Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (64 page)

For a decade after the Civil War, civil rights blossomed in the South under Union military protection, with many Southern blacks elected to state and national office. For Southern whites, though, blacks in office were shameful symbols of defeat, economic dispossession, and degradation. Preachers in white Protestant churches railed against the loss of traditional sacred values—of honor, duty, and respect—to modern Yankee vices of crass commerce, sexual license, and drunkenness. Everything changed when Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote in the disputed presidential election of 1876 and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to remove the troops to win office through the electoral college. The Ku Klux Klan and other religiously inspired groups of poor and Southern whites were now free to act, terrorizing blacks and any others who would uphold the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution for the next century. Only the southern black churches kept the opposing sacred hopes of freedom and dignity for all alive in the black counterculture.

Ivy League intellectuals and liberal youth no doubt helped to rouse national support for the civil rights movement, but the inspiration to sustained struggle and sacrifice came from preachers like Martin Luther King and his forebears. They saw freedom’s future in One Nation Under God as the fulfillment of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (3:28): “There is no Jew or Greek, neither slave nor freeman, there is neither male or female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.” It was the black churches that began creating a color-blind America, or at least a rainbow with no hard lines. That heritage of religious outreach and fellowship is also part of Barack Obama’s church conscience, cadence, and appeal and not, as some political conservatives and liberals intimate, a mere bone he’s thrown to the masses.

GLOBALIZED RELIGION

Globalization has created a market of social movements, both political and religious. But these political and religious movements are very different now from those in times past. They have become dislocated from ancient roots of ethnicity and territory as well as from more recent ties to nations and cultural areas (or “civilizations”).
²²
Economic globalization, whatever its considerable material benefits, is erasing traditional paths to security and well-being among masses of culturally unmoored and marginalized peoples. And among their youth, the mores of society—even the very word “society”—seem contrary to the feverish hope of unbounded friendships and emancipation.

The preferred purchases in this global market are the “purist” forms of politics and “fundamentalist” religions. They are the ones that have become standardized and superficial enough so that traditional knowledge and learning, and the weight of cultural history and the social order, count for little or nothing. Christian and Islamic “revivalist” movements fit the bill, but not Eastern Orthodoxy and Hinduism, which are still too closely tied to a particular part of the world. With these new fundamentalisms, the absolute and arbitrary boundaries of “the sacred”—now almost completely divorced from their previous role in helping to establish cooperation within and competition between cultures, nations, and civilizations—become the primary markers of collective identity: the Ten Commandments, “pro-life,” the justice of “an eye for an eye,” the world according to the
hadith
(original sayings of the Prophet), the division of material and intellectual life (food and sex, art and literature) into
halal
(the licit) and
haram
(the illicit). Blasphemous words and actions that violate these markers, like cursing God or depicting the Prophet in cartoons, are taken as frontal assaults on these globalized forms of collective identity, more threatening even than military attacks on cultural territory.

These markers are simple to learn, readily remembered, and easy to implement in clear and concrete terms that have no particular relationship with people’s personal pasts. It matters not that there’s almost no causal connection between these sacred markers and their original sources, as long as people believe them to have ancient authority and can apply them in the current context. Contrary to what the current crop of new atheists claim,
²³
these fundamentalisms have no historically fixed connection or shared “essence” with whatever founding texts they may use, like the Bible or Koran.
²⁴

French political scientist Olivier Roy perceptively observes that today’s Christian Evangelical and Muslim Salafi movements are thoroughly modern and novel “reformulations of religion rather than a return to ancient practices left aside during the parentheses of secularization.”
²⁵
Across the planet, there are mass conversions moved by television and the Internet and the twenty-four-hour news cycle of world events. People are “born again” into new global religions, not born into them: As I’ve noted before, relatively few people who join the jihad ever grew up with religious education. These media-driven movements feed off one another, especially in their most extreme and militant forms. There’s a lot in common, for example, between what Marc Sageman has dubbed “leaderless jihad”
²⁶
and the “leaderless resistance” of the Aryan Nations, or between the jihadi movement and the Christian Identity Movement’s vision of Revelation and the bloody apocalyptic fantasies of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series (around 50 million sold, at last count).

“Leaderless jihad” most aptly refers to recent developments in the global jihadi movement, exemplified by Mustafa Setmarian Nasar (aka Abu Musa al-Suri; see chapter 11). A veteran of the Soviet-Afghan War, Setmarian had lived and married in Spain and later went to England, where he edited
Al-Ansar
for the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armée (GIA). After a falling out between the GIA and Bin Laden, in 1997 Setmarian joined Bin Laden in Afghanistan and began lecturing in mujahedin training camps on leaderless resistance. His collected works were published online in early 2005 in a 1,600-page manifesto,
Da’wah lil-Muqawamah Al-Islamiyah Al-Alamiyah
(A Call for the Islamic Global Resistance).
²⁷

Setmarian’s online treatise contains important elements of the tract “Leaderless Resistance,” written in 1983 by Louis Beam, a former Aryan Nations “ambassador” and Texas Ku Klux Klan leader.
²⁸
Leaderless resistance rejects traditional pyramidal organization in favor of a collectivity of self-organized groups with no apparent leader. These groups act on their own initiative, based on their own interpretation of ideology, to carry out attacks or foment violence against the American government (and also against Jews, blacks, and other nonwhite Christians, supposedly in accordance with Revelation 12:10). The aim is to protect the wider movement from destruction through decapitation, and to absolve it of responsibility for the actions of associated groups. Beam’s brief tract became the new bible of the cyber-based White Pride Movement that extends across the Americas, Europe, and into South Africa, and its philosophy of plausible deniability has become the legal foundation for numerous radical and militant Internet Web sites that host extreme ideas and plans.

