The following article is from Volume 26, Issue 1 of Free Inquiry
Without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk the greater the faith.
—Sören Kierkegaard
Who are these new possessed who think anything is
permitted, not because God doesn’t exist, but precisely because He exists and this existence drives them to
madness?
—Bernard-Henri Lévy
Suicide bombing is the targeted use of self-destructing human beings against noncombatants (“soft targets”), most often with the ostensible purpose of effecting geopolitical change. It is a psychological weapon, aimed not so much at a given bombing’s immediate victims but rather at the larger audience made to witness it. This deep understanding of the need to force others to witness makes the suicide bomber, by definition, a modern protagonist.
There are other levels of this modernity that bear close investigation. Why? Because to explain suicide bombings with reference to any single, overt “cause”—poverty, the Palestine question, or a reaction to Islamic eclipse—is to miss their essential nature. There are other things going on here.
Who Are They?
I feel it is naïve, perhaps even
dangerous, to think in terms of a precise “profile” of the
suicide bomber. Still, the phenomenon has been with us long enough
for certain trends to emerge.
The experience of the suicide bomber
has a coherent and rational connection to the rest of his (and,
increasingly, her) life, concerns, and values, and general sense of
how the world works. One key motivator is a profound dissatisfaction
with, and alienation from, contemporary secular society. What little
research there is (it’s tough to find subjects, since most of them
blow themselves to bits) suggests that these suicide bombers have no
appreciable psychopathology and are at least as well-off and
well-educated as the surrounding populations. The suicide bomber
tends to be older, better-educated, more widely traveled and
well-read, and more sophisticated than those populations.
Suicide bombers apparently span the
whole spread of their societies’ normal distribution in terms of
education, age, socioeconomic status, and personality type. Their
religiosity appears to be no more radical or strong than the
surrounding population (which may be an alarming fact in itself, but
that is another discussion). Bombers are generally men aged eighteen
to forty (though there was a flurry of young, female bombers at one
point). They express no socially dysfunctional attributes or suicidal
symptoms.
With suicide bombers, then, the central challenge is to decipher why educated, nonpathological individuals respond in such a way, and in such numbers. Why this act? One would expect people like that to think twice about dying. Apparently not. Or maybe they did think twice—and did it anyway. Other than the one, final horror, the final exclamation point on an otherwise ordinary life, the suicide bomber as a type appears to be completely normal. Then why?
I would argue that a large part of what
we are seeing is a deep philosophical hunger: a hunger for a simple,
Manichean worldview; a hunger for an unconditional encounter with the
real and a craving for an irrevocable decision. In some of the most
unstable parts of the world, it is, not surprisingly, the most
educated and worldly who will often feel this lack of decision, this
lack of certainty—an ache in the soul, born of a deep intolerance
of ambiguity coupled with an unquenchable hunger.
As if on cue, the unquiet ghost of
Sayyid Qutb appears on the scene to feed that hunger.
Qutb
Contrary to the simplistic view that
suicide terrorism is the tainted fruit of “Wahhabism,” I would
argue that the new, virulent strain of Islamist fundamentalism that
fuels suicide terrorism is made up not of people who are Wahhabis but
people whom I suggest we should consider calling “Qutbists.”
Intriguingly, Qutbism is not an indigenous growth. It is an exotic
hybrid, bred from the encounter of a brilliant Islamic intellectual
with some familiar, radical Western ideas. Middle East scholar Malise
Ruthven has shown that Sayyid Qutb, the most influential philosopher
of radical Islam, incorporated many elements derived from European
ideology into his thinking. For example, the idea of a revolutionary
vanguard of militant believers really has no grounding in traditional
Islamic thought. It is a “concept imported from Europe, through a
lineage that stretches back to the Jacobins, through the Bolsheviks
and latter-day Marxist guerrillas such as the Baader-Meinhof gang.”
Unpacking Ruthven’s analysis, we are
able to see the very close affinities between Qutb’s flavor of
Islamist fundamentalism and many of our old friends in the modern
existentialist pantheon. Qutb draws his ideas and inspiration not
from the Qur’an but from the main themes of thinkers such as
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and, perhaps most significantly, Kierkegaard.
Qutb’s philosophy, which is nothing less than the template for all
of current Islamist radicalism, is informed much more by the
twentieth century’s experience of the death of God than by anything
to be found in the Qur’an.
In his earlier writings, Qutb was
heavily influenced by Western individualism and existentialism. In
common with many Arab intellectuals of his era, Qutb traveled and
even lived in America, earning a master’s degree in Colorado in the
late 1940s. His personal encounter with America was somewhat less
positive than his educational encounter. It has always been an
American conceit to pretend to be shocked—shocked, mind you—that
the September 11 hijackers could have lived among us and yet still
hated us, instead of fulfilling the archetypal myth of falling in
love with America and its values. This should not be surprising when
one considers that Qutb, their philosophical master, lived in America
and found himself horrified and disgusted. America’s secularism and
freedoms, especially sexual freedom, sent him back to Egypt in a dark
mood of hatred and disgust.
Once back in the Middle East, he slowly
assembled an enormous, internally consistent philosophical
interrogation of the entire modern world. In Qutb’s view, humanity
had reached a crisis stage. Humanity had lost touch with its own
nature—which is to say, its own religious nature. Sexual relations
had deteriorated to a level lower than animalistic. Life was an
endless round of skeptical contingency, filled with anxiety, misery,
and insecurity. He was onto something here that many can recognize:
the sense that true human nature and the modern world have gotten out
of joint, indeed are at war with each other. Qutb brilliantly
articulated the disconnect felt by so many of his suicidal followers,
the pain of being thrown into a world of secular and liberal values
while dreaming of a completely different world. Qutb simply
experienced and analyzed this insight in distinctly Muslim terms. Or
did he?
