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"No More Crusades" first appeared in the Harvard
International Review, Volume 25, Issue 4, Winter 2004 and appears here
with the authors permission. Permission to further republish the article is
not granted in this publication and must be arranged with the author.

No enmity is natural. Each arises from a specific set of historical circumstances.
We in the West have fallen prey to the idea that Islam was not just a historical
foe but also a natural enemy of Europe and later of the West. It was not so with
the "red" enemy. When the Communist threat ended in 1989, the antagonism between
the United States and the USSR turned into a quasi-alliance. By the mid-90s there
was no longer a red menace; instead, there was a green enemy: Islam. Always lurking
in the shadows, it emerged as a real foe during the Iranian Revolution of the late
70s. The band of bearded ayatollahs and their leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, became
the clerical counterweight to a secular, pro-Western, capitalist world order. Yet
neither Iranians, Libyans, Lebanese, Sudanese, nor Iraqis proved to be the real
menace. When September 11, 2001 brought the green enemy out of the shadows and
into the headlines, it was a non-state Saudi related group that attacked the United
States in the name of Allah. Al-Qaeda seemed to justify the worst fears of crisis
managers and civilization watchdogs. There was an Islamic enemy, with a Saudi face
and modern weapons that was real and determined. September 11 seemed to confirm
the major theories proffered in the aftermath of the Gulf War: Samuel Huntington's
clash between civilizations, Bernard Lewis's replay of the Crusades, and Francis
Fukuyama's reemergence of fascism with an Islamic face.

Since September 11, the "Clash of Civilizations" theory has dominated and incorporated
all others. It seems to explain Muslim-Western hostility as both ancient and irreversible.
It is neither. This enmity is made by humans and thus can be unmade by humans.
The historical events over the past millennium can and must be retold from a broader
perspective that includes multiple interpretations of the same events and their
sequels. There is no single Christian view and no single Muslim counterpart; both
exhibit an internal variety.

What is needed to advance beyond pseudo-dialectics and interminable warfare is
a double critique — internal and external — that must begin with the symbolic event
that haunts the memory of Christians and Muslims alike: the Crusades. The Crusades
began over 900 years ago and still continue today. Pope Urban II's call for Crusaders
in 1095 was not an isolated message from the European Middle Ages, but an awakening
of Christendom to the threat of Islam. To quote Pope Urban II, "In our days God
has fought through Christian men in Asia against the Turks and in Europe against
the Moors." By Crusader logic, Christians must fight on and on, in every continent
and in every age, against Turks, Moors, Saracens or their 21st century collective
successors: the Muslims.

Protestant and Catholic Crusaders

Who are today's Crusaders? They are both Protestant and Catholic. News headlines
have featured the raw provocations of evangelicals, from the Southern Baptist President
who derided Muhammad as a pedophile to Franklin Graham lampooning Islam as an evil,
misguided religion. Until 1995 the Californian Baptist minister Tim LaHaye was
best known for his leadership of the Christian Family movement. He has now become
the bestselling author of a whole line of apocalyptic fiction, including Left Behind
brigade. LaHaye, of course, does not project Left Behind as fiction but as fact
that the end will come. It will come in the near future and it will be marked by
a soul harvest. The few who survive the Tribulation, the AntiChrist, and the Armageddon,
will be saved, while the rest will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

What does all this have to with Islam? Ostensibly nothing. The goal of the Christian
Right is purely religious: to reclaim Jerusalem for the Jewish people, as in the
1999 title of sixth installment of Left Behind: Assassins: Assignment Jerusalem,
Target Antichrist. Yet the fact behind this fictional account involves real
people. The real people to be targeted are Arabs. It is Arabs who occupy Jerusalem
and mark it as the territory of the Antichrist. It is the Arabs who represent the
forces of evil. It is Arabs who have to be killed in the Battle of Armageddon.
Only with the removal of the Arab/Muslim beast can the Holy Land be reclaimed for
the People of God.

