
imperial enterprise, which its rhetoric of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘freedom’ merely
seeks to mask, or does it genuinely cherish hopes of a universal peace that is
based on justice and equality for all? Do the power-brokers of modernity, to
say it bluntly, honestly believe in a world order without the exploitation and
enslavement of the weak by the powerful, or do they employ their rhetoric in a
cynical vein just to further their own interests? Indeed, to come to the most
disturbing insight of all, is modernity’s commitment to freedom
incommensurate with a world order in which justice is the defining norm?
One may start this
inquiry by listening to the internal debate on the problem of organized
violence in the name of the state that constitutes, in theory if not in
practice, a formidable challenge to modernity’s rationalist world outlook. Here
Hans Joas’s work offers an intense meditation on the issues of war in the sociological
and philosophical discourses of modernity. Despite the density of its
labyrinthine German style, not to mention the studied opacity of its ‘message’,
it is a rewarding work that provides no simplistic reading of the martial text
of modernity. Joas’s starting point is that for anyone who confronts the
history of modern violence in all its bloody seriousness, it is difficult to be
seduced by the myth of progress. And this is despite the fact that the
optimistic worldview of Enlightenment, shared both by liberalism and Marxism,
promises us a world without violence. History, it is also worth recalling, constantly
reminds us of its tenacious persistence. Indeed, war and violence are to be
construed as intrinsic to the modern project, and not merely parts of its
prehistory. And yet, modernization theory, the standard interpretation of
contemporary history, posits, more or less implicitly that modernity is
peaceful. In fact, in the post-World War theory, the non-violent resolution of
conflicts is presumed to be the defining feature of modernity. Not
surprisingly, Joas muses, ‘the major theories that are the subject of general
discussion today – let’s take Habermas, Luhmann or the post-structuralists –
contain hardly any mention of war and peace.’ (126)
On the other hand, as
suggested by Michael Mann, there exists a strong ‘militaristic’
counter-tradition, usually traceable to non-liberal currents, within the annals
of sociological thought itself. Here, one finds an over-emphasis on power and
violence that is the obverse of their neglect by liberals and Marxists. These
anti-liberals and staunch defenders of bourgeois society fear that ‘a peaceful
civilization and the disappearance of warlike virtues would lead to a general
decline in morals and a rise of softness and effeminacy.’ (31). In Germany,
old-fashioned militarism is couched in the language of Lebensphilosophie
or existentialism: ‘violence as creativity, struggle as inner experience, the
community of soldiers at the front as the inspiration of a new type of
state-order.’ (32). The most influential theoretician of the ‘existentialist’
school was, of curse, Carl Schmitt whose conception of the political was
nothing but a recasting of the biological maxim of Darwinism – the survival of
the fittest - in a metaphysical mould.
For all these internal
contradictions or external challenges, it is well-worth emphasizing that the
most fundamental tension within the political thought of modernity concerns the
dreams of a pacifist utopia and the realities of power-politics. Obviously,
like any other universal vision, modernity cannot escape the logical
contradiction, and existential unity, of the Empire-Mission nexus. It too exhibits
the logic of Din and Dawla as the two opposite sides of the
single coin of its project. The most disturbing insight into modernity’s
intrinsic unity of the discursive and the coercive however comes from the sombre
sociological studies of Zygmunt Buman whose inquiry into the Jewish Holocaust led
him to conclude that the Holocasut does not constitute a peculiarity of the
German history, or an aberration of the modernist ethos. There is instead a
direct link between modernity’s bureaucratic rationality and its politics of
genocide – a practice that was by no means rare in the modern enterprise of the
colonization of non-European peoples.
