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America as a Jihad State:

Middle Eastern perceptions of modern American
theopolitics
Faith and Public Policy Seminar
Kings College, London, 21.04.09

© Abdal-Hakim Murad [April 2009]

THE PRESENT TIME OF SLACKENING IS A HELPFUL MOMENT TO

examine Muslim perceptions of Western religious intention. A kind of seven-year itch
following 9/11 seems to have thrown up some possible resolutions of the polarity
which look beyond the clearly fruitless ‘security agenda’. The publication, two years
ago, of the Common Word marked perhaps the clearest and most remarkable sign of
this, a genuine shift in the Muslim-Christian equation: David Burrell, one of the most
seasoned Catholic specialists of Islam, has spoken of a dramatic turn-about
unparalleled in recent history.[1] Even more recently, the fall of the Bush
administration has allowed a more measured and less histrionic assessment of
America’s engagement with political Islam and political Christianity over the past
eight years. The Obama victory was followed within days by the death of Samuel
Huntington, most notorious of advocates of the thesis of the mutual allergy of Islam
and Christendom. It is a good time to take stock.

In today’s seminar I propose to begin with a survey of changing Middle Eastern

perceptions of America following upon the rise of the so-called ‘theocon’ agenda in
Bush’s America. I will then move on to some more general considerations of the issue
of religious extremism as a strand in the mutual regard – or disregard – of what
remains of Christian and Muslim civilisation.

My survey is needfully imprecise. Determining a generic Muslim view is seldom

possible: regional, sectarian and educational variants see to that. Elites which
conform to the emerging global monoculture are resistant to the idea that religion
might be a factor in the politics of the world’s most modern state; Islamic activists, by
contrast, may brandish evidence of US religiosity as part of their polemic against the

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secular discourse of the rulers. Furthermore, elites loyal to the monoculture may not
have access to the material written in local languages, both monographs and media
reports, which should be the basis of our survey. Increasingly the elites in the Islamic
world read only in English and French, and a survey of local newspapers and
vernacular TV channels is unlikely to provide sure clues to their perceptions of the
world. Religionists, by contrast, are typically consumers of a mass media over which
they have only very limited influence, subject to the systematic censorship which is
still normal in most Muslim states. Hence the media coverage of American
fundamentalism has been extremely erratic. Egyptian newspapers such as al-Ahram
have devoted a good deal of space to it; while the Saudi-controlled al-Sharq al-Awsat
has hardly mentioned it at all.

But for all the measurement problems, the transformation of Muslim perceptions of
America is undoubted. Only two weeks ago, in the Sahara desert near Timbuktu, I
listened to a wholly traditional Sufi leader expound the view that America’s violence
towards the Muslim world is the consequence of a sahwa misihiyya, a Christian
revival. He was well-aware of the role of the Christian Coalition in the run-up to the
Iraq war, despite living in a region where I saw no newspapers, and where internet
access is almost impossible. Yet he was familiar with the names of Franklin Graham,
Pat Robertson, and other icons of the Christian Right. For him, Alan Greenspan’s
explanation of the Iraq invasion in terms of America’s need for oil was unpersuasive:
Bush and his team were crusaders, servants of Israel, and harbingers of the violent
Second Coming of Christ.

Here is another anecdotal sign, this time from the opposite end of the cultural
spectrum. In November of 2005, a very different group of Muslims gathered in
Casablanca for the second symposium of an Arab-American Dialogue. The sponsor
was the right-wing Values Institute, and the subject was the familiar one of the
relationship between religion and state in the Arab and American contexts. The
American team presented a critique of Arab society based on the assumption that its
political processes were rooted either in medieval Islamic thought (essentially
Mawardi’s model), or in modern radical Islamism, with its doctrine of tawhid
al-hakimiyya (unity of sovereignty in God). The Arab team, mainly composed of
secular intellectuals, attempted to explain that most modern Arab regimes, as
nationalist autocracies, do not see themselves as standing in continuity with either
tradition. They then explained that political thought lies largely in the ijtihadi
category of rulings, and is hence one of those institutions of Shari’a law which are

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readily susceptible to change.

At this point the discussion grew more interesting. Some of the Arab thinkers present
raised the issue of American theopolitics, citing Tocqueville’s well-known
observations about the coexistence of American official laicism with popular
religiosity, and pointing out that many modern Muslim jurisdictions preside over a
broadly similar separation. But as in the world of Islam, where popular religious
convictions on, say, alternative sexualities, or abortion, can still influence the
decision-making of the officially secular elites, American politicians cannot and do
not ignore the hundred million or so voters who grade politicians for their correctness
on religion-specific issues. The report in al-Sharq al-Awsat continued: ‘our American
colleagues (some of whom play an influential role in the American decision making
process) failed to respond objectively and precisely to the fears of their Arab partners
concerning the role of Christian fundamentalism in American political decision-
making.’[2]

In the early years of the decade, a major concern of Muslim commentators seemed to
be Christian Zionism. Al-Ahram, and the Lebanese-rooted newspaper Al-Hayat, ran
a number of op-ed pieces interpreting the indulgence shown towards Israel by the
Bush presidency in terms of the influence of pro-Israel evangelicals. Typically the
Iraq invasion was interpreted in terms of the end-time persuasions of some members
of the White House staff and the Pentagon. For instance, an article by Jaafar Hadi
Hassan in al-Hayat in 2003 urged readers to broaden their understanding of US
objectives in the region to include the chiliastic. For Hassan, what this means is that
Bush’s core electorate are expecting the parousia in their lifetime, as he writes: ‘they
believe that occupying Iraq confirms the predictions of the Holy Bible; it is one
incident in a series of events before the return of the awaited Christ’. Hassan offers an
outline of the history of Christian dispensationalism, summarising the seven ages of
the world, and explains how Bush’s voters believe themselves to stand at the
threshold of the seventh age: Christ’s millennial reign. Hassan then goes on to
identify dispensationalist decision-makers in the Bush team, including Commerce
Secretary Donald Evans, a disciple of Billy Graham, and discusses Graham’s son
Franklin, in his role as President Bush’s personal religious mentor.