Another intriguing example of convergence concerns the works of white supremacist ideologue William Pierce, which inspired Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City: For example, Pierce’s
The Turner Diaries,
written in 1978, ends with the hero plowing his jet into the Pentagon with an atom bomb on a successful suicide mission.
²⁹
(See also Pierce’s analysis of the 9/11 attacks being carried out for the right reasons by the wrong people.)
³⁰

CULTURE CRASH

The global political conflicts that today’s religious reformulations inspire don’t represent a
clash
of traditional territorial cultures and civilizations,
³¹
but rather their collapse. The jihad, for one, is much more about global youth culture than the Koran or restoring the defunct caliphate. But it’s a particular kind of youth culture, one that virulently opposes the unbounded possibilities that secular society often tolerates: free love and pornography, alcohol and hard drugs, making money and caring just for oneself. The sacred values that frame secular society (including human rights) and permit such practices must then be null and void. On the other side of the looking glass, some secularists argue that the very existence of religious intolerance is so dangerous that religion should be wiped from the earth,
³²
or at least kept on a choke leash.
³³
Fat chance.

Over the last century, the proportion of humanity that affirms no religious affiliation has grown steadily, from about 3 million people in 1900 to nearly 1 billion today.
³⁴
But the trend is reliable only in Europe (particularly countries of the European Union), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and America’s “blue”
³⁵
states (particularly the Northeast and West Coast). These are places where liberal democratic values (including advocacy of global human rights and environmental awareness), a large middle class, and per capita income are comparatively strong.
³⁶

In France, for example, only 30 to 40 percent of the population claim to be “religious”
³⁷
(although at least two thirds of French folk believe in “God, spirit, or a life force”),
³⁸
and the practice of Catholicism, the dominant religion, has been steadily declining for years. But the European trend away from religion is not necessarily irreversible, as the great French secularist André Malraux surmised half a century ago. Take the case of Russia, the core of the former Soviet Union. For more than seventy years, atheists ruled the Soviet Union. Beginning in the first year of school and for each year all the way through college, Soviet students were required to take a course in atheism. But because the educators cared nothing about religion, they made little progress. The assumption was that since religion is bunk, you needn’t really know anything about religion to refute it,
³⁹
and so educational efforts to stifle religion were shallow. There was also often intense discrimination against religious believers. But oppression of religious minorities and leaders often results in broadcasting their costly commitments, which then helps rather than hinders the growth of their message and following.
⁴⁰
We saw in the previous chapter that early Christianity spread to become the majority religion in the Roman Empire through costly displays such as martyrdom and charity (for example, risking death by caring for non-Christians infected with plague).
⁴¹
The payoff? In Russia today, 96 percent of the people profess some sort of faith in God, about the same number as in the United States.
⁴²

In fact, both Protestant Evangelicalism and Islamic Revivalism are gaining ground throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Globalization is producing a growing gap between secular and religious society. Believers in the new global fundamentalist religions, which cut through and across cultures, share less and less cultural substance with secular folk. Secular folk increasingly know nothing, and couldn’t care less, about what believers believe and why. This is because the traditional religions are increasingly irrelevant—to secular folk and believers alike—the more societies become globally involved, and because the new global religions have nothing organic to do with whatever traditional aspects of society secular folk might have grown up to be tolerant toward. Secularists see believers as believing in what’s crazy; believers see secularists as mired in what’s meaningless. Each side demands that the other come to its senses and seek unconditional surrender. Or else. That’s a prescription for conflict and war, not for democracy, tolerance of diversity, or global consensus.

I’m aware that we are living on the cusp of perhaps the second great tipping point in human history, and that this is an awesome and chancy thing to experience. I can almost imagine myself in ancient Mesopotamia, following the advent of the written word, as if in a time machine, out of the cold and cyclical universe of oral memory and myth and into the spiraling torrent of history and civilizations. And then today, cruising in cyberspace among all the world’s words and through all of its walls, I can see once-indispensable material technologies and territorial relationships, like books and nation-states, vanishing in a chain reaction of knowledge and technology produced by a global social brain that anybody can access but nobody can manage.

If people could soar like winged angels and demons, they wouldn’t need cars or airplanes; and if they can surf for knowledge in no time and bind into communities unbound by space, then libraries and borders become irrelevant. Yet I can no more foretell the actual forms of knowledge, technology, and society that are likely to result than an ancient Bushman or Sumerian could foresee how people could split the atom, frolic on the moon, crack the genetic code, or bond unto death on the Internet. (And anyone who says they can is just blowing smoke in your face.) But I’m reasonably sure that whatever new forms arise, they will have to accommodate fundamental aspects of human nature that have barely changed since the Stone Age: love, hate, jealousy, guilt, contempt, pride, loyalty, friendship, rivalry, the thrill of risk and adventure, accomplishment and victory, the desire for esteem and glory, the search for pattern and cause in everything that touches and interests us, and the inescapable need to fashion ideas and relationships sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness in the random profusion of the universe.