In a radical but well-documented work, Modernity and the Holocaust (Polity Press, Oxford, 1991), Bauman demonstrated that the Holocaust is the obverse of modernity; that it represents 'another face of the same modern society whose other, more familiar, face we so admire. And that the two faces are perfectly comfortably attached to the same body.' The Holocaust, he insisted further, cannot be dismissed as the failure of civilization, as the 'hiccups of barbarism' that humanity has to suffer through only temporarily. No, it is part of the same 'morally elevating story of humanity's march towards greater freedom and rationality' that forms the imperious, nay imperial, myth of modernity and Enlightenment. Of course, modern civilization was not, according to him, the Holocaust's sufficient condition; but 'it was most certainly its necessary condition. Bauman further insinuated that reason not passion, civilization not barbarity, science not superstition, imperils the existence of man as a moral being. He even argued that the bureaucratic logic of the modern state inevitably translates into the imperative of 'final solutions' and that the value-free epistemology of modern science indubitably redeems its claim in the merciless world of the gas chambers. Obviously, Bauman’s work has great relevance for any non-Western attempt to appraise modernity as Empire.
Against the backdrop
of colonialism and the genocide of non-European peoples, which went hand in
hand with the unfolding of the modernist project, all these theories smack of
insufferable sanctimony. (But then it has to do with modernity’s construction
of the Other and the Pandora’s box of moral paradoxes that it opens!)
Colonial wars, even from the universalist perspective of Enlightenment, were
not only necessary; these actually worked in the service of peace! For it has
been constantly proclaimed and untiringly reiterated to this day that ‘the War
and world dominance of Western powers serve the cause of strengthening and
disseminating universalist values.’ (9)
Joas’s work is commendable
not only for exploring the agonizing issues of war, on which the theoreticians
of modernity, he admits, are curiously reticent, but also for earnestly
confronting all the moral and pragmatic arguments of pacifism and Realpolitik.
It is also to his credit that he never looses the moral compass and succumbs neither
to the logic of force, which legitimates itself in the name of some putative human
nature, nor to its total renunciation for the realization of utopian dreams. For
instance, he does not shy away from facing
‘the empirical persuasiveness’ of power-political realism but asks: ‘Are
the social sciences obliged to see the world without illusions as an eternal of
conflicting interests, or can sociology prove that ‘realpolitik’ is
itself an ideology.’ (32). From his dialectical approach, it appears that
‘there is not just an analytical need, but also a moral one, to create or
increase our sensitivity to the distinction between different kinds of acts of
violence, instead of applying a global formula that reduces them all to the
same level.’ (10).
Joas’s work significantly
is about war and modernity, and not about modernity and Empire, a subject of
crucial importance for any understanding of modernity as a historical project. And
this is despite his recognition that ‘phenomena such as the use of power to perpetuate
the inequalities in development are never discussed’ by the ideologues of
modernity. (47; emphasis supplied).
Covering the same
ground but far more lucid in style is Jonathan Schell’s courageous and
eloquently articulated argument about the obsolescence of the imperial dream.
In fact, Unconquerable World provides a most felicitous expression of
our longing for a world beyond the logic of Empire and the obscenity of terror,
beyond even the rational calculus of war and the irrational cult of violence. Violence
as a political instrument, he maintains, has now become dysfunctional and the
world is no more conquerable. So reads the inspiring message of this book. In
these dark times, when every conversation is saturated with apocalyptic
imagery, Jonathan Schell, the author the highly acclaimed work, The Fate of
the Earth has succeeded in producing an optimistic vision of the future. It
is an optimism, however, which comes from a bold and innovative reading of
history and which is not a product of wishful thinking or day-dreaming. On that
score alone, it is worthy of the serious attention of all who are disgusted by
the Manichaean rhetoric of Empire and who refuse to wallow in the visions of
doom and gloom.