Hassan then summarises the core passages of the Book of Revelation which are
central to the world-view of the so-called theocons. Much of Revelation, he writes, is
ambiguous, but the role of Iraq in the end-time scenario is clear: Iraq, or ‘Babylon’,

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will fill the nations with impurity; and an angel of God’s wrath will bring it to
destruction, and it will be divided into three parts – exactly what America has
achieved.

When that takes place, Jerusalem, the city of true belief, the polar opposite of
Babylon, will hear the four angels liberated by the fall of the false city. They will
proclaim the imminence of a great battle, and then the reappearance of Jesus. Thus,
for Hassan, the next stage in the theocon plan will be the destruction of the Dome of
the Rock and the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple, where Christ will preside over the
sacrificial rituals to symbolise the restoration of God’s order on earth.

Hassan then concludes with some reflections on right-wing American policies,

attempting to fit them all into his interpretation. Pat Robertson, he reports, preaches
to the Christian world the inexorable disappearance of virtue, the spread of abortion
and sodomy, and the forgetting of God. The environmental crisis is a positive sign
that the present world is coming to an end;[3] and this explains, for Hassan, American
indifference towards the Kyoto Protocols. Peacemaking is an illusion, even a demonic
subversion, since conflict can only come to an end with the millennial reign of
Christ.[4]

Hassan’s article is fairly typical of the growing Muslim concern over the influence of
America’s radical right. Baffled by the apparent foolhardiness of the Iraq adventure,
and the administration’s maximalist support for Israel, Arab commentators have
sought a master explanation in the Bible-time beliefs of key Bush decisionmakers.[5]

As Hassan notes, this interpretation of American actions is new. And it will be helpful
to trace the conduits by which, in a highly-censored media environment not
particularly open to innovation, such a sea-change in understanding has been
effected.

One key channel has undoubtedly been Christian Arab journalists, whose cultural
familiarity with the Bible and with Christian eschatology has allowed them to unravel
the famous ‘double-coding’ in presidential speeches, where apparently innocuous
phrases turn out to trigger specific Biblical references important to the religious
electorate. Particularly impressive was Al-Hayat’s coverage from Washington during
the 2008 elections. Its correspondent, Joyce Karam, was alert to the evangelical
hesitations over McCain, successor to Bush, as a credible new ra’is injili, or Gospel
President. Conservative evangelicals will almost invariably vote Republican, she

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observes, despite McCain’s uneven record on abortion, but some moderate

evangelicals, less convinced that religion requires a state of endless Middle Eastern
war, have been seduced by the Obama camp, which has adroitly revived the memory
of the Carter years. Karam then smartly accounts for the last-minute and apparently
desperate appointment of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate. Altogether, she
presents a persuasive account to her Arab readers of Obama’s rise to power: religious
politics, as well as the economy or a general post-conflict tristesse, are a vital
hermeneutic key.[6]

Karam has done much to emphasise the centrality of theopolitics in America. Like
most Middle Eastern Christians, she is herself at a considerable ideological distance
from evangelical Christianity; indeed, the targeting by evangelical missionaries who
accompanied the first American military units into Baghdad of Eastern Christian
communities as the first object of their attention generated a good deal of
resentment; and some Orthodox and Catholic leaders in Middle Eastern countries
have, in response, called for a ban on some hardline evangelical churches in their
countries.[7]

If there is an interpretation, or an explaining-away, of the embarrassing – to

Christian Arab nationalists – fact of American religious violence, then it seems to
have been articulated most typically by the Israeli Arab writer and former Knesset
member, Azmi Bishara. In a characteristic article in al-Ahram, this left-wing secular
Christian interprets the theocon phenomenon by outlining its historic roots in
America’s Puritan heritage. For Bishara, the New Testament does not provide
guidance, other than ‘a universal message of love and understanding.’ The Puritans,
however, ‘stressed the moral code expressed in the Old Testament.’ The violence of so
much American religion can be traced back to Puritan holy wars against Native
Americans, and thence to Cromwell’s Biblically-preoccupied New Model Army.
Apparently revisiting perhaps the oldest trope in Christian anti-Semitism, the
law-versus-spirit dichotomy, Bishara concludes that this is a Judaizing Christianity,
which turns the Gospels into a simple extension of what he sees as the unpleasant,
lawbound violence of the Hebrew Bible. Although Protestantism, for Bishara, is
naturally anti-Semitic, he believes that the Jewish lobby, and the power of
Hollywood, have ‘managed to twist the US obsession with the Bible into something
akin to political Zionism and support for Israel’.[8]

