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What We Forget About Osama
Osama Bin Laden was a religious man. This is an uncomfortable truth that is being lost in the deluge of commentary and speculation about his violent death.
The comparisons over the past few days between Osama and Hitler are facile. Yes, both were mass murderers; both were charismatic leaders. But it is a crucial difference between the two men that is propelling us into the twenty-first century.
Hitler, like Stalin, Pol Pot and the lesser genocidal figures of the twentieth century, did not believe in God. These evil geniuses were products of the materialist impulse that shaped our recent history.
Osama, however, was a devout practitioner of his faith. Westerners who met him commented upon his religious asceticism. He was willing to give up the world for belief; for the most part, except for the indulgence in wives, he did. Americans, including by the way President Obama’s counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, who see hypocrisy in Osama’s final dwelling place, that compound in Abbottabad, are missing the point.
Like Francis of Assisi, Osama Bin Laden relinquished family, fortune, bodily comforts and security for God. Even a few seconds in contemplation of convergence of impulse between these two dead men are most uncomfortable. Both leaders were extremists. What made one a saint and the other a monster?
This conundrum—and in particular our human inability to answer the question—created the United States. This is a simplification, of course. But the wind to the sails of many a perilous Atlantic crossing was our ancestors’ fervent desire to escape the real-world consequences of religious doctrine carried into the political sphere.
First the American colonies, eventually Europe—and in some aspects before both the Ottoman Empire—divorced from sectarianism. The spread of Islam through conquest, the Catholic-Protestant wars in England, Holland and France—slaughter in the name of religion, wherever it occurred—we were done with all that. A hallmark of the modern civilized world was that here we no longer persecuted other human beings over matters of faith and creed. If there were bombings in Northern Ireland, conflicts between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East and instances of religious genocide in broken states like Yugoslavia and Iraq—well, these were anomalies that the eventual internalization of Enlightenment principles would cure.
But the life of Osama Bin Laden shows that we are not done with all that, after all. A century’s worth of enclosure, in which religion slowly became a private matter, not only in the West but also in second and third world nations modernizing through secular and/or socialist governance, has ended. Across the planet, and often at cross-purposes, we are trying to create the City of God here on earth once again.
Osama Bin Laden has been the Golem of our age, stalking lives and dreams alike, minatory, a reminder of the darker consequences of the marriage of religion and society. But he was and is not alone in rejecting the practice of faith in private as a kind of purdah. In our own country, the political battles over abortion and gay marriage and school curricula are driven on the right by deeply-held religious belief. Osama’s extremist counterpart here is the abortion doctor murder, the clinic bomber, the pastor who dramatizes rejection of Muslims by burning a copy of the Koran.
Demonizing these proselytizers is a danger for us. It is the too-easy impulsive reaction to something we find distasteful, even disgusting, fearful. Why? Because the fanatics are merely the outliers at the edges of movement—the mightier groundswell that is returning tenets of faith to the public square.
Perhaps the pendulum toward secular society swung too far, and what we are experiencing is a pushback against that. Certainly, we see in both the Christian and Muslim worlds believers who feel that modernism abrades and threatens their faith.
Living one’s faith, as opposed to merely observing it through ritual, necessarily requires taking that faith public. And so we are returning to a moral and practical geography we thought we had left behind four centuries ago. Hopefully, we will relearn the old lessons, one in particular. The acts of loving God and honoring his creation are easily confused.
Post-Osama, the lesson has yet to be driven home. As any South Asia expert will tell you, Al Qaeda and the Pashtun Taliban have not had that much to do with one another in recent years. The Taliban will persevere, either by fighting on or by negotiating as a strategy to wait out American forces. In one sense, whether we go or stay in Afghanistan does not matter, because a war that is fueled even only in part by religion is one that cannot be won.
If you follow the Arab Spring on Twitter, as I do, then you know that the uprisings’ leaders, who are urban, educated, and westernized—if for no other reason than speaking languages other than Arabic—are slowly coming to grips with the fact that the majorities of their countrymen do not want new governance to be completely secular. In Syria and Lebanon (should the Syrian uprisings spill over the border) this tension takes a different form. Here secular governments keep a lid on underlying resentments and tensions among religious groups. This is why, most likely, Bashir al-Assad will hold onto power in Damascus. It is not in the interest of Syria’s Christian, Kurdish, Shia and Alawite minorities to live in a more open society that Sunnis might dominate.
Meanwhile in the United States we have not come to grips with secularism’s waning power to check the popular imagination. On the one hand, Evangelicals, who are the fastest-growing Christian congregations, believe that the war on terrorism (as John Brennan called it Monday) is at heart a religious struggle. Christianity and Islam are at war, either existentially or literally to the death. Evangelicals differ in opinion here.
In developments like demographic change—and here I’m thinking about the growth of Hispanic populations in the United States—we hesitate to talk about consequences in terms of religion. But surely the fact that most Hispanics are either Catholic or charismatic Protestant (a growing force) will profoundly change American society and politics.
All these unfoldings—in South Asia, in the Middle East, in the United States (not to mention the growing tensions in Europe)—will require the working out, once again, of the relationship between reality and vision, between human diversity and the singular revelation of divine Will that lives in the heart of every religion. We humans are multi-faceted and messy and at times inchoate in all our manifestations. We have come to recognize this reality through honoring the rights of the individual. What form will it take in future?
What the death of Osama Bin Laden dramatizes, in us, is that yearning for simplicity that I wrote about last week. The role of religion in human affairs, just like the great change taking place in the American middle class, is not easily assessed, however. It will not, by its very nature, be assigned to a slot, “its proper place,” or one corner of the public square. Religious faith cannot be walled off from the rest of life—that truth, if anything, is what this endgame for the Enlightenment teaches us.
Yesterday Jay Carney, President Obama’s press secretary, had this to say at the daily briefing in the White House. I repeat his remarks here because it is now and was before in the George Bush administration a common observation.
“Well, we have—we make no apologies about that [entering Pakistan without Pakistani permission]. He [Osama] was enemy number one for this country and killed many, many innocent civilians. And—no apologies. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be entirely respectful of Islam, which we are, or that it doesn’t change the fact the President’s very strongly held conviction and expressed conviction that this has never been about Islam, because, in fact, Osama Bin Laden represented—was a mass murderer who killed many Muslims.
“And one thing that—he was a relic of the past, in many ways. I mean, the kind of yearning for individual freedoms—the people on—that we’ve seen protest on the streets of the Arab world in these past few months represent a movement that is in the polar opposite direction that Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda wanted to take the Arab world. . . .”
Would that it were so clear.
May 4, 2011
