I just wanted to share this brilliant insight by our very own brother Sanneh
at Yale.


September 23, 2001
Faith and the Secular State
By LAMIN SANNEH
NEW HAVEN

In the days since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, the nation has been
numb from grief and anger, unable to comprehend the motives for the attacks,
and unsure what to do next. President Bush has declared war on terrorism,
and he has said that the prime suspects are radical Islamic groups connected
to the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda organization.

There are many questions to be investigated, but one in particular demands
immediate attention: Why America?

Osama bin Laden himself has gone some way toward answering this question,
most recently in a 1998 interview with ABC's John Miller: he delivered a
rambling diatribe against the American military presence in Saudi Arabia
during the Persian Gulf war. Mr. bin Laden called the United States an
illegitimate, infidel presence, trespassing on the holy soil of Saudi
Arabia. But it's hard to see why support for a Muslim Saudi Arabia — and the
defense of a Muslim Kuwait — should affront Mr. bin Laden's Islamic
sensibilities.

Around the world, United States foreign policy belies the claim that America
is an enemy of Islam. In Kosovo, the United States led an intervention to
aid ethnic Albanians, who are predominantly Muslim. While Russia waged a
brutal military campaign in Muslim Chechnya with surprisingly little
reaction from Mr. bin Laden's foot soldiers, President Clinton publicly
confronted President Yeltsin about Russia's human rights violations. America
has been the leading humanitarian donor to Afghanistan.

It's true that the United States has supported the Israeli government, but
it has also supported Muslim regimes in Egypt and Turkey and in Pakistan, a
neighbor and close ally of Afghanistan's Taliban government. Surely all this
is evidence that America has not been on an anti-Islamic crusade. On the
contrary, America has proved hospitable to an estimated 5.8 million Muslims
who claim this country as their own.

The Muslim fundamentalist movement began in 1979 with the Iranian revolution
that brought down Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and installed Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini. Iranian Islamists took American hostages, calling America
the Great Satan or Jahiliyah — the New Barbarity. Fundamentalists moved
quickly to make good on the ayatollah's call for jihad against Israel and
the West, and a series of attacks followed. In 1981, President Anwar
el-Sadat of Egypt was assassinated by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad
group. Attacks on American and French troops and the United States Embassy
in Beirut followed in 1983, killing more than 300 people. Then came the
ayatollah's fatwa pronouncing a sentence of death on Salman Rushdie, author
of "The Satanic Verses," which set off violent outbreaks throughout the
Muslim world and in the West. In 1993 a blind Egyptian cleric, Omar Abdel
Rahman, was implicated in a World Trade Center attack that now seems
mercifully small-scale. He was subsequently arrested, but his continued
imprisonment in the United States only fueled fundamentalist fury abroad.

All of this was enough to inspire The Economist to publish, in August, 1994,
a detailed investigative story entitled "The Fundamental Fear: Islam and the
West." It argued that there was a distinct possibility of "a general war
between Islam and the West."

If that prediction has not yet been borne out, there has nevertheless been
an alarming string of terrorist acts against the United States. Osama bin
Laden is believed to have masterminded the 1998 terrorist attacks on the
embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and he is accused
of having been involved in the aborted millennium plot that targeted Los
Angeles airport and in last year's seaborne attack on the American destroyer
Cole, anchored in Yemeni waters.

It is becoming clear that support for these attacks goes beyond a handful of
fundamentalists: Muslim leaders from Mombasa to Malaysia, from Cape Town to
Olympia, Wash., praise Osama bin Laden as a hero. Officials in Pakistan are
currently struggling to appease the United States without inflaming their
own citizens. All these incidents, combined with the horrific events of
Sept. 11, demand explanation.

Oddly enough, what most inflames anti-American passion among fundamentalist
Muslims may be the American government's lack of religious zeal. By
separating church and state, the West — and America in particular — has
effectively privatized belief, making religion a matter of individual faith.
This is an affront to the certainty of fundamentalist Muslims, who are
confident that they possess the infallible truth. For them, this truth is
not a private revelation but a public imperative, and states, like people,
are either Muslim or infidel. America's government is not anti- Muslim, but
it is among the most secular. For fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden, that
amounts to more or less the same thing.

This religious certainty is at odds with the very idea of the nation-state,
as has been apparent from the earliest days of the modern Muslim
fundamentalist movement. When he met with students from Saudi Arabia in
November 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini explained that the demands of Islam went
beyond — and often against — the demands of nationalism. He declared that
Islam appealed to all mankind, not only to Iranians, and not only to
Muslims. And he argued that secular states drained Islam of its vitality.
Western governments "have completely separated [Islam] from politics," he
said. "They have cut off its head and [given] the rest to us."

In seeking to reunite Islam with politics, Muslim fundamentalists have
embraced globalization as zealously as their capitalist counterparts have,
ignoring state boundaries to create a multinational movement. The United
States government is discovering this anew as it tracks Osama bin Laden's
network.

Many Muslims, especially those living in the West, have sought to distance
themselves from fundamentalist ideology. By insisting that fundamentalists
have misinterpreted the Koran, they seek to downplay the widespread support
for fundamentalism in the Muslim world. But the challenge facing Muslim
leaders goes beyond Koranic interpretation. In the aftermath of this month's
attack, and in the face of increasing antagonism, both the West and the
Muslim world need to make compromises.

Muslim leaders need to embark on programs of democratic renewal — with the
support of the West, if necessary. The West needs to overcome its insistence
that the nation-state must be secular to be legitimate. The West should
recognize that specific cultural values and political policy may intersect
without threatening civil liberties, and that religion can play an important
role in public life. That would enable Muslims to engage with the West
without endorsing secularism. Such a compromise would move us away from the
current perception of Western imposition and restore real balance in the
relationship between Western and Muslim states. Only then could we acquire a
sustainable interest in our common security.


Lamin Sanneh is a professor of history and religion at Yale University.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company


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