By comparison to Protestant doomsday sayers, Catholic sabre rattlers may seem
almost anodyne in their view of both the last days and Arab adversaries. But are
they? Consider the Vatican. It has often been suggested that the current Pope is
well disposed to Muslims in general and to Palestinians in particular. But Papal
pronouncements also include beatifications; one recent beatification, announced
in April 2003, elevated an obscure Capuchin monk/priest named Marco d'Aviano. Brother
Marco is alleged to have inspired the now famous cappuccino coffee, but he was
also a seventeenth century Capuchin monk, and he helped to defend Vienna against
a Turkish assault in the 1680s. The Turks were Muslims and they were allegedly
defeated because Brother Marco rallied both Protestants and Catholics to oppose
the Muslim invaders. The Turks, defeated in the 1683 Battle of Vienna, never again
besieged Western Europe. In his April pronouncement Pope John Paul II celebrated
that moment as a Christian victory. He lauded Brother Marco as a true Crusader,
asserting that he had helped defend the "freedom and unity of Christian Europe," reminding
today's Catholics that the continent is founded on "common Christian roots." The
Holy Father's commendation had an unspoken trailer: "Muslims are not welcome; go
home, to Asia or to Africa, but depart from Christian Europe!"

Beyond papal pronouncements there are Catholic polemicists at large. William
F. Buckley leads the pack. No sooner had the U.S. completed its invasion of Iraq
than Buckley wrote a provocative article for The National Review (27 May 2003).
It was entitled "Onward, Christian Missionaries!" echoing the words of the 19th
century Anglican hymn, "Onward, Christian Soldiers!" In the article Buckley declared
that in present day Iraq, Protestant missionaries are right to tell Christian men
and women "to spend their lives, and even to risk them to pass on the word of the
Christian faith." A special difficulty, laments Buckley, "is that the moderate
Muslim voice arouses the antagonism of the militant, which antagonism seeks satisfaction,
from time to time, in mayhem. The wrath of the militants is feared not only by
non-militant exegetes of the Koran, entire governments are intimidated." The only
safe haven for moderate, as for militant, Muslims is conversion to Christianity.

Islamist rhetoric as Crusader logic

Crusades are reciprocal warfare: Crusader logic is matched by Islamist, or Islamic
extremist, rhetoric. Islamists claim to speak on behalf of eternal Qu'ranic values,
even though they do not speak for all Muslims, nor do they speak in unity. Militant
Muslims are a fractious minority. The sine qua non of Islamic belief is "No god
but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God." Once a person has made that affirmation
with total sincerity, he or she becomes a Muslim. For most Muslims, the very next
obligations after professing faith are peaceful: prayer, fasting, almsgiving and
perhaps pilgrimage. Islamic observance is a rigorous daily regimen, yet for the
militant minority of Muslims, it is not enough to say "No god but God." For the
militant Muslim minority, the necessary sequel to professing the faith is defending
the faith. Instead of daily prayer, almsgiving, fasting or pilgrimage, the next
step required of all believers in Allah and his last prophet, Muhammad, is to wage
war, holy war, or jihad.

Militant Muslims are in effect Crusaders for Allah. They are everything to the
Crusaders that the Crusaders are to them: unflinching warriors of the faith. They
embrace the term jihad as holy war. They project themselves as holy warriors. Other
Muslims contest that definition of jihad as too narrow and bellicose. Yet militant
Muslims prize jihad as the flip side of faith. First you believe, and then you
fight for what you believe. Holy war must be waged against all unbelievers. This
is the model and the legacy of the earliest Muslims. Those who first accepted God's
revelation to Muhammad and became Muslims were compelled to wage war against their
adversaries. They fought to ensure the toehold of Islam in Arabia. For militant
Muslims, there is no separation between 7th century Arabia and 21st century America.
Both are marked as realms of ignorance. Both are battlegrounds, pitting good against
evil, them against us.

