Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

The concept of cosmic war, which in its simplest expression refers to the belief that God is actively engaged in human conflicts on behalf of one side against the other,

God, as conceived of in the ancient mind, was not a passive force in war but an active soldier. Central to biblical ideas about cosmic war was the belief that it is not human beings who fight on behalf of God, but rather God who fights on behalf of human beings. Sometimes God is the only warrior on the battlefield. When the Babylonians conquered Mesopotamia, they did so not in the name of their king but in the name of their god, Marduk, who was believed to have sanctioned, initiated, and commanded each battle. The same holds true for the Egyptians and their god Amun-Re; the Assyrians and their god, Ashur; the Canaanites and their god, Baal; and, most especially, the Israelites and their god, Yahweh.

Obviously, when confronting any biblical text, one must remember that these are not descriptions of historical events but rather theological reflections of events long since past. Archaeological evidence suggests that some of the tribes the Israelites claimed to have annihilated were actually absorbed into their nation. But the biblical ideal of cosmic war is exceedingly clear. It is “ethnic cleansing as a means of ensuring cultic purity,” to quote the great biblical scholar John Collins. It was, in fact, the principal means through which the nation was made.

But at the turn of the first millennium C.E., in the turbulent landscape of first-century Palestine,* one group of religious nationalists pushed the biblical doctrine of cosmic war to its ghastly extreme. They were known as the Zealots. The Zealots were not a formal religious group or political party. They were a loosely affiliated, heterogeneous movement of Jewish revolutionaries, centered in the Galilee—long a hotbed of radicals and rabble-rousers—who shared contempt for the Roman occupation of Jerusalem and a fierce opposition to the Temple authorities. Some Zealots were members of the priestly class; others raged against the priesthood. Some practiced prophecy and soothsaying, while others seemed wholly detached from all aspects of the Jewish religion. A few Zealots were pacifists, but the great majority believed in the unflinching use of violence against both the Roman occupiers and those Jews they termed “collaborators.”

Still, it would be inaccurate to think of the Zealot movement as a religious movement. This motley group of priests, brigands, and social revolutionaries functioned more as a primitive social movement, one focused as much on the liberation of Israel as on religious purity. Considering that most Jews in first-century Palestine would have framed their political and religious sentiments in the same language, the Zealots’ call for “the sole rule of God” would have been indistinguishable from the call for freedom from Roman occupation.

I have that photo, here before me. Rabbi Goren is wearing Coke-bottle glasses, but I tell you, I can see the light dancing in his eyes. With the ram’s horn pressed to his lips he is Joshua, calling forth the wrath of God who crumbles mountains. He is Aaron, staring out with virgin eyes upon the land of milk and honey. He is Moses: see how the soldiers run to him through the parting of dust and rubble! Two thousand years of wandering in the wilderness, and now, at long last, Eretz Yisrael is secured. Surely redemption is at hand.

Rabbi Goren could hardly be blamed for such apocalyptic fervor. By the end of what came to be known as the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel had captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights—the totality of biblical Israel.

Even the most secular Israeli could not fail to be moved by the thought that the war was divine providence. Within hours of the army’s taking of the Temple, bulldozers began destroying Palestinian homes in front of the Wailing Wall, making it accessible to the Jews for the first time in centuries. Within months, the first settlers, mostly Religious Zionists from Goren’s own village, Kfar Hasidim, and its sister village, Kfar Etzion, began settling the West Bank. With the victory of 1967 and the occupation of Palestinian lands, Secular Zionism, once anathema to many Orthodox Jews, was gradually being framed as merely a transient stage in God’s master plan for the Jewish people—a precursor to the reestablishment of the Kingdom of David.

The notion that the state of Israel was just a placeholder for the eventual rule of God was not new. It was, in fact, the core belief of Religious Zionism

In 1921, Rabbi Kook established an institute in Jerusalem dedicated to rebuilding the Temple. “Our faith is firm,” he said, “that days are coming when all the nations shall recognize that this place, which the Lord has chosen for all eternity as the site of our Temple, must return to its true owners, and the great and holy House [the Temple] must be built thereon.” Of course, rebuilding the Temple would mean razing the Dome of the Rock. A story is told about Rabbi Goren: After blowing the ram’s horn, the rabbi ran up to General Uzi Narkiss, the commander of the Israel Defense Forces, and urged him to blow up the Dome of the Rock—now, before things settled, before the politicians and the peacemakers appeared. General Narkiss brushed Goren off, and control over the Temple Mount was returned to Jerusalem’s Muslim authorities.