Bishara’s view is one that I have also heard from Orthodox church leaders in the

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Middle East. The theocons are a reversion to an older, ‘Jewish’ type of political
religion, and have failed to notice that St Paul proclaims the radical inferiority of
Judaism and its law. As for the theocon preoccupation with the seer of Patmos, this is
also, he believes, a sort of Judaizing. Although he does not explain this, it is possible
that he is aware of the literature on the Book of Revelation, which sees it as part of
Jewish apocalypticism. Long ago, Bossuet called radical Protestants who stressed this
text ‘judaizers’.[9] The true meaning of Revelation is the eschatological revelation of
transformed life which is the Church. This was Augustine’s conviction; but not every
Protestant has been so happy to explain away the evident violence and retributive
quality of the text. 59 percent of Americans, according to a recent poll, affirm its
literal truth.[10]

Another view is offered by Ghassan Rubeiz, the former secretary for the Middle East
of the World Council of Churches, who is also widely-read in the Arab media. Rubeiz,
evidently aware of modern sensitivities about anti-Semitism, chooses not to adopt the
old trope of ‘Judaizing Christianity’, but offers a sociological account. He asks why the
religious right is now the prevalent form of religion in America, with mega-churches
experiencing boom times while older, self-styled ‘mainline’ churches are in steady
decline. His interpretation is conventionally sociological, and somewhat moralising:
America’s ever-increasing social mobility and rootlessness, with an unstable job
market and the rise in divorce and remarriage, allows fundamentalist preachers to
offer a simple explanation of an otherwise confusing world: geography resolves into
Christendom and the lands of darkness; while history is interpreted as a series of
Biblically-foretold signs, culminating in the imminent end of ambiguity and doubt at
the Rapture and the Second Coming.[11]

Turning now to more overtly religious mass media – a small part of the whole in the
Middle East – we encounter an increasing sophistication and level of awareness.
While takfiri Salafi formations such as those which self-identify as al-Qaida are
content to use generic terms such as ‘crusading’ to account for American
interventions in the Muslim world, and offer simple accounts of the power of the
Jewish lobby over Christians paralyzed with guilt over the Holocaust, mainline
Islamism can adopt a slightly more analytic view. One example would be the coverage
by the Turkish religious newspaper Zaman of President Bush’s enthusiastic reading
of the memoirs of Oswald Chambers, a Baptist missionary who accompanied the
British invasion of Ottoman Palestine in 1917, and whose crusading manual is still
popular inspirational reading for advocates of ‘faith-based war’.[12]

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A further case of this has been the coverage of the role of Blackwater, the security firm
deployed by the Pentagon in trouble spots such as Iraq. Exempted by Paul Bremer’s
Immunity Order No.7 from prosecution by Iraqi authorities, Blackwater operatives
were accused of a range of atrocities against Muslim civilians, including the Nisour
Square incident late in 2007.

Islamist understandings of Blackwater’s role do not appear to originate in media

coverage internal to the Islamic world. Instead, they illustrate a growing familiarity
with Western media, including specialised sources.

The sources of Islamist knowledge about the alleged religious agenda of Blackwater
appear to be twofold. Firstly, there is a European Parliament report written by
Giovanni Claudio Fava, which detailed the connections between Blackwater and the
Knights of Malta, a sovereign fraternity of Catholic military elites answerable directly
to the Pope. The occasion for the European Parliament’s inquiry was the revelation
that two Blackwater subsidiaries were involved in US special rendition flights. Fava
confirmed the connection with the Knights of Malta, and indicated that Malta is one
of Blackwater’s primary operational bases. Its vice-president, Cofer Black, had been
the CIA officer responsible for special renditions of detainees to pro-Western regimes
which employed torture as an interrogation method.

The second source is the bestselling book on Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill.

Meticulously referenced, this book convinced many in the West that the leadership of
Blackwater was driven by a hard-line Christian agenda deployed by, as Scahill puts it,
‘extreme religious zealots’.[13] Scahill records that its boss, former Pentagon Inspector
General Joseph Schmitz, is himself a knight of Malta. He is also shown as a vociferous
preacher on behalf of a crusading ideology for our time, his recurrent theme being
‘the rule of law under God.’ America’s role in the world is to bring God’s law to all
humanity, in what Scahill terms a vision of ‘Christian supremacy’.

Scahill’s book appeared in March 2007, and became a world bestseller, following
intense speculation about the shadowy global crusaders and their role in the
Pentagon’s new wars against Islamists. A month later, a review appeared on a website
connected to the Muslim Brotherhood leader Shaykh Yusuf al-Qardawi.[14] The
review homes in on the religious ideology of the Blackwater leadership, particularly
Erik Prince, the founder-chairman, a figure already known to the Arab press. Prince,

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the review states, is a ‘secretive, neo-crusader mega-millionaire … a major bankroller

of President George Bush.’ On Scahill’s account, with his connections to right-wing
Catholic groups Prince believes that Blackwater is an important vehicle for ensuring
the central role of Christianity in US public policy. As he says: ‘Everybody carries
guns, just like the Prophet Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel – a sword in one
hand and a trowel in the other.’

The explosion of interest in Blackwater’s right-wing Catholic affiliations had several

consequences, most notably an instruction purporting to be from al-Qaida
summoning Muslims to attack the Knights of Malta embassy in Cairo. (In the event,
nobody bothered.)