And so the creed of Crusaders — to kill the infidel Saracens — is matched by
the creed of militant Muslims — to kill the infidel Christians. Both creeds attract
warriors for the faith and each side is willing to preach and to act on behalf
of their sacred trust against all enemies. Their enemies are not just outside others;
they are also internal dissenters. Indeed, it is the internal dissenters who are
the most dangerous. For militant Muslims, as for Christian Crusaders, the first
task is to confront co-religionists who claim to be believers but are unwilling
to fight for the faith. They are viewed as hypocrites, backsliders, heretics.

If religion is about peace, neither Crusaders nor their Muslim counterparts are
religious. They seek war, not peace. The cardinal tenets of apocalypticism are
war in the name of God, my faith over your faith, the end of the world in our lifetime.
They will not go away soon. And in the aftermath of September 11, currents of religious
hatred and violence that threaten to engulf our world seem to justify fear of Muslims,
and to mark Muslim fanatics as the enemy auguring the end of time

We need to have religion unshackled from dyads and diatribes. We need to move
beyond proclaiming the end of the world as certain because God decreed its end,
and instead consider making the world a better place for pagans as well as pietists,
for Muslims, Jews, and Christians, but also for Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs. Why?
Because Mystery is the first and last name of the divine and demanding humility
rather than hubris is the litmus test of faith. The true problem is neither Islam
nor Christianity; the enemies are not those who identify as Muslims or Christians.
The enemies are those who claim religion as the basis for conflict, faith as the
motive for violence, and Armageddon as the outcome of war. The enemies are the
militant defenders of the faith, at once blinkered and blinded to divine mystery.
It is not a mock war, but rather a serious, protracted war, and those on the sidelines
need to move beyond their own religious labels and grapple with the militants of
both camps, reclaiming a truth, which is also a truce, beyond their grasp.

Beyond Crusades and Crusaders

Since September 11 images of Islam have proliferated in the media in the United
States. The very act of bombing the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was theater.
Those planes were meant not only to destroy buildings and to kill people, but also
to send a message to the largest possible audience through modern media. The message
was as stark as it was simple: the United States is the enemy of Islam, and the
core of the United States is business that is privileged by the capitalist world
system. And so the attack on the United States had to be an attack on its core,
its center: the World Trade Center.

The print and TV and cyber media have all dutifully gotten the message. It would
be impossible to catalogue all the ways in which Islam has become an evil religion,
and Muslims the enemy of the US since September 11. But the most thought provoking
essay has come from a leftist turned social critic, Paul Berman. Berman's essay "The
Philosopher of Islamic Terror" appeared as the New York Times Magazine's lead story
on March 23, 2003. It focused exclusively on the lessons to be learned from a single
dissident Egyptian scholar and activist, Sayyid Qutb. According to Berman, the
power of Qutb's prose derives from his mixed education, which combined traditional
religious training in Egypt with modern secular education, including a stay in
the U.S. during the late 40s when he earned his M.A. from the Colorado State College
of Education. Berman touches on many issues, but he keeps returning to the central
difference between East and West: unlike their US enemies, Muslim zealots have
no fear of death; in fact, they welcome death, especially the death of martyrdom. "The
death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause,
which continues to thrive on their blood," writes Qutb. "Their influence on those
they leave behind also grows and spreads. Thus after their death they remain an
active force in shaping the life of their community and giving it direction. It
is in this sense that such people, having sacrificed their lives for the sake of
God, retain their active existence in everyday life. There is no real sense of
loss in their death, since they continue to live."

