Doug
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Response to Hitchens' lampoon of MESSAGES TO THE WORLD: THE STATEMENTS OF OSAMA BIN LADEN (Verso, 2006)
Max Weber, perhaps the foremost student of comparative religions, once described himself as "religiously amusical". He admitted a fascination with the social processes that informed religious institutions and regimes but he didn't get what it was all about, this God talk, as well as the beliefs, rituals and actions that followed from it.
Christopher Hitchens is at least as religiously amusical as Weber, but Hitchens is less honest than Weber about the deficit in his outlook, as also his analysis, that this handicap produces. In savaging my edition of the public pronouncements of Osama bin Laden, Hitchens hones on the difference between 'radical' and 'reactionary'. 'Radical' is what I call bin Laden but, argues Hitchens, as any commonsensical – and also conservative – observer, knows bin Laden is not a radical but a reactionary. And my great problem, according to Hitchens, is to be secretly supporting those reactionary religious forces that are intent on destroying Western civilization. I have this problem because I am residually religious. Not just a liberal, in Hitchens' reckoning, I am also a leftist, one who, along with other leftists, 'in some ignorant and subliminal way identify bin Laden with the third world and anti-colonialist politics of, say, Frantz Fanon."
Alas, Bernard Lewis, who is neither religious nor liberal nor leftist, and not characteristically paired with Frantz Fanon, uses the same vocabulary as I in describing bin Laden and al-Qa'ida. "There are several forms of Islamic extremism current at the present time," writes Lewis in THE CRISIS OF ISLAM (2003). "The best known are the subversive radicalism of Al-Qa'ida and other groups that resemble it all over the Muslim world; the preemptive fundamentalism of the Saudi establishment; and the institutionalized revolution of the Iranian hierarchy."
Hitchens' major grievance with me, other than my dubious credentials, is my inclusion of several observations on bin Laden's character made by Michael Scheuer, former head of the bin Laden desk at the CIA. Again, it is not just Scheuer but his organization that is to be faulted. "Like many people from that singularly incompetent and venal organization (is this the old lefty speaking through the voice of the neocon convert?), "declaims Hitchens, "Scheuer is unteachable and unstoppable."
Perhaps in a moment of inadvertent self-reflection Hitchens is projecting himself as the one who is truly unteachable and unstoppable. After all, Hitchens chooses to neglect the major sections of my Introduction to the statements of bin Laden where I critique the Al-Qa'ida leader. I call his dream of defeating what he terms 'the Zionist Crusader alliance" illusory. Bin Laden wants to transfer the 'success' in Afghanistan to a larger theatre of conflict. To quote myself in one of the several passages Hitchens overlooked, "Like many revolutionaries – the Russians after 1917, the Cubans after 1959 – bin Laden and his associates ignored the special conditions that had given them victory in one society, imagining it could be reproduced with the same tactics in other societies."
And it is not just bin Laden's tactical miscalculations that I lay bare, I also fault the nature of his religious vision. In another book – ironically one that appears from Atlantic Books in the same series as Hitchens' manifesto on Tom Paine – I demonstrate how bin Laden deliberately misreads the Qur'an. (THE QUR'AN – A BIOGRAPHY, 2006). In the Introduction to bin Laden's messages, I further decry his lack of social vision. "In place of the social, there is a hypertrophy of the sacrificial. Bin Laden's messages rarely hold out radiant visions of final triumph…. It is a narrow and self-limiting vision: it can have little appeal for the great mass of believers, who need more than scriptural dictates, poetic transports, or binary prescriptions to chart their everyday lives, whether as individuals or as collective members of a community, local or national."
Hitchens, it seems, resembles bin Laden in settling for binary prescriptions instead of charting, as does Max Weber, the complexities of social phenomena where labels such as 'reactionary' and 'radical' do not substitute for close scrutiny and productive analysis. Logically Hitchens, in trying to be a wordsmith polemicist like William Safire, falls into the fallacy so well described by the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Those obsessed with singularity, or logical perfection – such as claiming what is religious cannot be secular, and what is secular must always oppose what is religious – "have at least one thing in common" observes Berlin: "they clearly favor one type of proposition or statement before all others; they treat it as possessing a virtue which other types conspicuously lack; it seems to them untouched by the problems and difficulties which afflict other modes of expression which are represented as being defective or likely to lead to paradoxes from which the model propositions are commendably free."
I prefer Berlin's ironic complexity to Hitchens' polemic simplicity. I also hope that many readers of FREE INQUIRY will hesitate before acceding to Hitchens' final plea in his supine and superficial lampoon of my Introduction to bin Laden's messages. What is Hitchens' fervent hope at the end of this diatribe? "I hope," he writes, "that my fellow secularists will join me in helping to combat this stupid and wicked mentality wherever it is found." The evil, of course, is critical thinking, itself the basis for free inquiry, whether religious or secular in motivation. It is difficult to hear alternate octaves when you are tone deaf.