The Truth about Religious Extremism

 

Religious extremist

Friend Xerxes has just put out a column based on an old headline: “Half of Canadians consider religion damaging.”

He agrees. Religion is a source of harm; religious certainty is a bad thing.

So how did almost half of us arrive at such a novel and wrongheaded idea?

I trace it to 9/11 in particular, and to a lesser degree the troubles in Northern Ireland. As he notes, accusing Buddhism or Judaism or Quakerism of being harmful seems ridiculous. But surely Islam, with the terrorism? And then, we cannot cite only Islam, we’d be accused of racism; so we think as well of the Irish troubles, and generalize, and say “religion.”

The misperception is exacerbated by the press constantly pushing the notion that Islamist  terrorists are “extremists”: the problem is supposedly that they believe their religion too fervently. They are too sure of things.

But if a too-devout belief in Islam is the problem, why was the Muslim world not generating terror until relatively recently? Why were Muslim states relatively sanguine under European/Christian rule, French, English, and Italian, during the 19th and early 20th centuries? Why were significant Jewish, Christian, Yazidi, and Parsi minorities able to live in peace and harmony in Muslim-dominated areas for centuries, until just recently? The Muslim Brotherhood was formed only in 1928; Al Qaeda in 1988; ISIS in 2006. Even the Palestinian resistance to Israel was not Islam-based until recently: the PLO was Marxist; the more radical PFLP was led by a Christian. Is it plausible that the Muslim world has recently become more certain of their faith? What dynamic would have caused this?

It is obviously the opposite: increasing globalization and increasing secularism in the dominant West has caused Muslims to doubt, to lose certainty. This has caused the growing violence.

When one looks at the background of actual Muslim terrorists, one discovers they do not come from a religious background. Childhood friends or older acquaintances always remark that they were never devout, nor from a religious family; they were recently “radicalized.” They are commonly Westernized, often educated in the West. Bin Ladin himself was an engineer. Al Qaeda ran houses of prostitution for their fighters.

Living and teaching in the Arabian Gulf, I found I could count on goodwill from any student or fellow faculty member with a full beard; this showed they were a committed Muslim. Any hostility to the foreigner or non-Muslim or Westerner that there was came from the clean-shaven secularized locals.

People similarly overlook, when considering the Irish Troubles, that Sinn Fein and the IRA were Marxist organizations, hostile to and generally condemned by the Catholic Church. The association with religion may have seemed clearer on the Protestant side; but anyone can declare himself a Protestant minister and form his own denomination, stealing the prestige of religion for his political agenda. 

This is a simple trick, used by Jim Jones, purely a Marxist, for his “People’s Temple,” or by Fred Phelps for his “Westboro Baptist Church.”

Islam has the same problem, as, like Protestantism, it lacks a recognized central authority. Any fraud can declare himself an Imam.

Nor, historically, can religion explain the longstanding tensions in Ireland. The English were just as determined to colonize Ireland and suppress its culture before the English Reformation. Religious difference was never more than an excuse.

What does religious extremism actually produce?

Those most committed to their religion, most convinced they know the truth with certainty, become friars and monks. Catholic, Orthodox, Hindu or Buddhist. Not a lot of violence coming from that cloister. Among Protestants, the most devout would be the Amish and the Mennonites. Not a lot of blood in the streets. Also, in their way, the Salvation Army.

It is only when you have doubts about your world view that you feel threatened by the mere existence of opposing views. Only then are you likely to resort to violence to impose your views. Relativism, not conviction, is the problem.

The poets, who see most deeply into the zeitgeist, rightly saw this at the outset the 20th century. Many of them lamented the rise of relativism and the decline of religious conviction. Kipling wrote: 

For heathen heart that puts her trust
  In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
  And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard;
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord

In 1897, he saw the growing reliance on scientism instead of religion inevitably leading to dark places. His prediction came true in 1914, and in 1917, and in 1939, and in China, Cambodia, Korea, and too many other places since.

Yeats wrote, in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Who is the falconer, the centre, but God? What is the ceremony of innocence, but conventional religion with its rituals?

And the harm is not limited only to violence. I blame relativism, the notion that there is no ultimate meaning to life, for the growing epidemic of drug use, suicide, depression, and mental illness. 

The media and the clerisy have done humanity untold harm with their propaganda campaign against “religious extremism.” Religious extremism is just what the world most desperately needs.

Extremism

Extremist

On February 24, a young man went into a Toronto massage parlour with a machete and killed one of the masseuses. He has now been charged with terrorism—on the grounds that his motive was support of the “incel” movement, defined by CSIS as “violent misogyny.” 

