Faith & Terror

THE ENEMY AT HOME: THE CULTURAL LEFT AND ITS RESPONSIBILITY FOR 9/11
BY DINESH D’SOUZA
DOUBLEDAY, 333 PAGES, $26.95

CONSERVATIVES are as deeply factionalized as any other domestic ideological group. But it’s still surprising when one of our own writes a book that manages to make him not only the scourge of the Left but hardly more popular on the Right. Such a book is Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Enemy at Home,” which blames American left-liberals for provoking radical Muslims into committing the attacks of 9/11.

From folks on the Right, D’Souza has evoked responses ranging from pure hysteria (e.g. Bruce Bawer’s denounced him as a traitor) to the needlessly harsh (Victor Davis Hanson charged D’Souza with libel) to the more moderate but still disapproving (Stanley Kurtz granted that the book contains “an important kernel of truth”).

D’Souza’s point is that not only radical but also traditional Muslims resent us not for our freedom (as President Bush has argued) but rather because of “what we do with our freedom.”

As early as the Eisenhower era, a Muslim literary man turned theologian, Sayyed Qutb, foresaw America’s increasingly decadent way of life. Qutb wasn’t a terrorist, but he inspired terrorists – including the ones who crashed planes into the World Trade Center.

Qutb warned that American secular culture threatens to displace that of the Koran. What disturbed him chiefly was not exactly Americans’ irreligiousness, but the way we put religion in a box, safe from harm, to be opened only on Sunday – revered but otherwise irrelevant in daily life.

As Osama bin Laden charged in November 2002, Americans “separate religion from your politics,” resulting in a culture of “fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling,” and other vices. It was because of our temptation to compartmentalize faith, a temptation many Muslims would like to see their culture resist, that we were attacked on 9/11. This is D’Souza’s bottom line and it rings true.

While praising religion in a general way, many Americans (conservative and otherwise) indeed prefer to keep faith in a box. Even when we oppose public policies at odds with religious morality, we do so (with some exceptions) on secular grounds. Try to imagine a mainstream Republican officeholder or conservative journalist arguing against gay marriage because the Bible forbids it.

The Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (no conservative himself) applied a famous phrase to this: “Nonoverlapping Magisteria.” To Gould, religion and science – that is, religion and reality – occupy totally separate realms. So religion is most appropriately respected, Gould thought, when it is not allowed to become sullied by casting a shadow on real-life debates about evolution, politics or anything practical.

This remains the perspective among many of our own conservative intellectuals. It was not Qutb’s perspective, nor is it D’Souza’s.

If D’Souza’s book got slammed by his colleagues on the Right, it should come as no shock.

David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. His forthcoming book is “Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore the 10 Commandments at Our Peril.”