On the other end of the spectrum, Jordanian MP Jamal Muhammad Abidat wrote in
the Abu Dhabi newspaper Al-Bayan that the revelations about the religious
motivations of the Blackwater management shed new and disturbing light on
American intentions:

The painful saga of modern Arab-Muslim history evokes the battles fought in the Crusades of the

11th century, when the Knights of Malta began their operations as a Christian militia whose

mission it was to defend the land conquered by the Crusaders. These memories return violently to

mind with the discovery of links between the so-called security firms in Iraq such as Blackwater

have historic links with the Knights of Malta. You cannot exaggerate it. The Order of Malta is a

hidden government, or the most mysterious government in the world.[15]

The notion of the world’s largest mercenary army, accused of arbitrary and excessive
violence in Iraq, being led by soldiers who take a direct oath of obedience to a Pope
who has already become unpopular for his comments on Islam, has now entered a
very wide circulation.

Blackwater’s rendition flights have frequently been routed through Malta, to the
concern of the island’s press. And the practice of rendition (terminated now, we are
told, by the Obama administration), has also triggered Arab media concern with the
interrogation style and cultural policies applied to Muslim suspects in American
custody.

While it is not possible for the media to know precisely what procedures have been
used at the various black sites around the globe, there is extensive public domain
documentation about American practices at the Guantanamo Bay facility. The various

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methods of humiliation are known to be deployed by interrogators schooled in what

they take to be the cultural vulnerabilities of Arabs and Muslims – the use of loud
rock music, insults to female family members, nudity, comparing prisoners to rats
and dogs, forcing detainess to wear female clothes: all this has been familiar in the
Muslim world since, in June 2005, Time magazine published classified logs from the
interrogation of the Saudi prisoner Muhammad al-Qahtani.[16]

Culturally-specific interrogation techniques designed to cause maximum distress to

Muslim detainees are, of course, likely to cause maximum outrage to Muslim public
opinion. The provocation has been particularly acute in the case of the religiously-
specific interrogation methods reported at Guantanamo. Best-known have been the
repeated instances of ‘Qur’an abuse’ by guards; but the use of Christian imagery to
humiliate prisoners is also well-documented, such as the use of crosses to which
prisoners point or reach to indicate that they are ready to talk. Take, for instance, the
poem by Mohammed El-Gharani, a fourteen year-old Chadian taken to Guantanamo
(since released):

We saw such insults from them,

Not even the book of God was protected.

Along with their malice, they were foolish.

Tribulations, then hitting and imbecility.

For they are a people without reasonable minds,

Due to their supply of alcoholic drinks.

The ‘Greasy’ arrived, in our state of need,

On the condition that we raise the card with a cross.

‘If you want dignity and protection,

Then raise the cross for protection.’

All of us threw the card away,

Intent that our spirits be redeemed in sacrifice.[17]

With literature like this reaching the Muslim world, memories of the Inquisition are
rekindled: the convicted Morisco spitting on the cross that the inquisitor raises before
him, refusing the kiss that will save him from the pyre.

Also popular among Muslims is the memoir of the former Muslim chaplain at
Guantanamo, James Yee, who was arrested on what turned out to be spurious
charges.[18] He describes the curiously religious atmosphere on the base, with camp

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commander Major-General Geoffrey Miller at the forefront of morning prayers with

his guards and interrogators before they dispersed to their tasks.[19] To his
recollection, religiously specific forms of abuse, such as desecration, were woven into
the system; [20] ‘Gitmo’s secret weapon,’ he writes, ‘was the use of religion against
the prisoners.’[21] The evangelical Miller, shortly afterwards, departed for Iraq with a
brief to ‘Gitmoize’ the prison facility at Abu Ghreib. He was sent there by General
William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, himself a hardline
evangelical, who regularly preaches in uniform, claiming to his congregations that
‘Satan wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian
army.’ But ‘they will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of
Jesus.’[22] Perceived evangelical control of the major detention facilities in the War
on Terror has again had a substantive impact on Muslim public opinion.

The final conduit through which information on US theopolitics has reached the
Middle East has been the translation of Kimberly Blaker’s collection of essays by
academics, first published as The Fundamentals of Extremism in 2003. In 2006, an
Arabic translation, Usul al-Tatarruf, appeared with the Cairo-based publishing house
Dar al-Shuruq, eclectic promoters of everything from the novels of Naguib Mahfuz to
the fundamentalist manifestos of Sayyid Qutb. This is a careful and responsible
translation of an important text, perhaps, along with Chris Hedges’ book American
Fascists, the best study of the subject yet to appear.

Through all of these channels, then, the perception of the leading Western nation as
profoundly driven by Christian dispensationalism has become widespread in the
Middle East. The consequence has been far-reaching: whereas ten years ago Muslims
tended to view America as a secular republic containing many religious Christians,
the perception is now gaining ground that America is a specifically Christian entity,
whose policies on Israel, and whose otherwise mystifying violence against Muslims,
whether in occupied countries or in detention, can most helpfully be explained with
reference to the Bible.

Reflecting on this historic transformation, some remarks on the irony of the mutual
regard are inescapable. Superficially, the dispensationalism of the Bush years appears
as a mirror image of takfiri Salafism; this parallel has been drawn by, amongst others,
Tariq Ali in his 2002 book The Clash of Fundamentalisms, and also, in a more
theologically nuanced way, by the Turkish writer Sule Albayrak in her 2007 work on
radical Christianity.[23] In the vision of General Boykin, leader of the hunt for Bin