However, its current alignment with the right-wing Likud party, whose platform rejects the possibility of a Palestinian state and refers to the Occupied Territories by their biblical names, Judea and Samaria, now allows members of Gush Emunim to engage directly in the implementation of government policies in the Occupied Territories.

Like their Zealot predecessors, Gush Emunim and like-minded Religious Zionists insist on a state governed wholly by religious law, one in which the land is cleansed of its “foreign” inhabitants so as to hasten the return of the Messiah; non-Jews, and even secular Jews, have no place in the divine Israel imagined by the Gush.

In repeated confrontations with the Israeli army, most recently in Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the Religious Zionists have shown that they would prefer civil war in Israel to peace with the Palestinians. That is because these Jews define their national identity in terms not of civic loyalty to the state but of religious obligation to the land. For them the state of Israel has no intrinsic value, other than to serve as a vehicle for the settlement of Jews. Their national narrative begins not with Dreyfus and Herzl but with Moses and Aaron. Their divine mission is to ensure that the Occupied Territories are permanently annexed into the state of Israel, that not one inch of God’s promised land will ever be returned to the Palestinians.

And as they have repeatedly demonstrated, they will go to any length to disrupt peace negotiations that may lead to a Palestinian state, even if it means killing their fellow Jews. Thus, the homes of Israelis who have criticized illegal settlements have been bombed, and fliers have been distributed in Jerusalem offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who kills a member of the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now, which favors dismantling the settlements as part of a peace plan with the Palestinians. As a settler leader told The New York Times in 2008, the Jews must decide “whether they are on the side of the Torah or the state.”

It was one of these Jewish radicals, Yigal Amir, who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after he had signed the Oslo Peace Accords, which promised to return lands seized in 1967 to th...

Yigal Amir has been branded a zealot, a radical, a terrorist, even a madman. But the truth is that his views on the sanctity and inviolability of biblical Israel, and the measures that could be taken according to Jewish law to cleanse and preserve the totality of the Promised Land, are surprisingly widespread in modern-day Israel.

It is not only in Israel that one finds support for men like Amir and his fellow Jewish cosmic warriors. When Pat Robertson, America’s premier evangelical preacher, heard about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, he was convinced it was part of God’s master plan for the region. “This is God’s land,” Robertson declared, “and God has strong words about someone who parts and divides His land. The rabbis put a curse on Yitzhak Rabin when he began cutting up the land.”

Robertson is not just an evangelical media mogul. He is one of the principal figures in a coalition of evangelical organizations, based mostly in the United States, dedicated to helping Israel’s cosmic warriors maintain their grasp on the whole of the land. These so-called Christian Zionists (the term was coined by Theodor Herzl to refer to the Christian colonialists who supported the creation of the state of Israel) are motivated by the conviction that the politics of Israel, and indeed of the entire Middle East, are being orchestrated by God.

And like their Jewish and Muslim counterparts in Israel and Palestine, they are actively engaged in working against the peace process, which, they argue, is “an international plot to steal Jerusalem from the Jews”—a plot that, in the words of the evangelical writer Mike Evans, is being controlled by “a master collaborator [Satan] who is directing the play.” As the megachurch pastor John Hagee, the high priest of Christian Zionism, has proudly decl...

Like Israel’s Jewish cosmic warriors, these Christian cosmic warriors believe that the Jews must rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem in order to usher in the return of the Messiah. Of course, as Christians, they believe that the Messiah is Jesus Christ and that when he returns to earth the Jews will have to either convert to Christianity or be damned. But remarkably, the last act of this cosmic drama seems not to matter much to either the Jews or the Christians in this messianic coalition. That is because what binds these two very different religious communities together...

Yet while these Christian Zionists believe that the final battle on earth will begin in Jerusalem, the attacks of 9/11 and the resulting War on Terror have, in their minds, expanded the theater of conflict and shifted the epicenter of the cosmic war to what they like to call “God’s New Israel”: America.

Americans have always had a sense of divine destiny. The Puritans who settled this untamed land were convinced they were reliving the story of the Exodus in the New World. “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people,” Herman Melville wrote, “the Israel of our time.” Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century fire-and-brimstone preacher best known for his phlegmatic sermon “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,” liked to describe America as “the new Canaan,” declaring that “America has received the true religion of the old continent.”

It is not that evangelicals advocate war in general. However, there is something in the evangelical worldview that, in contradiction to traditional Christian teachings regarding forgiveness and nonviolence, allows for far greater zeal for war, especially if the conflict is presented through a cosmic lens. (Think of the success that Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” or George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” had in capturing the evangelical imagination.) To understand why this is the case requires a closer look at the roots of evangelicalism.

