Unholy Wars

Seyla Benhabib

I
It has become clear since September 11 that we are faced with a new form of strug-
gle that threatens to dissolve the boundaries of the political in liberal demo-cracies.
The terror network of Osama bin Laden, and its various branches in Egypt,
Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Algeria, and among Islamist groups
in western Europe, is wider, more entrenched, and more sophisticated than it was
believed to be. The attacks unleashed by these groups (and their potential sympa-
thizers in the US and Europe among neo-Nazis and white supremacists), especially
the use of the biological weapon anthrax to contaminate the civilian population via
the mail, indicate a new political and military phenomenon which challenges the
framework of state-centric politics.
Historians always warn us that the unprecedented will turn out to have some
forerunners somewhere and that what seems new today will appear old when
considered against the background of some longer time span. Nevertheless to “think
the new” in politics is the vocation of the intellectual. This is a task at which Susan
Sontag, Fred Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek have failed us by interpreting these events
along the tired paradigm of an anti-imperialist struggle by the “wretched of the
earth.”1 Neglecting the internal dynamics and struggles within the Islamic world
and the history of regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Kashmir,
these analyses assure us that we can continue to grasp the world through our usual
categories, and that by blaming the policies and actions of western governments one
can purge oneself of the enmity and hatred which is directed toward one as a
member of such western societies. These analyses help us neither to grasp the
unprecedented nature of the events unfolding since September 11, 2001 nor to
appreciate the internal dynamics within the Arab-Muslim world which have given
rise to them.
The line between military and civilian targets, between military and civilian
populations, had already been erased during the aerial bombings of World War II.
This is not what is new since September 11. Faced with the total mobilization of
society, initiated by fascism and National Socialism, it was the democracies of the
world, and not some marginal terrorist group hiding in the mountains of
Afghanistan, that first crossed that line and initiated “total war.” The civilian popu-
lation at large became the hostage of the enemy, as during the bombing of London
by the Nazis and then of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki by the Allies.
In the 1950s, the Algerian War marked a new variation in this process of the

Constellations Volume 9, No 1, 2002. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
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 Unholy Wars: Seyla Benhabib 35

erasure of the line between the front and the home, the soldier and the civilian. The
Algerian Resistance against the French aimed at destroying the normalcy of every-
day life for the civilians of the occupying population. By blowing up the French
residents of Algeria in cafes, markets, and stations, the Resistance not only
reminded them that they were the enemy but that there could be no “normal life”
under conditions of colonial occupation. Since that time, this kind of terror – which
fights against the superior military and technical weapons of a mightier enemy by
tearing apart the fabric of everyday life through interrupting normal routines, and
by rendering every bus or railroad station, each street corner or gathering place, a
potential target – has become one of the favorite “weapons of the weak.” The strat-
egy of this kind of struggle is to make life so unlivable for the enemy civilians that
they concede defeat even if they enjoy superior military power. The Palestinian
Intifada at least in part follows the Algerian model: by creating conditions of contin-
uous fear, insecurity, and violence in the land of Palestine, it aims at destroying the
resolve of the Israeli civilian population to continue a normal life.2 In recent years,
however, infiltrators from Islamist groups like the Hamas and the Hizbollah into the
ranks of the Palestinians, and the widespread practice of “suicide bombings,” are
changing the nature of the Intifada as well.
The bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is unlike both the total
war waged in the struggle against fascism and the terrorism against the occupier
initiated by the Algerians. These new attacks, perpetrated against a civilian popula-
tion in its own land and against a country in no state of declared hostility with the
attackers, not only defy all categories of international law but reduce politics to
apocalyptic symbols. Until Osama bin Laden released his terse video celebrating
September 11, his deed had no political name: in whose name or for whom was his
group acting? What political demands was it voicing? The brief references to the
stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia, to US sanctions against Iraq, and to US
support of Israel were shrouded in the language of “jihad” (holy war) and obfus-
cated by allusions to the lost glory of Islam in the thirteenth century through the loss
of “al Andalus” (Spain) to the Christians. While it is conceivable that Palestinian
terror could end one day if Israel withdrew from the occupied West Bank, released
Palestinian prisoners of war, found a settlement for the refugees, and somehow
resolved the question of Jerusalem, it is unclear, what, if anything, could end the
“jihad” of the Osama bin Laden network against the US and its allies. Theirs is a
war of “holy” vengeance, a war designed to humiliate the mighty “Satan” in New
York and Washington by turning the weapons of the most developed technology
against the society which created them.
The result is a sublime combination of high tech wizardry and moral and politi-
cal atavism, which some have named “jihad online.” But this unholy politics threat-
ens to undo the moral and political distinctions that ought to govern our lives,
distinctions between enemy, friend, and bystander; guilt, complicity, and responsi-
bility; conflict, combat, and war. We have to live by them even if others do not.
One of the most commonly heard contentions in the aftermath of September 11

