Fr. Shall on Islam
ASSESSING WHAT IS AT ISSUE IN THIS WAR
By James V. Schall, S.J. Georgetown University
I. Every liberal instinct in the West is against seeing the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as anything but products of "extremists." The enemies are called "terrorists," a most unfortunate abstraction. If we have a secular Western mind-set, we cannot easily comprehend a vaster geopolitical or religious project that does not stem primarily from weakness or resentment or a feeling of injustice caused either by Israel or by random use of Western power. Supply food and help the poor, limit retaliation to a bare minimum. The problem will go away. At the recent Synod in Rome (October 2, 2001), the Cardinal Archbishop of New York warned against feelings of "revenge," even in his own city, the one most violently attacked. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle writes that "to passion and anger are due all acts of revenge. Revenge and punishment are different things. Punishment is inflicted for the sake of the person punished; revenge for that of the punisher" (1369b12-14). Thus, it is possible to think of punishment without necessarily indulging in revenge. What seems less comprehensible is to think of acts of such "terrorism" without also thinking of justice, of due punishment. The "do-nothing-to-retaliate," either on religious (turn the other cheek) or prudential (will cause something worse) grounds, makes such attacks appear to be both more successful than they are and worth trying again. The purpose of just punishment, which was implied by the Holy Father in his comments on the New York attack as well by President Bush in his various statements, is prevention of immediate or long-planned attacks by those still capable of and willing to carry them out. Even though no one so far has had the courage to claim responsibility, such hostile forces cannot any longer claim "innocence" or "ignorance" to describe their moral status before the world. In the current case, punishment, however realized, could not be intended for the "reform" of those who carried attacks out, or even vengeance against them, as they are already dead. The planners are being hunted down because they threaten, with evident seriousness of purpose and plausible means of delivery, to multiply the attacks almost anywhere in the non-Muslim world. They will not be stopped even by the fear of their own deaths, which are conceived as a kind of perverted religious glory. In this background, none of the commonly applied deterrent tools seems to work. We are puzzled.
II. Let me cite two very strong, perhaps controversial statements from young men, the first in an American East Coast state, the other resident in a very explosive Muslim country: 1) As a native Irish "cradle Catholic," I treasure my holy faith and keep somewhat informed. I have never been well-disposed to the Moslem people, since their "Faith" began as one of the early (seventh century) Christian heresies. It has a long history of virulent anti-Catholicism. Though we undoubtedly share some views in common with them, we are ecumenically antithetical. I can conceive no basis ever for the possibility of accord with them. Their missionary outreach is with the sword! Mosques are springing up like MacDonald franchises in our country. I believe that it is fatuously naive not to see the possibility of a networking connection between some of the Islamic leadership here and in the Middle east. 2) Do you recall during the interminable election last year that there was a Catholic rosary campaign started to pray for the protection of George W. Bush's victory? It was called the "Lepanto Campaign," invoking the rosary campaign that assured the naval victory of Lepanto (over Turks, 1571). How ironic that seems now. But in fact, I wonder if it really was irony and not the foreshadowing of the Holy Spirit. I am terribly concerned that a tremendous global war between Islam and Christendom (what's left of it) may be beginning. To his credit, the President has made clear that the efforts of the United States are focused on the terrorists and the states that harbor them. This is just. But it seems as if the Islamists and jihadists want nothing more than to ignite a great conflagration with the West and the "crusaders." Such a war has been going on here ... at a low-scale for several years now.... These frank comments are, as I say, opinions of two different young men both concerned that something more than merely an action of "justice" or defense is going on. Are such views radical? uninformed? naive? on the mark? The question is the following: if we accept what seems to be the dominant American view that this attack is an identifiable and isolated manifestation of a relatively few "terrorists," so that the rest of Islam is not considered to be a serious problem, are we doing anything more than indulging in wishful thinking? Ought our understanding of what is at issue here to include the actual record of Islam, take some account of the nature of any Islamic government, the social, religious, and political condition of anyone within such a world of other views or positions. Do we simply accept that what goes on in terms of de facto and often de jure "union of mosque and state," of intransigent refusal to allow any inner or outer freedom on the grounds that our concern is merely with a few "terrorists" and not with large segments of this world itself? This cautious policy is what the elder President Bush, in the Gulf War, followed. He complied with, but did not challenge, Muslim religion laws about alien religions even when they deprived our own forces of guaranteed rights. An historic opportunity to challenge the central Islamic state to justify its unreasonable positions was lost. I would certainly hope, though I do not think it to be true, that the current war involves only a few organized "terrorists," though it may be politically indelicate to acknowledge otherwise. For prudential reasons, moreover, I can accept the constant reiteration of the very limited scope of our thinking on who is the enemy in this war. We might even hope, granted that most Muslims may well be sympathetic with the attackers, to lead them back in a position more in line with our own interests. Yet, one can wonder if this limited view is not, in the long run, a dangerous position, one blinded by our own philosophy from seeing the possibility of any determined and long-range purpose that would not be simply described by the aberrations of a few heretical fanatics? In the Second Special Assembly for Europe, Archbishop Giuseppe Germano Bernardini, O.F.M.Cap., Archbishop of Izmir, in Turkey, spoke on "the problem of Islam in Europe today" (L'Osservatore Romano, November 17, 1999). "I will make mention three cases that, due to their provenance, I believe to be true," he said. 1) During an official meeting on Islamic-Christian dialogue, an authoritative Muslim person, speaking to the Christians participating, at one point said very calmly and assuredly: "Thanks to your democratic laws we will invade you; thanks to your religious laws we will dominate you..." 2) During another Islamic-Christian meeting, always organized by Christians, a Christian participant publically asked the Muslims present why they had not organized at least one meeting of this kind. The Muslim authority present answered in the following words: "Why should we? You have nothing to teach us and we have nothing to learn." A dialogue between deaf persons? It is a fact that terms such as "dialogue", "justice", "reciprocity", or concepts such as "rights of man" and "democracy" have a completely different meaning for Muslims than for us. But I believe that by now this is recognized and admitted by all. 3) In a Catholic monastery in Jerusalem there was ... a Muslim Arab servant. A kind and honest person, he was respected greatly by the religious, who in turn were respected by him. One day, he sadly told them: "Our leaders have met and have decided that all "infidels" must be killed, but do not be afraid because I will kill you without making you suffer." Are these words anything more than naive or even "extremist" Christian reactions? The Archbishop added: "We are all aware that we must distinguish between the fanatic and violent minority from the tranquil and honest majority, but the latter, at an order given in the name of Allah or the Koran, will always march in unity and without hesitation." Thus, there are not a few, when free to speak frankly, who are concerned that we have here something more than mere limited action against a few "terrorists." "History teaches us that determined minorities always manage to impose themselves on reluctant and silent majorities," was Archbishop Bernardini's final observation on the topic. These words were spoken some two years before September 11, 2001. Since then, again mostly in the West, even in Rome itself, but not, I think, in Mecca, there are suddenly many conferences and inter-religious meetings to discuss just how peaceful Islam is in its own theoretical books and in its own historical record. "Koranic teaching that the faith or 'submission' can be, and in suitable circumstances must be, imposed by force, have never been ignored," the English historian Paul Johnson has written. (National Review, 15 October '01). On the contrary, the history of Islam has essentially been a history of conquest and reconquest. The 7th Century "breakout" of Islam from Arabia was followed by the rapid conquest of North Africa, the invasion and virtual conquest of Spain, and a thrust into France that carried the crescent to the gates of Paris. It took half a millennium of reconquest to expel the Moslems from Western Europe. The Crusades, far from being an outrageous prototype of Western imperialism, as is taught in most of our schools, were a mere episode in a struggle that has lasted 1,400 years, and were one of the few occasions when Christians took te offensive to regain the "occupied territories" of the Holy Land (20). This record and the spiritual force that caused such expansion simply cannot be ignored either as if it did not happen or as if it is not still present.
