Fundamental problems

In Middle Eastern countries the secularization process has often been so accelerated that it's felt as an assault. In Turkey, Ataturk closed all madrassas [religious schools], forced the Sufis underground and forced men and women to wear Western dress. In Iran, Shah Reza Pahlavi gave orders to shoot at hundreds of demonstrators protesting compulsory Western dress. In that environment, you can see how secularization is experienced as an assault.

You have people who feel under fire, rageful and vengeful and feel that they're fighting for survival. In that condition, anyone can lash out. People in the United Kingdom are so disinterested in religion, so there's no problem, but we do have football hooliganism where the experiences normally present in religion manifest themselves: You can pour your soul into a movement, experience a collective defeat and lash out at a common enemy. It's the same mix that fuels a lot of these fundamentalist movements.

Why do you tie the growth of Islamic fundamentalism to the aftermath of the Six Day War?

They felt that adopting the Western method didn't work, that it was bankrupt, and they withdrew to a religion that they knew.

At the same time, Khomeini was studying in Qum and started protesting against the Shah. He was deported in the 1960s, then there was a lull and a sudden upsurge in the late 1970s. The Moral Majority appeared in the United States, the Iranian revolution exploded and you also see the emergence of religious Zionism in Israel with the new power of ultraorthodox parties there. In the Middle East, you have more and more people inspired by the example of the Iranian revolution turning to their own ideologues like Said Qutb in Egypt who was executed by Nasser in 1966.

Then Afghanistan blew up, then Lebanon. The Moral Majority's political prominence receded in the United States after the sex scandals, but they're still in America and are getting more extreme. It hasn't gone away; these movements don't go away, they just change.

Similarly in Israel you have more and more fundamentalist parties in the 1980s having an effect on government that they'd never had before. Israel was a defiantly secular state, but now no politician can form a government without support from fundamentalist Jews. At the same time fundamentalism has seen a quiet and steady growth in Islam. Islam is now as popular as Nasser's socialist and nationalist policies were in the 1950s and 1960s.

There was a yawning vacuum, especially in the Middle East where society became divided and split between an elite intelligentsia who have a Western education and understand what's going on and the vast rank and file who are essentially left to rot in a pre-modern ethos. They didn't understand the changes: everything from a new type of town planning, to new political institutions. How can they vote creatively when they don't understand secular politics? The West did it gradually so that it could filter down to the people. In the Islamic world modernization split countries right down the middle.

It's worth noting that at the turn of the 20th century every Muslim intellectual was pro-Western because they saw it as a beacon of progress and justice. They thought that progress and justice would filter down to the people. They said, "These Westerners are better Muslims," because Islam puts great weight on social justice, and it looked like social justice was filtering down to the masses in the West.

What happens now that fundamentalists have such a great deal of support in the Islamic world and many appear to tacitly support terrorist action?

These are all bad religions. In a hostile world, they play down the compassionate ethos of religion and accelerate the more bellicose elements of religion. When you have bad religion, like bad art or bad sex, it can easily tip over into nihilism and tip into things like what happened on Sept. 11.

Once they get into power they moderate, but they still say, "We don't want to be like Westerners." It's a po-mo ethic that says you don't have to be like the West to be progressive or modern. Rafsanjani [president of Iran from 1989 to 1997] said this will be a Shiite democracy, we're doing it our way. But at the end of the day they find that any modern government has to be democratic. The governments in Eastern Europe learned the same lesson after they tried to hog all the benefits of modernity and fell behind.

You have to remember that in every society culture is contested. There's always a struggle over which ideology should prevail. That conflict is going on in the United States where there are people who don't identify with democracy and have a dim view of it and are convinced that the federal government will fall and that God will take care of it. Similarly, in other countries you're seeing a struggle over which ideology will come out on top.

What about President Bush's declaration of war and subsequent use of the term "crusade" to describe it; does that demonstrate a very basic problem of understanding how to approach winning the hearts and minds of fundamentalists?

It was very stupid of him to say "crusade" when trying to appeal to Muslim counties. Americans don't understand enough about the Muslim world in order to mount a good P.R. campaign. That applies to the Western world in general, but in America there's a particularly acute ignorance.

In my travels around the states, I'm astonished about the lack of interest in the rest of the world. If you're staying in Denver the local paper seems totally local; there's lots of commentary and very little news. That's all got to change because this attack has shown that if you ignore the world, the world will come to you.

Just before this tragedy, in the United Kingdom, the big scandal was asylum seekers. Every night a number of people would try to walk through the chunnel. You suddenly had a feeling that the world that we ignore is suddenly pressing in on us. We arm our ports, but truck drivers would open their trucks to find them packed full of asylum seekers.

There seems to be some kind of awful parallel between that and the crazed fury of crashing into the World Trade Center.

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