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was that even if the terrorist attacks upon the World Trade Center and Washington
equaled war in the civilian and property damage they inflicted, the deliberateness
and precision with which they were executed, and the brazenness with which they
violated customary moral, legal, and international norms, the US Congress could
not actually declare “war,” not because the enemy was as yet unknown, but because
a state can declare war only against another state. The idea that a democratic nation-
state would declare war upon a global network of loosely organized sympathizers
of a religious-cum-civilizational cause strained all categories of international law
with which the world has lived since 1945 and in which nation-states are the prin-
cipal recognized actors. For this reason, the current military action in Afghanistan
has not been preceded by a declaration of war; rather the Congress has authorized
the president to do whatever is necessary to fight the global terror network and to
bring the perpetrators to justice, but declared war neither on the Taliban (whom
most nations do not recognize as a legitimate regime) nor on the Afghani people. It
is as if the territory, the terrain of Afghanistan, is our enemy, in that this terrain
offers a sanctuary and an operational base for one of the great fugitives of our time
– Osama bin Laden. Ironically, the people of Afghanistan have themselves fallen
“captive” or “prisoner” to one who operates on their territory, and to whom the
Taliban had granted refuge. Afghanistan is a decaying or failed nation-state, and this
very condition of decay permits us to understand all the more vividly the principles
of national sovereignty which have governed international relations since the
Second World War.
Recall here Max Weber’s classically modernist definition of the state as “the
legitimate monopoly over the use of violence within a recognized and bounded
territory.”3 Modern statehood is based upon the coupling together of the principles
of territoriality, administrative and military monopoly, including the use of
violence, and the legitimacy to do so. When states decay, dissolve, or secede, these
three principles fall asunder. Their territory can become a staging ground for oper-
ations not only of guerilla warfare, but of drug smuggling, weapons production,
contraband, and other illegal activities; administrative and military competence is
overtaken by units at the sub-state level such as warlords, commandos, traditional
chieftains, or religious leaders; and legitimacy loses its representational quality in
that there is no longer a unified people to whose will it either refers or defers – legit-
imacy either flows from the barrel of a gun or from other sources of supra- and sub-
national ideological worldviews, be these race-, religion-, or civilization-based.
The decaying and weak nation-states of the contemporary world bear similarities
as well as differences with the totalitarian regimes of the mid-twentieth century. The
breakdown of the rule of law, the destruction of representative and democratic insti-
tutions, the pervasiveness of violence, and the universalization of fear are features
of both state-forms. Although at times they mobilized “the movement” against the
state bureaucracy, the totalitarian regimes of the mid-twentieth century by and large
strengthened and rebuilt the state by rendering it subservient to their ideologies. But
the postmodern/quasi-feudal states of the present, like Afghanistan, Chechnya,

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 Unholy Wars: Seyla Benhabib 37