III. When the bombing began in Afghainstan (October 7, 2001), we had been at war for some time. The real "cost" of this initial attack, in terms of loss of normal national and international business activity and income throughout the globe, is many, many times the cost of the buildings and businesses destroyed. The overall cost, even assuming nothing further happens, will turn out to be enough to pay for any number of "Marshall Plans." Moreover, the whole world at the air-travel level is on wartime readiness. Few want to fly, even when necessary. We were surprised, even impressed, that the American response so far has been mostly in intelligence gathering or fiscal and homelands defensive measures. The Taliban called the Americans "cowards." The fleeing people of the Afghan cities certainly expected an attack. Many in Islam, recalling Archbishop Bernardini's warning, moreover, seemed to be anxious for American retaliation to take place as an occasion for further wide-spread attacks of the same variety, even for a massive uprising. Bin Laden himself is quoted as desiring such a thing.
IV. We have had, indeed, analyses after analyses about the "causes" of this attack. It is instructive to line them up in some order, for thinking is the first line of defense, indeed of offense. First, the "minimalist" thesis, as I call it, maintains that what we have here the actions, led by bin Laden and as yet unidentified others, of a few hundred or thousand "terrorists" with their support groups that we can identify by name. These "terrorists," it is hinted, are mostly psychotic types, outside the pale of normal human discourse. In spite of their own persistent and evidently popular claims to the contrary, they are said to be related to Islam in only the vaguest sense that the Waco cult or the Jonestown mass suicides were related to Christianity. The existence of such "terrorists," it is maintained, implies no further relationship of the attackers to their respective countries of origin or even to their religion. There is an army of sorts, made up of young men from all over the Islamic world who constituted the backbone of this threatening group. Actually, they were brought together initially to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan several years ago. The exigencies of diplomacy and limiting the war, however, seem to demand that no one should imply anything further. This is why the remarks of the Italian Prime Minister suggesting that there really was a sign of superiority in the West in comparison with Islam are taken not as an accurate description of what is at stake but as an aberration of a single right-wing politician. Islam is thus said to be "peaceful," however much such peace is not the actual history of classic Islamic expansion against formerly Christian and Hindu nations and peoples. The word Islam means not "peace" but "submission," though even that can have a benign meaning. Once we "bring these few insane men to justice," it is said, the problem will be solved as the causes go no deeper than their fervid minds. The policy this dictates is predicated on not opening a larger struggle and on the premise that Islam does not "naturally" and with frequency produce such "terrorists." The vast majority of Islamic states and people are said not to associate themselves with these small groups who can be isolated and identified and, hopefully, eliminated. Though the proof of this thesis is at best sketchy, it is politically incorrect to imply anything else. This is the counsel of slow prudence that does not see any long-term or world-historical movement at work here. Among the Americans, this view is probably most associated with Colin Powell, the Secretary of State. We have, secondly, the "Jewish" explanation. None of this warfare would have happened except for the existence and extremist conduct of Israel over the past half-century. Islam will not rest until Israel is eliminated. It is embarrassed at its impotence and blames the Americans for their interference. Without Israeli presence in the Middle East, no problem would exist. The very existence of Israel constitutes an hostile presence in Muslim lands. Israel is from the beginning an unjust and expansionist aggressor. It too has used "terrorist" methods and taken lands unjustly. Israel has caused deep resentment throughout the Arab world. Bin Laden himself says that the American support of Israel is the cause. Leading Jewish thinkers, however, see Israel as merely a symbol of some greater Islamic concern. They do not claim that Islam is so much against "Christendom," as that would present a problem in Jewish theology itself, but against "the West." Israel is a surrogate, the symbol of the hated West. The hatred is not for Israel as such. The secular, modern, democratic society is despised by Islam, some think as a sign of its own inferiority, others as a symbol of an alien religion that stands in the way of its own world conquest, now seen as something within sight after the manifestation of America's vulnerability before a few Muslim brave attackers. A third explanation has, perhaps, more "Catholic" or Christian overtones. There is indeed real, fundamental debasement or moral corruption in western society. An American president evidently bombed Islamic lands to get out of the consequences of his personal moral problems. Thus, by his own conduct a few years ago, he broadcast this typical moral corruption to the world. We found little horror in his lies and his deeds because they reflected much of what we actually do ourselves, much of what we call "democracy." Even the more sensible Muslims can see the rottenness of our culture, our abortion, our promotion of every sort of moral decadence. They see our movies, Internet, hear our music. They react in self-defense to this spreading "culture of death" and its consequent evil. Because of our attention to ourselves and our own declining society, we have not noticed the rise of a virile, dynamic Islam that rejects these cultural values. Islam has bodies, millions upon millions of them. They are rapidly moving into western countries because of the killing of our own kind by our lethal policies. They use our political freedom to establish bases within the very heart of our civilization. European decline of population is drastic, as is ours. From this angle, the war against us is a war against a corrupt civilization too introspective to keep up its own defenses or its own morals or its own population. We are the cause of our own problems. Islam 's fear and hatred of such a sick society that refuses to look at itself for what it is are justified. The problem is not with Islam, but with us. A fourth view is that Islam has always been a war religion. It has conquered by the sword and only been stopped by the sword; diplomacy and kindness have never worked with Islam. Without an effective military defense, Europe would have been Muslim today. The efforts to dialogue or turn the other cheek are hopeless in the face of Islam intransigence and self-righteousness. No one leaves Islam once under its thumb. There are few, if any, "converts" from Islam to anything else. They simply do not survive if they try. Once Islam regains the power, it will do exactly as it has always done. Islam is in a sense, as Belloc said, a Christian heresy. It has taken the admonition to "go forth and teach all nations" literally, but it has added the sword as a means of growth. It is implacable. There may or may not be passages in the Koran that advocate peace and tolerance. Some clearly advocate the opposite. But within Islamic states, there is in fact no such thing as freedom of religion except in the most minimal sense. There has been an active persecution of Christian peoples within many Islamic states. This persecution almost never gets mentioned, let alone confronted. Mass is not allowed to be celebrated. Schools are tolerated only under the strictest regulations. There is always the threat of the establishment of the Koran as the only law of the land. Christians in Muslim lands seek to leave. Most of the "Arabs" in the United States are Christian, people who have fled while they could from their ancient homes from increasingly threatening Islamic states. There is, on the contrary, almost no emigration from western lands into any Islamic country, except in the case of refugees. A fifth and final view is that we have a serious, long-term war on our hands and we best face the fact. Many Muslims are peaceful but they are themselves caught in between the fundamentalists or terrorists and their own government, which is usually military. Meanwhile, almost every Islamic government sees itself as sitting on a hotbed of trouble arising from these same "terrorists." By supporting these Islamic military governments, we hope that the civilizational war can be avoided. Besides we need the oil, even though we have not taken nearly enough steps to make ourselves independent of this need by rapidly developing hydrogen-fuel cell cars and busses and by devising our own sources of oil or its substitutes. Such oil independence is something that would undermine the whole basis of Muslim financial power. The issue is now, in this view, to estimate properly the scope of the danger. Mark Helprin has warned that "the pre-eminent imperative of the war on terrorism must be to eliminate the weapons of mass destruction that may find their way from the fever swamps of the Middle East to the air above American cities" (Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2001). The rooting out and killing of terrorists and their camps will not secure us if the larger and much more dangerous potential threat is ignored. But this view assumes that this war is not limited to a few thousand "terrorists."
