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The Kurdish Case Against
Islamism
By: Sabah
Salih
9 June 2007
One reason why religion, one
of humanity’s most enduring but futile creations, continues to have a role in
human life is because most human beings cannot live without a consoling
illusion, something religion is all too happy to provide.
Perhaps it was this that Karl
Marx had this in mind when he described religion as “the heart of a heartless
world.” Marx knew that religion is like the unconscious, or what Slavoj Zizek
calls “the poor man’s ideology”: a simplistic but comprehensive response to the
cruelties and mysteries of a world ruled by the twin forces of evolutionary
necessity and economic competition. Indeed, for many, since reason alone cannot
explain everything we humans believe in and care about and since many cannot do
without consoling and metaphysical reassuring, turning to religion becomes their
only way out.
My late Muslim aunt, at a
point in her life when she had become the embodiment of what Yeats described as
“a tattered coat upon a stick,” once told me over a simple dinner of yogurt and
bread, “Prayer is the only thing that keeps me going.” At this personal level
religion is no one’s enemy, and it is in nobody’s interest to pick a fight with
it. What this case shows is that many people are just too frail, intellectually
and otherwise, to let go of faith. My great grandfather, I’m told, by day led
the faithful in Muslim prayer; by night he was a jovial drunk. He was obviously
too smart to see any contradiction in this.
Religion, however, as
Christopher Hitchens warns in his illuminating new book (god Is Not Great:
How Religion Poisons Everything), can easily become “the incubator” of
totalitarianism. This is because a fair amount of foolishness and muddle and
gross simplifications and contradictions and dogma and neurosis and manipulative
language is built into every religion, and once this is allowed to play a role
in shaping a society’s political and cultural institutions, religion begins to
alter a people’s view of themselves, their history, their culture, and the world
around them, so much so that the most horrific crimes can then be justified in
its name and the most obvious efforts at ideological manipulation can go
unnoticed.
In the case of Islam, this is
the juncture when Islam ceases to be a simple matter of faith or conscience and
becomes instead an ideological aggressor trying to usurp political power as a
first step; its ultimate goal is to remake and control society from the bottom
up. This Arab creed which promises to be something like a blue print for how to
think, how to live, how to govern is otherwise known as Islamism, or what Salman
Rushdie has aptly described as “totalized explanations.” This is the juncture
when crackpots like Al-Jazeera’s Qarradawi and Kufa city’s Muqttada Sadr begin
to dominate, poisoning the public sphere with one absurdity after another. This
is when language ceases to pose questions. This is when religion is offered as
the only option. This is when, as Terry Eagleton writes in a similar context, a
“full-blooded metaphysical onslaught” against society gets into high gear.
Indeed, as the Kurdish
experience shows, Islamism is not interested in limitations; it is a colonizing
force. The land, the people, the culture, state power, national ideology: it
wants to colonize it all. It wants to rewrite a people’s history and change
their way of life, or as V. S. Naipaul puts it, it wants to make the non-Arab
part of the Arab story. There is nothing universal about its so-called
universalism: if anything, it is a thinly disguised effort to promote Arabic
language, Arab culture, and Arab history and rob nations of their memory and
their holy places and replacing them with Arab holy places.
Dr. Sabah Salih is
professor of English at Bloomsburg University.