Bosnia, and Rwanda, emerge as a result not of the strengthening but of the destruc-
tion of the territorial and administrative unity of the state in the name of subunities,
which are then globally networked. As Hannah Arendt has shown us, totalitarian
movements also had globalizing ambitions in that they touted supranational ideolo-
gies like pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism.4 Yet the global ideologies of today’s
terror movements are both larger and smaller in range: instead of the ideology of
linguistic or cultural unity among the Slavic or Germanic nations, for example,
today we are dealing with ideologies aimed at tribes, ethnicities, or a vision of a
community of believers that transcends them all – namely the Islamic umma of the
faithful. The new unit of totalitarianism is the terrorist cell, not the party or the
movement; the goal of this new form of war is not just the destruction of the enemy
but the extinction of a way of life. The emergence of non-state agents capable of
waging destruction at a level hitherto thought to be only the province of states and
the emergence of a supranational ideological vision with an undefinable moral and
political content, which can hardly be satisfied by ordinary political tactics and
negotiations, are the unprecedented aspects of our current condition.
This remark should not be taken to suggest that I attribute an overarching ratio-
nality or normativity to the state use of violence. State terrorism can also be brutal,
unjust, and merciless – recall the war of the Yugoslav state against the Bosnians and
the Kosovar Albanians! The point I am emphasizing, however, is that in liberal
democracies the monopoly which the state claims over the use of the means of
violence is always in principle, if not in fact, subject to the rule of law and to demo-
cratic legitimation by the citizenry. These internal constraints upon the legitimate
use of violence are then carried into the international arena, where sovereign states
bind themselves to limit their use of violence through entering into pacts and asso-
ciations, signing treaties, etc.
The end of the bipolar world of the Cold War brought with it not just multiplu-
rality but a global society in which non-state actors have emerged as players
possessing the means of violence but who are not subject to usual constraints of
international law and treaties. All treaties which have hitherto governed the non-use
and proliferation of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons have been rendered
irrelevant: those who will deploy them have never been their signatories.
Furthermore, not being recognized as legitimate political entities, these groups have
no responsibility and accountability toward the populations in whose midst they act
and which harbor them. Suppose Osama bin Laden and his group possess Scud
missiles with nuclear warheads, which they may have obtained either from Iraq or
from the Russian Mafia or other weapons smugglers. What would prevent them
from firing these missiles against population centers in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India,
or Israel if this would serve some purpose? Since they are accountable to no one,
the collateral damage which they may cause even to their own allies and sympa-
thizers is of no concern to them. Whereas terrorist groups like the Basque ETA and
the IRA still have to be governed by some sense of proportion in the damage they
inflict and the violence they engage in, in order not to lose all sympathy for their

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38 Constellations Volume 9, Number 1, 2002

