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Sermon Index

FEAR, FUNDAMENTALISM, AND FREEDOM

by the Reverend John Parker Manwell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 21st of October 2001

Reading

Karen Armstrong is an English scholar who has immersed herself deeply in Islam, Judaism and Christianity. In The Battle for God, she studies the emergence of fundamentalism in all three religions, as a response to the threat of secular modernism. Let's look at her comparison of mythos and logos, contrasting ideas that may help us to understand Islamic anxieties in today's world.

We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories were an ancient form of psychology

Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new

In the premodern world, both mythos and logos were regarded as indispensable Myth was not reasonable You were not supposed to make mythos the basis of a pragmatic policy. If you did so, the results could be disastrous, because what worked well in the inner world of the psyche was not readily applicable to the affairs of the external world

Logos had its limitations too. It could not assuage human pain or sorrow. Rational arguments could make no sense of tragedy. Logos could not answer questions about the ultimate value of human life. A scientist could make things work more efficiently but he could not explain the meaning of life

Sermon

Why do I begin with mythos and logos? Because they symbolize the difference between premodern and modern societiesand because mythos is the language of meaning. If Western culture leaves no place for it, then Islamic countries quite rightly must fear a devastating loss of cultural cohesiveness with the invasion of Western values. We in the West have had time to look for meaning in other ways, and still we struggle: Modernity disclaims any need for mythos, and yet mythos is the language of meaning.

I do not think that this is enough to explain the cold-blooded terrorism of an Osama bin Laden, but it may well contribute to the extremity of his fear for the future of Islam, in the mere presence of Western troops in the same country as the great Muslim holy places. I think it also helps us to understand the sense of vindication, which his bellicose statements and the events of September 11, have aroused across the Islamic world. Obaydullah, a 27-year-old Afgan refugee at an Islamic school or madrassa in Pakistan, favors only the voluntary spread of Islam, Yet, he still declared to a Western reporter that "Osama bin Laden is a hero (Langfitt). Obaydullah speaks for many.

We do not know whether bin Laden orchestrated the September 11 attacks. We do know that for several years he has run a network to train and sponsor terrists, called "Al Qaida." And we know that in 1998, he and four other radical Muslim leaders issued a fatwa against Americans. Citing American bases in Saudi Arabia, attacks on Iraq, and support for Jewish control of Jerusalem as amounting to a declaration of war on God, Mohammed and all Muslims, the decree declared, in the name of God, that "for every Muslim who can do it," it is a duty to kill Americans and their alliescivilians and military We ...call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it (Shane).

Chilling as it is to contemplate the murder of millions of people in the name of God, it is more so to be reminded of bin Laden's words on September 12: "The United States will not be able to achieve its goal by eliminating me, because there are hundreds of Osamas now."

If we and our children are not to live with the threat of terrorism for generations to come, we must do something about it. Our current military actions will doubtless hamper bin Laden and his movement for a time, but for every terrorist who dies in our attacks in Afghanistan, there will surely be another, probably many more, ready to take his place. We need to understand why.

I

Why, then, do they hate us so much? My clipping file is overflowing, but I especially commend to you two recent books by Karen Armstrongher study of fundamentalism in the three "religions of the book," called The Battle for God and her little volume titled simply Islam: A Short History. She was here in Baltimore this week, talking about them. Armstrong speaks of the pervasive sense of violation felt by Muslims in Islamic countries that have experienced modernism primarily through Western colonialism. It has aroused a fear of powerlessness and marginalization, and even a fear of Islamic inferiority in the face of Western culture and technology.

Modernism is a term we use for a society based on what Armstrong calls "logos"a scientific approach to knowledge, a rejection of myth-based thinking, an expectation of ongoing technological progress, and an ever-growing economy. Modernism requires a market-based, capitalist economy and places a high value on individualism, materialism, and pluralism. It assumes the individual's right to choose, whether in the marketplace of goods and services, opinion or religion. Pluralism is assumed, along with separation of religion and politics. Religion is optional.

Lest we forget, these shifts have been painful even for the West. They have brought an industrial revolution, with its massive social dislocation; exploitation of workers, including women and children: and widespread environmental damage. They have brought economic booms and busts, ever wider wars, the genocide of entire populations, fascist and communist totalitarianism, and even in modern times, pervasive urban loneliness and anomie. The shift to religious pluralism has come only after strenuous rearguard efforts to sustain orthodoxy. Even now, at the close of a century that has finally seen widespread prosperity, a taming of market cycles and the safety net of the welfare state, the globalization of economics and culture still has met intense resistance in our own Western culture. Some of us have been among the resisters.

Modernism has brought tremendous benefits, but the fostering of meaning in human life is not one of them. As the West has abandoned traditional religion, its peoples have turned in their search for meaning to secular ideologies, to nationalism, and to psychoanalysis. We also have turned to new religions, both fundamentalist and exoticand ominously, in more recent years, to virulent homegrown hate groups. All this is how modernism has come to the West.

What, then, has it been like in Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and other Muslim countries? Remember first that what has taken the West hundreds of years to achieve, Muslim nations must achieve much faster if they are ever to catch up with the West and break free of dependence. Remember, too, that their exposure to modernism has been colored by the fact that it has come to them primarily through the experience of colonization. England and France may have built modern factories in their colonies, but they were built to meet European needs. Exports were developed to serve European markets. Tariffs were lowered to let in European goodsand local industries, such as they were, could not compete. So the domestic economy came under European control. Muslims therefore may be excused if they see the whole project of modernism as a Western project, for Western benefit, which threatens their Islamic identity and independence.

