Pushing Past Terror to Understanding

Continued from page 4

Judea Pearl: I'm going to give you a secular Jewish perspective. Every religion has its extremists. Every scripture has passages that make one embarrassed, at least by today's standards, and other passages that put one in awe. However, religions do not provide us with a full recipe of behavior. They provide us with the intellectual resources, which are like building blocks, with which we construct a code of behavior. Religion, therefore, is combined with culture, to dictate our behavior. Some religions happen to be embedded in supportive cultures, some in negative cultures. Some cultures are able to exercise safeguards to prevent their religion from being hijacked.

What kind of safeguards would those be? Can you give examples?

Judea Pearl: As a secularist, I must say that the safeguards come from rules and principles that are higher than the religion. Look at the American example. We are a pluralistic society. Being pluralistic means that whenever I have a conflict, between the principle that I learned from Jefferson and the principle that my priest or my rabbi teaches me, I'm going to prefer Jefferson. Because Jefferson represents for me the universal principle by which I and the rest of society are willing to abide.

So are you agreeing with those who say we would have a safer and more peaceful world if we weren't separated by religious particularisms?

Judea Pearl: No, I didn't say that. It's a matter of priority. We look at the principles that we learn in school as the highest platforms for morality. And we look at the priest and the rabbi with sort of a smile. And we treat what they say as a very nice metaphor that reinforces Jeffersonian morality, not the other way around.

Even for my son, Daniel, American values constituted the superstratum of values. And religion was poetry. But this is a secularist viewpoint. I'm sure that John [Chane] will object to it. Even though I take this viewpoint, I say that we need religion, because we need poetry. And without poetry you don't see yourself in the universe, and you don't have the metaphors and the building blocks with which to reinforce the principles by which you conduct your life.

Bishop John Chane: Judea has made a very fine point, and it really defines, at least from the perspective of this country, the gift of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that continue to at least create a separation between the role of religion and the role of the state, which we continue to struggle with in these times.

In the introduction to "After Terror: Promoting Dialogue Among Civilizations," Prof. Ahmed points out that most of the essayists in the book reject historian Samuel Huntington's notion of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. Is that skepticism about the validity of Huntington's argument still valid, given the ongoing terror threat?

Akbar Ahmed: We weren't actually saying that we would like all the contributors to reject Huntington as such. What we were really saying is, Let us explore alternative paradigms. Remember where the book begins. I was in class [at American University] on 9/11, and just a few miles away you had the plane flying into the Pentagon. I was teaching these wonderful American kids. And from that experience grew my desire as a Muslim scholar to try to create some other way of looking at the world. The idea of the clash of civilizations was a very dominant one. It's a very strong one, and it's a very valid one-there is a great deal of truth in it.

But I'm not prepared to say that that is the only way. So I began to explore the idea of dialogue of civilizations. I began to talk about it. My friend, Prof. Brian Forst [professor of Justice, Law and Society at American University's School of Public Affairs] and I developed the idea of the book and asked the other distinguished scholars to join us. We were very fair and wished to hear diverse voices. We have the entire gamut from Professor Bernard Lewis to President Khatami of Iran.

As to American values: I want to point out to your readers that while on the surface this may look unlikely, the Islamic ideal and the American ideal have much in common, although they are coming from different traditions.

As an anthropologist, let me point out what is common: The idea of respect for the family. The idea of respect and welcoming the stranger, the immigrant communities. The idea of living as a balanced and healty community. The idea of respect for justice, for education, for science, for an open mind. All these are very much a part of the Islamic ideal. It will be a great surprise to many Americans to know that the number one poet of the United States of America is none other than Mowlana Rumi [the 13th-cen. mystical Muslim poet]. For the past 10 years, his books have sold more than any other poet, more than Frost, more than Whitman.

You're talking about a community of people already open to crossing religious and cultural boundaries to read the wisdom of other traditions. But that's a different climate than the one we're trying to understand, the one that produces suicide bombers. Who are the people who are willing to kill themselves and others, and what are the religious components in their motivations?

Bishop John Chane: That's a great question. I'm not sure if you're familiar with a book written by Phillip Jenkins, "The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity," which came out in 2003. It is an analysis of the growth of [evangelical] Christianity and Islam, and to some extent Judaism, in what would be called the "Southern Church," or what we often refer to as the Third World. The growth of these two monotheistic religions in the Third World is a growth of fundamentalism and also extreme emotion, which gets melded into the religious convert. Jenkins' point is that if there is not a way to undercut what is a very clear fundamental and rudimentary reading of sacred texts, then we really are going to be looking at what might be considered a third crusade. A civilized effort to disarm such fundamental and extremely narrow, self-serving interpretations of the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam must become a significant priority for all three Abrahamic faiths.