cause in world public opinion, these new terror networks are not motivated by fore-
seeable political goals analogous to the independence of the Basque land from
Spain and France, the removal of the Irish Loyalist population and unity with
Catholic Ireland, and the like. Nor are these groups fighting for hearts and minds in
the West by seeking the conversion of the population to Islam and to Islamic ways
of life. When it was practiced by Islamic armies in the centuries after the death of
Mohammad (632AD), “jihad” – which can also mean the struggle of the soul with
itself to lead the virtuous life as dictated by the Koran5 – aimed at the conquest of
the land of the “infidels” in order to force their conversion to Islam. People of all
races, colors, ethnicities, and tongues could convert to Islam and become “good
Muslims.” It is this option of conversion which has made Islam into the biggest
Abrahamic religion of the world; ironically, it is the very absence of this conversion
mission that is striking in the new jihad.
The new jihad is not only apocalyptic; it is nihilistic. A Taliban spokesman’s
statement that his people love death as much as the Americans love life is an expres-
sion of superb nihilism. The eroticization of death, as evidenced on the one hand by
the frequently heard vulgarisms about huris, the dark-eyed virgins who are to meet
the warriors in the afterlife, but on the other hand and more importantly by the
destruction of one’s own body in an act of supreme violence which dismembers and
pulverizes it, is remarkable. Human beings have died throughout the centuries for
causes they believed in, to save their loved ones, to protect their country or their
principles, to save the faith, to exercise solidarity, and the like. But the emergence
of “suicide bombings” among Islamist groups on a mass scale is astonishing. As
many Koranic scholars have pointed out, there is no theological justification for
this: it is one thing to die in war and yet another to make the destruction of one’s
body along with those of others the supreme weapon. In order to quell such waves
of suicide bombings, the Israeli authorities resorted to an atavistic practice: they
made it publicly known that they would bury the remains of suicide bombers in
shrouds of pigs’ skin (an animal that is considered “haram” – taboo – by Jews and
Muslims alike) in order to prevent their ascent into heaven in accordance with
Islamic faith. It is of course hard to know whether men of the sophistication and
worldliness of Muhammad Atta and others, who have lived in the capitals of Europe
and the West and who have attended universities as well as bars, movie houses as
well as brothels, believe in the afterlife. I personally doubt it. Not only is it clear that
the very strict version of Islam – Wahabism – which Osama bin Laden follows is
not shared by all even within his own group, but the Egyptian Brotherhood which
was the original organization for many Islamist philosophies in the 1950s had its
own version of things, as do members of the Algerian terror network. These
networks of young militants who trot the globe from Bosnia to Afghanistan, from
Paris to Indonesia, and back to Baghdad, Hamburg, or New York, are like Islamic
soldiers of fortune, in search not of riches but an elusive and decisive encounter
with death. In this regard they bear more resemblance to chiliastic sects among all
world religions than to the Muslim armies of the Umayyad, the Abassids, or the

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 Unholy Wars: Seyla Benhabib 39

Ottomans. While using friendly Muslim governments and their hospitality for their
own purposes, these groups pose a clear threat to any established form of authority
– which may have been one reason why the Saudis renounced Osama bin Laden’s
citizenship and rendered him an international fugitive.
As in the past century, faced with a novel form of totalitarianism, democracies
confront unique challenges. The presence of an enemy who is neither a military
adversary nor a representative agent of a known state creates confusion as to
whether police and other law enforcement agencies or the military should take the
lead in the investigation and the struggle; the lines between acts of crime and acts
of war get blurred. The concept of an “internal enemy,” which is now being
promoted against “suspect groups” through surveillance, wiretapping, and stricter
immigration controls, is not one that democracies can live with. The category of the
terrorist as an “internal enemy,” as one who is among us, even if not one of us,
strains the democratic community by revealing that the rule of law is not all-inclu-
sive and that violence lurks at the edges of everyday normalcy. Our thinking about
foreigners, refugees, and asylees becomes colored by the image of others as poten-
tial enemies; the “other” becomes the criminal. We may be at a point in history
when the state-centric system is indeed waning: global terrorism and the formation
of a global economy and civil society are part of the same maelstrom. Yet our laws
as well as institutions, practices as well as alliances, are governed by state-centric
terms which presuppose the unity of territoriality, the monopoly over the use of the
means of violence, and the attainment of legitimacy through representative institu-
tions. It is of course supremely ironic that President Bush, who advocated a new
version of American unilateralism and isolationism and who denounced “nation
building,” now finds himself supporting multilateral actions with allies like
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, whose democratic legitimacy is highly question-
able, but also reconstructing a post-Taliban government in Afghanistan. Can we
find responses to this new challenge that will break the vicious cycles of violence,
incomprehension, and repression at home and war abroad?
Although the attacks have so far been directed against the US, and although the
US is justified under international law in invoking the right of self-defense to justify
the current war,6 the US and its NATO allies have resorted to the clause of collec-
tive security and Article 5 of NATO, which guarantees the security of each member
of the alliance. I support this course of action, and I would further endorse the call
by UN President Kofi Annan to declare terrorism a “crime against humanity,” and
to try the terrorists, if and when they are captured, before an international tribunal.
Furthermore, the UN General Assembly should condemn the Taliban regime for
committing crimes against humanity not only for harboring Osama bin Laden and
his men, but for the way the Taliban have trampled upon the human rights of their
own women. There is no reason why the human rights of women to work, to be
educated, to walk on the street, to dress as they wish, etc. should be considered any
less sacred and any less in need of defense than the rights of ethnic minorities. In
response to the events of September 11 and to future threats, multilateral responses

