When discussing holy war, religion cannot be ignored

Terror in the Name of God

Why Religious Militants Kill

Jessica Stern

Ecco: 368 pp., $27.95

*

A whirlwind of energy is roaring out of the Islamic world and bearing down on the West. Here it is called “terrorism” or “fundamentalism,” and the question of the day is what can be done to stop it. It is analyzed in universities and think tanks; it is examined in books; it is argued on newspaper editorial and opinion pages and on television shows. The United States has undertaken a couple of wars against it.

Yet for all the furious examination of this phenomenon, little light is cast on what is actually happening. It is argued that the Muslim world is aggrieved by the West’s superiority in the advance to modernity. It is said that centuries of humiliation have filled Muslims with feelings of despair and rage. It is put forth that Muslims understand all too well that free-trade and globalization are merely the cover for America’s drive to world domination, power and wealth.

Too little of the current comment focuses on the obvious -- that the great struggle now underway is just what militant Islamists say it is, a religious battle for the soul of the world. Throughout history the converting religions -- chiefly Christianity and Islam -- have not been shy about proclaiming their missions. Asserting that they have absolute knowledge of the ultimate truth, they have claimed the right, indeed the God-given duty, to force others to comply, upon pain of death.

In “Terror in the Name of God,” Jessica Stern, a writer and lecturer at various universities, comes in her examination of contemporary “terrorism” to the evidently reluctant conclusion that religion must be a big part of it. Rather artlessly she tells the reader that as a secular Jew she had, when she began her work on terrorism, “a prejudice in favor of religion.” “It seemed to me that faith made people better -- more generous, more capable of love.” She explains that she reached this conclusion on the basis of reading in high school about the French mystic Simone Weil and knowing a nun who was a friend of her own grandmother.

Stern candidly if uneasily explains how meeting with Christian, Jewish and Muslim religious zealots led her to look if only from the surface at the deeper currents of the control that religion can seize over human life. She was at first disconcerted by a much-praying Christian ex-con who had been a leader of a violent apocalyptic cult in the American South. Next she encountered ardent Jews burning to build the Third Temple, then, in their multifarious complexity, Muslim militants in Central and South Asia.

She discovered there was more to 21st century religious violence than mere resentment or victimization or even -- and she mentions this -- threatened masculinity. Stern seems to be acknowledging that in her modernist, rationalist quest for understanding of a sociological phenomenon she stumbled over a deeper, darker and more persistent strain in human attitude and action.

This does not deter her from offering suggestions on how the West can deal with militant Islam. Human life, she says, is too mysterious to employ the popular term “root causes” to the current crisis; she prefers as more accurate the vaguer phrase “risk factors,” such as the notions of alienation in the Muslim world, powerlessness, underdevelopment, corrupt Muslim rulers.

Stern would have the United States be more restrained in dealing with other societies, less hypocritical on free trade, less insistent that other nations should exactly follow the American pattern of democracy. She also argues that the United States needs to mount an intensive propaganda campaign on its own behalf. However, these commonplace prescriptions for action are less interesting, or even useful, than Stern’s personal discovery of the awesome power of the religious wind that is blowing strongly and steadily from East to West.