The End of Faith (4 page)

Most people in positions of leadership in our country will say that there is no direct
link between the Muslim faith and “terrorism.” It is clear, however, that Muslims hate the
West in the very terms of their faith and that the Koran mandates such hatred. It is
widely claimed by “moderate” Muslims that the Koran mandates nothing of the kind and that
Islam is a “religion of peace.” But one need only read the Koran itself to see that this
is untrue:

Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them.
Hell shall be their home: an evil fate. (Koran 9:73)

Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that
God is with the righteous. (Koran 9:123)

Religious Muslims cannot help but disdain a culture that, to the degree that it is
secular, is a culture of infidels; to the degree that it is religious, our culture is the
product of a partial revelation (that of Christians and Jews), inferior in every respect
to the revelation of Islam. The reality that the West currently enjoys far more wealth and
temporal power than any nation under Islam is viewed by devout Muslims as a diabolical
perversity, and this situation will always stand as an open invitation for jihad. Insofar
as a person is Muslimthat is, insofar as he believes that Islam constitutes the only
viable path to God and that the Koran enunciates it perfectly he will feel contempt for
any man or woman who doubts the truth of his beliefs. What is more, he will feel that the
eternal happiness of his children is put in peril by the mere presence of such unbelievers
in the world. If such people happen to be making the policies under which he and his
children must live, the potential for violence imposed by his beliefs seems unlikely to
dissipate. This is why eco- nomic advantages and education, in and of themselves, are
insuffi- cient remedies for the causes of religious violence. There is no doubt that many
well-educated, middle-class fundamentalists are ready to kill and die for God. As Samuel
Huntington14 and others have observed, religious fundamentalism in the developing world is not,
principally, a movement of the poor and uneducated.

To see the role that faith plays in propagating Muslim violence, we need only ask why so
many Muslims are eager to turn them- selves into bombs these days. The answer: because the
Koran makes this activity seem like a career opportunity. Nothing in the history

of Western colonialism explains this behavior (though we can cer- tainly concede that this
history offers us much to atone for). Sub- tract the Muslim belief in martyrdom and jihad,
and the actions of suicide bombers become completely unintelligible, as does the spec-
tacle of public jubilation that invariably follows their deaths; insert these peculiar
beliefs, and one can only marvel that suicide bombing is not more widespread. Anyone who
says that the doctrines of Islam have “nothing to do with terrorism”and our airways have
been filled with apologists for Islam making this claimis just play- ing a game with words.

The believers who stay at homeapart from those that suffer from a grave impedimentare not
the equal of those who fight for the cause of God with their goods and their persons. God
has given those that fight with their goods and their persons a higher rank than those who
stay at home. God has promised all a good reward; but far richer is the recompense of
those who fight for Him.... He that leaves his dwelling to fight for God and His apos- tle
and is then overtaken by death, shall be rewarded by God. . . . The unbelievers are your
inveterate enemies. (Koran 4:95-101)

Outright prestidigitation with the articles of faith regularly pro- duces utterances of
this sort: “Islam is a religion of peace. The very word 'Islam,' after all, means 'peace.'
And suicide is forbidden in the Koran. So there is no scriptural basis whatsoever for the
actions of these terrorists.” To such magician's patter, we might add that the phrase
“dirty bomb” does not appear anywhere in the text of the Koran. Yes, the Koran seems to
say something that can be construed as a prohibition against suicide“Do not destroy
yourselves” (4:29)but it leaves many loopholes large enough to fly a 767 through:

Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the here- after, fight for the
cause of God; whoever fights for the cause of

God, whether he dies or triumphs, We shall richly reward him The true believers fight for
the cause of God, but the infidels fight for the devil. Fight then against the friends of
Satan.... Say: “Tri- fling are the pleasures of this life. The hereafter is better for
those who would keep from evil. . . .” (Koran 4:74-78)

When the above invitations to martyrdom are considered in light of the fact that Islam
does not distinguish between religious and civil authority,15 the twin terrors of Koranic literalism spring into view: on the level of the state, a
Muslim aspiration for world domination is explicitly enjoined by God; on the level of the
individual, the metaphysics of martyrdom provides a rationale for ultimate self- sacrifice
toward this end. As Bernard Lewis observes, since the time of the Prophet, Islam has been
“associated in the minds and memo- ries of Muslims with the exercise of political and
military power.”16 The metaphysics of Islam are particularly inauspicious where toler- ance and religious
diversity are concerned, for martyrdom is the only way that a Muslim can bypass the
painful litigation that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to
paradise. Rather than spend centuries moldering in the earth in anticipation of being
resurrected and subsequently interrogated by wrathful angels, the martyr is immediately
transported to Allah's Garden, where a flock of “dark-eyed” virgins awaits him.

Because they are believed to be nothing less than verbatim tran- scripts of God's
utterances, texts like the Koran and the Bible must be appreciated, and criticized, for
any possible interpretations to which they are susceptibleand to which they will be subjected, with
varying emphases and elisions, throughout the religious world. The problem is not that
some Muslims neglect to notice the few ref- erences to nonaggression that can be found in
the Koran, and that this leads them to do terrible things to innocent unbelievers; the
problem is that most Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal word of God. The corrective to the worldview of Osama bin Laden is not to point out the single line in
the Koran that condemns suicide,

because this ambiguous statement is set in a thicket of other pas- sages that can be read
only as direct summons to war against the “friends of Satan.” The appropriate response to
the bin Ladens of the world is to correct everyone's reading of these texts by making the
same evidentiary demands in religious matters that we make in all others. If we cannot
find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to
Armageddonbecause God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn
the other cheek.

