Journalism & Theology: Our Recent Rediscovery of Islam
by Patrick Graham
delivered at the 2017 Atlantic Theological Conference, "God Every Day and Everywhere"
It is wonderful to be giving a paper to a conference on theology in an era when, somewhat astoundingly, theology has become important. Theological terms are tossed about on television shows, and magazine articles arguing theological positions are reaching large audiences of the intelligentsia. Even presidents are giving speeches containing references to various doctrinal disputes. Theology in our secular world is serious business. It is once again the stuff of life or death, empires and war.
But, of course, it is not Christian theology that is obsessing us. Instead, we have chosen to opine on a religion most of us know little about and that expresses itself in a language few of us speak or read. This monotheism shares just enough of our own culture’s DNA to lull us into confidence while eluding comprehension, often becoming a screen on which we project our own cultural crises. Obviously, I am talking about Islam.
In this paper, I do not presume to tell you much about Islam. Instead, I'd like to examine what it means to discuss the theology of another religion from the perspective of a culture, our own, that dismisses theology in general. What does it mean that those who often pronounce on Islam could explain little or nothing of the theological origins of the “western” cultures they often defend so enthusiastically? How many of our “experts” on Islam could discuss Pelagius?
And even those who do know their own theology rarely know much about Islam while making generalizations they would find intolerable about their own beliefs to audiences who know even less than they do. This is to say nothing about the recent intellectual industry whose knowledge is primarily aimed at discrediting Islam for political or ideological reasons.
I write neither as a theologian nor an historian but as a journalist and I hope to outline what I understand as our approach to the “Muslim world” in a very general way. The fog of our most recent and apparently endless war in Islamic countries is thick and much of it is made up of clouds of ink. But with countries like Iraq having become broken petri dishes for our Utopian experiments, it is important to sort out what we are doing from what we are telling ourselves we are doing. Of course, when I say “we” I do so in a general way.
To begin with, I would like to take you through our most recent discovery of Islam, a rediscovery really, which seems to happen whenever the tectonic plates of our economic and political interests grind up against the “Muslim world,” as we like to call it as if it were a monolith of monotheism. In a very general way, during the last 15 years, I have noticed a progression as we have turned from the historical or sociological to the theological as we search for ways to understand the Islamic “other,” whether we see them as friend or foe.
This is dangerous territory. Greater minds than mine have charged into this culture war and left the field wounded. Pope Benedict XVI's lecture at the University Regensburg in 2006 comes to mind, when His Holiness, whether out of academic hubris or a spirit of intellectual provocation, insinuated that, in contrast to Christianity, Islam was not a rational religion.
Like accusations of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and for similar reasons, accusations of irrationality should be carefully made and much evidence provided. But whether on purpose or by accident, the Pope expressed what many in the West think, or want to think, is true. On what grounds we know this is often unclear. Indeed, on what grounds we can show that we ourselves are rational in our approach to the Muslim world is increasingly less clear.
As leading Islamic scholars argued in their response (Open Letter To Pope Benedict XVI), the Pope, hardly an authority on Islam, had cherry-picked his evidence for the sake of what was barely an argument at all, more a tossed off, polemical academic retort. But since irrational in the West implies intolerance, the Pope was wading into very dangerous territory indeed, especially for someone who had once been head of an institution formerly known as The Inquisition.
As Dr. Wayne Hankey has pointed out in his paper "9/11 and the History of Philosophy", it is not clear that the kind of real philosophical rationality for religion the Pope’s stance presumed belonged to Islam’s Christian critics can be claimed by many in the West. Indeed, Dr. Hankey shows that the Hellenic philosophical reasoning the Pope would claim for his Catholic tradition has been systematically shut out in much of the West, especially in the dominating English-speaking institutions.
And since the Pope has no divisions, as we know, and the English-speaking cultures have many in constant rotation, Rome is not the “decider” when it comes to how western culture deals with the Muslim world, however critical or sympathetic a Pope may be. As for those who would still argue that the administration of George W. Bush acted rationally when it invaded Iraq and handed the country to its long-standing regional enemy, Iran, a new definition of reason will need to be developed.
