This Month's Colloqium

Colloquia Archive

1. Introduction: In the Hickory Daily Record of Sunday, September 23^rd, in the "Your Voice" letters section, appeared this note from George Anastaplo, distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola and the University of Chicago, who has for over fifteen years graced the faculty of the annual Hickory Humanities Forum at Wildacres, sponsored by the Lineberger Center of Lenoir-Rhyne: "Among the innocent victims of the monstrous assaults last week on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are the multitudes of decent Muslims worldwide who must endure the shame, for years to come, of the shocking abuse of American hospitality by their demented co-religionists, the kind of hospitality that Islam and its Prophet have always cherished." I want to address two phrases from Anastaplo's note: first, "multitudes of decent Muslims worldwide." And second, "their demented co-religionists."

2. Apropos "multitudes of decent Muslims worldwide": The connection of Islam with the atrocity of September 11 is inevitable, given the identities emerging from the several crews that hijacked the jets and flew them into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon--and given what is known about the "prime suspect" Osama bin Laden. What we need to know, and to repeat often, is that the religion of Islam does not sanction, much less encourage, such acts of violence. For some of us, Islam is still an unfamiliar religion, though there are between 4 to 6 million Muslims in the United States.

Islam means "submission" to God, or Allah, and Muslims are those who submit to God's will as revealed to the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, a merchant from Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia. Islam is predominant as a religion in the Middle East. Within two centuries after Muhammad's death, Islam had spread across North Africa and down the Nile, as well as into Asia and Europe. Most Arabs today are Muslims, but most Muslims are not Arab. In fact, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim nation with almost 190 million believers of the approximately one billion Muslims in the world.

Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, is monotheistic. Muslims worship the same God as Jews (Allah means God) and Christians. They see Jesus as a prophet but not God incarnate or the only Son of God. They are rigorously monotheistic, rejecting the Christian concept of Trinity. Muslims regard Judaism and Christianity as religions based on scripture, but claim Muhammad's as the final revelation.

The five main pillars of Islam are as follows: affirming that there is only one God and Muhammad is his prophet; praying five times a day; giving alms; fasting from dawn to dusk during Ramadan (the lunar month during which the Quran was revealed to Muhammad); and performing the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The jihad--which has been translated as "holy war" declared in behalf of Islam is more often and more deeply understood as "holy struggle," which has its central locus in the individual. The "greater jihad" is the personal "struggle with one's lower nature, the tendency to do wrong," while external struggles are merely "lesser jihad." The phrase "holy war" does not appear in the Quran. The phrase makes no sense because Islam regards war as a "necessary evil," rather than something intrinsically holy, no matter how waged and against whom. Islam is not pacifist, but, as for instance in the Sunni branch, insists that war must be undertaken for the right reasons: ordered by competent authority and conducted through moral means. The means include, as from the instructions of Muhammad's immediate successor the Caliph Abu Bakr, the following: he forbade the killing of women, children, clergy, and the aged....which is taken to mean protection for all civilians.

Though the concept of Jihad has several shades of meaning, its application by al-Quaeda is beyond Islamic teaching on warfare; direct targeting of civilians is off the charts. So, the terrorist attacks, if they were indeed carried out by Islamic militants, are an aberration of Islam and its central tenets. Devout Muslims worldwide have in good faith and conscience condemned the acts of September 11, and have joined with President Bush in declaring against the scourge of international terrorism of whatever stripe.

3. As to Anastaplo's designation of "demented co-religionists": On the other hand, the events of September 11 are, indeed, religious attacks. They are "religious" in that they are motivated by a religious mindset, a religious weltanschauung, a religious perspective on the world--as opposed to a secular view of the world. Anastaplo's label of "demented" is a studied judgment formed by his own understanding of how the world works, or ought to work. Anastaplo's world is our world--the world that has emerged from the intellectual and political revolutions of the 18^th century: the Enlightenment; government of the people, by the people, and for the people; essential and foundational tolerance of all sorts and conditions of men and women, including the right of self-determination; the notion of individual freedom to pursue one's life in openness of political, economic, and religious opportunity. There has been conflict before between Islam and the Christian west--in the early Middle Ages in Spain and, a little later, when Medieval Europe launched the crusades to "liberate" the Holy Land from Muslim control; in the 15^th and 16^th centuries after the Islamic capture of Constantinople, now Istanbul.

