New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism
I’m a tad behind on book reviews and so had to dip back into this a little to jog my memory, and was reminded again of what a really interesting book this is, even though it ended up being a tad disappointing on the subject of Islamism. I posted about Cooper’s basic theory about pneumopathology, first & second reality, etc. with reference to Aum Shinrikyo and Stalin in some detail back in October when I was actually reading this the first time. And indeed, as I expected then, his treatment of the Islamic sense of history turned out to be as good as any I’ve come across so far:
… following the hijra, the Prophet defeated his own tribe in battle and therefore created the umma, humanity in statu nascendi obedient to God …The most obvious characteristic of the early history of the Islamic community was its political success. Unlike Christianity, which penetrated an already existing political order, imperial Rome, Islam combined temporal and spiritual activity in a single act of imperial-religious founding. As Smith observed: "the success was comprehensive as well as striking. As we have said, the enterprise gained not only power but greatness. In addition to quickly attaining political and economic mastery, Muslim society carried forward into new accomplishments both art and science. Its armies won battles, its decrees were obeyed, its letters of credit were honored, its architecture was magnificent, its poetry charming, its scholarship imposing, its mathematics bold, its technology effective." Moreover, it proved difficult and perhaps impossible for one participating in Islamic history, that is, the pious Muslim, to distinguish the political from the religious dimensions. As Fazlur Rahman puts it, Muhammad was "duty-bound to succeed." His success, for the community, was understood to be an intrinsic part of Islam, an element of Islamic history, proof, as it were, of God’s favor. The victories of the Prophet were understood to be the victories of God.
… The success in actually spreading God’s message to humanity seemed to confirm the meaning of Islamic history in the course of events, namely, the history of Islamic society and of the Muslim religion. That is, the gap between paradigmatic and pragmatic history or between Augustine’s two cities seemed to be closing and perhaps even to be closed. For Muslims, God had spoken and told human beings how to live; those who submitted to God’s will and lived the way God said were visibly blessed. The pragmatic triumphs of the Muslim armies were understood as the confirmation and triumph of paradigmatic Islamic history. Pragmatic events thus confirmed a symbolic meaning and then came to be understood as having themselves acquired a symbolic meaning.
(Though Cooper does not head in this direction in his analysis, it seems to me partly to explain why the complaints of Muslims against the West seem to spring not just from jealousy as some have argued, or even solely resentment of specific real injustices, but from an underlying sense of existential wrongness with the current position of Muslims in the world. Indeed, even among the relatively secularized in Muslim lands there’s a sort of bafflement about this. This also perhaps is why it did finally become possible for Muslims in the 20th Century to embrace the European notion of an International Jewish Conspiracy, which would have seemed utterly nonsensical to their forebears. Yes, the Jews were sometimes enemies of the Prophet, but the Prophet always won. The Jews had not even succeeded in killing Jesus, though the Christians mistakenly thought they had. In Islamic history until the advent of the state of Israel, the Jews were considered too incompetent to seriously trouble anyone. How could it be otherwise if they were not Muslims?)
Anyhoo, having described the Aum Shinrinkyo cult and its progression from predicting a coming apocalypse from which those who accepted its purifying message could be saved to seeking to bring about the apocalypse in order to punish those who ignored it, Cooper promises:
As we shall argue below, modern Islamist thinkers such as Qutb or bin Laden easily combine jihadist and apocalyptic traditions in the expectation that a final and ecumenic conquest requires a pure society, which in turn is a bridge to the end time, an essential element in a grandiose redemptive event prior to the end of the world.
And there follows a valuable discussion of the theological evolution and general headspace (to use the technical term) of the Islamist jihadist movement and its suicide-bombing foot soldiers. But the evidence of apocalypticism is a bit thin:
The Jews are not, for Islamists, merely the citizens of Israel and unwelcome neighbors of the Muslim states of the region. Nor are they merely the repository of a long-standing hostility. Later in the interview bin Laden explained why he was so confident of victory: "We are certain that we shall--with the grace of God--prevail over the Americans and over the Jews, as the Messenger of Allah promised us in an authentic prophetic tradition when He said the Hour of Resurrection shall not come before Muslims fight Jews and before Jews hid behind trees and rocks."This "authentic prophetic tradition" is one of many apocalyptic themes surrounding relations between the two religions, Islam and Judaism. Article Seven of the (Sunni) Hamas Covenant, for example, states: "The time [of Resurrection] will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, and until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees whence the call is raised: ‘Oh Muslim, here is a Jew hiding! Come and kill him.’" During the apocalyptic Hour of Resurrection, therefore, the common world is transfigured, and even the rocks and trees cry out to assist in the process of extermination of the enemies of God.
