Resurrecting their feeling of grief, rage and disbelief from three years ago, Americans were heard to holler around Sept. 11: Evil Islam.
You would’ve thought that after Hannah Arendt dismissed it as banal more than four decades ago, and St. Augustine disabused the Western intellectual tradition a millennium before from conceptualizing it literally, evil — evil in the Manechean sense of being a dark, cosmic force embodied, say, in the person of a political leader or a social ideology — would not be credible in a serious public discourse, left instead to kitschy fundamentalists to bandy about.
That’s not the case. President Bush, heir to a literalist paradigm in the Protestant ethic, popularized the notion, you will recall, after Sept. 11 with his earnest references to “evildoers.” He was determined, he said, to “rid the world of evil,” and to go after Iraq, Iran and North Korea, that between them represented an “axis of evil.” And so on.
The problem with dichotomizing the world into the good guys and the bad guys is that the notion is seductive to intellectually lazy folk who prefer to see objective reality as encompassing either black or white, where your enemies are all bad, bad to the bone, in this case all anti-American Muslim zealots devoted to the destruction of the United States.
And never mind that militants, who embrace or have appropriated Islam as a vehicle of their self-definitions, say in places like Chechnya, Palestine and Iraq, as opposed to Bin Ladenist terrorists hellbent on a course of nihilistic destruction, may be human beings responsive to rational debate.
If you have made up your mind to draw no fine distinctions here — not to consider, in other words, the possibility that some men, over the ages and across cultures, have resorted to terror where they were smothered by a profound sense of social despair, personal worthlessness and national malaise — then you would find it easy to adopt a scorched-earth policy in pursuit of the evildoers, and get a cheap thrill out of seeing these Satanic agents suffer.
More than being seductive to the intellectually lazy, this notion also happens to be dangerous in the extreme, for it is no different, at a seminal level of relating to it, from Bin Ladenism, whose followers will buck no self-scrutiny, or self-doubt, about their actions. Rather they are suffused with self-assurance, for in their warped interpretation if Islam, no question is left unanswered, no answer in doubt.
In a thoughtful piece in the Washington Post last Sunday, Robin Wright, author of several books on Islam, wrote: “Once familiar to most Americans mainly from seventh grade social studies, Islam has now become synonymous in the minds of many with the biggest post-Cold War threat.
Even as we struggle to understand it, we’re afraid of it. And because of that fear, we’re drawing a Green Curtain around the Muslim world, creating an enduring divide. [Thus] figuring out Islam’s role in the 21st century is an existential challenge.”
Not only should Americans figure out Islam’s role in the 21st century, but also why political activists in the Muslim world, from Iran to Egypt, Indonesia to Afghanistan, and Algeria to Palestine, have found in mosques the only place where their political passions are absorbed.
The answer to that is simple: In a community where your social discontent and political aspirations are denied expression, the only place left — sacrosanct and inviolate by the authorities — is your house of worship. Black Americans, denied participation in the political process, were no different. In Latin America, liberation theologians were leading the struggle for human rights; Anglican bishops like Desmond Tutu, the fight against apartheid; and Catholic priests in Poland the call for freedom from Russian domination.
No two ways about it: Americans have to come to terms with Islam, not only outside their borders, where it is embraced by 1.2 billion people spread throughout 53 countries, but within the United States itself. There it is the fastest growing religion, expected to become the second largest faith in less than a decade.
They can begin doing that by accepting the proposition that, thanks to the foibles of our human nature, anyone — Muslim terrorists in New York, as German Nazis in Europe, British colonialists in India, French Pieds Noirs in Algeria, and, yes, the occasional American invader in Vietnam, torturer in Abu Ghraib and Cold Warrior in Chile — is capable of slipping into the garb and glove of evildoers.