I recently stumbled across a passage
from Sayyid Qutb that encapsulates his assessment of American
religion during his years in Colorado: “Nobody goes to church as
often as Americans do, yet no one is as distant as they are from the
spiritual aspect of religion.” Sound like anyone we know? Think of
Kierkegaard, critiquing the easy religiosity of his Northern European
contemporaries. I detect a strong “family resemblance” here.
The Gloomy Dane
Like Qutb, Kierkegaard felt that the
people he dealt with every day went to church a lot but had not a
clue in the world about the essence of true religiosity. While it is
true that Kierkegaard is referring to the sort of typical anemic
Northern European Lutheranism common in his day, I think we will able
to see how his views can be deployed to interpret religiosity in
general terms.
In contrast to the easy, comfortable,
“bake-sale Christianity,” Kierkegaard unmasks a God whom you
encounter, a God who confronts you. And, when you encounter this God,
he tells you things. You see, there are some things this God wants
you to do.
To Kierkegaard, religiosity is not
going to church, paying alms, making the appropriate noises and
gestures. It is not even enough to believe. One must believe and then
act on that belief. And one’s acts must be such acts that one
experiences “fear and trembling” at the enormity of what one is
about to do. “There is no room for vacillation or ambiguity of the
sort one commonly experiences elsewhere.”
This fear and trembling in the face of
the requirement to act is the hallmark of freely choosing the absurd
act. “He whose eye chances to look down into the yawning abyss
becomes dizzy . . . dread is the dizziness of freedom. In this
dizziness freedom succumbs. Further than this, psychology cannot go
and will not. That very instant, everything is changed, and when
freedom rises again, it sees that it is guilty. Between these two
instants lies the leap, which no science has explained or can
explain.”
As Kierkegaard tells us, religion, real
religion, quite simply does not make sense. It wants us to believe
that 2+2=5. Is it plausible that God actually wants me to take my son
out into the desert and bend him over a crude altar and slit his
throat? Is it plausible that God actually wants me to slam a
bomb-laden truck into a hotel, or a fuel-laden jetliner into a
skyscraper? Of course it isn’t plausible—which is why it is an
object of unshakable belief. It only looks absurd because we are
outside; we are not a part of it.
Decide. Commit. Act. Only then can the believer be said to exist. This leap is not necessarily a single act. It may be a series of acts, sliding into deeper commitment, and at no point in the step-by-step process does the person know the end result—until the moment the final decision is made.
In place of today’s limp, easy
religiosity, Kierkegaard leaps clear over the whole of Western ethics
and says, Do what God commands! “The misfortune of our age—in the
political as well as the religious sphere, and in all things—is
disobedience, unwillingness to obey . . . it is not doubt of
religious truth but insubordination against religious authority which
is the fault in our misfortune and the cause of it.”
Being a religious fanatic is, at
bottom, a choice. A choice to fix everything in one fell swoop, in
one absurd act that is embraced, not in spite of being absurd, but
precisely because it is absurd. At this point, at the moment when the
unequivocal and absurd act takes place, the feeling must be almost
one of relief. Survivors of suicide bombings have reported seeing the
bomber smile just before pushing the button. This makes perfect
sense. All ambiguities are resolved, all problems solved, and all
questions answered. No anxiety anymore. No despair anymore. No fear
anymore. Nothing left to decide.
Must Action Necessarily Follow?
Kierkegaard always talked a good game.
Brave words, a brave philosophy, from a man whose most “gutsy”
action in his entire life was breaking off his engagement. To him,
the whole thing was inward. What would this seemingly ordinary
Northern European Victorian chap have made of those who take the same
leap and act in ways that actually have consequences? Would he have
been horrified? Would he have babbled, “But, but, that’s not what
I meant!” Or would he have nodded reflectively and said, “Yes.
There it is. Right there. Now you see what I was getting at.” We
must never allow ourselves to forget that Kierkegaard considered “the
faith of Abraham” to be exemplary.
Kierkegaard felt that he was trapped in
an age of reflection and repose, lacking in frenzy. From our
perspective, looking back over the long, dreary gulf between
Kierkegaard and ourselves, we have seen quite enough examples of
where frenzy can lead.
It is true that absurd beliefs, being
easily vulnerable to rational attack, tend to generate a great deal
of passion. But is passionate faith of this sort to be sought and
admired? And why stop at Christianity? Can any person in good
conscience construct an argument protecting Kierkegaard’s absurd
faith of Abraham while simultaneously condemning the absurd faith of
the suicide bomber? After all, twentieth-century Christian martyr
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “When Jesus calls a man, he calls him to
come and die.”
If one is willing to treat
Kierkegaard’s leap of faith as an admirable thing, then one must be
prepared to come to terms with the consequences of that leap. All the
consequences.
Given Kierkegaard’s seminal influence
in the genealogy of Qutbism, the suicide bombers and all the rest
were inevitable. When we look at the suicide bomber, we are seeing
our own existential sensibility, stripped of ornamentation and boiled
down to its pure, uncut essence: freedom and the act. This forces us
to confront once again an ugly truth that the West has worked so
assiduously to ignore for too many years: religious ideas have
consequences.
Further Reading
Sören Kierkegaard, “The Point of
View,” “That Individual,” “The Concept of Death,” “On
Authority and Revelation,” and “Concluding Unscientific
Postscript” in Walter Kaufman, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky
to Sartre (New York: American Library, 1975).
Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America (London/New York: Granta Books, 2002).
Stephen Gallagher is a philosopher and writer who lives in North Carolina. He has lectured at the Southern Humanities Council, the Global Studies Association, and l’Université de Provence. He will speak at the Russian Academy of Sciences on “the death of tolerance” in June 2006.
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