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Laden, the world seems to divide into an abode of peace, freedom and love, presided
over by America’s believing army, and an abode of war, a Muslim Babylon, the
necessary object of invasion and subsequent economic and cultural control. This is
what Albayrak refers to as moral Manicheanism.[24] Evangelical leaders are mullahs,
issuing fatwas which sanctify wars which devastate whole nations. The enemy is
Satan himself, opposed by Hegelian heroes: Boykin, Zarqawi, Miller. Scripture
supplies values and law; secularity is Godless hubris and the reign of darkness. Each
side figures itself primarily as the virtuous opposite of the Other: Boykin is raised by
God to challenge Bin Laden; just as Charlemagne existed because of al-Ghafiqi.
Rights are easily suspended: Islamists kill civilians with reference to maslaha (the
public interest); Washington corrals and kills suspects in the spirit of Tocqueville
himself, who had supported the total abolition of human rights in order to suppress
the 1848 Paris revolution. Both call for a utopia established through maximal
constraint. Both hold, with Robespierre, that virtue and terror are the Revolution’s
twin children (although Boykin will not attribute terror to himself, but will speak of
‘shock and awe’). Both, finally, are erastian in their constitutional thinking: the
established religious leaders are to be bypassed as false mediators, in favour of a
divine sovereignty exercised by the king alone. Such warriors are clear that they take
their orders directly from God.[25] As Bush himself said: ‘I trust God speaks through
me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.’[26]

We are suspicious of such tidiness. In a facile way members of each culture can
exonerate themselves by pointing to reciprocities on the other side; and at times
Albayrak seems to do this, as does, for instance, William Arkin, with his denunciation
of the Pentagon’s ‘Christian jihad’.[27] More taxingly, the discourse of a clear
mirroring implies that the internal differentia of Christianity and Islam have no
entailments today.

What is illuminating about this interesting clash of fundamentalisms? There are

asymmetries which demand to be listed prominently. Most evidently, one needs no
Marxian baggage to observe that Islamic civilisation, with minor Gulf exceptions, is a
Lazarus at the gate of Dives. Christianity, which emerged – pace the prosperity-
gospellers – as a discourse of the poor, has become the favoured sacred space of the
wealthiest and most competitive economic culture that has ever evolved. For the
theocons this is not a paradox but a grace from God.

Islamism, however, exists in order to refute this discourse. Despite its abhorrence of

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Sufi asceticism, and its generally conservative social ethos, it often takes itself to be a
site of resistance to wealth and privilege. It is not figured as Babylon – that was the
self-serving secularity of Saddam and the Ba’th elite – but as Ishmael. Like the
dispensationalists, the Islamists are unnerved by the absence of God – the deus
absconditus who because of the sins of the faithful allowed the rise of liberal
secularity and the decline of faith. Yet the Islamist response is precisely the old trope
of God’s preference for the underdog. For Boykin, God is with America, and this is
shown by America’s economic and martial prowess; for the Islamists, God is with
Ishmael, as is shown, again, by America’s economic and martial prowess. The global
panopticon of surveillance is not reciprocated by Al-Qaida; neither are the ever more
stringent visa laws which, like the ha-ha around an English stately home, exclude
trespassing animals while remaining hardly visible from the house itself. Attorney-
General John Ashcroft has himself anointed with holy oil,[28] denounces church-state
separation as ‘a wall of religious oppression’,[29] and seeks to implement God’s law.
Islamists do just the same. Yet theirs is a site of resistance, on behalf of Ishmael’s
‘black house in Mecca’, against the evangelical White House, in the city of Masonic
symbolism, seen as the nerve-centre of Pharaonic evil. This is not the pacifism and
political indifferentism of the Gospels, nor a Baptist joy in God’s empowerment of His
covenant people; it is more akin to Amos’ prophecy of the uprising of the poor.

Hence, instead of a simple symmetry, we might prefer to diagnose a rescuscitation of

the ancient theme of Rome and Jerusalem, beloved of Tacitus, and present in its most
iconic form in Josephus. Hamas are the sicarii, the assassins of occupied Judea, who
die in suicide missions against their Herodian and Roman overlords. Their struggle
includes violence against local collaborators and quislings, who have failed to observe
that God’s law alone applies, and that the civic space of Rome, now the global empire
of the monoculture, has its foundations in anthropolatry: public sports, the shameless
cult of the body, the greed of the forum. Rome, in contempt at the rebels, deploys its
Herod, whose name may not only be Mahmud Abbas, but is also Asif Zardari and
Husni Mubarak, and many others besides, as the loyal subject of a world empire in
which lesser deities may be tolerated only in the private space. The public square is
ruled by the son of God alone, divi filius, the ancient title of the emperor and his
deputies.

Such a vision may help us to penetrate the optimism of the apocalyptic Islamist. Even
utter defeat at Masada is reckoned a victory for the Zealot martyr, who, therefore, can
never be defeated. Guantanamo has been the zealot’s triumph: during six

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excruciating years, several camp guards convert to Islam, but not a single inmate
reaches for the Cross.[30] Under the unblinking eye of the evangelical in Ray-Bans
and crew-cut, the detainee may go insane, or may attempt suicide, but he is not
defeated. Rome, he knows, will fall in the end; God is with the tormented.

So the cage, the great panopticon in the sun, inverts its creator’s purpose. It was built,
it now seems, not to extract confessions – since the more significant suspects
remained always out of view in the black sites – but as a therapeutic exhibition akin
to the victory parades of Titus and Vespasian. The American soul was wounded on
9/11, and the parade of naked humiliated men in beards at Camp X-ray was an icon
which it could contemplate, and in which it could find healing. Jesus himself will
stare, with eyes of fire, at the sinners, before consigning them to torment everlasting;
and the Cuban cages seemed to serve as a proleptic anticipation of the vengeance of
Christ promised in the Bible. Yet still the icon failed. In the world of Islam it was read
as a kind of monastic parody, where prisoners whose crimes were always doubtful,
but whose Muslimness was certain, were tormented by Christians. For many in the
world of Islam it also represented, in the most public way, the private habits of the
local Herods, whose cages are also full of same kind of animals.