V. During this period, the Catholic and Christian press has been filled with discussions of "just wars," discussions which seem strangely out of date. After decades of wrangling over "just war" doctrine, five thousand people were killed by an ordinary airplane. No episcopal conference, nor the government itself, had even come close to thinking about this new, but ancient use of force. It involves none of the sophisticated nomenclature of the nuclear war debates. The only real weapons were evidently knives and brains. One looks in vain, moreover, for any concerted geopolitical effort to understand Islam and its apparent potential to incite such destruction. War theory is not enough. Several Islamic leaders have, in recent years, written, with some irony, that they could peacefully take over Europe simply by continuing their high birth rate and immigration ratios. France is five percent Muslim. Thousands of mosques are now found in Germany and the United States. The largest Mosque in Europe is evidently being built in Belgium. However, this patient route to conquest seems to have been superceded by a more militant mind-set that is now willing to use the numerical superiority of young Islamic men. These same young men themselves have, as far as we can tell, shown great enthusiasm for the more radical path. They do not, if we can judge by their enthusiasm, see bin Laden as an evil man who kills innocents but as a hero who kills "enemies." Western policy thus far has shown great prudence in not doing anything that might contribute to this holy war mentality, which, as Gerald Seib has written in the Wall Street Journal (October 3), is exactly what bin Laden has been shrewdly planning all along. Meanwhile, it seems true to say that Christian peoples are very confused in deciding what might be the proper reaction to this attack and how to stop further ones. Muslims, after all, are not atheists. It would be most useful if the Holy Father would write an Encyclical "On Islam," one which faced, accounted for, and described the theology, philosophy, and history of Islam and how it relates to salvation history. It is one thing to maintain that Islam and Christianity pray to the same God, but is not the Islamic conception of God as pure will, without any Trinitarian or Incarnational overtones, a problem? Does it not produce radically different understandings of man and the world, not to say of God? Such an encyclical would also have to call our specific attention to the fact that Christian peoples have been and are still being persecuted in Islamic lands. The section of the Martyrology that simply lists those killed in Islamic lands needs to be widely known. It should not be a secret document. It seems almost eerie to speak of ecumenical relations with Islam without directly confronting the darker side of its record, past and present. Ironically, the recent practical alliance of the Papacy and Islamic governments on population issues suggests to many critics that, at bottom, Catholicism bears the same fanaticism that Islam is now showing. The answer, it is said, is to "secularize" Islam, to separate it from its own religious sources in such a way that it accepts all the modern aberrations. This same approach also serves to justify a complete "secularization" of Catholicism. Catholicism, thus far, unlike the secularist view, is reluctant to argue that an irreligious Islam would be an improvement over a believing Islam. On the other hand, meaningful "dialogue" with Islam still seems most unproductive. Those Muslims who do "dialogue" seem to have little relation to those who are causing the current "terrorist" problems. The results are always one-sided. Without the backing of force, nothing will happen. And yet, many Christians persist in seeing this reliance on force as an admission of failure of their own principle of suffering evil. Rarely, however, are there examples of Christian martyrs in Islamic states whose example ever changes anything there. Conversions are almost impossible. Christians, I think, have never really faced this fact as itself an intellectual and religious problem to be analyzed and not simply ignored. If you will, this utterly closed world of Islam is as much a problem in Christian theology as of Islamic theology.
VI. The Holy Father, in several of his addresses in Kazakhstan, has stressed the need for religious freedom in all lands (L'Osservatore Romano, September 26, 2001). Pope Wojtyla has no illusions about the cultural condition of Western nations (World Day of Peace Address, January 1, 2001). He knows much is aberrant. "I wish to reaffirm," the Pope remarked on September 24, 2001, in Astana, Kazakhstan, "the Catholic Church's respect for Islam, for authentic Islam, the Islam that prays, that is concerned for those in need. Recalling the errors of the past, including the most recent past, all believers ought to unite their efforts to ensure that God is never made the hostage of human ambitions. Hatred, fanaticism and terrorism profane the name of god and disfigure the true image of man" (L'Osservatore Romano, September 26. 2001, p. 5, #5). Reading between the lines, we can see that the Holy Father too implies a distinction between good or authentic and bad Islam. He seeks to make an alliance with what is good Islam. One of the ironic things about Islam, for all its apparent unity, it has no single authority with whom a pope can speak of these things. And just how we can identify "authentic" Islam from that Islam that is, presumably, "unauthentic," seems difficult in the extreme. We are, however, in all these considerations, left with the impression that the normal exhortations to dialogue, tolerance, and compassion are not enough. Rightly, the Pope continues to urge a peaceful path. But behind this conciliatory path looms the fear that by following it, we may well make things worse. It would be ironic if the influence of religion resulted in obvious and greater evil, more bombings. Because of our perceived weakness or unwillingness or scruples, we might see the use of the ever more lethal retaliatory instruments that Mark Helprin worried about. Ironically, Islam, the religion that most blesses the use of force to spread its faith, seems the one religion least open to dialogue that is anything more than a tactic to get its own way. Again without denying the distinction between what the Pope called "authentic" and presumably "inauthentic" Islam, this situation is itself the single most plausible argument for the careful and deliberate use of force. One final point, in conclusion, that needs to be considered. Stanley Jaki has been writing for a number of years about the relation of the development of modern science in the light of the theological presuppositions in the great religions that would foster or make possible this development. He notes that what we know as theoretical science did not arise in Islam, even though it was always a great trading power that was able to use many modern instruments. Many writers have suggested that part of the rage found in Islamic societies today is due to their own sense of incapacity before this scientific development, which also has a political side to it. David Pryce-Jones has stated the political structures that in fact exist in contemporary Muslim States in graphic terms: The conflict that has now erupted has been gathering for a long time. Its roots lie deep in history. To be brief and blunt, the Muslim world has never known exactly how to respond to the West, whether to adopt its values or to reject them.... For the past half century and more, the Muslim world has been free and independent, with every opportunity to organize as it wishes. And this is the heart of the issue: The Muslim world is a political and social disaster for all to see. With the arguable exception of Turkey, it consists of a series of despotisms, each with an absolute ruler whose ultimate justification is his strength and will. A family or a clique gathers around the ruler under the protection of the state apparatus of secret police and military repression. To be powerful, the spoils; to the weak, submission. No rights, no freedom of expression, no loyal opposition, no rule of law, no redress except through violence, conspiracy, a coup. And ultimately civil war (National Review, October 15, 2001, 22). If we use the relativist model of "multi-culturalism" to judge this scene, we will have nothing to say about this situation, except to praise it -- to each his own. If we use a classic Western criterion, we can distinguish between regimes and rank them by some objective criterion. We may be perplexed about how this situation might be changed, but, at some level, the first step must recognize its existence and its relation to its own beliefs and history. Why indeed does this pattern exist and recur? Jaki has speculated on the historical consequences of what might have happened had Islam been able, at a theoretical level, to arrive at a knowledge of science and technology as happened in the West. "It is easy