For Berman the martyrdom logic of Qutb is not just scriptural, based on an interpretation
of certain verses from the Holy Qur'an. It is also cultural, reinforced by political
events of the past fifty years. While Bin Laden and his suicide warriors came from
Saudi Arabia, their broader roots came from Egypt via Afghanistan. Al- Qaeda, notes
Berman, was created in the late 1980's by an affiliation of three armed factions
- bin Laden's circle of Afghan Arabs, together with two factions from Egypt, the
Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the latter led by Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri,
Al Qaeda's top theoretician. The Egyptian factions emerged from a school of thought
within Egypt's fundamentalist movement, the Muslim brotherhood, in the 1950s and
60s. At the heart of that single school of thought stood, until his execution in
1966, a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb - the intellectual hero of every one of the
groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way),
their guide.

Berman has no answer for the martyrdom logic of Qutb. "The terrorists speak insanely
of deep things," he laments. "The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally
deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline
to dispatch armies, for better and for worse." It is left to philosophers and religious
leaders to speak up, loud and clear. The challenge, in other words, is to articulate
what it means to be antiterrorist, to defend religion as a force for collective
good and preservation of life, and not as a motive for violent destruction and
the end of the world. We must be willing to engage the enemy, and to fight the
real enduring battle of ideas.

To
fight a war to end war, the contestants must gather like-minded Muslims, Christians,
Jews and Buddhists together against other religionists equally drawn to divine
guidance but mistakenly intent on apocalyptic doomsday brands of scriptural truth.

Berman's diagnosis is apt but it needs a prescriptive sequel. If the real battle
is the battle of ideas, then surely there must be Muslim warriors who also join
in this combat. To fight a war to end war, the contestants must gather like-minded
Muslims, Christians, Jews and Buddhists together against other religionists equally
drawn to divine guidance but mistakenly intent on apocalyptic doomsday brands of
scriptural truth.

In this anti-Armageddon battle a formidable Muslim warrior is the Shi'i activist
and university professor, Abdul Aziz Sachedina. For Sachedina, as for a growing
number of Muslim pluralists, the Qur'an must be read as a whole book of coherent
intent and not as a scrapbook of conflicting messages. The largest intent is inclusive:
to marshal all humankind on the path to peace, and that message prevails despite
the contexts of aggression that evoked Chapters 8 and 9. The Qur'an presents
Islam as the affirmation and the summation, not the denial, of earlier religions.
Even later Medinan Chapters declare that Muslims have no monopoly on divine grace,
either in this world or the next (2:62, 5:69); they also invite Jews and Christians
to join Muslims in emphasizing the essential similarities in their beliefs (e.g.,
3:64).

In his most recent book, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism(Oxford
2002), Sachedina shows how Qur'anic ideals are formulated and also how historical
developments rather than initial intent has limited their application. Again and
again, the key interpretive move is not to dwell on individual verses but to read
and understand all verses in their full context. To counter the verses used by
medieval jurists to rationalize discrimination against non-Muslims, Sachedina discloses
how the Qur'an projects an overriding concern with justice, as in the
following passage:

God does not forbid you, with regard to those who do not fight you because
of your faith, nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly
with them, for God loves those who are just (60:8).

The linchpin of Qur'anic logic is the universal scope of humanity. There may
be separate tribes and languages, races and polities, yet all humankind was created
to be one community, linked together and sustained by prophecy:

The people were one community (umma), then God sent forth the Prophets,
good tidings to bear and warning, and He sent down with them the Book with the
truth, that He might decide among them touching their difference. (2:213)

Difference is therefore not social waywardness, but divine prescription. Within
the overarching notion of a common community, above all marked through Abraham,
the Transcendent intended there to be differences among the children of Abraham,
Jews, Christians and Muslims. Those who could have been one united community are
instead destined to be linked communities, each with its own law and its own way,
in order that God might be the judge. In the meantime, believers are instructed
not to fight each other, but to compete with one another in good works.