THEM OR US
The question that underlines our approach to the Islamic world can be simply stated--is it them or us? Is the West to blame for the violence in the Middle East or is there something inherent in Muslim culture that is intolerant, illiberal and irrational?
With the Global War on Terror grinding into the second half of its second decade, there have by now been many versions of this debate. Some of them have been academic while other manifestations took place in politics or popular culture. For instance, Professor Edward W. Said blamed the West and its imperial history of colonialism, while others like Professor Bernard Lewis were more critical of “what went wrong” with the Islamic world. Some academic articulations that blamed Islam like Samuel Huffington’s “Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” passed into popular discourse.
And then the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIL or ISIS), with its beheadings, genocidal mania and obvious delight in atrocities arrived on our screens in creepy detail. (I will concentrate on our relations with the world of Sunni Islam because post-revolutionary Shi'ite Iran has its own complexities and would make this a much longer paper.)
What is so new about IS is that the group appears to argue for the proposition that Islam itself really is irrational. And they do this all the while goading us to interfere militarily and participate in the cosmic clash of civilizations that will bring a final Divine Judgement. Our War on Terror turns out to be part of their Divine plan. What else could one expect from a group that is the Frankenstein created by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden?
Ironically, the arrival of the Islamic State seems to demand that, in order to come to grips with them, we must move beyond traditional historical, economic or cultural analysis and enter into theology. But how a secular culture that views all religion as fundamentally irrational, indeed all religion as fundamentalism, can avoid finding exactly what it is looking for in the “other” that is Islam is going to be a problem. IS seems to understand this, mocking even the idea of being understood in everything they do as if to say, quoting President Bush, “Bring it on!”
CLANDESTINE PELAGIANS
It may seem obvious but it is worth pointing out that the debate about Islam in the West has taken place while we are at war in Muslim countries, wars in which we have vastly superior technological arsenals. We would benefit by looking at how our other wars were prosecuted against weaker enemies to see if what is going on today bears any similarity. If our western approach to war was the same against weaker but non-Muslim enemies then it may, indeed, be more us than them.
As is often pointed out, a modern war that is somewhat analogous is the American debacle in Southeast Asia. Like Vietnam, our present wars are prosecuted under claims of fighting a global ideology while the enemy refuses to either submit or conform to our views of them, let alone be defeated.
Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American outlined post-World War II American methods, and the novel offers a distilled comparison with our present quagmires. It is also a book about journalists and war, which is to some extent my topic. Indeed, Greene's novel was very much on the minds of journalists as the war in Iraq unfolded and I can remember sitting around the Al Rashid Hotel in the winter of 2003, a few months before “Shock and Awe”, talking about the book with American journalists, some of whom had covered that earlier episode.
It is the story of Alden Pyle, an idealistic Harvard graduate who has studied the "East" but, in the end, understands neither himself nor the peoples he has come to save, and dominate, in his work for the CIA. After arriving in Saigon, Pyle seduces a Vietnamese woman away from his British colleague with promises of marital escape to the promised land of America, organizes false-flag terrorist attacks to undermine his erstwhile French allies and attempts to create a Third Force to bring the country under US influence. Eventually, he is murdered by the enemy he neither sees coming nor understands. Pyle is sometimes described as a naive idealist but that is wrong.
It is perhaps not surprising that Rebecca West, an enthusiastic reader of St. Augustine, noticed the theological implications of the novel and described Pyle's idealism as Pelagian-- a term she used, perhaps more psychologically than theologically, for those who emphasize good works as opposed to Augustinians whom she saw as pessimistic about any human endeavour.[i]
What West understands is that Pyle thinks he knows the Good and plans to implement it by whatever means necessary. It is this confidence that he knows the Good and how to bring it about, more so than others whose Good he is willing, that allows him to be so cynical and so sentimental while still maintaining his idealism. After all, he means well and that’s what counts. But in the end, his learning only obscures and justifies his violent intentions without bringing about much good at all.
