Text: Armstrong, Karen.  The Battle for God.  New York: Knopf, 2000.

It doesn’t seem right that someone--anyone--could purposefully pilot a plane into the side of the World Trade Center towers, or into the U.S. Pentagon, or anywhere else for that matter.  To set out on a suicide mission, to willingly kill thousands of civilians seems unfathomable for many Americans in the wake of the tragedy of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.  Why would the suspected 19 hijackers do something like that?  The answer from many sources has been quick: religion.  More specifically, many people are blaming the Islamic religion, the religion that the hijackers are suspected to adhere to, claiming that Islam reveres its martyrs and sanctions war.  But the answer is much more complicated than this, and a look at religion and technology can help get a clearer picture of Islam and the events of September 11.

Karen Armstrong, in her book The Battle for God, claims that nearly all religions have a sect of “fundamentalists,” or what some have called “extremists,” who feel it their duty to rebel against the recent global cultural shift toward secular humanist precepts.  Christian fundamentalists have blown up abortion clinics in America; Muslim fundamentalists have committed acts of terrorism.

It wasn’t always like this.  In the premodern era, according to Armstrong, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam alike looked to past events to find inspiration for contemporary living.  The Muslims specifically clung to the “constants” of past mythology and mysticism, and a hope for an “ideal” society structured around Muslim law--law that is remarkably similar to that of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Modern American society is anything but the premodern Muslim ideal--and technology is largely to blame.  Armstrong says that the rapid technological improvements in Western culture have made ours a society that longs for provable fact and discredits the value of myth on which premodern religion was built.  The infiltration of technology has made our culture one that looks to the future for inspiration, and no longer to the past.  Premodern religion is not compatible with modern thought, values, and experience.

In many ways, religion has changed with the changing culture as a means of survival.  For example, premodern Christians celebrated the Eucharist and believed that the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ.  Modern Christians no longer cling to such a mystical thought, but rather take part in the Eucharist as a memorial act.  But the modernization of Christianity happened alongside the modernization of the West; it was a process.  The modernization of Islam has been much more difficult.

When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, Western culture was forced onto the “backward, isolated province of the Ottoman empire” (115).  To fight the French, Egypt had to modernize its military and its technology.  Over the next 40 years under the leadership of Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s entire culture was modernized, looking to the West for guidance, now, and no longer the Islamic clergy.

In order to survive in this new culture, a culture of separated church and state, Islam had to find a way to modernize itself.  Several movements were started to accommodate the new culture of technology, but some Muslims found (and still find) themselves alienated from this modern society and longing for the ideals of the premodern past.

An article in the September 24, 2001, issue of Newsweek magazine stated that modern “Islamists reject secular modernity, with its materialism, pornography and high divorce rate.”  Premodern religions are incompatible in such a society.  Muslims have attempted to create their own states and reject states which seem to be trying to destroy their ideal societies in any way.

According to Newsweek, the Koran does not condone war, but it does give license for “holy wars”--defensive strategies against enemies of the faith.  Presumably, some fundamentalists see the United States is just such an enemy--an incredibly influential and technological culture that poses a threat to Islamic societies.  And for these fundamentalists, that is a cause worth dying for.

Sources:
Armstrong, Karen.  The Battle for God.  New York: Knopf, 2000.
Woodward, Kenneth L.  “A Peaceful Faith, a Fanatic Few.”  Newsweek 24 Sept. 2001:67-68.
available at:  http://www.msnbc.com/news/629531.asp?0sp=w13b8