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Posted on 11/05/2001 4:08:08 PM PST by Pokey78

The conflict was foreshadowed by the battles of the 16th and 17th centuries

This is not a war of religion. All Western leaders (with the possible exception of the Italian Prime Minister) say so, and the mainstreams of Islam, Judaism and Christianity teach forgiveness and peace. Westerners cite Muslim moderates; but theirs may be an argument already lost, as the massacre of Christians at St Dominic’s Church, Bahawalpur, suggested.

Why, then, insist on an obvious half-truth? We cling to it because the al-Qaeda network reveals some key fissures of Western liberalism: that religion belongs to the realm of private opinion, or represents outdated superstition, or both.

We all knew there were problems with multiculturalism. In Britain, the Left thought the plural society could be made to work by more social services and democratic participation, the Right by more patriotism and family cohesion. How historically shallow these solutions were, Islam unexpectedly shows. Unintentionally, Osama bin Laden reminds Post-Modern Britons that theirs is an indelibly Christian country rather than an ahistorical “community of communities”.

Yet liberal orthodoxy is still “in denial”. Secular pluralism is consistently imposed from Northern Ireland to the Balkans, yet wars of religion have not faded away in the modern world: politicians merely insist on describing them in other terms and applying other remedies. The poor success of these attempts is held to show that the parties to the conflict have not yet grown up. Meanwhile, religious minorities commonly seek to transform their states from within, often in alliance with co-religionists abroad.

More have recently died in conflicts among Muslims than in conflicts between Muslims and Christians, yet Christians have historically participated. However much slaughter was caused since 1789 by secular ideologies, the identification of an enemy as belonging to the wrong race or class was as nothing compared to the perception, widespread in 16th-century Europe, that one’s opponents were predestined to eternal damnation. This tenet caused endless bloodshed.

Queen Elizabeth I’s ministers urged Europe that English Catholics were being executed for their politics, not their religion; but to Rome these two things were so inseparable that Campion, Fawkes and others were revered by their co-religionists as martyrs, not denounced as traitors. Whether young Muslims holding British passports who leave to fight for al-Qaeda fall into a similar category is the sort of problem Britain has seldom faced since; but where liberals shy away from the issue, British Muslims answered it in an opinion poll last weekend, 68 per cent putting their religion first, 14 per cent their country.

We have been here before; and it was intolerant 17th-century Europe, not the liberal Enlightenment that followed, which devised solutions to the problems the Reformation unleashed. Most, including partition (the formula that ended the disastrous Thirty Years’ War in 1648) and “toleration” (the supremacy of one Church and the exclusion from political power of dissenters), offend the modern conscience. Others seem worse, including the suppression of religious minorities and forced conversion. But they were devised by practical statesmen as well informed in theology as ours are in economics. The methods varied from country to country, and determined their subsequent enjoyment of personal liberty.

These formulae for peace were eventually forgotten or dismantled; but religious conflict evolved rather than disappeared. In Christianity as well as Islam, people orthodox in their theology, and politically moderate, can be mobilised for political action by heterodox minorities of extremists using political language (often natural rights based) that sounds plausible to the middle ground. This should not seem strange to Americans, since it is in a nutshell the story of 1776.

The US separated Church and State in 1787 to prevent such conflict, but a threat averted is not a problem understood. Where modern Americans thought they lived in a world made safe for consumerism by being secularised, others overseas interpreted American public culture differently: not self-evident secularity finally acknowledged, but as religion (in this case, Islam) negated, as the Devil. To the religious mind, all things express a religious position, secularism included.

Popular responses show a similar lack of perception. Americans denounce the suicide highjackers as “cowards” or “deranged” (rather than intelligent, courageous religious zealots) and presume that worldwide anti-Americanism is fed by jealousy of Americans’ material wealth (rather than by pietistic rejections of the values which that wealth projects).

Yet liberal, secular societies have liberal, secular equivalents of the idea that those dying in a jihad at once reach paradise: not until Muslim teaching on this point changes, and we respond to religious war better than to call it terrorism, will the problem be solved. If it took moderate Catholics and Calvinists decades to redefine their political theologies, however, the prospects for Islam doing so soon may be poor.

Meanwhile, many 17th-century remedies are being reinvented under the pressure of circumstance. It would still seem unacceptable to say that a Christian society could not tolerate a Muslim minority within it, although many Roman Catholic and Protestant states in Europe were historically forced to conclude that minorities of the other denomination were unacceptably subversive. If al-Qaeda found means to detonate nuclear devices, all the techniques of the 17th century would be seen again. But because our imperfect past has been largely forgotten, these lessons are unlikely to be learnt until it is too late.

The author is the Hall Professor of History at the University of Kansas

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