Some of the most
important changes for the future of war, Schell observes, have come from within
war itself. In the modern age, war has in fact undergone a metamorphosis so
thorough that its existence has been called into question. The advancement in
the technology of war have given us the unusable nuclear weapons and the
development of people’s war has taught us that popular resistance can bring
down the fall of the dictators or the defeat of the imperialists. This is the
gist of the thesis advanced in this volume, but it is a thesis which is presented
with a thorough survey of the history of events and ideas that have produced
the paradox of violence being the midwife of nonviolence. Schell’s book is as
much a history of politics as that of ideas, but its principal virtue is
lucidity; a joy to read. It is also panoramic in scope, giving full attentions
to the arguments of ‘realists’ and ‘visionaries’ both (Gandhi receives as much
attention as Clausewitz), assiduous in the pursuit of details, but imaginative
in its grasp of the whole.
What Schell has to say
on contemporary realities is no less insightful, courageous and candid: ‘None
of the structures of violence – not the balance of power, not the balance of
terror, not empire – can any longer rescue the world from the use of violence,
now grown apocalyptic. Force can lead only to more force, not to peace. Only a
return to structures of cooperative power can offer hope. To choose that path,
the
Philosophy, it is
often argued, is indifferent to history. It reflects on eternal truths, not on
contingent events. However when certain contingent events become the defining
moments of history, when these are perceived as watersheds in the political
landscape of an age, philosophical reflection becomes ineluctable. With her own
intimate and traumatic experience of the September 11 attack on
In many ways, we are
informed, this is the first real engagement between these two eminent thinkers
who disagree on most issues and who are generally perceived as speaking from
the opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Habermas’s discourse is, as
expected, dense, elegant and unmistakably modernist. Derrida on the contrary takes
a long, tortuous and often unpredictable path. Central however to both these
philosophical vision is a deep suspicion of the concept of ‘terrorism’, and
they both agree upon the need for a transmission from classical international
law, premised on the model of nation-states, to a new cosmopolitan order based
on a new kind of international sovereignty. Most significantly, they both discard
the intellectually facile and morally problematic rhetoric of good and evil.
Their intense philosophical gaze, it is apparent, shatters the chalice of
Manichaean rhetoric which holds the sacrament of the Empire!
The most notable feature
of Habermas’s response is that it is uncompromisingly committed to
Enlightenment rationality and universalism. Out of this engagement comes a
moral sensitivity which does not relinquish its calling even at the time of tragedy
and pain. Not impressed with modernity’s worldly triumphs, he expresses his
misgivings in a strongly worded statement as: “However, the asymmetry between the
concentrated destructive power of the electronically controlled clusters of
elegant and versatile missiles in the air and the archaic ferocity of the
swarms of bearded warriors outfitted with Kalashnikov on the ground remains a
morally obscene sight.” (28) Further, ‘The world has grown too complex for this
barely concealed unilateralism. Even if Europe does not rouse itself to play
the civilizing role, as it should, the emerging power of China and the waning
power of Russia do not fit into the pax Americana model so simply.’ (27)
Habermas is
perceptibly sad and pensive; he was supposed to be in
Predictably, then, Habermas
is able to reiterate the liberal mantra without diffidence, namely, ‘that the
complex life circumstances in pluralistic societies are normatively compatible
only with a strict universalism in which the same respect is demanded for
everybody – be they Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Muslim, Jewish, or Buddhists,
believers and non-believers’ (32). Even if the Muslim has no compunction
agreeing with him, it is impossible not to discern the secular moorings of this
universalism. Religious allegiance is for him without any political quotient,
and hence innocuous and inconsequential for the public square. It does not
cause his liberal conscience any discomfort and may therefore be tolerated. The
snag however is that the liberal cannot vouch any form of universalism in which
nation, state or citizenship are equally inconsequential and their diversity is
simply a matter of personal choice! Liberal universalism remains subservient to
the sovereignty of the liberal polity and the world order that sustains it. Be
that as it may, in this interview, Habermas comes across as a very gifted,
articulate and affable personality.
For all his
volubility, Derrida, on the other hand, remains largely inaccessible to the
uninitiated reader. His is a veritable sophist’s discourse that advances by
questioning everything and that perpetuates itself by answering every question
with a question. (Not a surprising strategy for a philosopher who claims that
‘the more one decodes a text, the more one encodes it.’!) Probably, it is
because of the spin that has gone into the making of 11th September
as the watershed of current history that Derrida seeks to deconstruct it first.
