Relativism: paving the road to radicalism

The vignette was charged with drama. A government informant had wheedled his way into radical Islam’s inner sanctum: the Jersey City apartment that served as home and haven for “the emir of jihad,” the honorific by which Omar Abdel Rahman, the infamous “Blind Sheikh,” was known to his worldwide following. Here, he conducted meetings, issued directives for his Egyptian terrorist organization, and was briefed by the jihadist cell he had established in the United States, the operatives of which required his edict—or fatwa—before they could execute attacks.

The informant was there to outline a plot then underway: simultaneous strikes against the United Nations complex, the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters, and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. It was May 1993, and New York City was already reeling from the same terror cell’s bombing of the World Trade Center just three months before. The Blind Sheikh listened, then made his ruling: The attack on the United Nations was permissible, though tactically unwise. “Find a plan,” he countered in a haunting whisper, “to inflict damage on the American army itself.”

The informant had been daring. He’d lured the cleric into a small kitchen, away from other jihadists milling about the apartment. Lest the slightest creak arouse suspicion, he’d ever so carefully inched his briefcase, equipped with a tape recorder, near the blind man’s mouth. The device worked perfectly. The United States now had an ironclad conspiracy case against one of the world’s most influential terrorists.

At least it did back then. Today—some fifteen years and countless jihadist atrocities later—one is left to wonder whether the case would still be so ironclad. Worse, given the ironic advances of Islamophilia since the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, it is not frivolous to question whether, a few years from now, this conduct would be prosecutable at all.

In its 1993 indictment of Abdel Rahman and his followers, the Justice Department matter-of-factly alleged that the defendants regarded the United States and its allies as “infidels” and interpreted the concept of “jihad” as “the opposition against infidels by whatever means necessary, including force and violence.” The allegation was based on the grand jury testimony of government agents. Objectively, it is undeniable. The agents had the benefit of blunt recorded statements (e.g., “jihad” means to fight “with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile”) by the Blind Sheikh—whose very authority over terror cells stemmed from his doctrinal prowess as a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni learning. Moreover, they had studied Bernard Lewis, the West’s pre-eminent scholar of Islam, who’d observed that jihad, conventionally translated “holy war,” literally meant “striving, more specifically, in the Koranic phrase ‘striving in the path of God,’” and was to be understood “in military terms” according to the “overwhelming majority of early authorities.”

This was reality, and it was thus, without apology, the theory on which the case was tried. To argue otherwise would have been absurd: even though the defendants implausibly suggested their jihad had been directed against the Soviets, the Egyptians, or the Serbs rather than the United Sates, none had the temerity to contend it was anything other than a religiously motivated war.

Nevertheless, the Blind Sheikh did attempt an interesting ploy, claiming his injunctions to strike American government targets were immune from prosecution because of Muslim law: He had not, he contended, been issuing commands to violence so much as performing the role of a traditional mufti, rendering opinions on the Islamic propriety vel non of proposed courses of action. A suggested bombing was thus no different from, say, a suggestion that non-halal meals might permissibly be consumed to avoid starvation—it is the cleric’s duty to render judgments on matters great and small.

The gambit was rejected by Judge Michael B. Mukasey (now, incidentally, the U.S. Attorney General).While freedom of conscience is absolute under First Amendment jurisprudence, religious practices may be regulated and even prohibited if they violate the law. It follows logically that there are no law-free enclaves in the United States: all those within our jurisdiction are obliged to follow American law. Consequently, Judge Mukasey refused to hear testimony from the defense’s proffered experts: He would not permit the jury to be misled into according any relevance to the fine points of “shariah,” the Islamic legal code that governs the Muslim world.

What a difference fifteen years makes. While the jihad has intensified, claiming thousands of lives since the 1993 bombing, the government has become increasingly ambivalent about its nature. All religions are basically good, goes the rose-tinted premise. Islam is no worse, has no less a claim on truth, than the Judeo-Christian traditions predominant in the West. Jihad, undeniably, is a core component of Islamic doctrine. Thus, to complete the syllogism, if jihad seems threatening this can only be because it has been “perverted” by “radicals” or “extremists.” There are benign interpretations of jihad, and no matter how revisionist or flatly ahistorical, they must perforce be dispositive.

On this, there is no shortage of relativist cavalry riding to the rescue. Leading the charge is Dr. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer. After decades of advising various government agencies on how to think about Islam and terrorism, Sageman was named this July as the “scholar in residence” at the New York City Police Department—believed to be the first such position of its kind. In Understanding Terror Networks, a book widely touted in U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement circles, Sageman writes:

Like other great, long-established religions, Islam is full of contentious issues, especially about some of its core concepts, such as jihad, which translates roughly as “striving” but denotes any form of activity, either personal or communal, undertaken by Muslims in attempting to follow the path of God. No single doctrine is universally accepted.