It would be inaccurate to consider evangelicals a distinct denomination within Christianity. Rather, this is a transdenominational movement that pulls from a host of Protestant traditions—from the Methodists to the Presbyterians, the Southern Baptists to the Pentecostals.

One had to make a personal, confessional commitment to Jesus Christ, so that he could wash away one’s sins with his “redeeming blood.” Only then could one reenter the world in purity and innocence as “born again.”

The fundamentalist position was a departure from traditional Christianity. Although the early Christians considered the Bible’s human writers to be conduits through which the word of God was revealed, they recognized that the texts themselves had nevertheless been written by men. That is why they canonized four gospels, even though the gospels often contradict one another on such sacrosanct issues as Jesus’s genealogy, the events of his birth, the chronology of his life, the date and time of his death, and the circumstances surrounding his resurrection. Rather than conceal or apologize for these discrepancies, the early Christians openly acknowledged them as part of an ongoing dialogue over the meaning and significance of Jesus’s words and deeds.

“the universe is divided into two—the moral and the immoral, the forces of light and darkness.” Though such beliefs exist in one form or another in many Christian denominations, what distinguishes the evangelical movement is the conviction that these doctrines, when adopted rigidly and as a whole, result in a kind of spiritual rebirth that separates evangelicals from all other Christians (hence the evangelical belief that salvation belongs only to those who have been “born again”).

when the largest and most powerful defense contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater, is headed by a man, Eric Prince, who, according to a former employee, views himself as “a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” it is difficult to imagine how these young, pious, and “shaken” soldiers could construe their military mission, and indeed the entire War on Terror, in any way other than as part of a new crusade—a cosmic war—between the forces of good (us) and evil (them).

No doubt that is how the Jihadists understand the U.S. mission. Indeed, the United States’ conduct in both Iraq and Afghanistan—the evangelizing soldiers, the humiliation of Muslim prisoners forced under torture to eat pork and curse Muhammad, the Crusader rhetoric of the military officers and political leaders—has not only validated the Jihadist argument that these wars are “a new Crusader campaign for the Islamic world” conducted by “the Devil’s army,” it has provided Jihadists with the opportunity to successfully present themselves as the last line of defense against the forces that seek to “annihilate Islam.”

These two terms—infidel (kafir) and hypocrite (munafiq)—have become permanent fixtures in the Jihadist lexicon. Both words have quite specific meanings in the Qur’an. Kafir is the term most often used to designate the powerful pagan rulers of pre-Islamic Mecca, the Quraysh, who fought a bloody, decadelong war with the nascent Muslim community. Munafiq is the term reserved for Arab tribes that joined the Muslim community, but only for political or material gain, and ultimately abandoned the new faith and returned to their old tribal ways. In Jihadism, however, both words have been stripped of their historical context, so that infidel has come to mean anyone who is not a Muslim, while hypocrite means any Muslim who is not a Jihadist. Both groups are designated as “unbelievers;” both are marked for death.

It is tempting, even comforting, to consider such abominable acts of terror to be the result of irrational or pathological behavior. But the truth is that terrorism is almost always a calculated choice. Terror is purposefully chosen, because it is often seen as the most effective, most expedient, and most economical method of pursuing a group’s aims.

Suicide terrorism is by no means a distinctly Islamic or even religious phenomenon. The tactic was popularized by the Marxist militants of the Tamil Tigers during their violent insurgency against the Sri Lankan government. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, has compiled a database of every suicide attack that took place in every part of the world from 1980 to 2003. His data demonstrate that “there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions.” In Pape’s database, secular groups account for a third of all suicide attacks. There is, it seems, a simple reason why suicide has become such a common method of terrorism: it works. When one’s adversary possesses the most formidable military hardware, when its strength cannot be challenged in battle, suicide terrorism levels the playing field.

As a Palestinian militant coldly explained to an Israeli reporter, “We have no planes or missiles, not even artillery with which to fight evil. The most effective instrument for inflicting harm with a minimum of losses is this type of [suicide] mission.” Put crudely, the suicide terrorist has become the poor man’s smart bomb.

Nevertheless, there is no question that killing and dying are always easier to justify if they can be framed as ritual or ceremonial acts, which is why Jihadists refer t...

