September 11 2002: Islam and the West

September 11, 2002

As the anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington approaches, newspapers and the other mainstream media are already preparing to revisit the events of last year and to re-open the question of the relationship between Islam and the West. That question is clearly all the more pressing in the light of American plans to declare war on Iraq in order to remove Saddam Hussein and bring about a change of regime.

These plans have already occasioned extensive comment not only on both sides of the Atlantic but far beyond. Yet much of the discussion of America’s intentions – and indeed of its entire response to ‘9/11’ – appears to have been conducted in a historical vacuum.

The relevance of such questions to this website may not seem immediately apparent. It is perhaps best explained if I say that, in the days and weeks following the events of 11 September last year, a number of friends asked whether I intended to re-issue my book about the Rushdie affair in an updated version in order to take account of what was, in effect, the second act of the same historical tragedy.

I have not done so but it remains the case that the extracts from A Brief History of Blasphemy which are presented here are directly relevant to more recent history. So too is the much briefer piece, The dark mirror of Islam which I wrote some ten years ago. There is also one piece which bears even more closely on the latest clash between Islam and the West.

The long essay which I wrote in 1992, Reconsidering the Rushdie affair, though never commissioned, was originally intended to be a CounterBlast pamphlet. By the time it was completed, however, CounterBlast pamphlets had ceased to be and ever since then the manuscript has languished in a bottom drawer, almost forgotten.

This essay is, in part at least, an attempt to examine a particular aspect of the pre-history of modern secular rationalism – the emergence of the secular American state and of the distinctively American ideology of freedom and free speech. In tracing these historical developments and the fundamental ethos of American foreign policy back to its roots in Puritanism, I have tried to show that these aspects of modern secular rationalism – like practically every other – have their origins in religious ideologies to whose enduring influence we remain subject even in the midst of our sceptical twenty-first-century materialism.

It was only as I was re-reading this essay in June of this year, during the preparations for the launch of this website, that it became clear how relevant some of its observations are to our present historical predicament.

It would be very easy with hindsight to refashion these observations in order to make them relate even more closely to recent events. However the observations are in some respects more interesting precisely because they were made long before 11 September. While I have added some material on the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, I have otherwise made only minor changes to the text so that the essay is reproduced here substantially in the form that it was written some nine or ten years ago.

One interesting perspective on the same historical question is provided by historian Tristram Hunt in an article which appeared in the Observer on 1 September 1, 2002. In A Puritan on the warpath he argues that the characters both of George Bush and of Attorney General John Ashcroft are deeply rooted in American Puritanism. The story of Bush's personal redemption is, he writes, 'a true Pilgrim's Progress . . . Brilliantly, the Bush campaign projected the morality of this Puritan journey on to the American body politic.'

Hunt, however, portrays this Puritanism as an aberration from the true course of American history: 'Bush is endangering a greater legacy: the revolutionary idealism of George Washington and the enfranchising liberalism of the founding fathers, who sent the language of autonomy and self-respect around the world. A political language that secured human rights and peacefully undercut authoritarian regimes across the centuries.' This is a very different view of history, and of the relationship between Puritanism and liberalism, from the one I have presented in Reconsidering the Rushdie affair. It would be difficult to find a clearer example of how the ocean of ideology can become invisible to the fish who swim within it. What Tristram Hunt clearly has not understood is the extent to which, in American history in particular, liberalism frequently serves as the velvet glove in which the iron fist of Puritanism has successfully hidden itself.

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