Originally appeared September 19, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.
THE SEPTEMBER 11 attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., constitute, and were clearly intended as, very serious assaults against international capitalism and free trade, U.S. economic influence, U.S. military power and the whole of America as a symbol of whatever it symbolizes to the perpetrators.
And what does the U.S. symbolize to the fundamentalist Muslims who are the chief suspects in the attacks? Secularism, rationalism, humanism, individualism, personal rights, capitalism. In short: modernity - modern society in all its aspects.
Capitalism? Especially capitalism. A friend sent me part of Iran's Tehran Times Sept. 12 story about the attacks which begins: "Yesterday the United States of America woke up to living terror when the landmarks of the capit alist world were rocked by a series of huge explosions."
If we want to better understand conservative Islam and the attitudes of many Arab Muslims toward the modern Western world, we cannot do better than turn to the useful guidebook, Seyyed Hossein Nasr's "Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World" (Chicago, 1994).
Describing the moral decay of modern Western society which young Muslims must resist and oppose, Nasr explains that the modern world is rooted in a "false view of man and of his society."
That false view includes "individualism, humanism, rationalism, ... rebellion against authority, ... the atomization of the family and the reduction of society to simply the quantitative sum of atomized individuals" - i.e., individualism (p. 245).
And Nasr denounces "Western capitalism and democracy" among the "various ideologies" with which modern society has been indoctrinated (p. 212).
Should anyone have doubts, Nasr regards homosexuality and all proposals for legal and social equality for gay and lesbians as key aspects of this modern, false view of society.
"Moreover, the new styles of living ... demonstrate the disintegration of (Western) society. ... To an even greater extent especially in big cities ... various forms of homosexuality have become more and more prevalent during the last generation" (p. 230-1).
"Even the meaning of the family ... is under severe attack." ... "There are now even those who attempt to break the traditional meaning of marriage as being between the opposite sexes and try to give a new meaning to marriage as being any bond between two human beings even of the same sex as long as they want to live together" (p. 201)
These are not the words of some fanatical Taliban leader in Afghanistan. They are by Prof. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University.
Just as the conservative Muslim worldview replicates Soviet Communism's hostility to Western individualism, personal autonomy, civil liberties, capitalism, economic freedom, sexual and artistic freedom, so it also finds a parallel in the conservative Christian opposition to secularism, individualism, personal autonomy, civil liberties, gender equality, sexual and artistic freedom.
As evidence, we need only recall Rev. Jerry Falwell's now notorious comments on Pat Robertson's "700 Club" in which he blamed the Sept. 11 attacks in part on feminists, secularists, civil liberties advocates, and homosexuals, saying they helped it happen.
Or, as the Christian fundamentalist Family Research Council said in its own denunciation of individualism and personal autonomy following the attacks, "Americans need that strength that comes from placing God first, others second, and self last. Let there be an end to the idolatry of self."
In short, the group is more important than the individual. And most important of all is making the individual subservient to religious authorities who claim to speak for their gods.
Whatever military response the U.S. government decides to make, it will necessarily be inadequate. What is needed is a new "culture war" - or if "war" is the wrong metaphor, then a new cultural advocacy effort.
Modernity has powerful influence, but it does not explain itself well, does not offer its own articulation and justification. We who approve of Modernity and benefit from it - as gays and lesbians have found liberation in modern individualism - must make a much more persuasive case for the value of Modernity than we have so far.
Modernity with its individualism, capitalism, rationality and undermining of religious dominance has more or less invaded an Arabic Muslim culture which is literally in its 1400s, and no doubt feels strange, foreign, threatening, rather as if the same institutions had suddenly appeared in Europe in the 1400s.
Muslim countries have had no Machiavelli or Hobbes or Spinoza to question religion and its texts, no Locke to defend self-ownership and individual rights, no Adam Smith to explain the value of economic freedom and its necessity for prosperity, no John Stuart Mill to defend free speech and discussion, no Karl Popper or Friedrich Hayek to explain why a free and open society has social value for everyone.
This cultural advocacy necessarily includes assisting Islamic religious figures who find a way to make peace with Modernity, promoting greater economic development so people in the Arab world benefit directly from it rather than from graft or government largess, and seeking ways to generate and sustain an Islamic version of the western Humanist Renaissance and Enlightenment they have never yet had.