Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism

by Weigel, George

• ISBN13: 9780385524780
• ISBN10: 0385524781
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-10
• Publisher: Image

Summary

With an unsettled Middle East, al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups actively plotting against America and its allies, and spillover from religious conflict in Muslim countries spreading instability and violence worldwide, George Weigel's Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism is an acute analysis of one of the most dynamic forces in world politics today u Islamist jihadism. After tracing the complex historical and theological roots of the jihadist movement, Weigel offers a comprehensive strategy for defeating jihadism and supporting those forces within Islam that seek a Muslim accommodation with religious freedom, the separation of religious and political authority in the state, and other key accomplishments of political modernity. Above all, Weigel insists, the West must take seriously the religious origins and rationale of jihadism if it is to meet the challenge posed by men of violence who claim to act in the name of God. Essential reading in a time of momentous political decisions, Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism is a clarion call for a new seriousness of debate and a new clarity of purpose in American public life.

Author Biography

GEORGE WEIGEL, Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s foremost commentators on issues of religion and public life. A Newsweek contributor and Vatican analyst for NBC News, Weigel is the author of fifteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Deadly Serious Business	p. 1
Understanding the Enemy	p. 11
Rethinking Realism	p. 75
Deserving Victory	p. 107
Afterword	p. 159
Acknowledgments	p. 175
Notes	p. 179
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Part One
UNDERSTANDING THE ENEMY


LESSON 1. The great human questions, including the great questions of public life, are ultimately theological.

How men and women think about God—or don’t think about God—has a great deal to do with how they envision the just society, and how they determine the appropriate means by which to build that society. This means taking theology seriously—which includes taking seriously others’ concepts of God’s nature and purposes, and their commitments to the beliefs arising from those concepts—as well as the theologies that have shaped the civilization of the West. If we have not learnedthisover the past five years, one wonders if we have learned anything.

Yet that very question—what have we learned?—arises every time a commentator or politician or statesman uses “theology” as a synonym for “superstition,” or “theological” as a contempt–riddled substitute for “mindless.” Such glib (and truly mindless) usages must stop; they are an impediment to clear thinking about our situation. And our situation is too urgent for muddleheadedness arising from prejudice.

Failures on this front tend toward the comprehensive, not least because American education has done a very poor job of equipping Americans with a minimal comprehension of the teachings of the world's great religions. The problem is particularly urgent, however, in those parts of the United States Government where a genteel secularity is the analytic default position—and the received wisdom on How to Understand Things As They Are. This puts American diplomacy and intelligence collection at an immense disadvantage in a world in which the true curiosities—the things that really need explaining—are not throngs of Mexican pilgrims at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, or several million Hindus ritually bathing in the Ganges, or theHajjto Mecca, or the Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala. The curiosities, the things that need explaining as cutting strangely against the human grain, are those redoubts of aggressive and inward–looking secularism to be found in, for example, western higher education and journalism.

Tone deafness to the fact that for the overwhelming majority of humanity, religious conviction providesthestory line through which life's meaning is read is, in one sense, a by–product of a disinclination to acknowledge the truth of what has become something of a cliché: that “ideas have consequences.” They do, manifestly, and understanding the consequential ideas that shape a given historical epoch, and their interplay, is essential to wise statecraft. We understood this during the Cold War, which was, at bottom, a global contest of fundamental ideas: ideas about human nature, ideas about human community, ideas about human origins, human aspirations, human destiny. Understanding that the contest with communism was idea–driven, the West, led by the United States, deployed intellectual and cultural resources as well as military power to blunt the threat that communism posed, to expose it for what it was, and, ultimately, to defeat it. There would seem to be a lesson here.

The idea of inevitable progress in history—the idea that the human story is inevitably unfolding in such a way that the future will always be better than the present and the past—has exercised such a profound grip on the modern American imagination that we may have forgotten that it is, at best, a hypothesis, not a given of the human condition. Things can, and do, get worse, especially when cultural morale declines: much of Europe today exhibits a kind of cultural exhaustion that does not bode well for the future. Moreover, as Aldous Huxley presciently saw inBrave New World, technology can lead to real reverses in human affairs

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Excerpted from Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism by George Weigel
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