Just under nine years ago, on 16 September, 2001, Richard H. Brodhead, then Dean of Yale College, convened a panel of Yale faculty members to speak on the significance of what had happened five days before. Not one of those on the panel took this as an occasion for denouncing those responsible for the massacres in New York and Washington. No one discussed the religious motivations of the perpetrators. No one laid stress on the need for retaliation. Some intimated that the United States was at fault. All urged those in attendance to consider the perspective of those who responded to 9/11 by dancing in the streets.
In Foreign Policy, in a revised version of his remarks, Strobe Talbott, who had been second in command in Bill Clinton’s State Department, urged that we take care to distinguish between “the assassins and those who mastermind and abet their operations” and “their constituencies – those millions who feel so victimized by the modern world that they want to be victims, too; those who see Osama bin Laden as a combination avenging angel and Robin Hood.” The “raw materials of what we are up against,” he contended, “are “disease, overcrowding, undernourishment, political repression, and alienation,” which “breed despair, anger, and hatred.” “Reactive, defensive warfare” he pooh-poohed. Instead he called for an international “war on poverty” – which he termed “a proactive prolonged offensive against the ugly, intractable realities that terrorists exploit and from which they derive popular support, foot soldiers, and political cover.”
What struck me when I first read about the Yale teach-in and, again later, when I perused Talbott’s remarks was the resolute refusal to take religion seriously. The same thought came to mind in 2008 when I read about the patronizing remarks that Barack Obama had delivered in a closed-door meeting with donors in San Francisco. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania,” he observed, “and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Both Talbott and Obama took it for granted that religious faith is epiphenomenal and that man lives by bread alone. To this day, neither understands that serious political disputes always turn on moral and religious principles. Leave aside the fact that LBJ’s war on poverty was an egregious failure and that an international war on poverty would be a fool’s errand. Those who flew jetliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon knew nothing of disease, overcrowding, and undernourishment, and, in justifying themselves, they said not a word about any of these. They were middle-class; many were well-to-do. They had been educated in the West, and we owe them this much respect – to take seriously their claim that their motives were religious.
These men sacrificed their lives for a cause they believed in. If we are to give them their due, we must ask whether they were right about the dictates of Islam. This is a question we should consider, and it is a question that all Muslims sooner or later will have to confront.
I lived in Istanbul for two years, and, for seven years, I was married to a Turk; I puzzled for many years over the uneasy cohabitation of Islam and a secular state in Turkey, and I still wonder whether that cohabitation can survive. But I do not pretend to know the answer to the question I have posed here. I do, however, know this. Islam is and has always been a religion of Holy Law. It has never embraced the separation of church and state and full religious freedom; it has never been willing to tolerate apostasy – though it has been tolerant of those born Christians and Jews. To make itself compatible with liberal democracy, it would have to be willing to treat religious obligations as a private matter and give up the quest to legislate for the whole political community.
This is a tall order, and we may wonder whether genuinely devout Sunni and Shiite Muslims can ever be fully comfortable within a secular state. It is, however, good to remember that there was a time, not so long ago, when it was unclear whether Roman Catholics, not to mention Anglicans and Presbyterians, could make their peace with a thoroughgoing separation of church and state. No one – apart from the adherents of Islam – can decisively answer the question I have posed. What, in the end their answer will be . . . this is a matter of profound significance for them, and it is hardly less important for us. I can only say that – if one is inclined to interpret the religious commitments of others as a pathological response to job loss, disease, overcrowding, and undernourishment – one cannot begin to comprehend the world into which we were so violently thrust nine years ago today.