The
philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed that Judaism was not a
religion, but a mere body of laws. Secular Jews would
agree with him. Some secularized Muslims say the same
about Islam, for
example Ali Sina of www.faithfreedom.org. Sina
writes: "Islam is not a religion. Considering Islam a
religion is a foolish mistake that could cost millions
of lives. Islam is a political movement set to conquer
the world. It is the Borg of the non-fictional world.
Islam has one goal and one goal alone: to assimilate or
to destroy."
In an emotionally charged
atmosphere, precise thinking is needed. Kant was wrong,
but wrong in a way that helps clarify the problem. Ali
Sina and other Muslim secularizers are just as wrong. I
shall argue that Islam is both a religion and a
political ideology. Religion is what makes Islamic
political ideology so dangerous.
"Judaism is
really not a religion at all," wrote Kant in 1793 (in
Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone), "but
merely a union of a number of people who formed
themselves into a commonwealth under purely political
laws, and not into a church." Specifically, "since no
religion can be conceived of which involves no belief in
a future life, Judaism, which, when taken in its purity
is seen to lack this belief, is not a religious faith at
all".
In a certain sense Kant is right. Although
Rabbinical Judaism speaks of a "world to come", it lacks
the central status to which Christianity assigns the
afterlife. Judaism seeks to transport eternity into a
sacred ordering of everyday life and deprecates the
unknown future past the grave. The 18th-century Hassid
Levy Isaac of Berdichev wrote of a dream in which he
ascended to heaven and saw the authors of the Jewish
Talmud surrounded by books in a library. Levy Isaac
complained that this was no different from what he saw
on Earth. "You are wrong, Levi Isaac," replied an
angelic voice; "the sages are not Heaven; rather, Heaven
is in the sages."
From a Christian standpoint,
that may not seem like much of a religion at all.
Judaism and Christianity, though, set out to address the
same problem - the inevitability of death - in different
ways that reflect the different circumstances of Gentile
and Jew. Christianity offers the Gentile tribes a life
beyond their ineluctable extinction on Earth. The
afterlife stands at the center of its promise. As I
wrote on a prior occasion (Does Islam have a
prayer? May 18):
The Jew is confident in his portion of
immortality because he believes the Jews to be an
eternal people. Because the Sabbath is a foretaste of
the world to come, the observant Jew revels in
devotion from Friday evening prayers at synagogue
until the concluding ceremony at the next day's dusk.
Sin is death; confident in their eternal life, the
Jews do not sense the waiting sting of death, that is,
what the Christians call original sin, as I have
argued elsewhere. The redemption of the Christians
lies in the future, when Jesus shall return and
establish His Kingdom on Earth; of this blessed event
the individual Christian can obtain no more than the
briefest glance in the form of the Lord's Supper.
Jewish redemption consists simply of being Jewish, and
the Jew already spends the seventh day in the World to
Come.
All religion, Franz Rosenzweig argued,
responds to man's anxiety in the face of death
(against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his
fingers in his ears and shouting, "I can't hear
you!"). The pagans of old faced death with the
confidence that their race would continue. But tribes
and nations anticipate their own extinction just as
individuals anticipate their own death, he added: "The
love of the nations for their own nationhood is sweet
and pregnant with the presentiment of death." Each
nation, he wrote, knows that some day other peoples
will occupy their lands, and their language and
culture will be interred in dusty books.
The
early Christian Church encountered a great extinction
of peoples and their cultures through the rise and
fall of the Alexandrine and Roman empires ... As
nations faced extinction, individuals within these
nations came face to face with their own mortality.
Christianity offered an answer: the Church called
individuals out of the nations and offered them
salvation in the form of a life beyond the grave. The
Gentiles (as the Church called them) embraced original
sin, which to them simply meant the sin of having been
born Gentile, that is, to a culture doomed to
extinction. (The Jews, who think of themselves as an
eternal people, were having none of
it.)
