William Cavanaugh has a review of George Weigel’s Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism. From simply reading Cavanaugh’s review, Weigel’s treatise on Islam and “jihadism” seems shockingly ignorant. It is little more than a justification for the “war on terror” promoted by the Bush administration and cheered on by a coterie of fellow-travelers, whereby all Muslims with a beef against the United States are lumped into one big nasty group of “jihadists”, regardless of context. Weigel’s chief ontribution is basically to say that it all stems from faulty theology. The problem, as pointed out by Cavanaugh, is that “privileging theological ideas as the cause behind jihadism seems to license Weigel to ignore material history”. For Weigel, it is all about the defects within Islam itself that leads to this irrevocable conflict with the west. The implication is pellucid: this enemy must be beaten at all costs.
Weigel is following the example of many associated with the Bush administration (and wannabes like Mitt Romney) who try to lump together every Muslim with a gripe against the United States and the west into a broad nefarious conspiracy intent on restoring the caliphate and destroying modern civilization in the process. He seems to forget that the true believers here number no more than a few thousand, and most of them are holed up in caves in inhospitable mountainous regions, lacking state support. Of course, Weigel’s vision of jihadism encompasses a diverse group of Sunni and Shia Muslims, from Hamas to Hezbollah to Baathists to the Muslim Brotherhood. But to make this story work, to use the words of Daniel Larison, “these diverse and disparate groups must be brought together under a single, frightening label and they must be made out to be enemies of America, whether or not these descriptions are plausible, true or reasonable.” When Romney tried to gain traction by pumping up the “worldwide jihadist effort” he was roundly mocked by citizens of the reality-based community. As Spencer Ackerman noted “there is no caliphate on heaven or earth that will simultaneously satisfy Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, which goes a long way toward explaining why there is no concerted worldwide jihadist effort by these groups to establish one”. But that doesn’t stop George.
What Weigel misses is nuance. What he essentially tries to do is put a theological gloss on the faux-machismo of the Mitt Romneys of the world. As Cavanaugh demonstrates, Weigel simply refuses to accept that Muslims might have legitimate beefs with the west. For Weigel, economic factors are not relevant, colonialism and imperialism represented “a great flanking movement in response to Islamic advances into the continent of Europe ” (leading Cavanaugh to conclude that he even blames European colonialism on the Muslims), and the west is guilty of no evil. Weigel has a lot of say about the Iranian revolution of 1979, but is silent on the western overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 (prompted by oil interests) and the subsequent support for the murderous regime of Reza Pahlavi. The US lop-sided support for Israel has nothing to do with it, neither does its penchant for talking about democracy while simultaneously backing despots and cracking down on outbreaks of democracy that have the audacity to elect Islamists. Nothing to do with invasions, occupations, and torture either. No, it’s all because they love death and are indeed (I’m not making this up) the “party of death”. In Cavanaugh’s words:
“They do not hate us because of the coup in 1953; or because we used to support Saddam and the Shah; or because we currently support repressive regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Indonesia; or because UNESCO said that our sanctions against Saddam’s Iraq were causing a half-million children to die each year and Madeline Albright said it was “worth it” (she later called that “a mistake”); or because our military occupies two Muslim countries; or because we give carte blanche to Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian territory; or because of Abu Ghraib or Halliburton or Guantánamo Bay or “extraordinary rendition.” No. They hate us because they hate life. Such self-serving hogwash ironically reproduces the worldview of jihadism: the binary division of the world into good and evil, the dehumanization of the enemy, and the inability to engage in self-criticism.”
The problem is, there are important theological points that must come to the fore in any debate between Christians and Muslims. Here, Weigel thinks he is directly following Pope Benedict. But he isn’t. The pope raised the issue, very subtly, of the link between voluntarism and Islam. Catholics believe that God is reasonable, and even though the mind of God is vastly beyond our comprehension, the way we think is close enough to the way that God thinks to allow us to claim that God is an infinite and eternal intellect. Voluntarists, on the other hand, believe that God should be conceived as pure will, not pure reason and intellect, on the grounds that God transcends all human ways of thinking about Him. The pope was trying to point out some problems with voluntarism, noting that it might “lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.” This is an important theological debate, and it is important to note that there have been strains of voluntarism in Christianity just as there have Muslims who worship a God of reason. We should not forget the debt that Thomas Aquinas owes to prominent Muslim intellectuals such as Averroes and Avicenna. This is a debate we need to have, as it relates to the crucial point of compulsion in religion, and there is evidence that Islamic scholars are ready for this debate. But we need to move away from the cartoon creations of George Weigel.
As noted by Rita Ferrone, a group of 138 Muslims scholars penned an unprecedented open letter last year, entitled A Common Word between Us and You, calling for earnest dialogue with Christianity. The signatories hail from forty-two countries, and represent “a wide diversity of Islamic thought, practice, spirituality, and schools of jurisprudence.” This truly historic. And yet, despite being welcomed by the Vatican, Weigel has publicly attacked the initiative, even voicing suspicions about some of the signatories.
Ironically, while Weigel hones in on what he sees as the flawed theology of Islam, he is embracing some really bad theology himself, veering in the direction of Calvinism. I’ve talked about this many times, as it pertains to foreign policy. Basically, this manifests as an inherent dualism, whereby the world is seen as divided between the good guys and the bad guys, the saved and the damned, the virtuous and the undeserving. There is no role for grace and redempti0n, no conception of “there but for the grace of God go I”. Instead of a theology based on the unity of the human race, where dis-unity results from sin, we have a theology that widens division. There is an obsessive need to vindicated as virtuous, as otherwise the guaranteed salvation might be in jeopardy. And how else you do validate your status as one of the elect if not by scapegoating others? That is why Weigel needs to blame the Muslims for all of their problems, and let the west completely off the hook. This is atrocious theology, and not very Catholic. Plus, as Cavanaugh points out, this level of caricatured certainty is being propounded by a man who opposed the Church on the Iraq war (same theology) and turned out to be disastrously wrong. The fact that he can so blandly use a term associated with the evangelical right in the US such as “party of death” is telling.
So while Weigel claims the Vatican mantle in the debate with Islam, his theology is very different. Think of a key example. The essence of Pope Benedict’s thought is that the Enlightenment, to the extent that it ignores the law of God, can lead to moral dead ends. As Catholics therefore, we need to tread carefully in addressing modernity, taking what is good, discarding what is bad, but always remaining open to reason. But I do not see that nuance with Weigel. For him, the problem with Islam is simply that it cannot address modernity, or science, or democracy, or freedom; and where God is seen as “distant and cold-an absolute power whose requirement of obedience rules out pluralism or any division between sacred and secular”. As with the evangelical right in the United States, we have a fusion between a Calvinist foreign policy and the liberal values that emanate from the Enlightenment. In the final analysis, Weigel is closer to Christopher Hitchens than Pope Benedict.
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