At any rate, the perception of the singularity of 11th September, he
feels, is ‘less spontaneous than it appears: it is also to a large extent
conditioned, constituted, if not actually constructed, circulated at any rate
through the media by means of a prodigious techno-social-political machine.’
(p. 86). Being extremely ‘attentive to the phenomenon of language, naming and
dating’, and to the ‘repetition compulsion (at once rhetorical, magical,
poetical)’, Derrida comes to the conclusion that the most powerful and
destructive appropriation of terrorism is precisely its use as a self-evident concept
by all parties involved! Thus, the discourse of terrorism appears in the light
of Derrida’s philosophical analysis as a kind of language game which defines
history by its own vision and by so doing seeks to control it.
A very different portrait
of terrorism as a radically modern phenomenon, sprung from the loins of a
totalitarian, positivist and imperial modernity, emerges from John Gray’s
brilliant little volume, Al-QAEDA and what it means to be MODERN.
Indeed, Gray who possesses exceptional facility with language, being able to
expresses complex ideas in the simplest words, also has the enviable gift of analysis
and perception. He exposes the intellectual and moral pretense of modern
ideologies as no one else, and his writings have attained the status of being
the veritable landmarks of cogent and powerful kulturkritik. Gray is
censorious of all kinds of totalitarian projects and universalist
visions which give rise to illusions of omnipotence and megalomania.
Modernity’s mistress, science with a capital S, he believes, is the mother of
the mythic belief in humanity’s ability to control its destiny.
Al-Qaeda’s closest
precursors, we are informed in the beginning, are the revolutionary anarchists
of late nineteenth-century
In brief sketches,
Gray presents a history of modernist illusions, paying equal attention to their
political, economic and ideological matrices. Whatever the topic, be it
positivism or globalism, free-market or Pax Americana, limits to growth
or the end of history, his is a lucid and intellectually gratifying analysis.
Nor is there any reticence when it comes to describing the follies of the
modern ways. Some examples: ‘It is a mistake to think that opponents of liberal
values are enemies of the Enlightenment…. The European right is not so much a
return of fascism as an attempt to modernize it.’ (14-15); ‘French nation is an
artifact of military conscription and the school system.’ (19); ‘
John Gray is a highly perceptive, outspoken and eloquent critic of
modernity’s totalitarian – missionizing as well as imperialistic – theories and
practices. His numerous writings, especially an earlier work Enlightenment’s
Wake (Routledge, 1995), are indispensable for any Muslim attempt to
understand modernity as a Western enterprise of din and dawla!
Among the more scholarly publications that also focus on September 11,
Bruce Lincoln’s Holy Terrors is worthy of serious attention. It is a
theoretical work that seeks to understand, in the light of the notorious
terrorist attacks on
As a phenomenological study, however,
If Bruce Lincoln’s effort marks a serious academic response to the
terror of 11th September, Charles Kimball’s When Religions Become Evil
is a testimony to the contrition and intense soul-searching of the religious
conscience that is also a gift of September 11th. Despite the provocative, if
not downright offensive, title, it is neither polemical in intent nor harsh in
tone. The author, an academic and a cleric, with special relationship to the
Middle East and the Iranian regime, is a teacher at heart who seeks to warn the
believers of every faith of the ‘five warning signs of corruption in religion’,
namely, absolute truth claims, blind obedience, establishing the ideal time,
the end justify any means, and Holy War or the Crusading impulse. For much of
the irenic sentiment that is found throughout the book, the author avowedly
feels indebted to W.C. Smith.