Rome may torment the body, and Herod is even keener to do so. But her main
instrument of pain is psychological. In the mid-19th century, American penal
reformers invented the Philadelphia System, following the idealistic British
innovations at Pentonville. For the most enlightened reasons, physical abuse was
abolished as a relic of the medieval past, to be replaced by modern and hygienic
methods of intangible pressure. Prisoners were to be referred to only by numbers.
They would be permitted no visitors and no letters, and would wear black hoods
whenever taken from their cells. Silence was universally imposed. ‘In the
penitentiary, the sense of criminal community was voided: All other prisoners were
silent, invisible abstractions to the man in his solitary cell. The republic of crime was
vaporized, and all social sense along with it, leaving only a disoriented, passive
obedience.’[31]

Charles Dickens, visiting Philadelphia’s new Eastern Penitentiary, was terrified by

this enlightened Benthamite machine:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony

which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts … There is a depth of terrible

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endurance in it which none but the sufferers can fathom. I hold this slow and daily tampering with

the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its

ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh;

because its wounds are not upon the surface … therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret

punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.[32]

No less Benthamite is the new willingness to abandon ancient precedent and to

convict on the basis of alleged intention. The Kafaesque trial of Jose Padilla, driven to
the brink of insanity by his treatment, is only the most notorious case of this.[33] The
panopticon will not allow even the mind to be a private space.

Here we might learn from Slavoj Zizek’s division of violence into three kinds:
subjective, symbolic, and systemic. This violence against the subject, recently
curtailed in President Obama’s directives, is more than replicated not only by Herod,
in the prisons of Egypt or Tunisia, but by the zealots themselves: whatever their
liberative cast of mind, the zealots have not hesitated to use forms of physical pain far
greater than those documented at Guantanamo. This has been the pattern of Islamist
revolt since the time when the enragés of the Iranian revolution, moralising about the
Shah’s secret police, quickly brought in Ayatollah Khalkhali as their own Robespierre.
But more substantial, Zizek claims, is symbolic violence ‘embodied in language and
its forms, what Heidegger would call our “house of being”.’[34] By this he means the
monoculture’s imposition of ‘a certain universe of meaning’:

In our secular, choice-based societies, people who maintain a substantial religious belonging are in

a subordinate position. Even if they are allowed to maintain their belief, this belief is ‘tolerated’ as

their idiosyncratic personal choice or opinion. The moment they present it publicly as what it is for

them, say a matter of substantial belonging, they are accused of ‘fundamentalism’. What this

means is that the subject of ‘free choice’ in the Western ‘tolerant’ multicultural sense can emerge

only as the result of an extremely violent process of being torn out of a particular lifeworld, of being

cut off from one’s roots.[35]

For Zizek, then, religion is always oppressed by the monoculture. An example would
be the monoculture’s insistence that freedom of expression, which in practice favours
those with access to media and money, always forms part of human dignity. If
remnants of non-monocultural worlds complain, as they do, that they prefer to suffer
physical over symbolic violence, the monoculture appears to have no reply. The
Muslim who says she would rather be tortured than hear her Prophet insulted is,

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from the perspective of the monoculture, simply living in the wrong world. The
present world, of a passionate susurration of anti-Muslim sentiment, is the only
world that exists. Those who experience it as violent must learn to experience it
differently.

Zizek’s third category, systemic violence, takes us back to Ishmael, and his
casting-out into the desert by the regnant forms of modern Biblicism. Zizek, of
course, prefers to think in terms of Marx. Turbo-capitalism, now amusingly on trial,
is straightforwardly at fault for the infant mortality rate in Mali. It also generates
terrorism. He writes of ‘the hypocrisy of those who, while combating subjective
violence, commit systemic violence that generates the very phenomena they
abhor.’[36]

What is notable, for Islamist observers, in the experiment with radical Christianity
during the Bush years, is not so much an adjustment in Christendom’s systemic
violence towards the East, which they regard as a historical constant. What they seem
to find refreshing is that the core religious differentials, once politely or even
sincerely buried away, are now in the foreground. Both Islam and Christianity claim
to be reverting to themselves. Yet historians might demur: the processes of identity-
retrieval in fact yield a growing distance from historic mainstreams. In the former
world, kalam, Sufism, and classical legal and political thought are giving way to an
insistence on building a scriptural commonwealth which champions the rights of the
righteous, and in which the classical Islamic denial of legislative powers to the state is
replaced by a totalitarian centrism. In Christendom, some forty percent of Americans
believe that the anti-Christ is already on the earth;[37] and nine percent would like to
see the Bible become the ‘only’ source of legislation.[38] Europeans may shrug, but
even in the UK, the number of worshippers at one Pentecostal church in
Walthamstow this Easter Sunday was more than double the congregations at St Paul’s
and Westminster Abbey combined,[39] and the presiding pastor, an advocate of the
prosperity gospel, is very clear that Israel is Isaac, while the Arabs are Ishmael, the
outcast.[40]

No doubt this tendency can be seen in simple terms as a decadence. Or, as Cardinal
Newman put it, ‘the nation drags down its Church to its own level.’ But it is a protest
against decadence as well. If the modern world is experienced as a kind of Mardi
Gras, all differences levelled in the pursuit of pleasure and the right to pleasure, and if
mainline denominations have substantively acceded to monocultural values and the