But the scientific, intellectual, political, economic, and technological revolutions of Europe--beginning with the Enlightenment and continuing into the present--have eclipsed Islam on the world stage. The world follows a western paradigm, secular in its major features, historically informed by Christianity. Scholars may argue that the West is now post-Christian. That may be. But the shape of the culture as to its heritage and foundations is Christian. Christian theologians, myself included, may make critique of the slide into both post-modernity and neopaganism, including most prominently the rise of moral autonomy--the individual usurping of the prerogative to declare what is right and what is wrong, as well as the personal authority to do it. But Western critics of secular modernity and post-modernity are only rarely disposed to challenge the foundational premises of liberal democracy: freedom, tolerance, self-determination. The terrorists do. They despise the West for its philosophical foundations, not just for its excesses or failures. They despise the West in principle. The West--especially the United States--is the Great Satan, the great tempter.

That's why Anastaplo calls the terrorists "demented." But, clinically speaking, they are not "demented." What informs them foundationally is a view of the world that is essentially pre-modern, an extremist Islamic fundamentalism that judges the West as evil. Not so much anti-Christian as anti-secular and anti-modem. From an article the other day on the situation "Today, some Muslims say they are again under Western siege. The global economy driven by the West has created new desires and new pressures. Liberal ideas associated with the West are spread through television, movies and popular music -- an emphasis on individual choice that weakens traditional male authority, the mixing of men and women at school and at work....Also fomenting tensions is a sense that in the United States and Europe secularism is promoted and God's will ignored." (Hickory Daily Record, Saturday, Sept. 22, 5D) One of Osama bin Laden's quarrels with the US is the stationing of American troops on Saudi soil--he considers it a sacrilege to have infidel troops occupying holy land. The Saudi government invited the American troops during the Gulf War. Osama bin Laden lost his Saudi citizenship over his criticism of his country's alliance with Washington. Another key quarrel is America's role as guarantor of Israel, a factor which brings three historic religions into face-off.

Present-day terrorism is, in mindset and methods, a power seized in the unholy mix of impotence and simmering rage. Their impotence is the lack of land and nation; they have no international legitimacy.* Their power is made possible by the very openness of Western society coupled with all the technological advances. We are vulnerable to terrorist attacks because of our freedoms, especially our freedom of movement. As to civilians as targets, here is Osama bin Laden in 1998, to ABC News: "In today's wars, there are no morals. We believe the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets." (quoted in Newsweek, Sept. 24, 2001, p. 59.)

President Bush has often and rightly labeled the attacks of September 11 as "evil." "Today America saw evil, and evil will not stand." From the point of view of Osama bin Laden and his ilk, the West is evil.

4. America and Repentance: From various quarters have come calls--some of them more strident than others--for America's repentance. From the cultural and political left, a few have been of the opinion that "America deserved it," citing one or another form of neo-colonialism, particularly in terms of economic influence and mere military might. The "American hegemony of economic imperialism" refers to the ubiquity of McDonalds and other symbols of US capitalism around the globe, raking in money, sometimes off the backs of people whose annual income is miniscule. Particular attention is directed to those firms who have shipped manufacturing off-shore, to countries of very low minimum wage. American labor has itself decried this phenomenon for nearly a decade; our own area has been hit by the NAFTA blight as textile jobs have gone south to Mexico.

It is argued that the US economic system, coupled with the spread of US popular culture via the various forms of media, have built to what amounts to an American cultural hegemony, with young people in particular both enticed and enchanted with things US--music, clothing, CD's, fads and fashions, dating and mating patterns. Twenty years ago Ted Turner observed that one satellite dish could bring down the Iron Curtain, because when people see freedom and truth they are less likely to endure oppression and lies. In a world where communication itself is now ubiquitous, the same phenomenon brings to countries where Islamic culture is yet conservative "even as to Islam--the enticements to cultural freedom of practice are equally as powerful as those to political freedom were to people of Eastern Europe fifteen years ago.