Suicide bombers now apparently have a foothold in the West. They are already in the Middle East, and in some parts of Asia. What is the theology that drives this phenomenon?

Bishop John Chane: I was in southern Lebanon not too long ago and spent some time with refugees from Palestine who have no state, no home. And I met with a parent who had five children, three of them sons. And he said to me, "I have nothing to leave my family. I have nothing." I was talking to him about the horror of suicide bombers, and he said, "I would be proud for one of my sons to give his life for the cause, because there is nothing else for him to give his people other than his life at this point." It just stopped me in my tracks.

Throughout history, there have been people in dire straits, and they have not resorted to murdering innocent civilians. This seems to be a latter 20th-century and 21st-century phenomenon. What is going on now that brings people to think of themselves as martyrs not when they sacrifice their own lives for a principle or a religious faith, but when they're willing to take other people's lives?

Akbar Ahmed: You have this very tragic and very dramatic, and very unfortunate example of my friend Judea's son in Karachi.

And I see in that-and I've told Judea-a collapse on several levels. It was a moral collapse, it was an administrative collapse, it was a political collapse. It is a process. It has been happening for at least the last two decades. So you are seeing several kinds of collapses in Muslim society.

Islam itself categorically prohibits suicide. So I'm puzzled as an anthropologist how the suicide bomber has evolved in the Muslim world, starting from the Arabs then coming over into Pakistan, and now to Britian. I'm not only alarmed, I'm worried. Because I'm seeing a trend here. I'm seeing how they are being encouraged to interpret religion itself in this negative way that it encourages them to blow themselves up.

And it 's not just in Islam. We have the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam [mostly Hindu armed rebel group, which also has support from Tamil Christians, fighting against the government for a separate Tamil homeland since 1972] in Sri Lanka. Almost 60,000 have died there in suicide killings, despite the strong local pacifist tradition. It is a social phenomenon. We are now faced with the situation that it has happened in the U.K. God forbid, it could happen in the U.S.A., if you have some youngsters, stupid enough, violent enough, confused enough, irrational enough, to be pushed over the edge.

So if we are aware that this could happen, let us not make the mistake of looking at it as we have been so far, in terms of security and terrorism analysis but in terms of ethnicity, culture, anthropology.

Judea Pearl: What Akbar says supports my claim that it is not religion to blame, but a combination of religion and culture. The suicide bombing is an example of how different cultures value life relative to other values, like for instance ethnic loyalty, family loyalty, and the idea of honor. In Judaism, for instance, life stands on the top of the ladder, more than loyalty to any collective.

Rami Khouri, a Lebanese journalist with Beirut's Daily Star, has written about distinctions between the two cultures-the Western culture and the Middle Eastern culture. And one of them was that loyalties-to clan and to country-are valued higher than individual life. And the same for individual freedom. It is not such a big deal, compared to what the collective expects from you. So you surrender your individual freedom to the expectation of the collective.

This is part of [Muslim] culture. I don't think the value of individual freedom is discussed in the Qur'an. I don't know how Islamic scholars deal with that. In the West, by comparison, the idea of individual freedom has been so deeply entrenched, from the time of the Renaissance.

Akbar Ahmed: We have a philosophic problem, living in the 21st century. Here I must bring up the dreaded word "globalization." The assumption that the Western frame of reference is the only frame is not only incorrect, but is causing a lot of the friction in the world today. You have an Indian way of living; you have a Chinese way of living; you have an Islamic way. There are different world civilizations.

The juggernaut of globalization seems to be on a collision course with local civilizations. Some of it leads to friction, some of it leads to unhappiness, some of it leads to violence. We have to remember that right now in the world we have a situation where, to quote [Britain's chief rabbi] Jonathan Sacks, we have 358 individuals who own as more financial assets than half the world's population.

Bishop John Chane: The assumption is that two-thirds of the world's population is living on less than two dollars a day.

Akbar Ahmed: This is also causing a lot of desperation in the world.

How would you counsel people who are afraid of Muslim individuals and angry about Islam, as to how they should regard that faith and and its followers?

