February 4, 2008
The historian Michael Howard, in his book on the First World War, writes:
The [Russian] regime remained terrified that industrial development, however essential it might be for military effectiveness, would only encourage demands fro further political reform, and it suppressed dissidents with a brutality that only drove them to extremes of 'terrorism' (a term and technique invented by the revolutionaries in the nineteenth century), thus justifying further brutality.
And so, there is the link between political oppression and terror, stated matter-of-factly, as if nothing could be more obvious. And yet, why is it suddenly considered to be "soft on terror" to make similar connections between, say, the brutal extremism of the Mahdi army, the Taliban or al-Qaeda and the actions of western governments and their middle-eastern client states? Why has it become fashionable to intimate, as Hitchens constantly does, that the inflexibility and inhumanity of Islam itself are almost solely responsible for suicide bombings?
I bow to no one in my hatred of all religions, but surely there is room to suggest that the political conditions in Iraq and elsewhere have created the space in which such things can flourish, have weakened the body and allowed the cancer to spread. And surely it is not inaccurate to say that Islam does have an opportunity to reform itself in the way that Christianity reformed itself after the Crusades (Maybe it is more accurate to say that political changes can actually force religion to make reforms: Islam certainly made very bizarre accommodations to Soviet dialectics in some central Asian states).
That is to say, it isn't the violence inherent in Islam that is the specific problem (though generally, religion always stinks and puts intolerable distortions on rational thinking, and devalues everything - including other people - in favour of a supreme and unattainable goal). In societies debilitated by self-serving dictatorships terrified of reform and propped up by omnipresent police states (Saudi Arabia), and where all other aspects of civil society have been ripped to pieces (Iraq), and where any attempt at rebuilding society in any conventional fashion has been stymied by civil war, foreign occupation or even brute economic realities (Afghanistan), people rush towards religious extremes because they represent the only way out, the only escape route, the only organized outlet for dissent, glory and salvation. Saddam tore the heart out of Iraq. Everything - art, culture, music, architecture - was replaced by the insignia and emblems of the Dictator. Religion was permitted, especially when Saddam was trying to portray himself as the new Saladin, the saviour of Islam, fighting back the heathen hordes. Religion was all that was left.
These religions naturally have a built-in confirmation bias, and despite centuries of decline (perhaps partly as a result of overzealous applications of sharia law), the mullahs attribute the current failures not to religious extremism, but to a failure of faith. (In the same way, St. Bernard interpreted the absurd, abject failure of the Second Crusade not to religious dogmatism, but to deviation from scripture). Religions tell people in a big hole to continue digging.
The point is, though, that there are clear examples of how all religions can be reconciled to prevailing political realities. They do not exist in a vacuum. They are not inchoate, however much they pretend to be so, and however much this pretense offers some sort of solace to troubled populations who have not done well from recent history.