But can America repent of this "hegemony"? Surely, in part, at least: economic justice demands a better accounting of fairness. The bottom line of business is, and will remain, profit, but programs of local economic relief and development would be both good in themselves and serve the long-term interests of business itself. But the allure of culture--especially the allure of personal and cultural freedom--is difficult to contain. The culture clash between the secular West and the conservative religious sectors of Islam is likely not to abate. What must be discouraged in this clash is violence and terrorism. It is in the interest of all standing governments to control and minimize terrorism.

But there have been other calls to repentance. Jerry Falwell said -- and then partially retracted -- that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon represent God's verdict on gay rights, feminism, abortion and the ACLU. Carter Heyward retorted from the left with an attack on the "self-righteous moral rectitude" of Falwell and his ilk.

Paul Hinlicky of Roanoke College has rightly made critique of both these views as "shallow, manipulative and predictable." In his "Repentance and the American Crisis: A Call for Debate," he writes: "Left-wing religionists are urging that the despair, violence and poverty of the Two/Thirds World is caused by America's prosperity, order and optimism spreading across the globe. Somehow this is said to have provoked the terrorists' attack on September 11. That is a hackneyed analysis. It is as off-target as the right wing view--that sexual immorality brought down the divine shield that had been protecting us--is morally trivial. The vast majority of the world's poor would love to have a share in American prosperity, order and optimism. It's precisely the reactionaries among them---who want to halt globalization--that were behind the attack...."

With Dr. Hinlicky, I agree that "the call for repentance in the face of political or military catastrophe is as old as the (Hebrew) prophets." We do need a curb on our materialism and consumerism. We do need a social conscience more keen as to those who are needy. We do need a reform of our collective mind about what constitutes sexual morality. Further, Hinlicky is right when he affirms that "repentance means bringing the judgment to bear, not on the other guy, but upon yourself. Leftists should judge the failings of America's Left. Rightists should judge the failings of America's Right."

Hinlicky's notion of the proper focus on repentance is the question of what he calls the "brutalization of warfare." By this he means the evil of "total war in which all distinctions between state and people, soldier and non-combatant, battlefield and civilian infrastructure are obliterated in launching a fight to the finish between systems set in mortal opposition to each other." He asks, "Just what role have we played in this brutalization of warfare? We need a new debate about the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, not to mention the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 'bombing villages to save them,' and Agent Orange in Vietnam, and modernized tactics along these lines rationalized as recently as the destruction of Serbia from the air, while an alleged genocide was being perpetrated on the grand next door."

I do not want to ignore American culpability in the framework of the brutalization of warfare, but the discussion should note at the beginning, at least, that America's presence at Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki was by radical provocation (Pearl Harbor), rather than by pique over the spread of putative cultural decadence. Such bombings have been debated since 1945, on several grounds, chief among them those that address how quickly that war could have been brought to an end. Vietnam can be questioned on many grounds, as can Serbia. Those are discussions for another time, and another setting.

5. A Just War?: But Dr. Hinlicky's challenge raises the question of response--how can America wage this "new war" against international terrorism. The doctrine of a just war has informed nations of a Christian heritage since Augustine framed them early in the 5^th century. Such a war must be a war of defense, rather than aggression. It must be properly declared, by a duly constituted authority. It must seek justice, rather than get revenge or enable hatred to be satisfied. One must stand a reasonable chance of winning--and be on that score better off than if one had not fought! (That is, if fighting and winning leaves one's country worse off than before, it is wiser not to fight.)

The tough questions here come in how war is waged. The just war is one fought with "appropriate force," rather than excessive force. What is forbidden in the just war is precisely what was the provocation of this one: the just war does not attack non-combatants. Women, children, and the elderly are forbidden as targets. Rape, pillaging, and looting are forbidden, as is profanation of houses of worship. Hinlicky is right to point out the "modern warfare" increasingly ignores these sanctions. In the case of terrorism, the violation is deliberate and calculated; the terrorist is a terrorist because he cannot or will not be a soldier in a conventional sense. His power is not in might but in terror and cruelty. All that he does is against any notion of "just war."

