Taming the Gods

by Ian Buruma

  The Islamists have merged their politics with their faith. There is no reason to follow their example. Religion and politics should be prised apart. If political violence is simply blamed on the “backwardness” of Islam or the intolerance of the devout, it will become difficult to isolate the revolutionaries from the believers, including fundamentalists, who are prepared to observe the laws of secular society. Violent Islamism is a political problem that cannot be solved with the rhetoric or attitudes of Kulturkampf.

  Kulturkampf tends to produce the opposite results from those intended. When Bismarck launched his culture war against the Catholics in the 1870s, it strengthened the sense of community among the Catholic believers and made many Protestants feel sullied. In the words of one Protestant theologian: “The state cannot conduct a war against a large part of its own population without causing, on all sides, profound injury to the moral consciousness.”48 Bismarck, in his wisdom, abandoned the war inside his German Reich. But in the Polish lands, then controlled by Prussia, which Bismarck and subsequent German leaders hoped to “Germanize” by encouraging German settlements, the cultural battles continued until, under Nazi occupation, they exploded in a campaign of mass murder.

  History never repeats itself precisely. The nations of contemporary Europe are not the same as nineteenth-century Germany, nor are the modern European Muslims much like the Catholics of Bismarck’s time. But human impulses toward violence, bigotry, and religious worship are more constant. Muslims in the West must be treated as fellow citizens, just as Catholics were in Protestant Europe. Europeans found a way to reconcile Catholics, Protestant, Jews, and non-believers by democratic means, but only after centuries of murder and oppression. It is in the interest of everyone, except the violent revolutionaries, that Europe escapes from another round of religious violence. Tocqueville’s idea that Islam and democracy cannot survive together must be disproven. This will be a test for Islam, but also for all the rest of us who will have to accept the believers as equals, even when we cannot share their faith.

  If Islam is to be accepted as one of Europe’s religions, which by sheer force of numbers it already is, then space must be found for its practices, as long as they are lawful. Strict secularists will argue that this space must be kept entirely private; the moment you allow religion to trespass on public territory (schools, swimming pools, and so forth), damage is done to the secular state and thus to the democratic order. In fact, the borderlines between public and private are not as clearly drawn in many countries as they are in the French republic, and even there the shadows of the Catholic Church are still long, even in some public schools. Religious practices and education in Germany and the Netherlands are partly financed from the public purse. This may seem unfair, even noxious, to the unbelievers, but it actually gives the secular state a degree of control.

  Does acceptance also imply respect? Why should an atheist respect beliefs that he holds to be absurd, at best? But respect is not the same thing as admiration. One need not feel any respect for religious beliefs, only for the dignity of the believers. This is easy to say, of course, but who decides when that dignity is offended? Mullahs, priests, and self-appointed “community leaders” often have a vested interest in being the arbiters of public discourse. They decide which words are offensive to “their people” and how their beliefs are to be discussed. Tariq Ramadan, for one, is most vulnerable to criticism when he adopts this role.

  Liberal democracies are not well served by laws that limit free speech, such as laws against blasphemy or denying the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide (both banned in France). In fact, blasphemy is not included in certain restrictions on the freedom of expression laid down in the European Convention of Human Rights. They only apply to intentional and gratuitous insults or hate speech that is designed to incite violence and discrimination against adherents of a particular religion.

  There are ways, however, to respect the dignity of fellow citizens without recourse to the law. In practice, people in civilized societies tend to refrain from using words or expressing opinions that are bound to cause offense. And offense depends to a large extent on who says what to whom and under what circumstances. Criticizing religious beliefs should certainly not be banned by law. Criticism among the believers is in fact a good thing, and such critics must be protected by the law against violent repercussions.

  Salman Rushdie made the distinction between attacking beliefs, and attacking believers. The former should be entirely permissible, while the latter is not. This distinction might be lost on some of the believers, who would take an attack on their faith personally. But this is no reason to dismiss Rushdie’s claim. It could be sharpened, perhaps, by stressing the legitimacy of attacking religious authorities, especially when their statements have political consequences. When the pope tells people in Africa that condoms encourage AIDS, he should be challenged. The same is obviously true when Muslim clerics make statements that encourage violent acts against women, homosexuals, infidels, or whomever.

  Yet it is possible to qualify Rushdie’s dictum in one respect, not legally but socially, even politically. Criticism is most useful when it concerns matters that can be rationally debated. Quite apart from the possible offense it might cause, there is not much point in using rational arguments against the belief in God, for it is a belief, not an opinion. Revealed truth can influence the views of an individual, for better or worse, but should not be granted any political authority. Expression of religious beliefs in politics are legitimate as long as those beliefs inform positions that are subject to reason. Martin Luther King’s politics, and the way he expressed his views, were deeply affected by his religious beliefs, but his goals were rational. He had turned his religious faith to secular ends. That is why he spoke to non-believers as powerfully as he did to his fellow Christians.

  So if one truly believes in the separation of church and state, which all democrats should, a certain discretion about the religious beliefs of others is in order. This need not, and should not, mean virtual segregation, as in the “pillars” that divided Catholics from Protestants in the Netherlands, or in the ideology of multiculturalism. It means what Olivier Roy meant when he spoke about leaving theology to the believers and concentrating on the rules of the democratic game. Confucius, that wise old Chinese sage, had never heard of democracy, but he said more or less the same thing when asked by his disciple how to serve the spirits and gods: Let us leave the spirits aside, until we know how best to serve men.

  NOTES

  ONE: Full Tents and Empty Cathedrals

  1. Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927), 48.

  2. Ibid., 432.

  3. Zev Chafets, “Late-Period Limbaugh,” New York Times Magazine, July 6, 2008.

  4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 293.

  5. Ibid., 295.

  6. Ibid., 449.

  7. Ibid, 295.

  8. Ibid., 298.

  9. Ibid., 301.

  10. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), Query XVII.

  11. Frank Lambert, Religion in American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 22.

  12. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 288.

  13. David Hume, “Essay X: Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (1742–54; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987).

  14. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII.9.

  15. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007).

  16. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 15.

  17. Ibid., chapter XI.1.

  18. Ibid., chapter III.10.

  19. Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  20. Ibid., 247.

  21. Secularism is not the same as secular; one denote
s an ideology, the other describes a state of being.

  22. The Social Contract, book 1. See The Living Thoughts of Rousseau, presented by Romain Rolland (Philadelphia: D. McKay, 1939).

  23. Quoted by Conor Cruise O’Brien in “The Decline and Fall of the French Revolution,” New York Review of Books, February 15, 1990.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Quoted by Isaiah Berlin in “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism: II,” New York Review of Books, October 11, 1990.

  26. Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” New York Review of Books, September 27, 1990.

  27. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 289.

  28. Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 38.

  29. See Lambert, Religion in American Politics, 36.

  30. Jeroen Koch, Abraham Kuyper (Amsterdam: Boom, 2007), 201.

  31. Lambert, Religion in American Politics, 170.

  TWO: Oriental Wisdom

  1. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 641.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Voltaire, Works, vol. 15, part 2, p. 180, quoted in Jyoti Mohan, “La civilisation la plus antique: Voltaire’s Images of India,” Journal of World History 16, no. 2 (2005): 173–85.

  4. Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary, selected and translated by H. I. Woolf (New York: Knopf, 1924).

  5. Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary, trans. and ed. Peter Gay, vol. 1 (New York: Basic Books, 1962).

  6. Quoted in Mohan, “Voltaire’s Images of India,” 179.

  7. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Gay, vol. 1.

  8. The Analects of Confucius, trans. Simon Leys (New York: Norton, 1997), 50.

  9. Ibid., 6.

  10. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 308.

  11. The Analects of Confucius, xxv.

  12. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Gay, vol. 1.

  13. Much of this information comes from Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1999). Spence also wrote a brilliant biography of Hong, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: Norton, 1996).

  14. Quoted in Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution through Reform (New York: Norton, 2003), 195.

  15. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 232.

  16. Min Pao, December 2, 1906, reprinted in Prescriptions for Saving China: Selected Writings of Sun Yat-sen, ed. Julie Lee Wei, Ramon H. Myers, and Donald G. Gillin (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1994), 41.

  17. Ibid., 88.

  18. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 303.

  19. See Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Council of East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986).

  20. Ibid., 123.

  21. Ibid., 143.

  22. Quoted in Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 133.

  23. Ian Buruma, Inventing Japan (New York: Random House, 2003), 38.

  24. See John Dower, Embracing Defeat (New York: Norton, 1999).

  THREE: Enlightenment Values

  1. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 445.

  2. See Israel, Enlightenment Contested.

  3. Olivier Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), xi.

  4. Quoted in Shiv Malik, “My Brother the Bomber,” Prospect 135 (June 2007).

  5. Ibid.

  6. Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (London: Encounter Books, 2006), 64.

  7. Ibid., 66.

  8. Melanie Phillips is by no means alone in her defection from the Left. Such Parisian veterans of the 1968 student rebellion as Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksmann, and Bernard-Henri Lévy have followed a similar path.

  9. Phillips, Londonistan, 62.

  10. Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (New York: Doubleday, 2006).

  11. Tom Gross in the New York Post, June 18, 2006.

  12. Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam, 31.

  13. Phillips, Londonistan, 70.

  14. Volkskrant, February 9, 2002.

  15. Phillips, Londonistan, 11.

  16. These events are well described in Gilles Kepel, Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

  17. See http://www.KenanMalik.com. A version of this article appeared in Kenan Malik, “Born in Bradford,” Prospect 115 (October 2005).

  18. Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” Commentary (February 1963): 93–101.

  19. Ibid., 99.

  20. David Edgar, The Guardian, April 19, 2008.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007), 296.

  23. Ibid., 272.

  24. Petition to support Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 2006, http://www.petitiononline.com/AyaanHir/.

  25. Reported on Dutch World Service, Radio Nederland Omroep, February 11, 2008.

  26. Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Abandoned to Fanatics,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2007.

  27. Volkskrant, January 28, 2008.

  28. Geert Wilders, Elsevier Magazine, December 27, 2007.

  29. In fact, as Benjamin Kaplan argues in Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), tolerance of other religions was already widely practiced before the Enlightenment.

  30. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), translated from Latin by William Popple (New York: Routledge, 1991).

  31. Pascal Bruckner, “On Identity,” Onwards and Forwards, January 27, 2007, http://onwardsandforwards.wordpress.com/2007/01/.

  32. Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (New York: Penguin, 2006).

  33. Leon de Winter, review of Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance by Ian Buruma, Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2006.

  34. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 265.

  35. Phillips, Londonistan, 189.

  36. Jean Baubérot, Histoire de la laïcité en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000).

  37. See Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  38. Quoted in ibid., 64.

  39. Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam, 38.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 27.

  42. Ibid., 73.

  43. First published online on http://www.oumma.com/ in October 2003, and later in the Geneva newspaper Le Courrier, October 8, 2003.

  44. Ian Buruma, “Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue,” New York Times Magazine, February 4, 2007.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam, 45.

  48. Gordon A. Craig, The Germans (New York: Penguin, 1984), 94.