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40 Constellations Volume 9, Number 1, 2002

that enjoy cross-cultural legitimacy and reflect some of the new norms of inter-
national law – like crimes against humanity or genocide, as defined under the
Statute of Rome of the International Criminal Court – should be invoked.
Unfortunately, the current actions of the Bush administration tend exactly in the
opposite direction: the captured Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers have been declared
“non-military combatants” and will be tried by military tribunals, held in the
extra-terrestrial space of Guantánamo Bay, which is not subject to US constitu-
tional protections. As with the abdication of the Kyoto and Salt II agreements,
around this issue too the Bush administration preaches internationalism but prac-
tices unilateralism.
Of course – and this cannot be said clearly enough by the citizens of western
democracies – a radical revision of US and NATO policy vis-à-vis the Arab world
and south-central Asia is needed. The US and its allies have to stop propping up
military dictatorships and religious conservatives in these areas in order simply to
secure oil supplies. Democratic movements within the burgeoning civil societies of
countries like Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, and the new Iran must be supported. A general
UN conference must be convened to deal with the rights of nations, ethnicities, and
other minorities without states in this region, like the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and
Iran; the Shi’ites in Iraq; and the Baha’is as well as the Azeris in Iran. Efforts anal-
ogous to the Marshall Plan in postwar Europe or the Soros Foundation in Eastern
Europe must be developed and furthered for entire regions. But even if all these
things are assumed, I believe that a more daunting cultural struggle and civiliza-
tional malaise is unfolding before our eyes.

II
As many have noted (including former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto),
the events of September 11 at first seemed to offer a belated confirmation of Samuel
Huntington’s famous thesis of the clash of civilizations. Huntington wrote:

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not
be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among
humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will
remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global
politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The fault
lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.7

Proceeding from a holistic understanding of cultures and civilizations – terms

which he at times conflated and others distinguished – Huntington was unable to
differentiate one “civilization” from another, with the consequence that, apart from
“the West and the rest,” he could not specify how many civilizations there were and
how they were to be differentiated.8 Edward Said pointed out that Huntington made
civilizations and identities into

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 Unholy Wars: Seyla Benhabib 41

shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and
counter-currents that animate human history, and over centuries have made it possi-
ble for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also
to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization, and sharing.9

It is precisely this history of cross-fertilization – exchange as well as confronta-

tion – between Islamic cultures and the West that we must pay increasing attention
to. One of the principal thinkers of the Islamist10 movement, Sayyid Qutb, an
Egyptian who studied philosophy in France and briefly visited the United States,
developed a civilizational critique of the West for its corruption, coldness, heart-
lessness, and individualism. His critique resonates with themes from the works of
Nietzsche as well as Heidegger, from Adorno and Horkheimer as well as contem-
porary communitarians.11 Describing the current condition of the West as one of
“jahiliyya,” a lack of knowledge and a condition of ignorance, the Islamists advo-
cate a return to Koranic law – the shari’a – and Muslim precepts to combat the
corruption of the western way of life. To combat the condition of jahiliyya, it is
necessary to rebel and establish a counter-community (jama’a) and spread it
through jihad.12 Very often, the Islamists’ struggle against jahiliyya takes the form
of a struggle against established authorities in their own countries and their
‘corrupt,’ westernizing policies.
This clash within Islamic countries between Islamist religious forces and
modernizers like Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, Habib Burgiba in Tunisia, Gemal Abdel
Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarek in Egypt, the deposed Reza Shah Pahlavi
in Iran, and even Saddam Hussein in Iraq, is long, deep, and powerful. The modern-
izers in these countries have usually come from military rather than civilian back-
grounds, and by transforming one of the few intact institutions of the old regime –
namely the military bureaucracy – into an instrument of political power and hege-
mony, they have consolidated their authority, often with limited popular support and
democratic institutions. All over the Islamic Arab world this military modernization
paradigm, in which Syria and Iraq had participated through the Ba’ath regimes in
the 1970s, has lost ground. The defeat of the Egyptian armies in the hands of Israel
during the Six Day War and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank are reminders
to the military elite of these countries, less of the plight of the Palestinians, whom
they have massacred and oppressed when it suited their interests (remember Black
September in Jordan in 1970, in which Palestinians were killed by the thousands, or
the persecution of the Palestinians by the Saudis because of their support for
Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War) than of the failure of their own truncated
projects of modernization. Israel is a thorn in the side of these regimes, whose very
presence is a reminder of their own failure to modernize in military, technological,
and economic terms.
The revival of Islamist movements is best understood in the light of the failure
of most of these societies to succeed in combining a prosperous economy with
political democracy and a Muslim identity.13 Islamism emerges as a plausible