Looking Ahead

In all, there are three broadly divergent perspectives that claim the mantle
of Muslim legitimacy. First, there are the ones whom Berman and other media mavens
depict as the militants. For them Islam is self-empowerment in a world where Muslims
are bereft of power. They invoke links to a scripturalist purity that they alone
defend; they assert its truth in order to confront a shattered present with apocalyptic
solutions. Only Armageddon is the answer, the route is different but the answer
is the same, for Muslim terrorists as for their Christian counterparts. Second,
there are devout Muslims who do identify with their own past but see that past
as sacrosanct and not subject to debate or to change. Democracy for them is a Western
power play, human rights are a US-backed ploy of the United Nations, women's liberation
or feminism is an American subversion of Muslim women's dignity. These traditionalists
are no less anti-American than terrorists, but they are opposed to physical violence
or armed conflict except when authorized by extant Muslim governments. And finally,
there are pluralists. Are they a minority? Perhaps. But they are not a belligerent
minority like the Jihadists or Islamic extremists. Sachedin, with other Muslim
pluralists, prize universal values, ascribing them to Qur'anic sources and applying
them to contemporary contexts. The pluralists may be in the minority of all Muslim
spokesmen but they are a zealous, restless minority. We do need religious voices
to speak to the current fault line between East and West, Islam and America, and
it is Muslim pluralists who are the philosophers and religious thinkers with whom
non-Muslim others can and should make common cause.

To make a plural world safe both for democratic citizens and religious rivals
demands nothing less than a hardy inter-faith coalition of good-willed Abrahamic
advocates. The only victory that counts in the war on terror will come off the
battlefield, in the minds and hearts of moral combatants who recognize their internal
enemies as well as their external foes. All those who seek to be winners in this,
the ultimate war must first acknowledge the power of Crusader logic: Catholic irredentism
remains the clone of Protestant rapturism, and both are reinforced by media negativity
as well as by political expediency re Islam and the Muslim world. These institutional
blockages limit the vistas for spiritual utopianism. Without attention to the fault
lines of human caprice, including those within the churches, there can be neither
peace nor its necessary concomitant, sustained Muslim-Christian cooperation, which
also includes Jews and Buddhists along with others dedicated to pursuit of the
collective good. It is a jihad, in the truest sense, a struggle against our own
demons as well as others. It prohibits a Crusade. Indeed, it will only succeed
when Crusades, Crusaders and Crusading have been understood for what they are:
a bygone chapter of world history not to be repeated, except as a cautionary tale,
for our own and for all future generations.

Bruce B. Lawrence is the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion
at Duke University.

Anonymous response from a professed Muslim:

Are pluralists who ascribe 'universal values' to "Qur'anic sources" really
legitimate scholars (or philosophers) in the eyes of most Muslims? Is this sort
of crude, inaccurate categorization really any more helpful than the 'Clash of
Civilizations' disourse that Professor Lawrence so rightfully criticizes in his
essay? Is it any different than our own President's "you're with us or against
us attitude"? (You're either a pluralist with us or an anti-American Militant/unthinking
traditionalist.) And how many of us still believe such a think as 'universal
values' really exists?

Dr. Lawrence's reply:

I did not use my three category distinction to provide a demographic profile
of all Muslims. That would be absurd, and I am sad to see such reductio ad absurdum
logic from someone as good hearted as the questioner appears to be. My point,
which is echoed again and again in many circles (Omid Safi, Progressive Muslims, could
and should be added to Hashmi, Sachedina, Taji- Farouki for written sources),
is that there are many ways of reckoning Muslim (or Christian or Jewish or pagan)
axes of loyalty, belief and practice. Above all, pluralism is not a nonsense
term to be paired with Huntington's CLASH as though one were equivalent to the
other, any more than war and peace are finally the same, equivalent options for
every religion. I am hopeful of common sense and visionary courage among ALL
Muslims, not just the tolerant few, but I continue to believe that pluralism
as a pragmatic option is better than closet fideism or spiritual jingoism, whether
under the cross, the crescent or the torah.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2004 at 12:23 am and is filed under Peace and Conflict, Editorial and Op-Ed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.