to guess the course of world history if at the time of the battle of Lepanto the Turkish navy had been propelled by steam engines," Jaki observed in 1988 ("The Physics of Impetus and the Impetus of the Koran," The Absolute beneath the Relative and Other Essays, ISI Books, 146). Behind this failure to develop technology was a problem of theology, of the conception of God and of the world as created. Jaki would evidently agree with those who see these current attacks on the West as expressions of a deeper theological problem. The question of the failure of Muslim scholars to formulate the proper impetus theory becomes the true nature of the intellectual impetus provided by the Koran. It is a question which underlies the great ferment that has increasingly engulfed the Muslim world for the past thirty years. Those years are also the first and full exposure of the Muslim world on all levels of Western technology, which brings along an exposure to Western scientific thinking. Not all of the fruits of that exposure are of course beneficial.... The Muslim world is fully justified in deploring the abuses of science and in trying to apply science in a human way. But before that humane application takes place, there has to be science, that is, there have to be minds fully familiar with science. This, however, demands that there be minds fully imbued with the thinking underlying science especially if they wish to be creative in science. The question is then whether the present-day Muslim reawakening, which is a reassertion of the role of the Koran in every facet of life, can be reconciled with the thinking demanded by science (148). What this passage implies is that the failure to confront theological, scientific, and philosophical problems at the level of theoretical intellect results in war and strife at the level of politics. And it is at this theoretical level, that the pope is surely right to dialogue with the Muslim world, if it will indeed dialogue with him. This pope has probably met more Muslim religious and political leaders than any other man in the Western world. He has not hesitated to insist, on the surface level, on genuine religious freedom, including the freedom of voluntary conversion, in any society, including a Muslim one. And he has probably understood, since he knows of the many, many Catholics and Christians who have been persecuted and killed in Muslim lands, the lethal nature of many unfortunate Islamic practices. But John Paul II has not seen war or violence as a way to resolve these problems. He is aware of what happens when an eye for an eye system is employed. On the other hand, he cannot ignore the demands for justice and security that result when cities and nations are directly and violently attacked. He cannot or does not excuse such an action. The end of war or self-defense remains peace. That is, peace in the minimal sense of cease-fire can provide a world in which some resolution of controversies can be resolved by other means than force. Yet, perhaps, as the ongoing, escalating war shows, the meaning of the contemporary rise of Islam is, ultimately, that we have reached the end of a theory of "tolerance" that refuses to understand the nature and consequences of ideas, religious, scientific, and political. If there can be any ultimate this-worldly "good" that can come out of these unfortunate events, including the efforts to eradicate the army ranged against us, it is that at some level religion, science, philosophy, and economics do have to confront their own "truth" in the light of what is, in fact, true.
(c) James Schall S.J., 2001. All Rights reserved.
WAR-TIME CLARIFICATIONS: WHO IS OUR ENEMY?
James V. Schall, S. J. Georgetown University, DC.
I. When Christ was asked "who, then, is my neighbor?" He responded with the Good Samaritan story. Christ was never specifically asked, "who, then, is my enemy?" Perhaps He figured it would be obvious in any generation. He did ask us to "forgive" our enemies, whoever they might be. Presumably, this admonition means that He expected us always to be in a world in which there were enemies to what He had asked us to do and believe. He told us in fact, for this very reason, to expect persecution. When He Himself was being executed in Jerusalem by the Roman state, in conjunction with local accusers, He whispered, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." But they killed Him anyway. His forgiveness did not stop His own killing. In other words, it is quite possible to have real enemies who seek our lives, to forgive them in our hearts, and find ourselves still having to deal with them, to prevent them from further attacking, killing us or those for whom we are responsible.. Thus far, the most remarkable passage explaining this war was written by Hilaire Belloc in 1938, in his essay, "The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed" ( The Great Heresies [New York: Dodd, Mead, MCMXXXIII]). I had seen a reference to this passage on a Chesterton web site. So I went to the library and found the book itself. The abiding questions Belloc asked himself sixty-three years ago were, a) what makes Islam attractive? b) why does it have no converts to anything else? and 3) will it rise again? Islam is the one militant religion that came out of the desert and invariably conquered much of the world with arms, not with words. Several times, Islam was on the verge of conquering all of Europe. Belloc thought it would rise again. Its simple faith remained intact in spite of its modern setbacks. What Belloc did not foresee, almost the only thing he did not foresee, was Islam's relative, but rapid demographic increases over against our "culture of death" decreases which latter have already killed more of our own that Islam ever will. We adamantly insist that our country's attack has no "divine" implications about the way we live. But the way we have been living, ruining our families, not begetting, has, like all moral disorder, its own consequences in this world. This is what we are also seeing. Yet, Christians still die in the Islamic world, often unheralded, a partial chronicle of which is found in Robert Royal's Christian Martyrs in the Twentieth Century. We have paid little attention to this on-ongoing persecution. Islam has millions and millions of young militants, zealous, ready to sacrifice their lives, with what they somehow consider to be a noble cause. By insisting on calling them by psychological terms – "fanatics"or "madmen" – we utterly blind ourselves to what is going on. These are soldiers longing for a great war, to recall the title of Mark Halprin's book. We are relatively few, we are oldish, we are, in fact, selfish, self-centered by comparison. We won't be left alone. We have thought that our technology would save us, but clever men figured out how to use or bypass our security devices. They caused the greatest single day's slaughter ever to happen on our soil at the price, as a friend said, of an airline ticket. "Today we are accustomed to think of the Mohammedan world as something backward and stagnant, in all material affairs at least," Belloc wrote in 1938. We cannot imagine a great Mohammedan fleet made up of modern ironclads and submarines, or a great modern Mohammedan army fully equipped with modern artillery, flying power and the rest. But not so very long ago, less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the Mohammedan Government centred at Constantinople had better artillery and better army equipment of every kind than had we Christians in the West. The last effort they made to destroy Christendom was contemporary with the end of the reign of Charles II in England and of his brother James and of the usurper William III. It failed during the last years of the seventeenth century, only just over two hundred years ago. Vienna ... was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the Kind of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history – September 11, 1683 (122-23). A date that ought to be among the most famous in history is September 11. Needless to say, no one remembered this date, September 11, 1683, and what happened on it until what happened on September 11, 2001. Surely a bin Laden's memory is not so sophisticated? We Catholics have long recalled that the Declaration of War, in 1941, was on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Belloc saw that Islam has been, at bottom, a war power from the beginning. He had no trouble in seeing abiding will over time, over centuries. He wondered if Islam could rise again. He noted how individuals like Saladin suddenly arose within Islam to set it afire. "The future always comes as a surprise but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam". (127) What is somewhat eerie about these remarks of Belloc is the comparatively little attention we paid to Islam as such during and at the end of the war against Communism. When we did pay attention to it, it was almost always a concern with oil or with Israel. We could not imagine a civilizational plot.
