Neither Their Perch Nor Their Terror: Al-Qaida Limited

I have beliefs, but I do not believe in them.

—J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 2003: 56.

We laughed and the laughter was foolish,            It seems to me;Far better that we should be crying            And bitterly:Behold! We are broken by Time,        We are failing, we fade–But think of the poor, broken glass       Whereof glasses are made.

—Abu’l Ala al-Maarri, Poems, 87.

There exists a widespread belief that as people become more modern they become less religious; that the ongoing growth of human knowledge contributes to the development of human reason, with the result that societies become ever more secular. Religion retreats as science advances, and the end point of this process will be a world in which the traditional faiths of humankind disappear. This was the expectation of Karl Marx. On this score, religion is not the expression of a primary human need; it is a by-product of ignorance, or else the result of poverty or political repression. Once these adverse conditions have been overcome, religion will vanish from human life, or at least dwindle into insignificance. This has not, however, been the case since the fall of Communism and the failure of the Left to meet the challenge of fanaticism, whether it be Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or Islamic.¹ Terrorism, for example, is a complex phenomenon whose causes include social and geopolitical conflicts, but its use by Islamist groups has brought religion into the center of the international arena in a way that few Western observers anticipated. At the same time, religious believers in many countries mobilized to promote a “politics of values.”² Conflicts over abortion, gay marriage, and euthanasia have helped shape the trajectory of American politics, and a similar curve can be observed in certain European countries. Until recently, Poland was governed by a Catholic party that supported Christian values, and in Britain, where the majority has long since ceased to follow any traditional faith, Muslims, Sikhs, Evangelical Christians, and other religious minorities have demanded censorship of artistic performances they judge offensive. In France “ostentatious symbols” were banned in schools and other public places so that the state could consolidate la laïcité, or secular effort, a political choice that defines the place of religion in an authoritarian, legal manner. La laïcité has always been associated with a political tradition of French anti-secularism, which not only demands the separation of church and state but also seeks to reduce the power of religion in society as a whole. In the past, its principal target was the Roman Catholic Church, whose influence the French secular state tried to restrict by every means at its disposal–including a state school system from which the Church was rigorously excluded. Today the chief goal of la laïcité is Islam, and the conflict has shifted to such issues as the wearing of al-hijāb by school girls, medical hygiene, and religious imagery.³ This is because Islam is perceived in France as a threat to national identity and unless it is laïcitized, it will not find its place in a secular state where religion continues to be intractably contested.

There is a real question then as to whether any process of secularism is actually under way. If societies become less religious as they become more modern, how is it that the US– which sees itself and is seen by the rest of the world as the epitome of a modern society, with the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution–remains as religious at the start of the twenty-first century as it was in the early part of the nineteenth century, when Alexis de Tocqueville noted the intense religiosity of American life? Is America an anomaly among advanced societies, or is the theory of secularization flawed? If the power of religion can be limited by a secular state, why does religious fundamentalism play a larger role in American political life than it does in the political life of any other developed country? Is it at all possible to create a secular civilization? The...