Certainly, there is nothing reprehensible in Kimball’s plea for the
ransacking of the religious conscience, especially when he is evenhanded in his
reproach and does not target any single tradition for the sake of political
expediency. Further, whatever he says is already part of the general wisdom of
all major traditions, which always warn against the dangers of sectarianism,
against the lure of turning the universal community into a party. What makes
his plea somewhat problematic is the fact that his view of religion too is a
thoroughly secular one, that he has internalized secular criticism to the
extent of brandishing ‘religion’, or at least certain sections of it, as
‘evil’. Only in the choice of the Manichaean terminology are found any traces
of his own faith! A far more revealing, and morally disturbing, study would be
the one carrying the title, When States Become Evil. Whether Kimball
will be tempted to produce such a sequel to his present volume remains however to
be seen!
That the ‘war on terror’ has reintroduced apocalyptic imagery and atavistic
rhetoric in the political language is no secret. In fact, Bruce Lincoln clearly
shows that there is a veritable symmetry in the scriptural allusions of both
Ben Laden and Bush (19-32), not to mention the pious rage against liberalism
that pervades the fulminations of rightist evangelists in the
A far more sophisticated and erudite, but by no means less passionate,
plea for the restitution of the Biblical vision of world order is found in
Thomas Prangle’s Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. Here is a
very intense academic reflection, in the form of a dialogue between the
partisans of philosophical rationalism and scriptural wisdom, that fully
reveals the angst and disenchantment that Biblical consciousness feels today.
As a very competent exegetical tract, it is also a tribute to the resources of
the religious intellect. In fact, Pangle passionately yearns for the kind of
transcendence which has been all but lost in the secular nihilism of modernity
(Nihilism as a metaphysical predisposition and a worldview, one ought to bear
in mind, also characterizes the mind-set of Muslim terrorists!)
Its tenor, however, is best appraised by listening to the concluding
statement which says: ‘Patriarchy, the Scripture teaches us, is the cornerstone
of the right way of life for mankind. The chosen people are a people of
patriarchal families…. Through the story of Abraham, the Bible shows forth the
exemplary patriarch, in all his pious glory. But patriarchy in and of itself,
even patriarchy inspired by Abraham, is far from sufficient. … (Later in the
stories of Isaac and Jacob) we learn why a society of patriarchs requires
broadening to a fraternal society….. What Scripture will mean by rule of law is
the absolute rule of divine positive law: a code of law made for men, but not
by men….. In order to understand the character and the need for such a rule of
divine positive law,
Unfortunately, for all its stylistic elegance, scholarly erudition and
intellectual acumen, Pangle’s statement also marks the limit of scriptural –
fundamentalist - imagination. No viable vision of world order emerges from this
reflection, nor does it lead to any genuine dialogue with secular conscience.
Further, like Muslim fundamentalists, Pangle propagates a theocratic, imperial
vision, just as the positivity that he attributes to the divine law renders it
indistinguishable from any secular penal code. Far more problematic is the very
choice of Abraham as the patriarch of humanity. For all his preeminence in the
Bible and the Qur’an, Abraham/Ibrahim remains unknown to the adherents of
non-Semitic traditions. The Muslim is thus obliged to point out that from the
standpoint of Qur’anic consciousness, only Adam stands for the whole of
humanity. Further, Adam, from the Qur’anic account of creation, may be
envisaged in both transcendental and immanentist terms; both as the primordial,
eternal man and as the individual, historical human being.
Most significantly, Adam is designated as the Representative or
Vicegerent (Khalifa) of God; a designation that is pre-eminently moral in scope and
purpose. It presents a conceptual scheme that mediates between transcendence
and immanence, that bridges the gap between the de facto and the de jure, the is and the ought, of the human situation - without
invoking the ontological language of incarnation. The Qur’anic view of Adam’s khilafa is a supremely humanistic doctrine, without
the hubris and arrogance of errant humanism that according to the critics of
modernity is its bane and the source of its nihilism. In any dialogue with
secularism, in any discussion on the problem of world order, the Muslim
contribution can only be through a deepening of reflection on Adam’s mission
and responsibility.