Is this still the case? Has our learning about Islam really just provided a cover for our own violent intentions? Do we think we know, without understanding? Is the recent debate about Islam really just part of our obscuring of our own standpoint—the discovery of Islamic theology as a method of avoiding rather than discovering the truth?
A SHORT HISTORY OF WRITING ABOUT ISLAM
The history of reportage about the Muslim world during the 9/11 wars is complex and it is surely too early to get a firm grasp on it. But perhaps after 15 years it is not too early to see if a general pattern has emerged. To do this, I will outline my own experience as I have looked for ways to explain these wars to a general audience.
When I first started to put Islamic theology into articles my editors invariably removed it. This was in 2003-4 when I had been living with a group of Iraqi insurgents fighting the US military in the villages between Ramadi and Fallujah. An Iraqi friend with a deep understanding of the country told me in the summer of 2003, when the idea of Americans losing in Iraq was laughable, that America would indeed lose because "The Sufis and Salafis were getting together to fight the Americans." That is to say, the mystical branch of Islam and those who viewed them as apostate, were overcoming their differences to throw out the invader. Imagine if Northern Irish Protestants had united with Catholics to get rid of the English and you have an idea of what was stirring in Iraq. And then try to imagine explaining Ireland without being able to use the terms Catholic and Protestant, which is what journalists were often told to do.
Sunni Iraq is in fact not traditionally fertile ground for the kind of Salafist interpretation promoted by IS or its previous incarnation, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Indeed, the insurgents I knew were more open to Sufism, and the rural culture in that part of Iraq is full of the stories of local Saints and their shrines--anathema to IS who have systematically destroyed them. It was only once the US military had ground down the traditional Sunni power structures that AQI was able to take over. Indeed, this is a theme of the war in Iraq--what the US starts, Al Qaeda often accomplishes. And what Al Qaeda fails to do, like destroy its enemy, the Islamic State, Iran and Russia will accomplish with the help of American air power.
But in those early days of the Global War on Terror, the term Salafist was not widely known in the West despite the fact that Bin Laden and al Qaeda could be generally described as such. Of course, Sufis were seen as a sort of hippie branch of Islam - although anyone who has attended some of the more enthusiastic Iraqi Sufi ceremonies involving daggers, swords, and electrocution, will know how ridiculous a view of Sufism that is.
But the problem as seen by editors in New York and London was entirely cultural or historical or perhaps even economic - the Sunni “elite” had lost control of the country. The Baathists were just disgruntled about the poor masses of Shia being released from decades of oppression etc... theology had little place in this rational, secular analysis.
Nevertheless, as my Iraqi friend had said, the Sufis really had aligned themselves with the Salafists in order to throw out the US Army, a development I thought important. However, in the early days of the war, theology was not considered fundamental to understanding Iraq in even intellectually sophisticated magazines.
This changed as al Qaeda in Iraq gained ground, much to the surprise of the war’s architects who seemed astounded their causus belli had come to life and was winning. Terms such as takfiri (apostate) and Salafi (devout ancestors) began to appear in print in order to portray what was described as a shift from the secularity of Baathism to the religiosity of groups like AQI, a shift in world view so extreme it could only be understood by an act of faith in the readers. Whether this was true or even why it might be true was rarely explained except by alluding to the “Arab mind” or the “Islamic world.” Editors had discovered theology and readers could now participate in this knowing standpoint - never mind that magical thinking was now often being offered instead of rational analysis. Theology had become a way of explaining what we could not understand.
By the time of the Arab Spring in 2011, a general familiarity with Islamic terms had permeated the public debate, although, as Dr. Hankey points out, this did not reach into the US bureaucracy, where the difference between Sunni and Shia remained obscure. In the spring of 2011, I wrote a piece on the Senussi Sufi tradition as a way of looking at the revolution in eastern Libya. Curiously, the heart of the story, my Sufi protagonist's description of his conversion which made one understand his faith, did not make it into the article. Thus, one could write about the “topic” of religion without subjecting readers to the logos of spirituality.