We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words “Jesus,” “Allah,” “Ram”can
mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting. Considering the stakes
here, it is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necessary to murder other
human beings for using the wrong magic words, or the right ones for the wrong reasons. How
can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so
in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the
books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our
world.

There is, of course, much that is wise and consoling and beautiful in our religious books.
But words of wisdom and consolation and beauty abound in the pages of Shakespeare, Virgil,
and Homer as well, and no one ever murdered strangers by the thousands because of the
inspiration he found there. The belief that certain books were written by God (who, for
reasons difficult to fathom, made Shake- speare a far better writer than himself) leaves
us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.17 How is it that the absurdity of this idea does not bring us, hourly, to our knees? It is
safe to say that few of us would have thought so many people could believe such a thing,
if they did not actually believe it. Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that
certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which
millions of

our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anythinganythingbe more ridicu- lous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are
living in.

Death: The Fount of Illusions

We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. The
world sustains us, it would seem, only to devour us at its leisure. Parents lose their
children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never
to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the last
time. This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast
spectacle of loss.

But it seems that there is a cure for all this. If we live rightlynot necessarily
ethically, but within the framework of certain ancient beliefs and stereotyped behaviorswe
will get everything we want after we die. When our bodies finally fail us, we just shed our corpo- real ballast and travel
to a land where we are reunited with everyone we loved while alive. Of course, overly
rational people and other rab- ble will be kept out of this happy place, and those who
suspended their disbelief while alive will be free to enjoy themselves for all eternity.

We live in a world of unimaginable surprisesfrom the fusion energy that lights the sun to
the genetic and evolutionary conse- quences of this light's dancing for eons upon the
earthand yet par- adise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of
a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn't know bet- ter, one would
think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with
its gatekeeper God, in his own image.

IMAGINE that you have gone to your doctor for a routine checkup, and he gives you terrible news:
you have contracted a virus that kills

100 percent of those it infects. The virus mutates so often that its course is totally
unpredictable. It can lie dormant for many years, even decades, or it can kill you
outright in an hour. It can lead to heart attack, stroke, myriad forms of cancer,
dementia, even suicide; in fact, there seems to be no constraints upon what its terminal
stages might be. As for strategies of avoidancediet and health regimes, sequestration to
one's bednothing avails. You can be cer- tain that even if you live with no other purpose
than to keep the progress of this virus in check, you will die, for there is no cure for
it in sight, and the corruption of your body has already begun.

Surely, most people would consider this report to be terrible news indeedbut would it be news, in fact? Isn't the inevitability of death just such a prognosis? Doesn't life itself have
all the properties of our hypothetical virus?

You could die at any moment. You might not even live to see the end of this paragraph. Not
only that, you will definitely die at some moment in the future. If being prepared for death entails knowing when and
where it will happen, the odds are you will not be pre- pared. Not only are you bound to
die and leave this world; you are bound to leave it in such a precipitate fashion that the
present sig- nificance of anythingyour relationships, your plans for the future, your
hobbies, your possessionswill appear to have been totally illusory. While all such things,
when projected across an indefinite future, seem to be acquisitions of a kind, death
proves that they are nothing of the sort. When the stopper on this life is pulled by an
unseen hand, there will have been, in the final reckoning, no acqui- sition of anything at
all.

And as if this were not insult enough, most of us suffer the quiet discomposure, if not
frank unhappiness, of our neuroses in the meantime. We love our family and friends, are
terrified of losing them, and yet are not in the least free merely to love them while our short lives coincide. We have, after all, our selves to worry about. As Freud and his descendants never tired of pointing out, each of us is
dragged and sundered by diametrical urges: to merge with the world

and disappear, or to retreat within the citadel of our apparent sepa- rateness. Either
impulse, taken to its extreme, seems to condemn us to unhappiness. We are terrified of our
creaturely insignificance, and much of what we do with our lives is a rather transparent
attempt to keep this fear at bay. While we try not to think about it, nearly the only
thing we can be certain of in this life is that we will one day die and leave everything
behind; and yet, paradoxically, it seems almost impossible to believe that this is so. Our
felt sense of what is real seems not to include our own death. We doubt the one thing that
is not open to any doubt at all.

What one believes happens after death dictates much of what one believes about life, and
this is why faith-based religion, in presum- ing to fill in the blanks in our knowledge of
the hereafter, does such heavy lifting for those who fall under its power. A single
proposi- tionyou will not dieonce believed, determines a response to life that would be otherwise unthinkable.

Imagine how you would feel if your only child suddenly died of pneumonia. Your reaction to
this tragedy will be largely determined by what you think happens to human beings after
they die. It would undoubtedly be comforting to believe something like: “He was God's
little angel, and God took him back early because he wanted him close to Jesus. He'll be
waiting for us when we get to heaven.” If your beliefs are those of a Christian Scientist,
obliging you to forgo all medical interventions, you may even have collaborated with God
by refusing to give your child antibiotics.