Thus far (i.e., through Friday morning the 28^th of September, 6:30 a.m.) the Bush administration is pursuing what the President asserted in his address to Congress of September 20: "Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.....We will direct every resource at our command--every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence and every necessary weapon of war--to the destruction and to the defeat of the global terror network....Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen....We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no ret. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

After 17 days, there have been no missiles to Afghanistan, no air strikes, no invasions, no assassinations reported. World opinion is against the terrorists. Thus far, the canons of a just war are being followed. Whether that can hold remains to be seen. The enemy traffics only in strategy and tactics that have always been considered outside the bounds of just war. It will be difficult, at times, not to engage him on his own terms .

6. Abortion as paradigm. As a final observation, some reflections: On the glass door that enters the Russell House, where I work, is a one-page, single-space caveat to the national outrage over the September 21 atrocities. The piece, as I recall it unsigned, basically agrees that the terrorist bombings are an outrage, an offense against humanity and civilization, an offense to the world, as many national leaders have already echoed. It cautions Americans, though, against finding the deaths of several thousand innocent persons so unique and outrageous, in the face of the 35 million or so abortions that have been performed legally in the United States in the last 28½ years, in the name of freedom of self-determination.

Wherever you stand on the abortion question, what is at stake nationally on that issue mirrors in no small measure what is at stake in the minds of the international terrorists whose chief quarrel is with America: the nature of freedom, a secular rather than a religious set of values in determining the course of civilization, how to deal with one's personal and ideological impotence in the face of perceived atrocities and offenses against what one believes is right and proper in human life and culture; and a struggle between those who do not have political and military power and those who, overtly or tacitly, do.

There are those who insist that the recent terrorist attacks by what appear to be "demented" Muslim extremists are comparable to terrorist acts by citizens in the United States, some of whom claim to be Christian, who have firebombed and otherwise attacked abortion clinics and abortion doctors. I submit that this comparison is accurate on at least two counts:

First, that the terrorist attacks are an aberration of Islam and its central tenets, just as any abortion-clinic bombings done by Christians are an aberration of Christianity.

And second and conversely, both are, indeed, religious attacks. They are "religious" in that they are motivated by a religious mindset, a religious weltanschauung, a religious perspective on the world--as opposed to a secular view of the world.

The September 11 attacks are, in fact, an escalation and globalization of culture wars, to a scale both ignoble and inglorious, to say nothing of despicable.

7. I offer these observations with no sympathy whatsoever for the actions, or even the feelings, of terrorists, domestic or foreign. In no way are these extremists revolutionaries or fighters for freedom. They violate the standards of ethics and decency in their religion. As to remedy, in the case of abortion in America, those who like myself philosophically and theologically disagree are obliged to work within the system, making sound arguments toward the day when Roe v. Wade goes the way of Dred Scott.

In the case of the present international terrorists, the nations of the world are virtually unanimous in their resolve to obliterate the scourge. The quarrel is a tremendous challenge to Western liberal democracy; as to how freedom and freedoms will fare in the face of what chooses to be clandestine and violent, impotence and rage come to intimidating power. It will not be solved by negotiation and "working within the system." It will take force. And it will take enormous resolve to continue what will be, I think, a long struggle. And equally enormous vigilance--to preserve what is good while attempting to eradicate what is indeed evil.

J. Larry Yoder - September, 2001

*Unlike the American revolutionaries of the 18^th century, the terrorist does not sign declarations, publish them to the world and then publicly set out to defend the principles. Jefferson and the others were concerned to avoid the label of"international outlaws" in taking up arms to overthrow legitimate authority. They had to make a case for the intrinsic legitimacy of their cause in order to fit within accepted notions of a "just war." They asserted that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," to secure "unalienable rights" - among them "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" -- that are "endowed by their creator." They further asserted the "right, the duty" of a people to rise up against "any Form of Government" that "becomes destructive" of securing the unalienable rights.