Standing up to the extremists
I hear voices on my way to and from work — sometimes happy voices, sometimes sad ones. Don't worry, I'm okay — I'm addicted to books on tape and go through about two books a month during the 90 minutes I spend in the car each working day.
Lately the voices have been incredibly depressing. I'm listening to The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, a history of Al Qaida. 
Even if you think you know the story of bin Laden's rise and the Twin Towers' fall, the book remains a shocking portrait of religious fanaticism at work. Wright's book is in part intellectual history, if "intellectual" can be applied to clerics who took clear-cut prohibitions on suicide and the murder of innocents from their own holy book — and transformed them into commandments.
Wright spares no one in this clear-eyed book: not the repressive "secular" Arab regimes that both enraged and empowered the jihadists, not the U.S. intelligence agencies that did too little too late, not U.S. policymakers who failed to see the consequences of their own actions.
None of that, however, diminishes Wright's indictment of Al Qaida's insane religious vision. He quotes Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's so-called right-hand man: "If we are a nation of martyrs — as we claim — all that we need is courage of heart and the will of killers and the belief in what we claim to be love of death for Allah's sake. That is the key to our triumph and the beginning of their defeat."
And what do these religious necrophiliacs — in Gaza, Afghanistan, and Lebanon — actually want? "Their only political goal," Wright wrote last Sept. 11 in The New Yorker, "is a return to the ideals of the seventh-century Prophet and his early successors; they spout messianic slogans about the caliphate and imposing Sharia, without a clear idea of what those goals entail."
Two competing thoughts have been running through my head as I listen to Wright's book. On the one hand, I've never loved the view from my windshield as much as I have while listening to the book. As Wright ticks off the jihadists' grievances with the West and modernity, Route 46 takes on a new luster. Willowbrook Mall never looked so beautiful; Bradley Pharmaceuticals glimmers like an oasis. The choices! The freedom! The diversity! I'm Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson, overwhelmed by the coffee aisle at my Manhattan supermarket, and I'm about to swoon behind the wheel.
My other thought is about religion and the challenge the Islamists' nihilism poses to all of us involved in our synagogues and churches. It's no coincidence that the post-9/11 era has spawned a raft of militantly atheist polemics, by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, to name a few. These authors challenge the whole notion of belief in the unseeable and the unknowable. Religious extremists, they argue, are not aberrational, but the logical consequence of thought systems that allow, in Harris' piquant phrasing, "Iron Age ideas about everything high and low" to "hobble science, inflame human conflict and squander scarce resources."
I'll leave it to the theologians to argue with the New Atheists about proofs of God and whether you can be good without Him or Her. Harris offers a more subtle, and disturbing, question: To what degree are religious moderates culpable for the behavior at their religions' extremes?
Harris understands that there are religious "liberals" who are willing to profess uncertainty about articles of their faith. "The problem," he writes, "is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism." Those who harbor doubts over what they believe but love the experience of going to church or synagogue support the extremists by protecting their faith from public scorn. By demanding respect for religious belief, we deny our more extreme coreligionists "a proper collision with scientific rationality."
Unlike Harris, I believe that there is a way to be a member of a faith community while fully engaging with scientific rationality. And I think the "slippery slope" argument — that one movement's belief in the centrality of a holy text gives cover to its fundamentalists — is intellectually lazy. Moderates can and do struggle for their beliefs in the face of fundamentalists, just as physicians fight for their profession's integrity in the face of quacks.
The challenge is: How hard do religious moderates really struggle? We know the record of the Muslim world, at least outside the United States, is dismal on this count. But there is a tendency on the part of many religious centrists — including our own — to tolerate and even emulate the extremes. We admire their "authenticity." They remind us of our ancestors. We're intimidated by their knowledge of the faith and the depth of their commitment. And our own doubts leave us insecure and lead us to allow the "Right" to seize the controls in religious and social matters — or at least duck rebuke.
True religious liberals are willing to stand up to the fundamentalists, but too often conflate "liberalism" with "apathy." Their engagement with their communities is often sporadic or noncommittal —and you can't fight if you don't show up.
A Martian would be hard-pressed to read Wright's book and not conclude that religion is a scourge on humankind. But a little voice tells me it needn't be that way. It is up to those who care about tradition and scientific rationality to stand up for what they do, and don't, believe in.
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