Benedict XVI and the redemption of jihad

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Chicago

Can jihad be redeemed? That is, can the religious sense of purpose that fuels Islamic extremism be leavened with a commitment to reason and peace, without thereby losing its sense of self? That’s the $64,000 question facing Islam, and it is for the most part one that only Muslims themselves can answer.

One could make the case, however, that if anyone in the West can help, it’s Pope Benedict XVI, despite Regensburg and all the heartache that followed – because Benedict is the lone figure of global standing in the West who speaks from within the same thought world that Muslims sympathetic to the strong religious identity of the jihadists themselves inhabit.

A detour into the recent history of Islamic thought helps make the point.

Egyptian poet and essayist Sayyid Qutb, hanged by Nasser in 1966, is known as the father of modern Islamic radicalism. Ironically, Qutb’s vision of jihad as an unrelenting conflict with the enemies of Islam was forged in part in the improbable locales of Washington, D.C., Greeley, Colorado, and Palo Alto, California, where he studied from 1948 to 1950 as part of an exchange program sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Education.

Qutb attended Wilson Teachers’ College, the Colorado State College of Education (today the University of Northern Colorado), and Stanford. Based on that experience, Qutb penned his famous tract The America I Have Seen, which has gone through innumerable printings and today can be found in cheap paperback editions in virtually every corner of the Islamic world. It still exercises a profound impact in shaping Muslim perceptions of American culture.

The work amounted to a ferocious attack upon what Qutb called “the American man,” depicted as obsessed with technology but virtually a barbarian in the realm of spirituality and human values. American society, for Qutb, was “rotten and ill” to its very core.

He wrote:

This great America: What is it worth in the scale of human values? And what does it add to the moral account of humanity? And, by the journey’s end, what will its contribution be? I fear that a balance may not exist between America’s material greatness and the quality of its people. And I fear that the wheel of life will have turned and the book of life will have closed and America will have added nothing, or next to nothing, to the account of morals that distinguishes man from object, and indeed, mankind from animals.

Qutb was not blind to the superficial attractions of America, which draw immigrants from every corner of the globe:

Imagination and dreams glimmer in this world of illusion and wonder. The hearts of men fall upon it from every valley, men from every race and color, every walk of life, and every sect and creed … America is the land of inexhaustible material resources, strength, and manpower. It is the land of huge factories, unequalled in all of civilization. … American genius in management and organization evokes wonder and admiration. America’s bounty and prosperity evoke the dreams of the Promised Land.

Yet Qutb saw that promise as false, because America’s technical virtuosity is not matched by a similar greatness of spirit:

It is the case of a people who have reached the peak of growth and elevation in the world of science and productivity, while remaining abysmally primitive in the world of the senses, feeling and behavior. A people that has not exceeded the most primordial levels of existence, and indeed, remains far below them in certain areas of feeling and behavior.

The American man’s obsession with technical power, Qutb wrote, has “narrowed his horizons, shrank his soul, limited his feelings, and decreased his place at the global feast, which is so full of patterns and colors.”

A particular zone of disgust for Qutb was what he saw as the sexual licentiousness of American culture (and this, bear in mind, was the early 1950s). He wrote that a society in which “immoral teachings and poisonous intentions are rampant” and sex is considered “outside the sphere of morality” is one in which “the humanity of man can hardly find a place to develop.” Qutb said that “providing full opportunities for the development and perfection of human characteristics requires strong safeguards for the peace and stability of the family.”

As Lebanese journalist Fawaz Gerges has noted, Qutb is no De Tocqueville. He barely scratches the surface of American culture, completely missing its underlying religiosity and failing to understand how core spiritual values such as liberty and equality form part of the bedrock of American psychology.

Yet for anyone familiar with the cultural criticism penned over the years by Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, there is nevertheless something strikingly familiar in Qutb’s critique – albeit not so much of America, as the West in general. What both men share is a conviction that the West’s scientific and technological achievements are not always matched by its spiritual and moral wisdom.

As early as his 1965 work The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence, Ratzinger warned against:

“… the reduction of man to homo faber, who does not interact with things in themselves, but only regards them as functions of his labor. With this … man’s ability to have a view for the eternal is destroyed. He is incarcerated in his world of labor, and his only hope is that future generations will be able to have more convenient conditions of labor than him, if he has sufficiently struggled to have such conditions created. A truly paltry consolation for an existence that has become miserably tight!”

In his 1990 book In the Beginning, on the doctrine of creation, Ratzinger wrote of contemporary Western society:

“The good and the moral no longer count, it seems, but only what one can do. The measure of a human being is what he can do, and not what he is, not what is good or bad. What he can do, he may do. … He does not free himself, but places himself in opposition to the truth. And that means that he is destroying himself and the world. … [The question] “What can we do?” will be false and pernicious while we refrain from asking, ‘Who are we?’ The question of being and the question of our hopes are inseparable.”

Ratzinger has even linked this critique to the question of birth control, arguing that it amounts to a mechanical solution to an ethical and cultural problem. In the 1996 book Salt of the Earth, he said: “One of our great perils [is] that we want to master the human condition with technology, that we have forgotten that there are primordial human problems that are not susceptible of technological solutions, but that demand a certain life-style and certain life decisions.”

I adduce these quotes, of course, not to suggest that Benedict is a Christian version of Qutb. Benedict is infinitely more balanced and subtle; among other things, Benedict is far more favorable in his analysis of American culture. As Cardinal Avery Dulles recently pointed out, at times Benedict sounds almost like De Tocqueville in his positive assessment of church/state relations in this country.

Yet Benedict XVI would nevertheless find in Qutb a version –in extreme and distorted form – of the same critique of the West that the pope in many ways shares.

In the end, this is the most compelling reason why Benedict’s repeated insistence that he wants a “frank and sincere” dialogue with Islam is more than lip service. Fundamentally, the clash of cultures that Benedict sees in the world today is not between Islam and the West, but between belief and unbelief – between a culture that grounds itself in God and religious belief, and a culture that lives etsi Deus non daretur, “as if God does not exist.”

In that struggle, Benedict has long said, Muslims are natural allies.

Yet Benedict is also well aware that at present, Islamic radicalism is having almost the opposite effect – discrediting religious commitment in any form by associating it with violence and fanaticism. Hence when Benedict presses Muslims to reject terrorism and to embrace religious liberty, he does so not as a xenophobe or a crusader, not as a “theo-con,” but as someone who perceives himself as a friend of Islam, pressing it to realize the best version of itself.

That, no doubt, is part of the argument he will try to make during his upcoming trip to Turkey.

If they could set aside their prejudices, at least some of the spiritual sons and daughters of Sayyid Qutb might well recognize a potential ally in Joseph Ratzinger – and therein lays perhaps the last, best hope for Muslim/Catholic dialogue under Benedict XVI.