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42 Constellations Volume 9, Number 1, 2002

civilizational project not just against the West, but against the failure of westerniz-
ing elites who have managed to import only a truncated modernity into their own
societies. Some of these modernizing elites had considered themselves “socialists”
of sorts. The Ba’ath regimes in Syria and Iraq, and even the kind of pan-Arabism
envisaged by Nasser in the early 1960s, advocated strong redistributionist economic
measures, built up huge public sectors (in state-owned utilities, for example), and
practiced what could be called “statist modernization” from above. The demise of
the Soviet Union has left these states with no patrons. Need we remind ourselves
that the mobilization of the Islamist mujahedeen in Afghanistan began against the
Soviet invasion of the country in 1979 – an invasion the Soviets engaged in to
support their own backers, the leftist fedayyeen?
The collapse of really existing socialisms and the failure of state-guided modern-
ization from above have created an enormous vacuum in the ideological life of these
societies. And into this vacuum have rushed Islamist fundamentalists. Osama bin
Laden is the most spectacular member of a long chain of critics in the Islamic world,
who, more often than not, have directed their local struggles against their own
corrupt and authoritarian regimes (Nasser banned the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood
and hanged some of its leaders) toward the outside, toward the external enemy.

III
I want to end with Max Weber’s question: which directions do religious rejections
of the world take and why?14 There is a fundamental conflict between secular, capi-
talist modernity, driven by profit, self-interest, and individualism, and the ethical
worldviews of the world’s religions. The religious worldviews preach various forms
of abstinence, renunciation of riches, the pursuit of virtue in the path of God, the
exercise of solidarity among members of the faith, and the disciplining of everyday
life to do the work of the Lord. What is it, Weber asked, that enables some religious
interpretations of the world to make their peace with the new world of modernity?
For Weber the Protestant ethic exhibited its “elective affinity” to capitalism by
transforming the abstinent and methodical pursuit of one’s vocation in the service
of God into the methodical, predictable, disciplined pursuit of work and profit in
this world. This process took several centuries and not all early modern Christians
accepted its logic: millenarian movements which rejected the capitalist control of
everyday life for the sake of disciplined labor and profit accompanied the rise of
western modernity.
The Protestant – and more narrowly Calvinist – transformation of religious
salvation into an earthly vocation of hard work in the service of an unpredictable
God is one among the many paths that the religious accommodation with the world
can take. It is also possible to split the religious and mundane spheres in such a way
that one altogether withdraws from engagement with the world; the religious abne-
gation of the world remains an option. A third option – besides engagement or with-
drawal – is to compartmentalize by separating the spheres of life which come under