Kant mistook the Jews' lack of interest
in the afterlife for absence of religious feeling. But
just what do we mean by "religion"? Communism can be
thought of as a religion (Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler,
Ignazio Silone and other ex-communists called it "the
God that failed"). In communism, History takes the place
of God; dialectical materialism assumes the role of
theology, and so forth. But "History" (like Destiny) is
no god; a "god" who is everywhere present but nowhere to
be addressed in person really is no god at all. Critics
of Islam argue that Allah is no more a personal god than
"History" in Marxist ideology, but simply a
personification of Destiny (see Oil on the flames of
civilizational war, December 2, 2003). That
is beside the point. We require a working definition of
religion before making further sense of the issue.
Religion offers the individual a way of
transcending death by separating the holy, or eternal,
from the profane, or transitory. It presupposes not
merely an eternal plane of being exalted above mere
creation, but also some means by which mortals may
participate in this higher being through revelation and
grace, and some procedure by which they may obtain
grace, that is, ritual and prayer.
In Islam,
this procedure is jihad.
Conventional theology
stumbles by restricting the question to the biological
death of the individual. Rosenzweig opened a more fecund
line of inquiry by considering the death of a people and
its culture, as I noted above. Sin is death; the
inevitable death of each people and the extinction of
its culture is "original sin", to which Christianity
responds by calling the Gentiles out of their nations
into a "New Israel". In its European variant, of course,
Christianity permits the Gentile tribes to bring a great
deal of their baggage with them into the "New Israel".
That, I have argued in the past, has been its tragedy
(No one expects the
Spanish Inquisition, June 22). The old
Israel, by contrast, needs only to make sacred its own
presumably eternal life. Kant and the secular Jews are
wrong: Judaism is a religion parallel to Christianity.
The sine qua non of religion is to enable the
individual to transcend death or, to be more precise,
the inevitable death of each traditional culture.
Christianity liquidates traditional cultures into the
ecclesia, the assembly of the New Israel called out from
among the nations. American Christians left the baggage
of their Gentile background on the dock before taking
ship to the New World, and for that reason feel the
greatest affinity to the Old Israel (Mahathir is right:
Jews do rule the world, October 28, 2003).
Islam, by contrast, seeks to prolong the life of
traditional society indefinitely, by extending it
through conquest. I refer here to mainstream Islam,
ignoring marginal currents such as Sufism. We find in
the practice of mainstream Islam hoary roots in
traditional society, in strange juxtaposition with the
most aggressive sort of universalism. For traditional
Muslims, religion cannot be separated from the most
trivial requirements of everyday life, I showed in the
case of the teachings of Iraq's Ayatollah al-Sistani (Why Islam baffles
America, April 16).
Traditional
society is the locus of the vast majority of the world's
billion Muslims. Global communications and the social
freedoms embodied in the US system threaten the
existence of these societies. For most of the world's
Muslims the United States is a menace, not a promise,
threatening to dissolve the ties that bind child to
parent, wife to husband, tribesman to chief, subject to
ruler. Traditional society will not go mutely to its
doom and join the Great Extinction of the Peoples,
blotting out ancient cultures and destroying the memory
of today's generation. It will not permit the hundreds
of millions of Muslims on the threshold of adulthood to
pass into the world of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and
lose the memory of their ancestors. On the contrary: it
will turn the tables upon the corrupt metropolis, and in
turn launch a war of conquest against it.
Jihad,
that is, conquest and forcible conversion of the
Dar-al-Harb (the realm of war), is the quintessence of
Islamic prayer, I wrote some time ago (Does Islam have a
prayer?, May 18):
Islam acknowledges no ethnicity (whether
or not one believes that it favors Arabs). The Muslim
submits - to what particular people? Not the old
Israel of the Jews, nor the "New Israel" of the
Christians, but to precisely what? Pagans fight for
their own group's survival and care not at all whom
their neighbor worships. A universalized paganism is a
contradiction in terms; it could only exist by
externalizing the defensive posture of the pagan, that
is, as a conquering movement that marches across the
world crushing out the pagan practices of the nations
and subjugating them to a single discipline. If the
individual Muslim does not submit to traditional
society as it surrounds him in its present
circumstances, he submits to the expansionist
movement.
Ali Sina is wrong: Islamic
expansionism arises from religious motives, that is, a
holy rage against the encroachment of death upon
traditional society. In the form of Islam, the West
confronts a challenge quite different from communism.
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example Ali Sina of 