II. The Muslim states, it turns out, may well have had another agenda all along, however haphazard. Afghanistan is almost a symbol of this alternate plan, a state that but a few short years ago was a heroic ally attacking the Soviets. Now it is, as we think, attacking us from the world's most unlikely and inaccessible bastion. It listens to our President's demands. It replies, "it will be a test of power." Its view of its own good apparently does not include the surrender of anything to the non-Muslim.. This again brings up the propriety of calling this a war against "terrorism," that abstraction that prevents us from asking more clearly, what terrorists? This is not a war against terrorism, as I saw it called not too long ago in a headline in The Washington Post. It is a war against specific forces with a specific agenda, a specific organization. It uses terror, but it uses it very designedly, to destroy our centers of culture, economy, and government. And it is not called terror by its users, however much it is objectively. It is called war by any means. President Bush's frank delineation of whom he considered the enemies – the organized Muslim groups scattered throughout the world in dozens of countries, including the most "advanced" – delicately exempted from its scope the "peaceful" Muslims, perhaps even the ones that cheer when they see us attacked. We as yet cannot comprehend that we have an enemy that has been, in some form, attacking us since the seventh century. Almost all the lands conquered by arms were once Christian lands. It is ironic that the last three wars we have fought, in Bosnia, in Serbia, and in Iraq, were to liberate Islamic peoples from other Islamic or Christian forces. Is our failure to know this history a cause of our being on the wrong side of history? In 1985, the great historian of science, Fr. Stanley Jaki, O.S.B., wrote an essay entitled "On Whose Side Is History?" In the course of his reflections on Marxism and modern science, he wrote: What is happening in the Muslim world is not so much an outburst of fanaticism as a frantic last-ditch effort to ward off the specter of – well, not of capitalism, not of Communism, not of hedonism – but of science. What is occurring in the Muslim world today is a confrontation, not between God and the devil, identified with capitalism or Communism, but between a very specific God and science which is a very specific antagonist of that god, the Allah of the Koran, in whom the will wholly dominates the intellect. A thousand years ago the great Muslim mystics al-Ashari and al-Ghazzali denounced natural laws, the very objective of science, as a blasphemous constraint upon the free will of Allah. Today the impossibility of making ends meet without science forces the Muslim world to reconsider its notion of Allah. It is an agonizing process, which, in spite of the bloodshed, may, in the long run, being a more rational mentality to troubled parts of the world (Chance or Reality, p. 242). These too, like Belloc's, are remarkable words. Can the meaning and method of these bombings, what we call "terrorism," have something to do with the Muslim world's notion of Allah as pure will? Is that hopelessly "intellectual"? But if there is no natural law, no divine order, no secondary causality, then the command to kill in the Allah's name might well be "reasonable" in some minds. There would be nothing "illogical" about it if there is no order on which to ground logic. Behind wars of the world, it is often said, much to our incomprehension, lie theological disputes about the truth of things, even including the truth of scientific things. Belloc himself remarked that Islam in theory is composed of a series of classical Christian propositions but themselves abstracted from any notion of a Trinity in the Godhead and of the possibility of Incarnation in the world. If Allah is indeed pure will, then contradictories can be true. This would include in a way the famous "double truth" controversy, made famous by St. Thomas' opposition to it, about whether we could have a truth of reason and a truth of faith, each of which contradicted each other. Someone who could hold this position, as Belloc intimated, could be a scientist and a believer even if the positions were contradictory. This might explain our evident surprise that many of the recent attackers were trained in science and engineering. It can be true that killing 6,000 people can logically be a command of God because the command not to murder is itself something that can be otherwise. (That is, on the hypothesis that Allah or God is pure will, therefore no "natural law" or order exists even in Allah or God. It follows that any command of God can be followed by its opposite. The will of Allah or God is to follow what Allah or God says whatever it is. There is no need to compare it with some standard of Divine Intellect that would imply Allah or God is bound by His own internal order). So perhaps it is more correct to see these recent events in a longer and more historical and theological context, the context of the very validity or grounding of Islam's conception of itself. It may be God's way of getting Islam to examine its Allah, as it were. In our liberal society, we are loathe, even incompetent, to consider these things. What we think of first is "tolerance," not truth. We think, to refer to the opposite of the title of Richard Weaver's famous book, that "ideas do not have consequences." These men are simply "madmen." We impose psychological philosophy on reality and think we have said something about reality. Tolerance is itself an idea that has allowed the present attackers to use our system to destroy us. I recall a quotation of, I think, bin Laden someplace in which he said that he would use our freedom of religion and speech to destroy us. Our opponents understand us, it seems, better sometimes than we understand ourselves. If they be "madmen," they are madmen who understand perfectly well our own system and modes of thinking and living.
III. We see, of course, a growing concern that our democratic categories, the ones that will not look to the truth or reason for a position, are inadequate. "Islam, the religion of more than a billion believers, has been hijacked," Martin Kramer, Editor of Middle East Quarterly has written. "If the first week's suspicions are confirmed, the suicide attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are the capstones of nearly twenty years of terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam. As layer upon layer of violence has accumulated, Islam itself has come to a tragic turn – and one for which the vast majority of moderate Muslims bears some responsibility" (National Review-on-Line, S. 19, ‘01). Can a systematic plan be conceived and carried out over twenty years, over ten centuries? I cite also, Charles Krauthammer's recent and very blunt comment about our unwillingness to see what goes on here as nothing but the aberrant actions of a few hundred "madmen." Moral obtuseness is not restricted to intellectuals. I witnessed a High Holiday sermon by a guest rabbi warning the congregation, exactly seven days after our generation's Pear Harbor, against "oversimplifying" by speaking in terms of "good guys and bad guys." Oversimplifying? Has there ever been a time when the distinction between good and evil was more clear? And where are the Muslim clerics – in the United States, Europe and the Middle East – who should be joining together to make that distinction (between good and evil) with loud unanimity? Where are their fatwas against suicide murder? Where are the authoritative communal declarations that these crimes are contrary to Islam? (Washington Post, S. 21, ‘01). The major Islamic response -- there are exceptions – has been to hide under our own legal rules, rules nowhere in force in Islamic lands, not to persecute them as they had nothing to do with it. We are asked to believe that the thousands of cells and men willing and able to carry these atrocities out, while living among large Muslim groups now in the West, were not noticed by any living Muslim or were not reported. Can we believe this unknowingness in the light of the popularity of this attack on our land among so many particularly young Muslims throughout the world, the ones we see on TV cheering our losses? We would like to believe it, if only to exempt our own system from partial complicity in the whole matter. We certainly need much more assurance than we have so far been given. Norman Podhoretz, writing in the Wall Street Journal (S. 20.01), cites a number of Arab and Egyptian sources that identify the real enemy as America and not Israel, which is conceived to be a lesser fish. It is tempting to think that America is in this only or largely because of Israel. America, however, in a recurrent phrase, is considered to be "the Great Satan." "The point is," Podhoretz wrote, "that if Israel had never come into existence, or if it were magically to disappear, the U.S. would still stand as an embodiment of everything that most of these Arabs consider evil. Indeed, the hatred of Israel is in large part a surrogate for anti-Americanism." This position, however much the existence and conduct of Israel have or have not focused and exacerbated the matter, is the one implicit in Belloc, Jaki, and in the general conduct of the ones carrying out the bombing and destruction. At present, we seem to be in a time of immediate expectancy. Any written word may be obsolete or put into a different context tomorrow by new events. There are voices that caution us to do nothing. We even have on our campus walls a sudden display of the old and tired Vietnam peacenik signs. Despicable signs. Zenit reports an Editorial in L'Osservatore Romano (S. 21, ‘01) that cautions prudence in use of force. It also uses the expression "madness of terror" to describe these events, an expression that I still think misses the mark. Then the Editorial recalls what the Pope said in the 1993 Day of Peace message: Military operations ... "never serve the common good of humanity, violence destroys; it does not build; the wounds it causes can bleed for a long time." The condition of the poor will only be worse as a result. We might say that, looking from the outside, these admonitions might be valid, a pox on both your houses. But surely the common good of humanity is served by stopping those who would destroy its very physical and political structure. A world that capitulates to such force will have to be content to live under it. It is quite possible and even likely that seeking to stop these men who seek to impose their religion on us by whatever means they see fit will incite a larger war. We can legitimately wonder if that would be worse than doing nothing, suffering the present damage and whatever else can be caused, on the grounds that civilization is not worth saving by any military means. The Crusaders, I think, were closer to the truth. Thus far, the attempts to deal with these attacks by way of prevention and seeking out those who caused them have been very specific and directed. There is no intention to starve anyone, no intention to kill masses of people in retaliation. Ironically, we are Afghanistan's primary source of humanitarian relief. But those who attacked us certainly expect us to retaliate against them, though they hold our courage and will to do so in some contempt. A recent letter in the Washington Times (S. 19, ‘01) suggested that the worst thing that could happen to us would be for bin Laden himself or the Talaban voluntarily to turn him over to us. That would immediately give him a world wide audience and an opportunity to claim he was totally innocent. Our judicial system itself has no place for this sort of thing; it might not even be able to convict him. Surely this approach is what is behind the Muslim clerics' insistence that we turn over to them what evidence we have of his guilt. It is wrong for a non-Muslim to judge a Muslim. Since it is quite certain that bin Laden could not have been alone in this affair, we still are not secure until whoever did cause these bombings and the network that carried them out is destroyed or until it changes its mind. No doubt this won't happen, but nothing bin Laden could do would cause more confusion in the West than his voluntarily giving himself up on the declaration of his own innocence. Indeed, he did say that he was innocent but "admired those who did" carry out the plots in New York and Washington.