THE ROOTS OF THE CALIPHATE
And then the Islamic State appeared. To anyone who had spent time in Iraq’s Anbar Province, the Islamic State was not a very shocking phenomenon - and IS is primarily an Iraqi phenomenon. The traditional rural tribal society had been weakened first by Saddam’s Baathist socialism, followed by years of harsh sanctions and a state-led return to religion. This was followed by the mismanaged US occupation that caused the rise of AQI and finally persecution of the Sunni by the Shia-led government of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki (2006-2014) whose primary enemies were these Sunni citizens.
This is to say that IS was not a foreign virus that infected Iraqi Sunni areas but an immune system response within the Sunni community to years of violence and fear, an autoimmune response so strong that it began destroying the body politic. It was expressed in spiritual terms because that is the language of resistance in that part of the world, just as in France, resistance to globalism is often expressed in the language of the hard left or hard right. Within its context, IS was as comprehensible as the election of President Donald Trump, somehow both a surprise and inevitable.
After the American withdrawal from Iraq, IS was welcomed in parts of Sunni Iraq as a protection against the central Shia-dominated government in Baghdad that was closely aligned to Sunni Arab (and American) enemies in Tehran who had been orchestrating what would have been called a genocide against the Sunni had it been carried out in the Balkans.
The events leading up to the announcement of The Caliphate are well known but worth summarizing: The morphing of AQI into IS; the sudden rush of oxygen provided by the Arab Spring in neighbouring Syria; and the relentless takeover of much of the Syrian Revolution by the experienced Iraqi-led IS whose leadership had been created in the gulags of the US military prison system in Iraq.
Thus IS has a context, primarily an Iraqi context. It was produced to a great extent by US polices going back to the time before the invasion. Not surprisingly, IS developed a paranoid, millenarian cultish outlook, as many groups do when they have been bombed a lot. The Khmer Rouge emergence from the US bombing of Cambodia is not a bad comparison. Indeed, occupation by colonial powers has often created the conditions for millenarian cults from ancient times until today, whether the rise of Christianity or Native American cults in the nineteenth century.
If you count the long horrible war against Iran, the Gulf War, the years of devastating sanctions, and the chaos following the US invasion in 2003 that set off sectarian fighting, much of Iraq had known 30 years of war by the time IS started to develop. If, after several decades of political upheaval and war, the US was invaded by an army from a Muslim country, one could expect a rise in the membership of the Ku Klux Klan or other such virulent groups.
I have gone into detail about the rise of IS to show that the group has an easily traceable context and did not appear in a vacuum. Of course, in the end, the level of trauma experienced in a country like Iraq is almost impossible to fathom for those outside of it.
DISCOVERING THEOLOGY
As I pointed out earlier, IS has demanded that we take their theology, or at least their beliefs, seriously. They are proud, even arrogant, on the topic. And so the media and think tanks have begun to do just that. The tipping point arrived with an article outlining the belief system of IS by a journalist named Graeme Wood in March, 2015, issue of The Atlantic. Having occasionally tried to write about Islamic theology, I was very impressed that The Atlantic should devote an entire article to the topic. So were others and the piece went viral, like so much of IS's own publications, and perhaps for similar reasons. The strong reaction suggests Wood hit some kind of cultural pressure point, but exactly what kind was not immediately clear.
A Harvard graduate, Wood does not appear to be either an expert on Islam or the Middle East or even an expert on terrorism. He is writing as a journalist, as I am. This is not a bad thing and, in fact, it may explain the article's success. It reads as if the author, like the audience, is discovering that theology itself can be a prime motivator of humanity as opposed to finding the roots of religious extremism in sociology or history or economics. There is an “OMG! They take this religious bunk seriously!!” sort of tone to the article. Indeed, understanding the fact that Muslims take theology seriously is important, although why we are taking the theology of IS more seriously than, say Shia Islam, is problematic.