So jihad is not about forcible conquest? Correct, insists Sageman. “In a world full of iniquities, the greater jihad is the individual nonviolent striving to live a good Muslim life, following God’s will.” This real jihad is about faithfully “adhering to the five pillars of Islam: profession of faith (shahada); praying regularly; fasting during Ramadan; being charitable; and performing the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.” By contrast, the violent species—labeled the “lesser jihad”—is the vestige of an outdated view that portrayed dar al-Islam, the Islamic domain, in a fight to the death with dar al-harb, tellingly, the domain of war. That this is precisely the view espoused by the world’s two preeminent proponents of Islamic ideology, the Sunni Wahhabism that is Saudi Arabia’s official brand of Islam and the militant Shi’a of Khomeinist Iran, dissuades Sageman not the slightest. Nor does it dissuade the wider government. It has become Justice Department practice to spout that there are various, equally valid interpretations of jihad. Indictments and other charging instruments are now wont to drop footnotes qualifying that the “jihad” allegedly at issue in terrorism cases happens to be that lesser, violent kind—implying that the “extremist” construction is the exception, not the rule.

While President Bush answered the 9/11 attacks with a fierce military assault, his determination was undermined by his simultaneous and conclusory assertion that Islam is a “religion of peace.” Indeed, despite the savage campaigns perpetrated exclusively by Muslims from the 1979 storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran through the barbarity of 9/11, and notwithstanding that the warrior prophet Mohammed’s creed had been spread principally by the sword and the humiliation of dhimmitude, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice later raised Islam’s status to the “religion of love and peace.” This treacly promotion, one is no longer surprised to learn, was announced in 2005 at the State Department’s annual Iftaar dinner—one of several at which official Washington, with all due ostentation, now marks Eid ul-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Muslim calendar.

Muslims themselves appear unaware of this loving tradition. Some of the most ferocious fighting in the ruinous war between Iraq and Iran during the 1980s occurred during Ramadan. It is, moreover, a seemingly annual ritual of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to mark Ramadan by warning Americans of an increased likelihood of terrorist attack. Nonetheless, such is the spirit of the times that only a few months ago, in Shelbyville, Tennessee, of all places, leaders of a food workers union dragooned a major American company, Tyson’s Chicken, to abandon Labor Day as a standard holiday. Plant workers—including some 700 Somali immigrants—will now have the option of taking a paid day off during the Eid.

This is our trajectory. In Minnesota, another unlikely enclave of the type Judge Mukasey disavowed, Somali Muslim taxi drivers have refused to pick up airport passengers believed to be carrying alcohol (which Islam considers haram, or prohibited). The authorities, who would not for a moment countenance drivers who refused cab service to Muslims, reacted to this affront by consulting the Muslim American Society. Never mind that the MAS had been founded as the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian font of Sunni jihadist theory whose stated goal is the “introduction of the Islamic Shari’ah as the basis controlling the affairs of the state and society.”

With their sensitivity enriched, the authorities responded not by withdrawing licenses but pleading with the cabbies to the effect that shariah had not been offended because its proscription targeted the consumption of alcohol, not its transportation. Of course, this served only to imply that, in clearer cases of shariah violation, American equal protection standards might well be nullified as necessary to give shariah its newfangled due. As night follows day, soon came reports of refusals by Muslim taxi drivers to drive homosexuals and immodestly dressed women.

Earlier this year, a Minnesota graduate student was coerced into leaving a teacher-training special-education program due to Muslim intimidation. The student was prone to seizures and therefore attended school with a trained service dog. Shariah deems dogs unclean and forbids touching them. At the high school where he did course field work, the special-ed trainee was taunted by Muslim students who threatened to kill the dog. The university responded with cowardice: awarding the graduate student credit absent the requisite training hours. An official rationalized that, notwithstanding the rights of the disabled, it was “important to respect different cultures,” and that the accommodation was simply “part of the growth process when we become more diverse.” (To be sure, British authorities are even further along in this “growth process”: in July, a police force in Tayside apologized to Muslim leaders for “offensive” public service ads featuring a puppy sitting in an officer’s hat. Though the six-month-old German shepherd had proved hugely popular, Muslims complained it was “ritually unclean,” embarrassing police officials who admitted failing to consult their “diversity” officers.)

Minnesota, it bears remembering, is also the locus of the infamous 2006 “flying imams” incident: six Islamic clerics aped the behavior of the 9/11 hijackers, were removed from an airplane when alarmed passengers complained, and are now suing the airline for discrimination and undue interference with their religious practices (such as chanting “Allahu Akbar!”—“God is great,” the signature cry of Muslim terrorists—as 141 passengers began boarding the plane). They are assisted in their transparently intentional provocation by the ever helpful MAS and the Council on American-Islamic Relations—a Hamas legatee organization, several of whose members have been implicated in terrorism-related investigations. Shortly after the suit was announced, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security cravenly compelled 45,000 airport security officers to undergo Islamic sensitivity training in preparation for the season of Hajj, during which thousands of Muslims fly to Mecca to make their pilgrimage.