IV. So to return back to the initial question, "who is our enemy?" The enemy is very unlikely to be only several thousand "terrorists." We must think in much broader terms. The enemy is one that has been recurrently attacking us for centuries. It is an enemy that has grown strong as we have grown complacent and introspective. We are but dimly aware that we have or have had such an enemy, even though, as Jack Kemp recently reported, this enemy officially declared war on us a couple of years ago. The Holy Father himself has done everything he could to engage the widely-diffused leaders of Islam in dialogue. He has insisted on our looking at the points within its system that we can agree with. On questions of family and population he has found them to be allies before the secularist movements of our time. He too, as we must, distinguishes between "peaceful" and "militant" Muslims. He could have no objection to having proof about which is which. He would not think it a frivolous question. He knows the civil, legal, and cultural pressure within Islamic states either to remove Christians or to restrict them from any growth. He knows that there is a mosque in Rome though Mass is not allowed in Saudi Arabia, among other places. A friend of mine told me recently of talking to the Holy Father several years ago in which he told her that we could expect something worse than Marxism on the immediate horizon. In all likelihood, he had in mind not Islam but our own culture growing more and more intolerant of our own essential Christian positions on a variety of basic human issues. And it may well be that the rise of Islam is itself made possible by our own moral weakness and spiritual disorder, however loathe we are even to consider this possibility. At times we seem more afraid of being told that God judges our personal sins than in being threatened by a vibrant Islam. But these bombings and the efforts to counter them can have one good effect. The President has bravely said that other nations are either "for us or against us." We need some binding authorities within Islam itself to tell us that Islam is indeed bent on a mission to conquer the world, step by step throughout history. Or, equally solemnly, they need to renounce any understanding of Islam that would justify in any way, with the theological presuppositions that might support it, such actions that seem to come out of its center. What Islam lacks, we realize, is, oddly enough, a pope, someone with the power to define once and for all what it is. "It is very commendable and very American that we want to guard against harm coming to innocent Arabs and Muslims, especially when most of us have a good idea about the bloodbath, were the tables turned," Balint Vazsonyi has written. But I believe we might have the entire question upside down. Americans may have reason to believe it is Islam that has declared war on the rest of us. Many have given passionate assurances on television that the events of September 11 represent an aberration of Islam. The trouble is that the people I have heard were neither Arab nor Muslims. Americans need to hear such expressions of "regret about the loss of life" which have come our way, but a word from the Imam at Friday's national prayer meeting, asking Allah to forgive the crimes committed in his name, would have lent much more substance. Instead, he pleaded that we protect his brethren from harm (Washington Times, S. 18, ‘01) From what we can tell, many Muslims, not just a few hapless "terrorists," do think that the West, "the Great Satan," must be destroyed. Fortunately, such new leaders are not in charge of the army in control of many Islamic states. The militant leaders, however, do threaten organized Islamic states. In one sense, actions to stop such wrathful new leaders, even military ones, are not enough. We need to hear now both why Islam is attacking us, as it is, and whether this attack stems directly from its faith. Knowing this, we know what we deal with. And if this renewed warfare is in fact at the essence of Islam, does that mean that every Muslim actually holds this? Certainly not. Many Muslims have escaped to Western lands precisely to escape this system. But as events now show, there is no longer any real escape from the central issue of what Islam officially teaches and expects of its followers. Paul Craig Roberts has also insisted on one last point. The fact is that we have been grossly, if not criminally, negligent in the sort of equipment allowed to be sold to Syria under the Clinton regime and before. "The Clinton regime permitted the delivery of top-end military communications equipment to Syria, a country officially listed as a threat to U. S. Security... The corporations that sold Syria communications equipment capable of evading detection by National Security Agency should publically identified and pilloried. They are prime defendants for class-action suits brought by relatives of the thousands of Americans killed by the transferred American technology that protected the terrorists from detection" (Washington Times, S. 17, ‘01). One suspects that there is a long and thoroughly unpleasant story here. So, in some sense, our enemies are ourselves, or at least some of us. We have not known Islam's heart, not known why they hate us. We are slow to recognize that things hateful do exist within us and among us, things that we sometimes perversely call "rights" or virtues. What is even more difficult for us to grasp is that we might well be hated if we had, mirabile dictu, no faults or sins. G. K. Chesterton was a man who also had much to say about Islam. He wrote, "A thing like the catholic system is a system; that is, one idea balances and connects another. A man like Mohammed or Marx, or in his own way, Calvin, finds that system too complex, and simplifies everything to a single idea, but it is a definite idea. He naturally builds a rather unbalanced system with his one definite idea" (Come to Think of It , [1931]108). This is, in other words, a fight for the legitimacy of other ideas of God, more basically for the balanced Trinitarian idea with its Incarnational addendum. Especially among the clergy, we find many pleas for turning the other cheek, for not resisting, as if that is an obvious solution or itself one without dire consequences. In this particular case, with the long record of Christianity before Islam, the question might be asked, "what do we call those Christians who do turn the other cheek in this context, especially those with the power and obligation to defend us?" What we call them, eventually, are Muslims. The net result of a simplistic view of this virtue of non-resistence, something historically resisted in the central Christian tradition, is ironically to eliminate Christianity as it has been systematically eliminated in lands lost to Islam over the centuries. These reflections are, of course, opinions. It is useful at times to spell out what we think, yet with the realization we could be quite wrong. Suddenly, after several centuries of relative quiet, Islam is on the rise. What do we make of this? do about it? Belloc was uncanny in 1938 in expecting the rise of Islam as one of the constituent elements of the public life of men. I have argued here that the methods being used by Islam call its own very principles into question, though only if we have a standard that can confront its own first principle of the "primacy of will" in Allah. But behind this question, and intimately related to it, is the relation of Christianity and Islam to historic and modern Judaism. If what is being called to our attention is the validity of Islam, what is no less being brought to the fore is the truth of the completion and development of the original Hebrew revelation in Christianity. Islam, in this sense, is a judgment on both of them, or perhaps, a judgment on their failure to see their intimate relationship. And the secular society that tries to explain the world without Islam, Judaism, or Christianity is quite unsatisfactory and empty. Is this reading too much world-historical significance into current events? Perhaps, but I think not. Islam, at least a significant part of it -- and I think it not really just a bunch of psychotic madmen – is indeed at war with us, with that civilization that includes Israel, Christianity, and its secular degenerations. Nothing else that could have happened to us, I think, could have made us look so clearly into the souls of Jews, Christians, secularists, and Muslims. What Islam must ask itself is whether the brutal destruction of these lives is what its faith is about? We must protect ourselves, in the meantime, so that we remain free to live our lives. But we are naive if we think that these deeper questions are not what is really at stake, the truth of Islam, the truth of secularism, the truth of Judaism, the truth of Christianity. We must keep ourselves free to say of what is not true, that it is not true. After September 11, 2001, the date that ought to be the "most famous in history" is September 11, 1683. These dates portend the unexpected decline and equally unexpected rise of Islam, a decline and rise that now force us to inquire more carefully what Islam is and, a pari, what Israel, Christianity, and modern secularism really are. The recent external events of war and destruction do not allow us to ignore these deeper questions. Until such questions are confronted more carefully, no theory or practice of "tolerance" will save us. It will only provide the cover for further efforts to eliminate us.
