Two competing views have come to dominate discussions of the war on terrorism in the wake of Sept. 11. One view, expressed in Samuel Huntington's book The Clash of Civilizations, holds that there is an inherent conflict between Western rationalism and the tribalism of the developing world that will inevitably be settled by war. An opposing, though not incompatible, view suggests that the wholesale exportation of American material culture has given rise to a population of have-nots whose wrath we cannot subdue with military force, and whose aspirations we will only placate by shrinking our global footprint.
Neither of these explanations considers what animates the struggles of the individuals involved. Who are they? What do they want? Mark Juergensmeyer is a man to ask. He's a professor of sociology and director of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of several books that try to explain religious warfare from the perspective of the true believer.
In The New Cold War? (1993), Juergensmeyer examines religious national movements of the Iranians, Sikhs, Hindus, militant Israeli Jews and the Sinhalese Buddhists. Through interviews with combatants, he teases out strains of belief common to all groups?among them a sense of marginality, a threatened loss of identity and a scriptural legacy that provides images of "cosmic war"?an epic and imminent battle between good and evil that places the individual holy warrior at center stage. His most recent book on the subject, Terror in the Mind of God, published last year, expands this view to accommodate violent religious movements that lack any territorial or political ambitions. In discussions with the leaders of Hamas, Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane, abortion clinic bomber Michael Bray, Aum Shinrikyo member Takeshi Nakamura and Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Juergensmeyer presents a chilling array of marginalized men who have discovered compelling new identities through their participation in what they see as an historic struggle.
We spoke by telephone on Nov. 14.
What is religious nationalism?
Religious nationalism is when religion provides the ideology that gives legitimacy to the nation state. It sounds very straightforward, but if you stop to think about it, it's really remarkable because the nation state as we know it is an artifact of the Enlightenment. The claim was that not just who happened to be the king or the leader of a territory, but the will of a people and social contract would create a nation legitimized by the ideology and the moral values of the Enlightenment. And now, some 300 years later, that idea has been hijacked?or rescued?by religion in parts of the world where people seem to have lost faith in the Enlightenment principles that undergirded the idea of the nation state. The classic example is Iran, where you had a strong sense of Iranian identity, but fused with Shiite Islam that gave it a moral legitimacy. Many of the movements of religious activism in the Middle East, whether they be the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the Hamas movement in Palestine, also have a nationalist touch to them.
Not all movements of religious activism are religious nationalism?of course Al Qaeda is quite different. It's transnational. That's one of the remarkable things about this new form of religious activism. I had to alter my analysis of the nature of this kind of religious activism because of groups like the Al Qaeda network, the Christian militia in the United States and the Aum Shinrikyo in Japan. They're guerrilla antiglobalists. They're looking at a new global network and they're saying, this is simply an extension of or a vestige of American-style secular politics and we don't want it.
So it's something that's grown up in opposition specifically to transnational global capitalism?
More than specifically?almost exclusively. The remarkable thing about Al Qaeda is that they have no political plan. They're fighting for no state. They have no political ideology. They scarcely have an army. All they have to offer to the Muslim world is war?the image of the Muslim world rising up in righteous wrath in an almost global act against the forces of secular globalization.
Osama bin Laden has talked about the way in which the secular West had oppressed Islam, he said it's been going on for 80 years. Now that's an interesting figure. What was it that disappeared 80 years ago? That was the ending of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of the caliphate. That was the last great transnational Islamic entity. So in many ways, Osama bin Laden is raising the image of a new kind of globalization, but an Islamic globalization to counter what he sees as a secular globalization.
Do Islamic terrorists want the things that global capitalism has to offer? The wealth and the materialism? Isn't there a strong reaction against that as a corrupting force?
Well, yes and no. Certainly the people with whom I talked are all modern people. It's not as if they want to go off and live in a cave with nothing. But what they talk about is not goods as much as power and control. It's really a matter of feeling that they are in control of their own lives and their own destiny and not a part of a homogenized culture that is exported by somebody else. After the Cold War, where Marxism as an ideology of rebellion has to some extent been discredited, then religious language provides an ideology of rebellion. In some cases, like in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood, people were in fact communists at an earlier point and now they're Islamic activists. It's almost as if they've exchanged one ideology for another, but the tenor of the rebellion is the same.
It seems pretty clear that the Koran prohibits the killing of non-combatant civilians. How important is scriptural sanction in this kind of cosmic-war mentality that you write about?
These guys are not narrowmindedly religious. Although religion is extraordinarily important in forming both the ethical justification for their actions and the image of warfare that animates them, they are not going to be limited by any narrow interpretation of scripture. They simply would take the broader context of the defense of Islam as their basis and observe that the confrontation that they see already involves noncombatants. They see America as violating, terrorizing, much of the world?at least in their perception of it?and therefore they're simply helping God to respond in kind. In their view of the confrontation, the bombing of the World Trade Center towers is an act of God for which they are simply the agents.