The article's title is reminiscent, perhaps on purpose, of those catchy headlines that might have appeared in Esquire in 1965 or Cosmopolitan in 1985. But instead of "What Women really Want" or "What Men Really Want," it is called "What ISIS Really Wants." In the tradition of these kinds of articles, The Atlantic piece offered new insights into the desires of a group we find confusing. And like those early How TOs of the sexual liberation era, the title promises not only insight but practical advice as well. Instead of getting this “other” into bed, we are going to learn how to kill them, or at least wipe them out doctrinally.
And what does ISIS want? It turns out that they want to meet God following an End Times battle with us. Indeed, the West is a player not just in the formation of IS but in their telos, an alpha and omega. In this, they seem to acknowledge our role in their ultimate salvation that borders on a Freudian Oedipal Complex. First we create them, then they kill us.
In any case, Wood's article encourages us to take this theology seriously, as strange as their proclamations may seem, in the way Esquire might have demanded its readers take women's feelings seriously, irrational as they might have appeared to an upwardly mobile male with a busy schedule of weekend golf.
The article is worth reading but I will make several points about it here. The first is that the context of IS - the perhaps boring and somewhat familiar story of the rise of IS out of AQI following the US occupation - is barely mentioned. The second is that the interviews with IS believers are mostly with westernized Muslims, some of them converts. This emphasis on IS's foreign recruiting base and not on, say, IS theologians in the IS controlled Caliphate is understandable. Most western journalists who strayed into their territory are dead, but once again this removes the theology of IS from its historical context.
Wood describes a cultish group that uses legitimate sources within the Islamic tradition interpreted in a literal way to argue for violence, even genocide, in attempt to return to the seventh century. The main thrust of his argument is that IS is a legitimate expression of Islam, however ugly, and we ignore that legitimacy at our peril.
"The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic," Wood writes, "very Islamic." This line irked many, especially Muslim, scholars, as did: "Muslims can reject the state; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn't actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it."
Critics of the piece, both in The Atlantic itself and in other publications, pointed out many problems with the article. A few titles give you the general tenor of the criticisms: The Clash of Civilization That Isn't. What the Atlantic Gets Dangerously Wrong about ISIS and Islam. Getting ISIS Wrong. The critical articles are also worth reading if only to show how hard it is even to discuss theology in a western context, let alone Islamic theology.
And this is important because, I would argue, the literal, fundamentalist, anti-rational beliefs of IS conform to our view of what religion is generally, not just Islam. Thus, arguing against this pre-supposition and then writing about Islam as well is very difficult. Like IS, Wood holds the higher ground when it comes to the argument. To argue that religion can be rational and then to argue that Islam can also be rational, as Christianity or Judaism can be, is an insurmountable task unless your audience is as familiar with theology as people in this room.
The article depends for this argument on two serious historians at Princeton's Department of Near Eastern Studies, Bernard Haykel and Cole Bunzel, who come from the same department as Bernard Lewis, another red flag to critics. And the article frames itself as a counter-argument to a speech by President Obama in which he described the Islamic State as un-Islamic. Thus the article launched itself into a pre-made controversy - an editor's dream - of the Is It Us or Them variety.
Critics of the piece like Professor Juan Cole, a well-known blogger and western academic authority on Islam writing in The Nation, pointed out that Wood had confused a cult with what would be called, in Christian terms, the main stream Churches of Islam - Episcopalians versus the Branch Davidians.[ii][iii] And, according to Professor Cole, Wood did this while ignoring the group's origins in the US invasion.
Even Professor Haykel, the main authority on Islam in the article, when asked whether Islamic texts and theology necessitated the creation of groups like ISIS - essentially whether IS is the "real" Islam as the article insinuates - responded that he thought IS was the "product of very contingent, contextual, historical factors. There is nothing predetermined in Islam that would lead to ISIS." [iv] Prof. Haykel goes on to point out that ISIS's theology is ahistorical. “This is something I pointed out to [Wood] but he didn't bring out in the piece: ISIS's representation of Islam is ahistorical...It's saying we have to go back to the seventh century. It's denying the legal complexity of the [Islamic] tradition over a thousand years.”
