The Real War
(taken without permission from ny times)
November 27, 2001
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
If 9/11 was indeed the onset of World War III, we have to
understand what this war is about. We're not fighting to
eradicate "terrorism." Terrorism is just a tool. We're
fighting to defeat an ideology: religious totalitarianism.
World War II and the cold war were fought to defeat secular
totalitarianism - Nazism and Communism - and World War III
is a battle against religious totalitarianism, a view of
the world that my faith must reign supreme and can be
affirmed and held passionately only if all others are
negated. That's bin Ladenism. But unlike Nazism, religious
totalitarianism can't be fought by armies alone. It has to
be fought in schools, mosques, churches and synagogues, and
can be defeated only with the help of imams, rabbis and
priests.
The generals we need to fight this war are people like
Rabbi David Hartman, from the Shalom Hartman Institute in
Jerusalem. What first attracted me to Rabbi Hartman when I
reported from Jerusalem was his contention that unless Jews
reinterpreted their faith in a way that embraced modernity,
without weakening religious passion, and in a way that
affirmed that God speaks multiple languages and is not
exhausted by just one faith, they would have no future in
the land of Israel. And what also impressed me was that he
knew where the battlefield was. He set up his own schools
in Israel to compete with fundamentalist Jews, Muslims and
Christians, who used their schools to preach exclusivist
religious visions.
After recently visiting the Islamic madrasa in Pakistan
where many Taliban leaders were educated, and seeing the
fundamentalist religious education the young boys there
were being given, I telephoned Rabbi Hartman and asked: How
do we battle religious totalitarianism?
He answered: "All faiths that come out of the biblical
tradition - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - have the
tendency to believe that they have the exclusive truth.
When the Taliban wiped out the Buddhist statues, that's
what they were saying. But others have said it too. The
opposite of religious totalitarianism is an ideology of
pluralism - an ideology that embraces religious diversity
and the idea that my faith can be nurtured without claiming
exclusive truth. America is the Mecca of that ideology, and
that is what bin Laden hates and that is why America had to
be destroyed."
The future of the world may well be decided by how we fight
this war. Can Islam, Christianity and Judaism know that God
speaks Arabic on Fridays, Hebrew on Saturdays and Latin on
Sundays, and that he welcomes different human beings
approaching him through their own history, out of their
language and cultural heritage? "Is single-minded
fanaticism a necessity for passion and religious survival,
or can we have a multilingual view of God - a notion that
God is not exhausted by just one religious path?" asked
Rabbi Hartman.
Many Jews and Christians have already argued that the
answer to that question is yes, and some have gone back to
their sacred texts to reinterpret their traditions to
embrace modernity and pluralism, and to create space for
secularism and alternative faiths. Others - Christian and
Jewish fundamentalists - have rejected this notion, and
that is what the battle is about within their faiths.
What is different about Islam is that while there have been
a few attempts at such a reformation, none have flowered or
found the support of a Muslim state. We patronize Islam,
and mislead ourselves, by repeating the mantra that Islam
is a faith with no serious problems accepting the secular
West, modernity and pluralism, and the only problem is a
few bin Ladens. Although there is a deep moral impulse in
Islam for justice, charity and compassion, Islam has not
developed a dominant religious philosophy that allows equal
recognition of alternative faith communities. Bin Laden
reflects the most extreme version of that exclusivity, and
he hit us in the face with it on 9/11.
Christianity and Judaism struggled with this issue for
centuries, but a similar internal struggle within Islam to
re-examine its texts and articulate a path for how one can
accept pluralism and modernity - and still be a passionate,
devout Muslim - has not surfaced in any serious way. One
hopes that now that the world spotlight has been put on
this issue, mainstream Muslims too will realize that their
future in this integrated, globalized world depends on
their ability to reinterpret their past.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/27/opinion/27FRIE.html?ex=1007878916&ei=1&en=fd327f2012cbbdb0
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