It seems not to matter that, on the topic of suicide, the Qur’an is absolutely clear: “Do not kill yourself; if someone does so [God] shall cast him into Hell” (4:29–30). Nor does it seem important that countless sayings (Hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad refer to the gruesome punishment that awaits those who take their own lives: “Whoever purposely throws himself from a mountain and kills himself, he will forever be falling into the fire of Hell, wherein he will abide eternally; whoever drinks poison and kills himself with it, he will forever be carrying his poison in his hand and drinking it in the fire of Hell, wherein he will abide eternally; whoever kills himself with an iron weapon, will forever be carrying that weapon in his hand and stabbing his abdomen with it in the fire of Hell, wherein he will abide eternally.” The Qur’an is equally unambiguous in its injunction against killing women, children, the elderly, protected minorities, and, most significantly, other Muslims. Some Jihadist ideologues go to great lengths to try to justify both suicide terrorism and attacks against fellow Muslims or civilian targets (“If the unbelievers kill young and old,” argues Yusuf al-Ayiri, the Saudi Jihadist who was once bin Laden’s bodyguard, “then Muslims should be permitted to do the same”). Yet even bin Laden has stated that “the one issue on which all people are agreed, even if they themselves have been the victims of oppression and hostility, is that you cannot kill innocent c...

The Mongols were actually quite tolerant of other faiths, and they easily absorbed Islamic beliefs and practices into their own shamanistic spiritual system, creating a kind of hybrid of Sunni Islam and Eastern paganism. This created a dilemma for Muslims under Mongol rule, many of whom did not know how to respond to the conversion of their new and unfamiliar masters. Now that the Mongols had become Muslims, must they be obeyed as God’s regents on earth? Should the same people who only a few years before had killed millions of Muslims, enslaved their children, plundered their property, burned their mosques, and uprooted their graves now be considered Muslims just because they had declared that “there is no god but God”?

Ibn Taymiyyah disagreed with his master. To live freely and justly as Muslims required a leader committed to Islamic guidance, he argued. If that leader failed in his duty to uphold Muslim principles and did not abide by Islamic law, then he was not really a Muslim but a kafir; his rule was invalid. Ibn Taymiyyah declared that it was incumbent upon all Muslims under the rule of an impious leader to rebel. Employing the practice of takfir, he even went so far as to argue that any Muslim who was willing to abide by the rule of the kafir leader was himself a kafir.

“The Neglected Duty” laid out, for the first time, the aspirations of the nascent Jihadist movement. Chief among these was the reestablishment of the Caliphate, which had been abolished after World War I by the founder of the modern secular state of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. For a great many Muslims, the destruction of the Caliphate had permanently fractured the worldwide community of faith, the ummah, which the Prophet Muhammad had established fourteen centuries before, into competing nation-states. As Sayyid Qutb, perhaps the most influential of all Jihadist ideologues, claimed, with the end of the Caliphate, the Muslim community had essentially reverted to a state of jahaliyyah—the time of ignorance and idolatry that existed before the introduction to Islam.

Yet whatever military success the United States and its allies have had in disrupting al-Qa’ida’s operations and destroying its cells has been hampered by the failure to recognize and confront the social movement—Jihadism—of which al-Qa’ida is merely the most militant manifestation. The truth is that al-Qa’ida has always been less an entity than a system of thought, a “mode of activism,” to quote Abdullah Azzam. “Al-Qa’ida is not an organization,” declared Abu Musab al-Suri. “It is not a group, nor do we want it to be. It is a call, a reference, a methodology.” Though the word “al-Qa’ida” is almost always rendered in English as “the base”—something concrete and conquerable, something that can be defended or assailed—“al-Qa’ida” more properly means “the rules” or “the fundamentals” and is used by Arabic speakers primarily to refer to the basic teachings or creed of Islam.

Social movements arise when relatively powerless people band together under the banner of a collective identity in order to challenge the existing social order.

Or consider bin Laden, a man with no religious credentials who has never studied in any Islamic seminary and who has only the most rudimentary knowledge of Islamic law and theology, but who has nevertheless managed to seize for himself the powers traditionally ascribed to Islam’s clerical class by, for example, repeatedly issuing his own fatwas (which, according to Islamic law, can be issued only by a qualified member of the clergy). It is his conscious appropriation of religious authority that has made bin Laden so appealing to those Muslims—particularly young European Muslims like Hasib Hussain and his fellow 7/7 bombers, who are themselves mostly ignorant of Islamic law and theology—whose sense of alienation from their own religious communities makes them yearn for alternative sources of spiritual leadership. In his speeches and writings, bin Laden warns these young Muslims not to listen to their clerics, whom he considers incapable of addressing their needs. “No official scholar’s juridical decrees have any value as far as I’m concerned,” he has declared. In fact, bin Laden makes the astonishing claim that following the leadership of these “hypocrite imams” (by whom he means any member of the clergy that disagrees with his interpretation of Islam) is “tantamount to worshiping [them] rather than God.” He then audaciously takes upon himself the duty, traditionally reserved for Islam’s clerical class, of “enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong.” It is a clev...