To illustrate his point, Haykel referenced Mohammad Fadil, the Associate Professor and Research Chair for Law and Economics of Islamic Law at the University of Toronto, who criticized Wood's piece in an interview with ThinkProgress. “Mohammad Fadil, for instance, would say when you talk about Islamic law, you have to talk about a tradition that is many centuries old and is extremely sophisticated, that has multiplicity of views and opinions and is not cut and dry the way ISIS presents Islam, in an ahistorical fashion, and in a completely monolithic way," Haykel said. "So ISIS's view of Islam is...unhistorical. They're revising history."
Much of the debate about the article centred around who can and cannot decide what is Islamic or un-Islamic or “How Islamic is the Islamic State” (Cole) as one response was called. One the difficulties in this kind of debate seems to be that the standpoint between an historian and a theologian are very different. The Princeton historians argue that IS can be seen as Islamic from an historical perspective, as seen in the terms of reference of the department of history in a western university. The critics argue this is not Islam as it is lived by the vast majority of Muslims and Islamic thinkers today. The audience for an article like this, with little experience of Islam, is most likely to listen to the historian.
In a way, the critics are pointing out that the article does to Islam what IS does - taking it out of context and making it ahistorical. Thus Western rationalism has the same effect as the irrationalism of IS - taking religion from its living context. Indeed, some pointed out that the ironic result of the article was to argue for IS against other forms of Islam for those “westernized” possible converts making Wood an inadvertent recruiter for the enemy.
CONTEXT WITHOUT THEOLOGY VS THEOLOGY WITHOUT CONTEXT
But this sudden interest in IS theology brings up a problem: why is the theology of IS, a violent cult we helped create, taken seriously when vast amounts of serious Islamic theology is of little or no interest? No comparable articles on the thought of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, have received this kind of attention, although we are often told that Iran is an enemy responsible for much of the world's terrorism, run by crazy clerics we might be wise to understand (Hankey, “Philosophy and 9/11”).
Thus the question is not what Wood got right but why, while ignoring much of Islamic thinking for years, should we suddenly take the Islam of IS seriously - very seriously. As I have tried to show, while even the authorities on whom the article depended, like Professor Haykel, criticized it, the piece obviously hit a cultural nerve. I would argue that Wood's article appealed to a large audience not because it tells us about Islam but because it reinforces a number of presuppositions that we hold about religion in general and Islam specifically. Here, finally, is an “Islam” acceptable to the West.
One presupposition is that the literalist interpretation of Islam presented by IS is, in the end, more legitimate than other interpretations because religion in a secular, scientific culture is seen as literalist by definition. The idea of theology, that there is a rationality natural to the divinity that must be discerned in revelation, is absurd. IS would agree with this, indeed it seems to go out of its way to reinforce the idea that religion is purely about willing, not thinking. Of course, this is a criticism of Islam by modern western thinkers going back to Hegel, whose grasp of Islam said more about Hegel than it did about Islam.
In this anti-rationalism, IS shares much with other modern cults like those of Christians who deny evolution and create theme parks where humans and dinosaurs mingle. Indeed, the so-called Caliphate, which was advertised to disaffected Muslims as a kind of religious theme park where adherents could act out a fantasy of being “Muslim,” as well described in Wood's article, is a very modern, even “Western” idea.
This division of Faith and Reason, as the Pope pointed out in his Regensburg lecture, is a real problem, especially in the West, and as, the Pontiff argued, may be the cause of the rise of extremist cults. But, as the Islamic scholars pointed out in their critique of that lecture, this may be a problem but it is not one that besets Islam alone and the Pope's point-scoring on the irrationality of Islam said more about western prejudices than it did about Islam.
As Professor Cole and others have pointed out, emphasizing the theology of IS while ignoring or diminishing our role in its creation, and while congratulating ourselves on our own insights into Islam, is an act of intellectual hypocrisy on a grand scale. It is as if we are going out of our way not to fight terrorism but to create ever more virulent forms of it and then blame religion while crowing about our own secularity.
Thus when it was vitally important that we understand the religious aspect of Iraqi culture before we invaded, we ignored it. And now that is vitally important to understand the cultural context of the Sunni religious response to our mistakes along with the regional dynamics, we ignore these. And yet the context of IS and its theology are closely related. And we do this while telling ourselves that Islam, not the West, is fundamentally irrational.