The government’s relativist quadrants have since upped the ante, embarking on a jihad against jihad. The word, that is. Their stated intention is to purge such terms as “jihadism,” “Islamo-fascism,” and “mujahideen” from our public lexicon. Guidance issued this past spring patently seeks to indoctrinate agents and the public in the conceit that there is no true Islamic component in the terrorist threat confronting the United States. “The civilized world is facing a ‘global’ challenge, which,” the guidance assures us, “transcends geography, culture, and religion” (emphasis added). The siege of Muslim terror has nothing to do with the terrorists being Muslim.

Ostensibly, the strategy is directed at an outside audience: Muslims living beyond our shores. The point of such schemes, however, is transparently to influence government’s most important inside audience: the American people. As such, this one is rife with political cant—the triumph of hope over experience. It instructs “senior officials” to “emphasize” the “positive fact” that “Islam and secular democracy are fully compatible—in fact, they can make each other stronger.” This “positive fact” is, of course, nothing but a theory, and a counterfactual one at that. The “democracies” promoted by the United States in the Islamic world are not “secular” at all. New constitutions forged in Iraq and Afghanistan establish Islam as the state religion and elevate shariah as part of the fundamental law. Predictably, in Afghanistan one man was subjected to a capital trial for the “crime” of apostasy (a death penalty offense under shariah). In Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, lauded by American officials as a “moderate” leader indispensable to their democracy promotion efforts, has recently issued fatwas calling for the murder of homosexuals (“sodomites should be killed in the worst manner possible”). Sistani, perhaps the world’s most influential Shi’ite authority, does not meet with non-Muslims, and instructs the faithful that infidels “should be considered in the same category as urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors, and the sweat of an animal who persistently eats [unclean things].”

The very concept of secularity is foreign to Islam, which aspires to be not just a religious creed but a full-blown cultural, legal, and political system, sprung from precepts dictated to Mohammed by Allah Himself. One might have thought this apparent enough from the fact that Islam has no tradition of secular democracy—in Turkey, where Islam is resurgent, secular democracy was achieved only by repressing shariah. Democratic systems, moreover, are based on notions of liberty and equality; in stark contrast, many injunctions of shariah reject freedom of conscience, freedom to make law that countermands Islamic teaching, economic freedom, equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, and equality for men and women, to name just a few key divergences.

Yet the DHS soldiers on. After paying lip-service to the notion that “the terms we use must be accurate and descriptive,” its guidance urges that we drop jihad from our lexicon, despite its being a perfectly accurate description of what al Qaeda and other Muslim terrorist groups are doing. According to the DHS and the “influential Muslim-Americans” with whom it consulted (but whom it declines to identify), the true meaning of jihad is the subject of controversy. In its best moral equivalence, the DHS frames the disputants in this supposed controversy as “polemic[ists]”—rather than, as is actually the case, one group accurately invoking jihad to wage holy war and another trying, whether out of good intentions or duplicity, to reinvent jihad as the virtuous striving to become a better person.

This fable about an amiable, virtuous jihad that discredits the better known, widely practiced, violent variety flows naturally from the ipse dixit at the heart of the DHS guidance: the premise that “many so-called [so-called?] ‘Islamic’ terrorist groups twist and exploit the tenets of Islam to justify violence.” Of course, the Koran commands (to take just one of many examples), “O ye who believe, fight those of the disbelievers who are near you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty unto him.” According to the DHS, though, a terrorist has to “twist” that in order to dupe fellow Muslims into thinking Islam actually enjoins Muslims to “fight those of the disbelievers who are near you, and let them find harshness in you.”

As policy, the DHS gives us rose-tinted category error. It confounds Islam with Muslims and non-violence with moderation. There are about 1.4 billion Muslims in the world and the majority of them would never commit a terrorist act. But their rejection of jihadist methods is not an en masse rejection of jihadist goals. Similarly, the belief that America should become a shariah state, which is not all that uncommon among even American Muslims, is not a moderate one, even if a Muslim who holds it is not willing to blow up buildings to make it so. And even if most Muslims resolve the tension between their faith and modernity by choosing to take scriptures non-literally, or by marginalizing their violent directives as relics of a bygone time and place, that makes those Muslims peaceful people; it does not make Islam a peaceful religion. Where combating Muslim terror is concerned, Islam is a hurdle one must get over, not a means by which to get over the hurdle.

In short, under the guise of prescribing how our agencies should speak “strategically” so as not to offend potential Muslim allies, the new guidance (and, importantly, the official ethos that produced it) is palpably intended to sell Americans on the Islam of our government’s dreams, not the Islam with which we actually have to deal. The effect, intended or not, is to deny the ideological catalyst and unifying thread of Islamic militancy—enabling the diplomatic class to portray such militancy as driven by “regional” concerns, economic privation, American policies, or legitimate “resistance” against purported oppressors. We need no longer worry about—nor defend ourselves against—a global movement, fueled by the fervor of divine mission and confidence in its inevitable triumph, which, far from a perversion of Muslim doctrine, is both well-rooted in scripture and a lot more mainstream than DHS’s consultants let on. We follow this pipedream at our peril.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 Number 5, on page 28
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