The Europeans who came to oversee these countries' governments and industries arrived with a conviction of the superiority of their own cultures and the Christian religion, which they credited with the West's success. They had little respect for Islam, which they saw as primitive and feudal.

But there is much more that Islamic nations hate about Western culture than its history of colonialism, its materialism, and its assumption of superiority. They hate its individualism, its pluralism, its seeming moral laxness, and its frequent slide into nationalism. They fear that its growing emancipation of women will disrupt the fabric of their society. They feel deeply threatened by Western secularism. They see our secularism, even our liberalism, as godless. And they resent the export of Western nationalism through the imposition of national boundaries that reflect European spheres of dominationof an Arab world that seesitself as a single, indivisible "ummah," or people,

Especially in accepting pluralism, Islam has an even greater challenge than did Christianity in adapting to modernity. While Christianity lived for centuries in close linkage with the state, it was in its early centuries a persecuted minority, far from the halls of power. Islam, in contrast, has preached from the beginning its ideal of a society in which religion and politics are one. As Armstrong points out, "salvation" for Muslims does not mean redemption from sin, but the creation of a just society in which the individual could more easily make that existential surrender of his or her own being that would bring fulfillment." Thus, issues of civic policy were always close to the heart of Islam. This does not make pluralism impossible for a Muslim nation, but it has yet to be comfortably achieved in any country and will require a painful change of outlook. It may be hoped that the experience of the rapidly growing Muslim community in the United Statesnow 6 million strong and growing rapidlywill, in time, reassure traditionally Muslim societies about accepting pluralism, much as American Catholicism has led the way for the Church worldwide.

But for now, we are experiencing a perceived Western assault on the pride of Islamic peoples and the religious and social structures that give meaning to their lives. You do not need to be an Osama bin Laden to feel this assault, and resent it. It can generate a self-righteousness so great that you even deny that your fellow Muslims could have had anything to do with the attacks on September 11. Educated Muslims have been known to convince themselves that the Israelis did it, or even the CIA, in order to create a massive western backlash against Islam. Others, admitting the probable involvement of bin Laden's terrorist network, insist that Americans have brought the violence upon ourselves as a result of our attacks on Iraq and our acquiescence in Palestinian repression. Even if 6,000 innocent civilians were killed, it is beside the point, they say. War always brings casualties, and the attacks on September 11 were merely a response to a Western attack.

Sadly, no military response on our part is likely to change this blinkered perception. I believe that we are in for long period of cultural struggle, risking the same sort of escalation we have seen for 50 years in the Middle East. Our growing security fears here at home gradually will erode our treasured freedom of movement, bringing growing militarism and profound economic disruption.

II

In such a bleak scenario, where is there any hope?

Many have declared that September 11 changed the world. But if nothing changes except increased security and an ongoing war against terrorism, those who planned these attacks will congratulate themselves. They will have succeeded in drawing much more of the Muslim world to support them and thus guaranteeing continued attacks.

But we in the West face the challenge of admitting and addressing the injustices that so offend Islamic nations. This is not just about assuaging their pride. It is not about blaming ourselves for the attacks. It is about addressing some very real issues of injustice, which generate support for terrorism.

Much as I support Israel, I firmly believe that its displacement of so many Palestinians and its repression of those who remain in Israel, constitute a great and continuing injustice. Some way must be found to address it. Israel must accept some responsibility, and America as its ally must share the cost and guarantee Israel's safety, even as it also insists on justice and safety for Palestinians. It is absolutely intolerable, in anyone's scheme of justice, for the Palestinian cause to go without redress. It is time that we made an all-out effort to address it. No one would benefit more than Israel from a settlement of this issue.

Second, our blockade of Iraq needs to end. Whatever its original justification, it serves now only to excuse Saddam Hussein from responsibility for oppressing his long-suffering people. Yes, it's his decision to let them sufferbut it's in our power to end the suffering, and in the meantime, the blockade serves no purpose but vengeance.

Then, there are those American military bases in Saudi Arabia, which seem to anger Osama bin Laden much more than the suffering of either Palestinians or Iraqis. This problem is more complex. We have very real interests in the stability of the Middle East. We can blame Big Oil and Big Business all we want to, but let's face itmost of us drive cars and depend on the products of industries that need oil. It is our economic interests that these bases defend.

All the same, we need to look seriously at alternatives. Were still paying the price for our support of the Shah of Iran and his repressive rule. We also need to talk about another big "unthinkable"our reckless consumption of oil, with so little thought to conservation and energy alternatives.

I would like to think that if we could deal with the Palestinian and Iraqi issues and begin to reduce our military presence in the Middle East, we might build enough credibility to bring a broader range of Islamic leaders to the table. Our goal would be to find ways to bolster Islamic pride and to strengthen their nations economicallywhile standing up for human rights and a growing measure of democracy.

It is a tall order. Many Islamic leaders will be too fearful of modernism, and of the West, to work with us. They rightfully distrust even their own governments. Here at home, it demands a national dialogue in a time of growing fear.

I pray that in the years to come, when we look back upon September 11, we will see that something really did change, and change for the betterour willingness to address the issues of injustice that provide such a fertile breeding ground for terrorism and our willingness to accept Islam as our neighbors religion, worthy of our understanding and respect.

Amen.

SOURCES:

Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God . New York: Knopf, 2000.

-----. Islam: A Short History. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Langfitt, Frank. Pakistani schools put faith in Taliban allegiance: Afghanistan can count on many Islamic students to trust bin Laden and fight the United States. The Baltimore Sun 27 Sep 2001: 9A.

Shane, Scott. Osama bin Ladens words trace evolution of a terrorist. The Baltimore Sun 23 Sep 2001: 2A.