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ideology of progress, then the fight for difference, including a difference that can only
exist by discriminating, can to some extent claim to be a site of real resistance. Milan
Kundera writes that ‘the struggle of men against power is the struggle of memory
against forgetting.’[41] The end of history finds it hard not to be an end of memory,
and therefore of the self: Foucault’s end of man. Fifty years ago, during another age of
polarities, Arthur Schlesinger wrote that Western man was in crisis; casting around
for a catharsis, he thought that the Cold War must be used as an opportunity to wake
him up.[42] Even further back, the Puritans found that ‘the world’s peace is the
keenest war against God’, leading to complacency and the death of the spirit.
Tocqueville thought that France’s invasion of Algeria would reawaken it from
post-Napoleonic lassitude. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on both Nazism and
Communism, concluded that the content of ideology tends to be less attractive than
the invigorating fact of belonging to it, of being steered in a rudderless world.[43] As
at Guantanamo, where guilt is not the issue, what matters is the mere fact of
belonging.

These examples, drawn from Corey Robin’s recent study of political fear, are linked
by the idea that it is rootlessness which drives people into the arms of apparently
absurd conflictual certainties. Today, the Saudification of Islam, or the
Southernization of America, are both strengthened by this modern anomie. Earlier
ages suffered it, but we are endangered by it far more, since we are that much further
from tradition. What is after post-modernity? When it arrives, whatever it is, can it
possibly allow the puer aeternus (Jung’s contemptuous diagnosis of our post-sacred
condition) once more to achieve adulthood?

For Zizek, the two fundamentalisms will only be neutralised when the world
appreciates the value of a public neutrality, thus resurrecting the central energy of the
Enlightenment. His prescription and prediction, then, are startlingly conservative,
converging with the polemics of Roger Scruton: one recalls the way in which Islam
has reconciled the Hitchens brothers. As in the time of Charlemagne, the West will be
united by Islam, but whereas for American believers this will be around a banner of
political Christianity, Zizek hopes for a secular revival.

Where mainline belief still manages to be full of passionate conviction, it will

probably prefer enlightenment in the form of better education. In an era of
connectivity, few seem to know anything: Muslims may be able to name Pat
Robertson and John Hagee, but are likely to ignore the existence of the archbishop of

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Chicago. Similarly, few in Christendom can yet name a single Muslim leader. This
was brought home in an absolute way last year, when two magazines, Foreign Affairs
and Prospect, sponsored a global survey to find the world’s hundred most influential
public intellectuals. The overall winner was Fethullah Gülen, a fact that surprised few
in the Muslim world, but baffled Westerners familiar only with the names of
radicals.[44]

The Other remains indistinct, as may be seen in the rhetoric of the radicals on both
sides. Neither side knows its enemy. The author of the Patriot Act, a US attorney-
general known for speaking in tongues, became precise and articulate when
explaining who was threatening America. But what was the public to think when, in
the UK, Robin Cook expressed strong doubts about al-Qaida’s very existence?[45] A
vast industry of agencies and experts, many with religious axes to grind, has sprung
up to profit from the ‘War on Terror’. One is tempted to recall David Healy’s book
Mania, which claims that pharmaceutical companies have invented a series of mental
illnesses, paying off opinion formers in the universities, in order to profit from the
promotion of new drugs.[46] Nothing is more lucrative than fear seasoned with
ignorance.

The consequences of this aporia for the mutual regard of Christianity and Islam have
been very negative. Christendom is increasingly figuring itself as what is not-Muslim,
as ‘the world’s leading Bible-reading crusader state’[47]; while the Islamic world
considers itself under military and cultural attack from Christians (but not often from
Buddhists, Hindus or others). Everywhere there is the complaint that the moderates
have not done enough to denounce the extremists. As Jan Linn says: ‘The virtual
silence within the Christian community about the rise of the Christian Right is partly
responsible for its gaining mainstream status.’[48] Zizek turns out to be no better than
the culture he critiques: at no point does he suggest that Christianity and Islam are
anything other than their extremes. He intuits that the new fundamentalism is part of
the chaos and identity-seeking of late modernity. Yet his reignition of the lumieres
carries little philosophical promise of anything better. If scientists are now writing
books like Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will,[49] if we are told that what we do
simply happens to us, then how likely are we to find any true humanism outside the
imaginative world of theism? Put Islamically, can we look for any morality in a
secular world which denies our acquisition, kasb, of our actions? Zizek should not
assume so quickly that the believer’s cynicism about secular ethics cannot be

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accompanied by an ethical alternative.

I began by suggesting that we are now in what feels like an aftermath, following the
closure of the Bush parenthesis. Obama feels like Charles the Second: after a decade
of Puritan sermons on sin and redemption, divine immanentism, providence, and the
special destiny of the people,[50] the population has grown tired, and the flags have
begun to disappear from the churches.

I also mentioned, as a sign of this, the Common Word, whose extraordinary trajectory
is still unfolding, and which in many ways is calming tensions which the ongoing
securitization of the world may only sharpen. Last July, the Common Word process
reached Yale Divinity School, which had already coordinated a response by over three
hundred evangelical thinkers. The final communiqué of the conference saw the
evangelicals present endorsing language about a common ‘Judeo-Christian-Islamic
monotheistic heritage’, rooted in the two commandments of love of God and love of
neighbour.[51] The initiative was denounced by some more radical Christians and
Muslims, but it was clear that an important conversation had fruitfully begun. The
mood of the participants seemed to be one of determination not only to confound
misperceptions, but to demonstrate to the world’s media, and perhaps even to Slavoj
Zizek, that scriptural fidelity, seen by many Muslims as the dynamo of America’s
current wars, can yield conviviality as well as conflict. Religion, they concluded, is
worth belonging to, but only when it supplies more than just belonging.

