Christopher Coker reviews 'Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam' by John L Esposito and 'Why Terrorism Works' by Alan M Dershowitz
Christopher Coker reviews
Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam
By John L Esposito
Oxford University Press, 2002
Why Terrorism Works
By Alan M Dershowitz
Yale University Press, 2002
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger told us that the world only becomes real to us when it breaks. As an illustration he took a glass of water. We tend to take both the glass and water for granted, until, that is, the glass breaks and we find it difficult to drink the water. It is at this point that we ask what is the essence of the glass and what is the essence of water.
Our world changed for good on 11 September 2001 when our conceptual framework was shattered: when we moved from a world of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) to one of Mutually Assured Vulnerability. Whether we are really any more insecure now than we were on 10 September is a moot point but our concept of security has provoked an intense debate about its nature both in the United States and the world. And it has provoked an equally intense debate about Islam and Islamic terrorism.
11 September also put paid to the idea that history had come to an end in 1989 with the West’s victory in the Cold War, and that ideas no longer count, that the market is everything. Without irony, Max Lerner once entitled a book Ideas are Weapons. What gives ideology its force is its passion. Truth lies in action and meaning is given to experience by a ‘transforming moment’ which is often war – or more recently, terrorism.
At the heart of the debate lie two conflicting approaches for dealing with it. One seeks to attribute blame to ourselves; the other to Islam. Both miss the point.
Alan Dershowitz’s book is a case of the former. A Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, he is a prolific author – this is his eighteenth book – and like the others it is trenchantly argued. Too trenchantly perhaps. Entitling a chapter: ‘How our European Allies made September 11 inevitable’ is not especially helpful. One could equally blame America for the World Trade Center attack by finding its origins in its unqualified support for Israel and its questionable support of the Saudi Arabian regime. And the author betrays a lawyer’s narrow focus. While he offers his readers a series of proposals to effectively reduce the frequency and severity of international terrorism he displays little interest in its causes except in five pages which begin with the injunction ‘we must commit ourselves never to try to understand or eliminate its alleged root causes’ (the italics are the author’s). What Dershowitz offers is a holistic approach that aspires to explain, once and for all, why terrorism has grown into a global phenomenon. Although persuasively written, it is tendentious in its narrow, over-legalistic focus and indifferent to the broader social concerns that give rise to terrorist acts. It displays a growing American self-absorption.
To understand is not always to forgive. In this case, it makes one better prepared to deal with terrorism as and when it manifests itself. As we face terrorists in the future we should be careful to respect them for their skills, if not their intentions. Dismissing them as criminals in the same light we would dismiss members of the mafia tends to be dangerous. For many have the courage of their convictions, however misplaced and alien to our own. We do need to understand them. We put ourselves in a better position to respond to them and to fight them in the future by taking their true measure. Making the enemy smaller than he is blinds us to the danger he presents and gives him the advantage that comes from being underestimated.
Esposito’s Unholy War is a different and more informative book. Written by a political scientist, the book is based on the years of study that Esposito has devoted to the Islamic dimension of international politics. His previous book was the much acclaimed Islamic Threat: myth or reality? In clear, unpolemical and refreshing prose he challenges many commonplace assertions that Islam is inherently prone to terror or terrorism. He does much to demolish Huntington’s thesis which gained spurious respectability (as well as a renewed lease of life) after 9/11. And he writes persuasively of other Islamic visions with which the West can engage constructively: from Anwar Ibrahim’s global convivencia (living together); Mohammad Khatami’s ‘dialogue of civilizations’ and Abdurrahman Wahid’s ‘cosmpolitan diversity’, all three of which show that Islam is not monolithic. Indeed it is important to remember that only 20 per cent of Muslims are now Arabs (native speakers of Arabic and heirs to Arabic culture). An additional sixty million Muslims live outside the Islamic world – indeed 70 per cent of all refugees are now Muslims.
There is a growing and disturbing intellectual gap in the search for a strategy to deal with terrorism between grand, all-embracing, one-dimensional approaches like those of Dershowitz and field-based observations of political scientists like Esposito. The latter give a voice to the ordinary Muslim – as victim, evil-doer and hero – and brings us to a closer understanding of political and social conflicts in the Islamic world. Left to the mercies of the holistic no-nonsense merchants, Muslim scholars should count themselves lucky that Esposito and others continue to write such well-informed studies.
Dr Christopher Coker
London School of Economics
This book review was first published in the RUSI Journal (Vol. 148, No. 1, February 2003).