Twin Golems of Violence

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 it has become commonplace that religious extremism, particularly of the Muslim kind, lies at the heart of the problems that seemingly condemn the Muslim majority world to political and social backwardness, economic stagnation, and cultural oppressiveness. For the planners and supporters of Bush administration policy in Iraq, the actions of the country's Sunni minority, and the thousands of foreign "jihadis" who have come to fight the Great Satan "between the two rivers" (as Musab al-Zarqawi has allegedly renamed his Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda), have become a poster child for all that is wrong with Islam.

Most scholars of the Middle East and Islam would take issue, strongly, with such simplistic (mis)characterizations of contemporary Islam and Muslims. But there is more than a grain of truth to the accusation that religious beliefs and motivations are among the biggest contributors to the violence plaguing Iraq. Indeed, the attitudes of religious leaders in the country, especially Sunnis, have played a powerful and negative role in the continuing violence that threatens to derail, or at best seriously delimit the positive impact, of the Jan. 30 elections.

Of course, the attitudes of senior American religious-cum-political leaders (and can there be any doubt George W. Bush functions as both for millions of Americans?) aren't helping much either. Much attention has been devoted to the numerous Bush administration errors – disbanding the Iraqi army, not putting enough U.S. forces on the ground – that encouraged the current chaos and violence in Iraq. Yet as important has been the clearly religious – jihadist, actually – foundations of the U.S. invasion and occupation of the country. Guiding American policy in Iraq and the larger Middle East are several troubling dynamics, the combination of which have led to 100,000 dead Iraqis, well over 1,000 dead U.S. soldiers, and counting; not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars literally wasted on useless violence (go ask the victims of last week's tsunami what better ways there are to spend that kind of money).

Crusader Mentality

First there is the "imperial" and "crusader" mentality that has come to dominate American foreign policy (the words are Condeleeza Rice's and President Bush's respectively, not mine). Next there is the belief among some of the most important political figures in the country, not to mention tens of millions of God-fearing Christian Americans, that the war in Iraq heralds the coming of the Apocalypse and is therefore part of God's plan and beyond criticism (no matter what the human and economic costs). Most important, fin-de-millennium America has witnessed the re-branding of Christianity as a religion of large-scale, divinely sanctioned violence that is specifically wed to a hyper-consumerist, market fundamentalism, which, as Thomas Frank demonstrates in his best-selling What's the Matter with Kansas, has the perverse ability to brainwash tens of millions of Americans to support economic policies that are manifestly against their class interests and violate the most cherished tenets of the Gospels (humility, serving the poor, struggling for social justice). Making the synergy work is the ability of what could be termed "market-fundamentalist Christianity" to redirect Americans' anger at the life-conditions it produces toward a mythological bogeyman called the "liberal elite."

While the above discussion explains why President Bush has been re-elected despite an invasion gone terribly awry – legally, politically, and economically – it shouldn't blind us to the fact that an equally disturbing rebranding of Islam in Iraq and across the Muslim world has enabled an equally disastrous decision by the highest levels of the country's Sunni establishment to use mass violence rather than mass civil protest to confront the American-sponsored occupation. As one of the country's most senior religious figures blithely explained to me during my travels through Arab Iraq last spring, the Sunnis would "kill the infidels" without question or remorse in order to defeat the occupation. The blood of the occupation would be answered by the blood of the insurgency, with little consideration of the implications of unleashing such a wave of violence across a country that had already lived through "thirty-five years of death," as a young Shi'a religious leader explained to me exasperatedly in describing his despair at the turn to violence by his Sunni colleagues and compatriots.