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 Unholy Wars: Seyla Benhabib 43

the ethical dictates of religion from those like the public spheres of the economy in
which more flexibility and compromise are possible. Throughout the Islamic world,
such a strict separation of religious observance (in the domain of family life and
everyday practices of prayer, cleanliness, food, and sexuality) from the sphere of the
economy in the “bazaar” (the marketplace) was practiced. This separation of the
home from the market was made possible by the practice of Islamic tolerance
toward the other Abrahamanic religions, like Judaism and Christianity. The
Ottomans adopted this “separate spheres” model, and permitted the wide array of
ethnic groups and peoples whom they dominated to govern themselves in their own
communal affairs according to their own religious and customary traditions (the so-
called millet system.) Global modernization is destroying the fragile balance
between these separate spheres; this may explain in turn the obsessive preoccupa-
tion with controlling female sexuality which all Islamist groups exhibit.
Technical modernization, which brings along with it the gadgets of modernity
like computers, videos, DVDs, cell phones, and satellite dishes, is no threat to the
Islamists.15 In fact, there is a ruthless exploitation of these new media to convey
one’s message to believers. Neither is finance capitalism as such problematic from
an Islamic perspective. Attempts exist all over the Muslim world to reconcile the
shari’a with modern financial institutions. Whether it is the hawale method of
money transfers, which bypass modern banks and rely on personalized contacts
among money lenders, or the obligation of the rich to share 5% of their wealth with
the poor, as dictated in the Koran (a practice that is partially behind the founding of
the Madrassas – institutions of religious learning – for war orphans in Afghanistan
by wealthy individuals all over the Islamic world), institutional innovations to make
Islam compatible with global capitalism are taking place. The threat to the separate
spheres model is primarily a threat to family and personal life.
Global capitalism is bringing images of sexual freedom and decadence, female
emancipation and equality among the sexes, into the homes of patriarchal and
authoritarian Muslim communities. It is Hollywood which is identified as America,
and not the Constitution, the Supreme Court, or the legacy of Puritanism and town
meetings. These fast circulating images of sexual liberty and decadence, physical
destruction and violence, sell very well globally because their message is blunt and
can be extricated from local cultural nuance.
In a global world, it is not only images that travel; individuals all over the Islamic
world are part of a large diaspora to the West. Sizeable Muslim communities exist
in every large European and North American capital. These migrant communities
attempt to practice the separate life-spheres model in their new homes. But the chil-
dren of Muslim migrants are caught between worlds; be it through educational insti-
tutions or the influence of mass culture, they are torn between the authoritarian and
patriarchal family structures from which they emerge and the new world of freedom
into which they enter. There is a continuous renegotiation of clashing moral codes
and value orientations in the minds of this younger generation, particularly regard-
ing women. If we want to understand why so many educated, relatively well-off

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Muslim males who had lived in Hamburg and Paris would participate in the actions
of September 11, we have to understand the psychology of Muslim immigrants in
their encounters with secular liberal democracies of the West. Given the failure of
their own home-grown versions of modernity like Nasserism and the Ba’ath move-
ment, given the global entertainment industry’s profound assault on their identity as
Muslims, and given the profound discrimination and contempt which they experi-
ence in their host societies as new immigrants who are perceived to have “back-
ward” morals and ways of life, many young Muslims today turn to Islamism and
fundamentalism. Commenting on l’affaire foulard (the headscarf affair) in France,
in which some female students took to wearing traditional headscarfs less as a sign
of submission to religious patriarchy than as an emblem of difference and defiance
against homogenizing French republican traditions, the French sociologists
Gaspard and Khosrokhavar capture these set of complex symbolic negotiations as
follows:
[The headscarf] mirrors in the eyes of the parents and the grandparents the illusions
of continuity whereas it is a factor of discontinuity; it makes possible the transition to
otherness (modernity), under the pretext of identity (tradition); it creates the sentiment
of identity with the society of origin whereas its meaning is inscribed within the
dynamic of relations with the receiving society. . . . [I]t is the vehicle of the passage
to modernity within a promiscuity which confounds traditional distinctions, of an
access to the public sphere which was forbidden to traditional women as a space of
action and the constitution of individual autonomy. . . .16

We can intervene in this process of complex cultural negotiations as dialogue

partners in a global civilization only insofar as we make an effort to understand the
struggles of others whose idioms and terms may be unfamiliar to us, but which, by
the same token, are also not so different from similar struggles at other times in our
own cultures; through acts of strong hermeneutical generosity, we can still extend
our moral imagination to view the world through the others’ eyes.17 While I believe
that at this stage of the conflict the use of force against the Osama bin Laden
network is inevitable and justified, the real political task ahead is to engage in a
dialogue with millions of Muslims around this globe – beyond vengeance and with-
out apocalyptic expectations. Democracies cannot fight holy wars. Reason,
compassion, respect for the dignity of human life, the search for justice, and the
desire for reconciliation are the democratic virtues which are now pitted against acts
of apocalyptic hatred and vengeance.