This is sort of strange from a Western point of view?we do not feel we are engaged right now in some global, life-or-death struggle. Or at least we didn't before Sept. 11.
We didn't before Sept. 11. Now we're beginning to use their language. That's the scary thing. When I interviewed Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the things he expressed to me was an enormous sense of frustration. He said, "You just don't get it. You people are like sheep. You don't see the wider war. The struggle between good and evil. You simply go about your life as if there was nothing important happening, but there is."
From his view, there's this enormous frustration that not just us but most Muslims don't see the war that's going on. To them it's painfully obvious. There's this "Aha!" experience once you get into this worldview. Suddenly everything makes sense. Why they feel oppressed. Why they feel humiliated. Why they feel marginalized. Why America seems to be doing so extravagantly well and why it seems to control the media and cultural images throughout the world?it's because there's this huge war. It seems perfectly clear from their point of view, and yet everybody else doesn't get it.
So an attack on the World Trade Center is meant to be a visible sign of this war. It's like street theater or performance art. It's meant to draw us into their view of the world. It's not strategy in the sense that they think they're going to gain some territory or some other advantage from it. Rather, it's meant to be an extraordinarily dramatic, visible demonstration of the war that they see going on. So the next morning after the attack, when the newspapers in the United States screamed "War," they must have been ecstatic. Finally we'd gotten the point.
Is this notion of being engaged in a cosmic struggle an easy thing for an Al Qaeda recruiter to communicate to prospective soldiers?
Mahmud Abouhalima told me about his life in Germany and his experiments with drugs and alcohol, and then suddenly he told me a story about a lion who was raised by sheep. One day the lion went to a pond and saw his own reflection and then he suddenly realized he wasn't a sheep, he was a lion. He said that is what Islam taught him?that he wasn't a sheep, he was a lion. This exhilarating sense of empowerment came with feeling he was a part of a great struggle. He was a warrior. A fighter. He wasn't just being humiliated by the mindless banalities of modern life, like everybody else. The idea of great war is appealing to really anyone who feels that the world is going awry and that somehow they're responsible and that they feel at sea because of it.
And these are mostly young men who join these groups?
They're people in moments of transition. In terms of age, fairly young. In terms of gender, men. Both are interesting phenomena. I think young because of the sense of transition as the kind of uncertainties that come about anyway when you're trying to find out who you are. In the case of the Al Qaeda network, these are expatriates, so the insecurity and the loss of identity of being out of one's own culture, that heightens that sense of loss of self.
But the gender part is quite interesting. The Basques or the Kurds or the Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka, all of which are movements for ethnic nationalism but use terrorism, a number of women have been involved. But in religious terrorist movements, they are almost all men. But why particularly in religious movements? It seems to me that there are a couple of factors at work. One is that religion appeals especially to people who feel responsible for the world going awry. Whether it's warranted or not, men often feel that they should have been in control or had a responsibility to be in control. So they experience the world going awry not only as dislocation but as humiliation. Humiliation is a common word that I found in so many of my interviews in talking with supporters of movements of religious violence. Dr. Abdul Rantisi, the political head of Hamas, told me, "Don't think we're fighting for land. We're fighting for pride."
You told me earlier that it was hoped by the Al Qaeda leadership that the images of the World Trade Center attack broadcast on Al Jazeera would lead to spontaneous uprising against the governments of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and others. Is the repressive character of these governments the only thing preventing an Al Qaeda revolution? Or does it contribute to their prominence?
Both things may be the case. There's no question there's a fairly strong populist sentiment in favor of the Osama bin Laden line. In his first statement on Al Jazeera television on Oct. 7, when America got involved in Afghanistan, he went through a litany of griefs that the Muslim world has against America, from Palestine to the embargo on Iraq, and then he said, "Your own government has done nothing about it," thereby castigating the entire leadership of the Muslim world, which I'm sure did not make them feel very happy. But it's clear that Osama bin Laden has that kind of anti-authoritarian image not just against America but against authority in general, including?maybe especially?Islamic leadership. And of course he has in mind his own Saudi Arabian government, which he hates with a passion.
What could those governments do to diminish his influence?
Well, it's a problem. In Algeria, the alternative to a dictatorship would be a popularly elected but strident Islamic populism. But on the other hand, as Iran has taught us, that doesn't necessarily last. I think we can learn a lot about the trajectory of a certain kind of Islamic rebellion from Iran. Rebellions don't last forever. They become routine in a way that makes for a kind of normal civil society. Whether this would happen everywhere, I don't know, but it certainly gives some reason to not suspect democracy, to allow democracy to run its course.