The press and media consistently describe him as an “extremist.” As they invariably do other terrorists.

The term presumes that the problem with his thinking is that it strayed too far from the average. This implies that the average person shares the same basic ideas in a more muted form.

In this case, that apparently means that we are all misogynists. We all believe we are entitled to sex, and that it is the duty of random women to give it to us. Most of us are simply not prepared to resort to violence.

I have a problem with the tacit assumption that sex on demand is okay.

Similarly, it is nonsense to call the attackers on 9/11 Muslim “extremists.” We have ample evidence that they were not particularly observant Muslims. They came from secularized, Westernized backgrounds. Al Qaeda ran brothels in Iraq.

I also have a problem with the notion that the average person and what he thinks and does is the standard of morality, or truth. This is what the term “extremist,” used as an accusation or charge, implies: “extreme” makes sense only in relation to a norm.

You want an obvious example of a person whose thinking strayed far from the norm? Here are a few: the Buddha. Socrates. Jesus Christ. Mother Theresa. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Oskar Schindler. Churchill. Copernicus. Steve Jobs, with his personal slogan, “think different.” Any individual who has ever contributed any significant good to mankind. Any was, literally, an extremist.

By contrast, it is not so clear that the guy who stabbed the masseuse was an extremist. The term, remember, makes sense only in terms of a social norm. If you are surrounded by people who think the same way you do, you are not an “extremist,” but a conformist.

The RCMP investigation determined that the "crime was in fact one in which the accused was inspired by the ideologically motivated extremist [sic] movement commonly known as incel."

Most of his social dealing may well have been with that movement, which apparently thrives online. Incels are not generally the type who get out a lot. Accordingly, he was not an extremist—he was a moderate in relation to the social group to which he belonged.

The same is true of the team of hijackers who rammed the World Trade Center on 9/11. They were not extremists at all, but conformists within their social group. Indeed, a large proportion of the populations of some Middle Eastern Muslim countries probably supported the attacks at the time.

To call such people “extremists” is a perfect inversion of the truth, and is, worse, calculated to encourage such incidents in future. Going along with those around you is the opposite of morality.

Who Shot Charlie Hebdo?

With the current attacks in Paris, perhaps it is time again to make clear what exactly “religious fundamentalism” is all about. It is not the same as “religious extremism.” In fact, it is the opposite. The Christian religious extremists are all in monasteries. In Judaism, they are opposed to the existence of the State of Israel. In Islam, they are in the mosques, not in the streets.

“Religious fundamentalism” is real enough, and it is identifiable currently in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism. But it is a rather new thing. The term originally refers to a movement in US Protestantism that arose only in the early 20th century, which insisted on a strictly literal reading of the Bible. Precursors can be traced as far back as the late 19th century. Before that, importantly, nobody ever thought to read the Bible literally.

The term has since been applied as well to Islamic movements. I think fairly—the salient feature, a strictly literalist treading of the Quran and Hadith, is again the font from which all else flows. Including a strictly literal reading of the term “jihad.” Again, this movement appeared in the late 19th century, not before, and has grown in influence especially in recent decades.

In Hinduism, the same approach can be traced back to 1923. Roughly the same time. And it too is growing in recent years.

Now, why did this movement/these movements suddenly appear? What changed? What else has been growing at the same time? Simple answer: social science and scientism, i.e., the idea that the principles and techniques of science can be applied to all aspects of human life. Not coincidentally, Nazism and Communism arose at this same time and from this same concept: the application of scientific principles to human society and government.

Religious fundamentalism is, quite simply, the attempted application of the principles and techniques of science to religious texts and beliefs. It has, therefore, more to do with science than it does with religion. There is a reason why so many of the known terrorists and suicide bombers, notably including Osama Bin Laden, trained as engineers or medical personnel. And had not formally studied religion, or  been known previously to be devout. They weren't, and they aren't. Science is unrelentingly literalist in its approach to the world: what appears is what is, and there is nothing more behind it. Read the Bible or the Quran as if it were a science text, and you get fundamentalism.

This is less of a problem in Christianity than it is in Islam (or in Judaism), because even the literal reading of the specifically Christian texts is pretty non-violent. But it is important to understand what is happening.

The worst possible thing to do to end the current troubles with terrorism would be to blame it on “Islam” or on “religion.” It would make more sense to blame it on science, but that is not particularly helpful either. "Scientism," the elevation of science to the status of a religion, is the problem ,and should be aggressively fought. Next to that, the best solution is to ensure that everyone is better grounded in their given religious tradition.