IS may be crazy but we seem to share in this irrationality as we befriend countries like Saudi Arabia who have midwifed IS while isolating a country like Iran that fights it. And we do this after destroying oppressive but rational Sunni cultures such as Saddam Hussein’s Baathist dictatorship or their rural, tribal life that could have served as bulwarks against extremists like IS but also resisted American domination. In 2003, my Iraqi hosts fighting the US military tried to convert me with tracts written by Jusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens. In those areas today, I would be beheaded - hardly the stated aim of the occupation of Iraq.
To a certain extent, IS can be seen as a nightmare mirror held up to the violence and irrationality of the last 15 years of western foreign policy. IS is very conscious of this, as can be seen in videos such as the immolation of the Jordanian pilot. In this disturbing propaganda film, the burning of children said to be killed in western-backed air raids is juxtaposed with the equally gruesome auto-da-fé of the coalition pilot. Its eye for an eye argument is, as they say, very Biblical. A Biblicism repeated by American Christian enthusiasts for the death penalty. As Reinhold Niebhur wrote “the evils against which we contend are frequently the fruits of illusions similar to our own.”[v]
Ironically, IS theology offers an explanation of our strange behaviour - it is God's plan. This is why we figure so prominently in their End Times scenario, which we seem to be doing our best to bring about. Indeed, there is an uncanny similarity between some North American Protestant views of eschatology, especially among Dispensationalists, and those of the Islamic State. The power of these kinds of Protestants within the US military and the US government itself cannot be underestimated.[vi] It can be argued that the willing of an immediate Eternal of the millenarians combined with the secular idealism of the neoconservatives, who hope to maintain the conditions for an eternal Pax Americana, have together driven much of US policy when it comes to the Middle East. And these, combined with the ambitions and largesse of the Military Industrial Complex that has provided the wherewithal, have created the conditions in which IS has arisen.
THEOLOGY AS DISTRACTION
It has taken us more than a decade, but in IS we have finally found the Islam we have been looking for and to which we can relate - irrational, violent and ahistorical. Not only did we help create it, but IS acts as a mirror of our secular culture. Professor Hankey argues that the Hellenic philosophical tradition is waning in the West, but we are still able to conjure up scenarios that would be familiar to the Tragedians.
We have discovered Islamic theology out of context just at the moment when we need it most, as a source of distraction for Western educated classes flummoxed by more than a decade of failure by our superior, secular culture. For us to use Islamic theology as a way of avoiding coming to terms with our own folly is revealing but articles on Islam, even good ones, are unlikely to wake us from the dream. The fact that Wood's piece is very engaging is itself a problem. The understanding we gain about IS comes at the expense of understanding what we ourselves are doing.
Graham Greene would have recognized the dilemma, I think. In the Middle East, like the Far East in his day, our kind of knowing is often a form of self-delusion that occupies us while we employ our violent plans. It is meant to mitigate understanding. In this, our actions argue for Augustine against Pelagius, as Rebecca West saw in Greene's novel. Even, or especially, well-meaning actions are not safe from our corrupted will. At the end of the book, Alden Pyle is stabbed by an unseen enemy that he never knew, a victim of the violence he thought was meant for others, the hidden kind that has plausible deniability. But according to the coroner's report, the Harvard grad did not actually die from his wound. Instead his lungs filled up and he drowned in the mud of the country he wanted to save while destroying it, suffocating on the land he failed to digest intellectually. Iraq and Afghanistan have less water than Vietnam, but that has not prevented our Pyles, choking on the dust of those lone and level sands that seem to stretch endlessly before us.
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[i]Rebecca West, The Court and the Castle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957) 103.
[iii] The Nation, February, 2015.
[iv] ThinkProgress, Feb 20, 2015.
[v]Reinhold Niebhur, The Irony of American History (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 208) 16.
[vi] Jeff Sharlet, “Jesus Killed Mohammed,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2009, 31-43.