(c) James V. Schall S.J. 2001. All Rights Reserved.
By James Schall, S. J.
Most columnists, newspaper editorials, and politicians agree that we are at war. The "war with whom" needs as yet more exact specification, but the general parameters are clear enough. The primary suspect is Osuma bin Laden, a rich Saudi of Yeminese extraction, evidently in Afghanistan, plus a number of interrelated Muslim militant groups and operatives that agree with his general purpose. These groups have cells and bases in as many as forty different countries, including our own. They have made it clear in various ways that they have declared war on us, both in act and in statement. Moreover, we do not have to have a specific "government" against which to declare war unless we find some government that directly supports this effort, as several government may well do. The fact that someone is killing us is reason enough to know we have a war on our hands. We have made it clear that, given evidence of support of such groups, the harboring country is guilty and an object of war. A formal declaration of war in some detailed form seems both possible and appropriate both to call attention to our seriousness of purpose and to provide legal and moral authorization for it. A declaration of war is also a statement of reasons. An attack on our citizens is itself implicitly a declaration of war by the attacker. We understand what this means. So do those who do the attacking. We retaliate. We have just cause. At the Prayer Service at the National Cathedral (14 September) the Reverend Billy Graham wondered why God permitted such evils. Graham said that he did not understand it all but knew God was good and this evil has some purpose. Thus, behind these events are more classical problems of philosophy and theology, problems that we ought to ponder in any education or society even aside from an immediate tragedy such as this one in New York and Washington. Briefly, I think, that God permits evil deeds because He makes us free and does not prevent the deviant actions we choose from having their natural effects in the world. When evil actions do occur, if we survive them, we are given our choice of responses to them, again responses that depend on our freedom. Many ways "can" be found to respond. Likewise, there are many ways in which we ought to respond. The fact that these events in their terror happen is neither a lament against God nor a declaration that we can do whatever we want in response, even if we "can" and should do many things. We "can," for instance, that is, we have the capacity to nuke Afghanistan or anyplace else. The clear and measured response approach, however, remains an alternative. We measure purposes and means. We know that certain responses can make things worse, even if for the moment we cannot imagine anything worse. I want to make five points that I think are pertinent to the public deliberation over what kind of a war this is. First, it is wrong to think of it as the attack of "madmen" or "terrorists." Madmen and terrorists exist in this world, but this is nor their work. This is the work of soldiers, albeit it extra-territorials of a makeshift, but real, army. They are carrying out the orders of a mind. The mind is in command of the army that the men, who killed themselves and so many others, serve. The army seems to be that basically left over from the Afghan-Soviet war when bin Laden was on our side plus subsequent recruits from all over the Muslim world. Bin Laden learned much in Afghanistan about modern governments. If he could defeat the Soviets, a major, ruthless power, surely he could strike a decisive blow at other enemies, even the strongest enemy left, namely, us. The mind that conceived this plot has a transcendent purpose, a political purpose for the organization of the world. Initially, it wants to free all Muslim states of any western and especially American influence. All of this is directly or indirectly related to Israel, both in itself and as a surrogate of the West. The plot was conceived and carried out, not flawlessly, but very, very well. At least one plane did not make it. One has to admire its execution and the "bravery" of the men assigned to carry it out. What did these men think they were doing? Committing evil? Terrorism? Not at all. They thought that they were destroying the corrupt enemy of their people and of civilization itself. What was destroyed were symbols and institutions, even perhaps the President himself, of this enemy. The destruction was carried out by men who knew about modern planes, weapons, psychology. They learned how to fly big commercial aircraft, ironically, at our air training facilities. They paid their bills in dollars. So the plot was long in preparation. Some had wives and children. What was their "theology?" They believed - whether this is exact Islamic theology or not - that they were dying for Allah and his cause. Subjectively, at least, they professed a "good," even noble cause. According to other standards -- but we must really have them and they must be objectively true - we can argue that this justifying position is in error, a crime, a sin. But these men did not accept such arguments because they had their own first principles from which they operated. If we are going to disagree with them, it is at this level, their first principles. Granted their first principles, what they did was brilliantly conceived and executed. They died for a cause that they believed gave them the heaven of Allah and struck a mortal blow at their movement's major enemy. Secondly, let us indulge in a little exercise, to make this point more graphic. Imagine that on 11 September, suddenly before Peter's gates, there appeared from New York and Washington, at about nine in the morning, some six thousand plus souls. Most were Americans, some were German or British, a few seemed to be Saudis or Iraqi, we are not sure, but presumably St. Peter was. How are they to be judged? As we know not the day or hour, let alone the mind of our Maker, we might find in the WTC many who had not lived their lives well, even to the previous days, who did not die in what we call the state of grace. Others may have repented at the last flaming moment. Still others may have been prepared for death all along, as we all should be on going to work in the morning. Then there are the twenty or so Muslims who rammed the planes into the buildings and carried the plot out. What is their destiny? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? None of the above? Is there justice in this world? If not, in the next? One of the convicted Muslim plotters at the first WTC bombing attempt, in 1993, said that he could face death by execution calmly. If he had "lived a good life, he would go to heaven; if not, to hell." Evidently, he held that blowing up the WTC was part of living a good life. Presumably, we are judged by our subjective conscience, provided that we did not deliberately blind ourselves to the objective evils we do. So it is at least possible, even in these objectively horrid deeds, the Muslims died and saved their souls, while some of the others did not. When we die, whenever or however we die, we cannot blame someone else for the condition of our soul on its passing. C. S. Lewis somewhere talks of the murderer and his victim who become friends in heaven, much to the consternation of certain earthlings. President Bush at the National Prayer Service mentioned the souls of those who died. I bring all of this up because there is a lesson in these deaths - it is the lesson of being ready. If we do not believe in hell or in anything, then it does not much matter what we think of these considerations. If we only believe in this world, well the ones carrying out the plot have received their reward, such as it is. Since, on this hypothesis, no transcendent justice exists, the world, at bottom, seems to be an intrinsically ambiguous place. On the other hand, if we have a theology that wants to save everyone, no matter what they do, then everyone killed is already happy in heaven and wondering why we are so sad. But if there is a hell and certain sins are not in any way repented or subjectively justified, then hell has some new members after September 11. But this ultimate situation is not our perspective now. We are currently looking to ourselves, to securing our safety, to requiting what is in any obvious sense an injustice of great proportions. The third point, then, is whether the war still goes on? We are the living. The plot was a rational act. It was formulated in the mind of one man and his collaborators. Someone gave a command that was brazenly carried out. He or they were not killed in the plane crashes or collapse of the buildings. The mind that conceived this operation and the will that decided to do it are still free and operative. Bin Laden, after the fact, said that he was not engaged in this plot but he "congratulated" those who were. Those who conceived the plot, moreover, must be enormously pleased at its success. They no doubt either have already or will in the near future plan something else unless stopped in advance. That they want a spectacular encore is quite probable. The first one was so easy. So there still exists in this world a plan, a plot that has a purpose with a mind, will, and organization to carry it out. The war declared on us will not stop until either the plotters change their minds, which seems