Akbar Ahmed: I would request them to follow a three-step program, to try to avoid any kind of conflict or confrontation. This is based on my experience here in the United States, with these two remarkable gentlemen who I'm talking to in this dialogue we are having. And it applies to everyone, including Muslims. The first step is, they must start a process of dialogue. Simple dialogue. Start talking to each other. I've been in front of audiences who say, "We've never talked to a Muslim before. We've never been in the same room as a Muslim." That has to really break down and it can if you have a personal dialogue

But dialogue by itself is incomplete. It is simply an exchange of words. It must lead to effort on both sides toward understanding. That's the second step. Understanding means to make an effort: Read a book, an article; learn about each other; visit a synagogue; go to a church; go to a mosque.

And third, if this process is successful, then I hope you are able to create friendship. And when you have friendship, then really everything changes. Even the most difficult problems begin to take a different shape when you have friends talking, as opposed to the first step, dialogue, where often it's a rehearsal of old prejudices, or putting out the old positions and grievances. One of the reasons the Palestinian/Israeli problem just doesn't seem to be getting unlocked or moving very fast is because both sides are meeting in dialogue, but there is very little friendship on both sides. If there is friendship-if the example of Judea Pearl is followed, where he has reached out in a very magnificent way, I would say even a heroic way-it creates an atmosphere where you can then say "Well, OK, maybe I was wrong. Let's look at it this way." Judea says "I'm secular." I always tease him that I find him more spiritual than some of the religious figures I know. Because what he did [dedicating himself to greater intercultural and interfaith understanding after the murder of his son] was really extraordinary.

This is what we've got to do, because we are living in the age of globalization, which means societies are interpenetrated, juxtaposed with each other. We have to be inclusivist in the way we look at the world. At the heart of the Abrahamic faiths, there is hope, there's optimism, and above all there is acceptance. And that is what is so marvelous and valid about the Abrahamic faiths.

But the terrorist next door is not ever going to be willing to enter into dialogue with those whose values or religion he hates. How do we extrapolate from what you three people are doing to how we untie this Gordian knot?

Judea Pearl: I think I'm the only contributor to the book, "After Terror," who makes the point that there are absolute partitions between good and evil, moral and immoral. And regardless of the source of this absolute, if we don't submit ourselves to such absolutes, we find ourselves in a moral morass.

So the key is to acknowledge that there is real evil in the world.

Judea Pearl: Which means that not every culture ought to be included in our inclusivity. We pride ourselves on being inclusive. But I do not want to include Al Qaeda in my spectrum of included members. Those who deny the basic principle of inclusiveness ought not to be embraced by my inclusiveness.

Akbar Ahmed: I think that Judea is quite right. Obviously, when you're talking about inclusivity you're not talking about people like Al Qaeda who want to blow you up. My concern always, and this is sometimes a difficult point to communicate to people who see Muslims as a monolith who all look alike, is the risk of alienating the majority. If we lose the majority, we lose the bigger game. When we alienate the majority, we strengthen Al Qaeda. So I think sometimes we are ignorant, sometimes we are plain, downright stupid. Because the longer you push in that direction, from a couple of thousand people who want to do harmful things to America, who are the "evil people," we have increased that base to maybe hundreds of thousands, and that has been quite unnecessary.

Judea Pearl: I absolutely agree. And when I say I do not want to include some people in my spectrum, of course I did not mean the Muslim world. I'm talking about people who categorically deny the principle of inclusiveness, and people who deny my basic values as a human being. We have to break the symmetry of "You deny my humanity, so I deny yours." There are absolute principles that civilized society has adopted, and we ought to enforce them. They stand above all sorts of considerations such as "You did me harm, and I do you harm." I'm talking here about the idea of targeting innocent people for the purpose of transmitting a grievance to some perceived wrongdoers. Civilized society has proclaimed that idea to be a taboo. And that taboo has been violated by certain groups. And we should not regard that violation as just another form of culture.

Akbar Ahmed: I read verses from the Qur'an in the National Cathedral last Sunday during the service for the London victims, and one of the verses was exactly what Judea says: That the good and the evil cannot be one.

The verse also says repel evil with the good.

Akbar Ahmed: You talk to ordinary Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, they will talk about Palestine, they will talk about Kashmir, about Chechnya, and that adds to the sense of irrational anger that right now is like an electric current throughout the Muslim world. And then it is difficult for people like me to talk of compassionate Islam, and friendship and balance, because they're no longer responding as "normal" Muslims and therefore not listening.

I have to shift the argument to include them, so that the majority is not lost. That is always my concern. If we lose the majority, then for me as a Muslim, it is going to be a very dramatic internal collapse of the Muslim world. Because then the argument for an inclusivist, tolerant, compassionate Islam, reflecting Islam's great days, will really have suffered a setback.