Why they hate us.

Terror and Liberalism

Paul Berman

W. W. Norton, $21, 214 pp.

Paul Berman is a political and cultural critic whose writings have appeared in numerous journals. His best-known work is A Tale of Two Utopias (W.W. Norton), an account of the complex and seemingly paradoxical political journey of what he calls the "Generation of 1968."

Terror and Liberalism was published only a few months ago, but it has already been discussed so widely that to review it now is to step into the middle of a conversation. Writing in the New York Times Book Review (April 13), for example, Gary Rosen observes (correctly) that because the book was conceived in the immediate aftermath of September 11, it focuses on Islamic radicalism and treats Iraq in a manner that is both cursory and disappointing. Writing in the New York Review of Books (May 1), Ian Buruma acknowledges that Paul Berman's scathing depiction of Europe's world-weary spinelessness in the face of Saddam Hussein's challenge "holds some truth." Nonetheless, he continues, "the common European calculation that international institutions are the most effective safeguards of our democracies is not just a matter of cynicism or cowardice. After all, this idea has served us well for fifty years; far better, at any rate, than a world in which nations compete in military prowess." For what it is worth, I agree; in the long run, the United States will pay a higher price for acting as a law unto itself than its current leaders realize.

To contribute to the discussion, I want to focus on a part of Berman's analysis that others have neglected--oddly neglected, given that it seems to be the heart of the matter. Berman characterizes our current conflict with the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as a continuation of the "antifascist" and "antitotalitarian" struggles of the twentieth century. Is he right?

In one sense, Berman is right by definition. Liberalism stands for (among other things) respect for legitimate diversity and limits on the power of government. Totalitarianism rejects these commitments in the name of a monistic vision of human life and an all-powerful government that seeks to implement that vision. To the extent that radical Islam espouses both of these antiliberal premises, it must be classified as a species of totalitarianism.

This is, however, only the beginning of the inquiry. The pivot of Berman's narrative is a gripping account of the thought of Sayyid Qutb, widely regarded as the most influential writer in the Islamist tradition. Born in Egypt in 1906, Qutb received a traditional education, joined the civil service, and studied at the University of Northern Colorado, receiving a master's in education. Upon his return to Egypt, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and spent more than a decade in jail. In 1966, at the age of sixty, he was hanged. By then, he was famous. (His younger brother, an important scholar with similar views, fled to Saudi Arabia where he taught, among others, Osama bin Laden.)

While Qutb did not reject every element of modern life (he admired the West's economic productivity and scientific dynamism), he identified for his students what he regarded as the core errors of modernity, which had to be uprooted. In the first place, the West placed an arrogant and deluded faith in the power of human reason, which led ultimately to the distortive dominance of technology over modern life. Second (and even more damaging), the Christian West had divided religion from daily life: "Everything that Islam knew to be one, the Christian church divided into two." The result was the "hideous schizophrenia" of modern European life, which the West's political and cultural colonialism now threatened to impose on the Muslim world as well.

The West's fatal step, in short, was the separation of church and state. And nowhere was that separation more thoroughgoing than in the temple of liberalism, the United States of America. From his brief sojourn in Colorado, Qutb came to regard Americans as hypocrites. But Berman argues persuasively that Qutb's "deepest quarrel was not with America's failure to uphold its principles. His quarrel was with the principles. He opposed the United States because it was a liberal society [that systematically divided church from state], and not because it failed to be a liberal society." He feared that the spread of that idea into the Muslim world would end by crowding out Islam. That, not military conquest and colonial occupation, was the gravest danger.

So far, so good. The problem with Berman's thesis arises in the next step. Qutb's doctrine, Berman argues, "was wonderfully original and deeply Muslim, looked at from one angle; and, from another angle, merely one more version of the European totalitarian idea." If so, its consequences were predictable: a rebellion against liberal values that could only end in a "cult of death."

This thesis is true (if at all) only at a level of abstraction so high as to blur a number of relevant distinctions. In the first place, the content of the monistic vision makes a big difference. European totalitarianism was ruthlessly antireligious. To oppose liberalism in the name of racial purity or the victory of the proletariat is one thing; to oppose it in the name of the truth of a religious revelation quite another. These differences lead to contrasting accounts of the sources of political authority and the proper organization of society. As Khaled Abou El Fadl has recently reminded us, classical Islamic jurisprudence long regarded the Caliphate, which fused religion and political power based on Shari'ah law, as the best system of government. At one point Berman goes so far as to claim that the "whole of the Muslim world has been overwhelmed by German philosophies from long ago--the philosophies of revolutionary nationalism and totalitarianism, cannily translated into Muslim dialects." In fact, there is nothing distinctively European (let alone German) about Qutb's thought. Its antiliberalism stems from genuinely Islamic sources.

The concept of the "cult of death" also obliterates key distinctions. We have to begin by distinguishing between homicide and suicide: unlike the shock troops of radical Islamism, the Baathist regime in Iraq was homicidal to the core, but not notably suicidal. (Nor was the regime of Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein's acknowledged inspiration.) Nor is all self-annihilation the same. There is surely a difference between Dostoyevsky's atheist nihilists, or Camus's depiction of Dora Brilliant for whom terrorist action "was primarily embellished by the sacrifice it demanded of the terrorist," and (on the other hand) suicide bombers who kill with political intent and expectation of eternal reward in the hereafter. (This in no way justifies suicide bombings.) But when Berman lumps together twenty-first-century suicide bombers with nineteenth-century Russian nihilists, however, his impulse to Europeanize Islamic terrorism gets the better of his judgment.

This said, there is much truth in the idea that liberals find few charms in the prospect of death. Modern liberal democracy has its roots in philosophies that sought, so far as possible, to ward off death and suffering. Outlooks that give more weight to the virtues of the warrior, or to the religious promise of the afterlife, are likely to regard death with less aversion. This difference leads antiliberals of various stripes to convince themselves that liberal democratic soldiers lack courage--a belief regularly refuted on the battlefield.

Let me end on a more political note. Berman's analysis moves on the high plane of systems of thought, that is to say, of warring ideologies. Stripped to its essentials, Berman's thesis is that the conflict between the United States and substantial portions of the Muslim world is best understood as an ideological conflict. This mode of analysis yields an elegant justification of the Bush administration's central proposition that "they hate us for what we are, not what we do." If radical Islamists make war on us because we practice the separation of church and state, there is nothing we can do to abate the conflict. We cannot and should not abandon the beliefs at the core of our way of life. There is no possibility of coexistence. The only cogent course is a war of incarceration or even extermination. Anything less is what Berman calls "wishful thinking."

The convenient consequence of this kind of thinking is that we don't have to think very hard about policies and their implications. We don't have to ask whether basing American troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War or supporting corrupt and authoritarian regimes for decades on end may have contributed to Islamist anti-Americanism.

Nor do we have to distinguish any longer between defensive and preventive wars. On the basis of the international legal principles that the United States officially espoused until last year, I believe that we were right to wage the Gulf War in 1991, right to pursue Al Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban in 2001, and wrong to attack Iraq in 2003. From Berman's perspective, this distinction makes no sense. It is a species of wishful thinking. We do not have the luxury of arguing about permitted versus forbidden means. What we need instead is what he calls a "new radicalism," a Wilsonian foreign policy that dares speak its name, a crusade aimed at overthrowing antiliberal regimes and reconstructing them along reliably liberal lines. You don't have to be one of the foreign-policy "realists" Berman so relentlessly excoriates (I'm not) to question the wisdom of this course.

William A. Galston is professor in the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. From 1993 to 1995, he served as deputy assistant to President Bill Clinton for domestic policy.