The purpose of this large-scale killing is akin to Asahara’s purpose of ordering large-scale pao-ing: to bring about a peaceful world of triumphant justice. As with the example of Aum Shinrikyo, common sense has difficulty grasping how an apocalyptic war of extermination can achieve an endless peace of righteousness. Thus, as Juergensmeyer said, with some perplexity, there are no "simple answers" that terrorists alive with apocalyptic expectations can give when they are asked "simple questions," such as: "What kind of state do you want? How do you plan to get it? How do you think you will get along with the rest of the world?" Juergensmeyer’s commonsense questions are easily dismissed by terrorist pneumopaths because such people are concerned, not with getting along with the rest of the world, but with changing the structure of reality, with "changing the world" as Marx put it, so that an apocalyptic conflict will give rise to a metastatic peace.
The hadith repeated in the forgoing is the only concrete Islamic or even Islamist reference cited as an example of Muslim apocalyptics; all other references Cooper makes are to a vague commonality with the apocalyptics of the Abrahamic tradition in general. It doesn’t seem like a firm basis for arguing that Islamism is actually animated by (as opposed to merely consonant with) apocalyptic expectations in the same way Aum Shinrikyo was. The hadith could be cited merely to bolster predictions of eventual victory, a claim common to most if not all leaders seeking to incite others to war. It might also serve the purpose of bolstering the notion, otherwise not terribly present in traditional Islamic sources or beliefs, that ultimately God wants all those Jews dead anyway, in the minds of those suiting up to slaughter unarmed busloads of them, today. If this is really all there is, isn’t it just as likely that Islamism is more like any other utopian political movement than an apocalyptic religious cult like Aum Shinrikyo? Could Lenin have answered any of Juergensmeyer’s "simple questions" in any detail either, before the fact of actually administering a state? After I had read Cooper’s book, references to "the Last Day" in Islamist texts did start jumping out at me, but I find it hard to tell how important they are. Christians refer to "Judgement Day" all the time, too. Among non-fundamentalist types it’s just supposed to remind you about prioritizing God’s expectations over material desires, not to imply that it’s just around the corner and you should be really expecting it or anything. I had probably recited the Lord’s Prayer a thousand times in my lifetime before learning that it contains references to the end time, in an Atlantic article about Millenarianism published on the eve of 2000. There’s not enough information here to even tell how present the End of Days is in the minds of ordinary Muslims, let alone Islamists.
I’m not convinced that the notion of "wrecking the present to create a peaceful future" as Cooper puts it presupposes an apocalyptic mindset, either. I have written before about the role the notion of going to war in order to make peace played in Muhammad’s use of warfare in spreading Islam, and a certain similarity that bears to the Bush doctrine (it’s a long entry, so to quote just the relevant bit):
At [the time of the hejira], only a small portion of the population of the Arabian peninsula was urbanized. Most Arabs were still organized into Bedouin tribes, and relations between tribes were mostly defined by warfare. Each tribe had its own god, and would routinely raid other tribes for treasure and slaves. The god of the loser would be smashed and repudiated by his or her previous adherents who had escaped the raid intact, and who would then sometimes adopt the god of the victors as evidently the stronger deity.Muhammad sought to convert the Arabs to Islam by warfare in a similar fashion. For one thing, victory in warfare was the major sign of the efficacy of any god in the minds of the Arabs; for another, monotheism offered the promise, ultimately, of peace. Muhammad's innovation was to offer prisoners of war the option of conversion to Islam and membership in the Muslim community rather than execution or enslavement; his theory was that once all the Arabs were united under the god of Abraham, war itself would cease. In this theory and in this context, warfare for the sake of Islam was understood to be basically defensive, it being only a matter of time before any prosperous community, including any community of Muslims if it gained any traction or success, would be attacked and raided by another under a different banner. (The notion of preemptive "defensive" warfare, with the additional purpose of creating the conditions for a more permanent peace, will perhaps be familiar to those following current events). In essence, the goal was to replace warring tribal affiliations with shared Muslim confessional identity as the basis of community.
And indeed there are many other examples. "Making the world safe for democracy," anyone? Intriguingly, the "reality-based" remark from an unnamed person in the White House was leaked shortly after my first post about Cooper’s discussion of first and second reality; I half-suspected that someone in the administration was reading his book, or some part of its bibliography.
I don’t regard Cooper’s theory about the role of Muslim apocalyptics as wrong so much as unproven. I imagine I’ll have to read some of the books he footnotes to get a better handle on what Muslim apocalyptics actually are and what role they might play in Islamist theology. For my own future reference, assuming I ever get around to this, the most relevant texts seem to be:
David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature. (Forthcoming. Well, maybe published by now.).
David Cook, Studies in Classic Muslim Apocalyptic.
David Benjamin & Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror.
Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence.