What’s Power Got To Do With It?
Quixote, not the gracious writer of After Corbu, blasts Mark Lilla’s NYTimes Magazine piece for getting the roots of religious violence and oppression wrong – it isn’t about scripture, it’s about power.
Balderdash. I have never in my travels met a person who’s really exercised about intellectual chasms. The things people are willing to throw bombs about is having control over their own lives and having resources. Does anyone honestly think that the US would have thrown bombs at Iraq if it had all the oil it needed and wasn’t worried about being forced to “live like Europeans”? Even Lilla couldn’t be thinking that Cheney sat there and said, “I can’t stand this intellectual chasm. Maybe a bomb or two will fill it in.”The problem is not chasms or principles or religions. The problem is the abuse of power. That’s what we have to be vigilant about.
It’s awfully reductionist to say that all religious conflict is about power. The people who are actually doing the fighting don’t say this, and there should at least be some presumption in favor of the reasons the people who are engaged in conflict give. So when Qutb or OBL say they are fighting in the name of a political theology or in the furtherance of abstract, messianic ideals, we should believe them – unless we have a good reason not to.
Quixote says he’s never met anyone who’s exercised over intellectual chasms and that people fight for resources or for control of their own lives. That’s fair – but “intellectual chasms” can exasperate those conflicts. There are plenty of places where resources are scarce and there isn’t massive conflict – it’s a horribly simple claim to make that all conflict is resource or autonomy driven. How does Quixote’s heuristic for understanding conflict explain the middle class terrorists of 9/11 or in London? They didn’t lack autonomy or material wealth, and still they were driven to kill dozens and even thousands of innocent people.
It appears that Quixote isn’t very familiar with how fundamentalists Muslims or Islamists think about politics. Both reformers like Ramadan and radicals like Qutb acknowledge that Islam is holistic – all political problems are religious ones and vice versa. Look at democracies and nascent democratic movements in the Islamic world. Turkey can only maintain politico-religious cleavage through the heavy hand of the military, and even there, the Islamist party is overwhelmingly popular. In Egypt, the only thing approaching a democratic movement is the Muslim Brotherhood – which has some common intellectual roots with Al Qaida, the work of Sayyid Qutb.
Sure, Quixote’s right in saying that there’s a long history of cynical politicians using religious language to influence believers into going along with their political program in pursuit of power, but he portrays an intentional ignorance of what those believers actually profess, what they actually believe. Liberals will be better off when we realize that (some of) our religious interlocutors are genuine in their belief and have real disagreements about how society should be structured and are not just ignorant masses drummed up by cynical right wingers.