Religion, of course, can be just as effective in promoting nonviolence and civil disobedience, as was the case with America’s civil rights movement or India’s movement for independence from Britain. But for movements that operate in societies where democratic institutions are either wholly absent or brutally repressed by the ruling regime, countries where legitimate opposition is simply not allowed, collective violence may be the sole means for a social movement to pursue its goals of radical social transformation, as Latin America’s Liberation Theology movement discovered. Developed by a handful of politically active priests throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Liberation Theology relied on familiar Christian symbols and metaphors (the Eucharist, the suffering of Christ, the coming of the Kingdom of God) to unite the impoverished and downtrodden of Latin America under a single collective identity and encourage them to rise up and challenge the accepted social order. By casting Jesus as a poor, illiterate revolutionary who fought the ruling powers of his time on behalf of the oppressed and marginalized, Liberation Theology sought to redefine the Gospel story in purely sociopolitical terms, as a means of fighting back against the ruthless, U.S.-backed regimes in countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Yet when these regimes responded to the Liberation Theology movement with indiscriminate and unrestrained state-sanctioned violence, when soldiers began raping and...

But though violence can be an integral part of a social movement, if taken too far, it can become a liability, as we have seen with Jihadism. On the one hand, violence can create the perception that change is possible, thus convincing people with similar grievances to align themselves with the movement one way or another. And as certain tactics, such as suicide bombing, begin to show success, they are picked up by other members of the movement. On the other hand, violence can lead to even greater repression by the state, which in turn can further radicalize the movement and thus frighten away sympathizers and invalidate the movement’s grievances.

when it comes to dealing with a social movement, society has only two options: either it can address the members’ grievances, thereby making the movement irrelevant, or it can deflect those grievances and further radicalize the movement.

Or as Sidney Tarrow puts it, “actions that begin in the streets [can be] resolved in the halls of government or by the bayonets of the army.”

Hizb ut-Tahrir—a Salafist organization that, despite its rejection of violence, nevertheless seeks to re-create the global Caliphate

The perception of the suicide terrorist is that he is driven by hatred toward his target or by a lack of value for life. But as Marc Sageman has argued, “It is actually quite difficult to convince people to sacrifice themselves just because they hate their target…. On the contrary, it appears that it is much more common to sacrifice oneself for a positive reason such as love, reputation, or glory.”

It is within such “identity vacuums” that Global Jihadism thrives. For kids like Hasib Hussain, whose religious and cultural affinities have been cast by their societies as other, Jihadism is more than an alternative form of identity—it is a reactionary identity, a means of social rebellion.

I have watched Muslims chant “Death to America!” on the streets of Tehran, then privately beg me to help them get a visa to the U.S. Despite the way in which the War on Terror has poisoned America’s image across the Muslim world, even America’s staunchest critics still recognize that there is no country—and certainly no Islamic country—in which Muslims can pursue their religion with more freedom and openness than in the United States.

By transforming the countless cultures of the Arab and Muslim world—from Morocco to Malaysia—into a single, homogeneous, and historically inevitable enemy, the Clash of Civilizations, insofar as it has served as the ideological underpinning for the struggle against Jihadism, is a blatant assertion that the War on Terror is in fact a war against Islam. After all, this was never conceived of as a war against terrorism per se. If it were, it would have included the Basque separatists in Spain, the Christian insurgency in East Timor, the Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist rebels in eastern India, the Jewish Kach and Kahane underground in Israel, the Irish Republican Army, the Sikh separatists in the Punjab, the Marxist Mujahadin-e Khalq, the Kurdish PKK, and so on. Rather, this is a war against a particular brand of terrorism: that employed exclusively by Islamic entities, which is why the enemy in this ideological conflict gradually and systematically expanded to include not just the persons who attacked America on September 11, 2001, and the organizations that supported them, but also an ever-widening conspiracy of disparate groups such as Hamas in Palestine, Hizballah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the clerical regime in Iran, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Chechen rebels, the Kashmiri militants, the Taliban, and any other organization that declares itself Muslim and employs terrorism as a tactic.