unlikely, or until they either are killed or rendered helpless. No pious wishes will change that. Fourthly, on campuses and in the society, we have witnessed much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Are we displaying to the world and to our attackers a society that lacks courage, lacks determination? In part, yes, granted that there is indeed objective reason to mourn. Our society has been wracked with subjectivism, wherein feelings and emotions were primary, not their control and guidance by reason as in classical and Christian traditions. We do not now have much time for weeping. We best imitate the Romans who, when they suffered a defeat, went right on as if nothing happened. This is what really frightened their enemies. Our economy and system are vulnerable. We must get them going again with the realization that a war goes on. We will be tempted, indeed the men who plotted this affair will expect us, to go back to "normal." When we get back to normal, they will have a better chance to do it again. They know this. It would be foolish to strike us immediately, unless they thought, as they may, but I doubt it, that they can finish us off with a few airplane bombs and perhaps a few nuclear devices or bacteria. What, fifthly, about turning the other cheek and no vengeance? Has our drive against the death penalty, against retaliation of any effective kind, only served to embolden those not concerned with these things? If we had managed to find one of the pilots alive after he killed a couple of thousand people, would we think it "just" merely to put him in jail? What if somehow we do capture Bin Laden and find him the master mind? This is not a criminal affair. It is not a court problem. Is there a way to look at what we think we must do to protect ourselves that does not fall under the subsequent accusation of vengeance or lack of mercy or justice? Ironically, religion has often prided itself in recent decades in "promoting justice," while saying relatively little of mercy. Now, suddenly, we hear discussions of mercy and a silence about justice. Billy Graham had no difficulty in combining justice with a higher way. No doubt, there is a case for justice both in retribution for a heinous crime and for self-protection against future attacks. If we turn the other cheek, and that is perceived as a message that we are weak, we can reasonably expect to be hit again and again. Those who recommend such a meek policy would then be in effect responsible for the results. Maybe mercy will "work"? There is something in the extremes of these Islamic movements that seems impervious to mercy. Several years ago, the several French Trappists held hostage in Algeria had their throats slit on Christmas by Muslim extremists. No pleas for mercy saved them. Are all Muslims like this? No. But those who are not have to prove not just passively that they are not by not allowing their countries to be so used. We know that almost every Muslim government that is not extremist is under some kind of siege in their own homeland. Moreover, we know that Christianity and Judaism and other faiths find no hospitable grounds within Muslim states who implicitly or explicitly make religion and state one. Muslim states will tolerate historic religious groups but allow them almost nothing else. So the line of mercy runs into something that is impervious to mercy. The old doctrine of the just war was designed precisely to meet this situation. Will justice "work" then? We should not delude ourselves that seeking justice, trying to prevent more attacks, will not cause much anger, confusion, discouragement. It might indeed make things worse. Will a policy of war against these groups stop this terrorism, as we are wont to call this war against us? Some of it, no doubt. Hopefully all of it. But it means killing those who kill us and who intend to kill us before they can act. If they get to us first again, we will be dead, some of us. This is a terrible logic, we know. Bin Laden said that he does not recognize any distinction between civilians and non-civilians. This is why he and his followers could kill as they did. They saw the killed, even those whom we call innocent, as "guilty" of the same crimes as enemy soldiers. Do we have to imitate this thesis to protect ourselves? Of course not. Bin Laden and his followers are soldiers in a declared war against us and our way of life. The mind that plotted these strikes takes no prisoners. It does not weep, but congratulates, when thousands are dead. The mind has not been changed. Aristotle talks of extremes of moral evil, of people who do such heinous things that we cannot imagine it, yet of things we must account for because they happen. My nephew said to me that he could not "imagine" the things that happened. I told him that a good education prepares one for such things before they happen, so that we will not be surprised. But this is a hard lesson. We do not need to "imagine" such atrocities any longer. Is it "just" to defend ourselves? Is it just not to defend ourselves adequately? If this means killing those who intend by their own testimony to kill us, it forces us to take another look at a distinction we have tended to drop in recent years, namely that between killing and murder. We have forgotten that killing someone who is killing someone else is itself a protection of life. It is not murder. Thou shalt not kill has almost always been understood to make a distinction between the one killed and the one killing, between the innocent and the guilty. This distinction is what is at work here and must be brought back into the centrality of things. Someone who says he is going to kill us and proves that he is quite capable and willing to do so by killing our friends, will kill us if we give him the opportunity and do not stop him. It is an ancient observation that anyone who is willing to give up his life can kill almost anyone unless stopped. We never imagined that this could include so many. As former Secretary of Navy, James Webb, has put it: "These terrorists have considered themselves to be at war with us for the past twenty years.... They have no intention of stopping on their own. This war will not be over until they are thoroughly defeated...." In this context, we cannot forget the Crusades and the real lesson of that era, something I believe The Economist of London has mentioned recently. We tend to look at the Crusades as if they, in spite of their admitted aberrations, were not a final, desperate response of self-defense against a deadly Islamic invasion of Christian lands. Had they not succeeded, Europe would be Muslim to this day, presumably. We suddenly find ourselves in a situation similar to that of the Crusaders, of having to do something we prefer not to do, something we have put off, tried not to notice, just to keep alive and to keep our freedom, flawed as it may be. Too, in retrospect, in the light of these bombings, the 17th to 20th century European colonial efforts to establish more liberal and rational forms of rule in Muslim lands looks less intolerable and unjust. We see what happens when these efforts failed, again whatever their admitted imperfections. Belloc said at the end of his book on The Crusades, that Islam, once it again regained the power, would do exactly as it did before. It, at least part of it, is doing exactly that. Islamic leaders tell us that they stand for peace. Some, many, are revolted by these actions. But others are not. Whether or not the Koran says that it is a noble thing to die killing the infidels is one thing, that some very sincere and determined men think that it does say this, is now a proven fact. This is what must be stopped. Do many Muslims have a legitimate complaint against American policy of seeming random support of various kinds of regimes and morals over the years? Of course they do. We look often arbitrary, one-sided. We can legitimately think that the official Muslim states are much too rigid and intolerant. We know that Christians are often under persecution in many Muslim states and nobody does anything about it. We have either turned the other cheek or ignored the problem. But Islam, some section of it, hopefully a minority, but a minority with brains and power, has brought death and destruction to us. This has come not randomly or by accident, but by design. Some of the world is beginning to think that religion as such, including Catholicism, is fanatical because they hold ultimate truths and that some things are worth dying for, something that Socrates also held. This is the price of the great religions pay for not seeing the ordered truth of revelation and of what is their purpose and relation to the world. We are not without faults. We hate to cast any stone. But, as Aristotle also said, that when reason and law do not work, coercion is necessary, necessary to reestablish reason and, yea, goodwill. Can, as Augustine said, we be merciful while fighting a necessary and just war, a war imposed on us, even when necessary to kill someone who would kill us? With careful, determined effort, I think it is possible. Maritain said that brains, morality, and political strength are not necessarily incompatible. There will be a time for mercy. This is where we are, what we intend to prove.
(c) James Schall S.J., 2001. All Rights reserved.
James Schall is professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University and is the author of many books.