NOTES

1. See Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, September 24, 2001; Fred Jameson, The London Review
of Books 23, no. 19 (October 4, 2001); and Slavoj Žižek, “The Desert of the Real: Is this the End of
Fantasy?” In These Times, October 29, 2001.
2. The analogy is not quite accurate, for the French colonizers eventually left Algeria. Despite all

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 Unholy Wars: Seyla Benhabib 45
theories to the contrary, the Jewish population of Palestine are not colonizers in the traditional sense
of the term. They are not there to exploit the indigenous population or their resources, but to establish
a “Jewish homeland” – however problematic and tragic this vision may be. The refusal of much of the
Arab world to understand the uniqueness of the dream that motivated the Zionist enterprise makes it
easy for them to assimilate Israel to the model of the western oppressor while presenting themselves
as the colonized and the oppressed. Israel was not established to be a colonizing force; it has become
so increasingly since the occupation of the West Bank, and since its growing dependence on
Palestinian labor to run its expanding economy.
3. “However, the monopolization of legitimate violence by the political-territorial association
and its rational consociations into an institutional order is nothing primordial, but a product of evolu-
tion.” Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978), 904–905.
4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1979 (1951)), pt. 3.
5. Roxanne Euben, “Killing (for) Politics: Jihad, Martyrdom, and Political Action,” lecture given
in the Political Theory Colloquium, Yale University, October 16, 2001. Forthcoming, Political Theory
(February 2002).
6. For a lucid elucidation of the current situation from the standpoint of international law, see
Richard Falk, “A Just Response, “ The Nation, October 8, 2001.
7. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:
Simon and Shuster, 1996), 2.
8. See my forthcoming The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002). I discuss the conceptual and explanatory difficulties of Huntington’s theses
in the Introduction.
9. Edward Said on Samuel Huntington, in Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line, <http://www.
ahram.org.eg/weekly/standard/aaw.gif> no. 555, October 11–17, 2001.
10. Roxanne Euben observes that “‘Islamism’ is another, slightly less controversial way of refer-
ring to Islamic fundamentalism.” (“Killing (for) Politics”)
11. See Roxanne Euben’s excellent book, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamist Fundamentalism and the
Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
12. Euben, “Killing (for) Politics,” 8.
13. See Sayres S. Rudy for an in-depth social theoretical analyses of some of these issues,
“Subjectivity, Political Evaluation, and Islamist Trajectories,” in Birgit Schaebler and Leif Stenberg,
eds., Globalization and the Muslim World (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002).
14. Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions,” Economy and Society,
vol 1.
15. At the end of the 1980s, when I first visited Germany as a Humboldt fellow in Munich, I was
taken aback by the sale of cassettes and videotaped versions of chants from the Koran in big shopping
centers. Recorded by well-known Muezzins (cantors), these tapes permitted the faithful to utilize the
technology of the society around them while remaining true to themselves. The irony is that the chant-
ing of the Koran, like the reading of the Old Testament, and unlike the reading of the Bible, is
supposed to be a communal and collective act of chanting, telling, and recalling. The medium of west-
ern technology threatens this communal fabric. The result may be “religion à la carte,” as this phenom-
enon has been called, for many Muslims as well.
16. Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhar, Le Foulard et la République (Paris: Découverte,
1995), 44–45. My translation.
17. I deal with the ethics of communication and multiculturalism in The Claims of Culture, ch. 5.

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002