Footnotes

[1] acommonword.com/en/a-common-word/11-new-fruits-of-a-common-word/236-
fisher-lecturecatholic-chaplaincy-.html

[2] Al-Sharq al-Awsat, 20.11.05.

[3] Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, has emphasised this: ‘when the
last tree is felled, Christ will come back.’ (www.commondreams.org/views04
/1206-10.htm). For the theocons and the environment, see Kevin Phillips, American
Theocracy: the peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the
21st century (London and New York: Penguin, 2006), 237-9.

[4] al-Hayat, 24.10.03. That peacemakers, particular those who seek to create peace
between Arabs and Israelis, are unwitting agents of Antichrist, is implicit in much

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evangelical rhetoric; as in the Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye, and the film The
Omega Code (1999).

[5] See also the review by David Tresilian, a lecturer at the American University in
Cairo, of Kenneth Brown’s L’Irak de la crise au chaos, in the English version of
al-Ahram (weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/788/bo4.htm); citing William Polk, Brown
outlines ‘the hidden agenda determining American relations with Iraq: the new
strategic conception of American world domination; the messianic faith in Christian
fundamentalism; and the connection between Christian fundamentalism and
Zionism.’

[6] al-Hayat, 28.10.08.

[7] Cf. Phillips, 260: ‘the principal evangelical churches were not just war supporters
but active mission planners … the Roman Catholic archbishop claimed they ‘seduced’
Christians from other churches.’

[8] al-Ahram (English edition) 609, 24-30 October 2002.

[9] Bernard McGinn, ‘Wrestling with the Millennium: Early Modern Catholic
Exegesis of Apocalyse 20’, in Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson (eds.),
Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalyse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern
America (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p.166. See further Tim Winter, ‘Jesus and
Muhammad: new convergences,’ The Muslim World, 99 (2009), 21-38.

[10] The Independent, 17.12.06.

[11] Daily News (Egypt), 6.4.07.

[12] Zaman, 04.03.03. See also the coverage in another Turkish paper, Sabah
(arsiv.sabah.com.tr/2004/03/07/cp/gnc115-20040307-102.html)

[13] Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: the rise of the world’s most powerful mercenary
army (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007), 443.

[14] www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1177156137661&
pagename=Zone-English-News%2FNWELayout

[15] Cited in Pamela Hansen, Malta Today, 13.01.08; and, for a more lurid treatment,
aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/blackwater-knights-of-malta-in-iraq

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[16] Time, 12.06.05. http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1071284,00.html

[17] Mohammed El Gharani, ‘First Poem of my Life’, in Marc Falkoff, Poems from
Guantanamo: the detainees speak (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), 39.

[18] See for instance Yee’s 2007 interview on Syrian television, in which he discusses
the practice of Qur’an abuse: www.memritv.org/clip/en/1610.htm

[19] James Yee, For God and Country: faith and patriotism under fire (New York:
Public Affairs, 2005), 84, 124-5.

[20] Yee, 111.

[21] humanrights.ucdavis.edu/events/the-davis-enterprise-may-7-2006

[22] The Guardian, 20.05.04; for more on Boykin as Christian warrior see Jan G.
Linn, What’s Wrong with the Christian Right (Boca Raton: BrownWalker Press,
2004), 61-3.

[23] Sule Akbulut Albayrak, Hıristiyan Fundamentalizmi (Istanbul: Etkilesim,

2007), 49-62.

[24] Albayrak, 35,

[25] Scahill, 377.

[26] Phillips, 208.

[27] Scahill, 377.

[28] Phillips, 118.

[29] Phillips, 233.

[30] Moazzem Begg, Enemy Combatant (London: Pocket Books, 2007), 220;
Newsweek, 21.03.09.

[31] Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to
Australia, 1787-1868 (London: Vintage, 2003), 520.

[32] Charles Dickens, cited in Hughes, 520.

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[33] www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts219.html

[34] Slavoj Zizek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009), 1.

[35] Zizek, 123-4.

[36] Zizek, 174.

[37] Phillips, 260.

[38] www.gallup.com/poll/28762/Majorities-Muslims-Americans-See-Religion-
Law-Compatible.aspx

[39] The Guardian, 11.04.09.

[40] Nigeria World, 02.06.02.

[41] Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (London: Faber, 1982), 3.

[42] Corey Robin, Fear: the history of a political idea (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 13.

[43] Robin, 103.

[44] www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=145788

[45] ‘There is no Islamic army or terror group called al-Qaida.’ Robin Cook, The Point
of Departure (Simon and Schuster, 2003).

[46] David Healy, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008).

[47] Phillips, 103.

[48] Linn, 2, cf.p.50.

[49] Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Boston: MIT Press, 2002).

[50] Cf. John Morrill, ‘The Puritan Revolution’, pp. 67-88 of John Coffey and Paul
C.H. Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), see pp.84-5.

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[51] www.acommonword.com/lib/documents/Yale%20draft%20statement.8.pdf ;
see also www.yale.edu/divinity/commonword/

www.masud.co.uk | More by same Author

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