A point I would add to the last post, which I think I was winding toward, is that the “Is it oppression or religion?” question is a false dichotomy because one of the few sweeping statements I’m willing to make about all religions is that they inform how you deal with bad things happening to you. (This is true of any philosophy of the universe actually, whether supernatural or not.) Your faith is going to help interpret not only how you respond to oppression, but why and in what way you’re being oppressed. Westerners, for instance, generally think that being deprived of a secret ballot is a greater oppression than being bombarded with images of scantily clad women, but a lot of people in the Muslim world (and probably outside it too) would disagree.

So if someone responds to oppression with atrocities, that’s a judgment against their religion. In fact, how people respond to being on the losing team can tell you a lot about what their faith is like. Back in this post I theorized that one reason Christians lost so many people to Islam in the first place was that they’d forgotten how to live faithfully as the underdogs, so when their armies failed to keep Muslims from taking over there wasn’t much to keep people on board. So if people believe God tells them to try to regain power with increasingly desperate acts of violence, there is indeed a religious problem.

But that doesn’t mean that the perpetrators of oppression are therefore off the hook, or that they are not implicated in the evils that follow. That was why early Christians could both accept apostolic advice to suffer Roman persecutions patiently and also read Revelation’s vision of Rome’s defeat. So even if all the doomsaying about Islam is true, it is still incumbent upon Christians to treat their fellow humans in a, well, Christian fashion. Throughout history power periodically inverts — first pagans were on top, then Christians, then Muslims, now Christians again — but the rules of good behavior remain the same.

After I wrote my post considering the popular determinist explanations for terrorism, a couple links at Get Religion reminded me of the popular opposing argument: that terrorism is really caused by religion. This reviews a book that argues that radical Islam has been more important to terrorism than colonialism or poverty; this argues that the American military is seriously underestimating the power of the faith of their opponents.

The way this seems related to the last post is that to ascribe something to someone’s religion, in the modern discourse, is virtually the same as calling it causeless. While various attempts have been made to provide mundane explanations for faith (father issues, social control, general desperation), the predominant way of looking at in secular America seems to be that faith is something some people just have; it intrudes from some spirit realm without reference to circumstances or evidence. That’s why the argument that terrorism is caused by oppression tends to be pitted against the argument that it’s caused by religion; one posits a traceable cause, the other does not.

I’ll leave it to my Catholic friends to point out the problems with the modern faith vs. reason dichotomy. But on my part, I wouldn’t exactly claim that people’s faith is rational, so much as that it very often stems from, and is affirmed by, mundane experience. Ralph Peters uses words like “intoxicating,” “soul-shaking” and so on to describe faith; but people of faith that I know, even very strong faith, rarely seem to have such lightening-bolt experiences. My impression of the Islamic world is that it’s pretty much the same. In fact, from my limited knowledge of Islam it’s Sufism, which everyone seems to regard as the nice, non-threatening denomination, that places the most emphasis on personal, mystical experience of God; the factions that produce terrorists seem to be a lot less interested in that sort of thing. (From what I’ve heard, in fact, many Middle Eastern terrorists aren’t all that religious.)

A much more convincing (to me) account of how someone gets dangerous religion appeared in a New Yorker article from December that investigated Osama bin Laden’s youth. The reporter, Steve Coll, interviewed an unnamed source who went to high school with the young bin Laden. Coll sets the scene by describing a phenomenon of which I was unaware:

A schoolmate of bin Laden’s told me that during the eighth or ninth grade, around 1971 or 1972, bin Laden was invited to join the Islamic study group. In that period at Saudi high schools and universities, it was common to find Syrian and Egyptian teachers, many of whom had become involved with dissident Islamist political groups in their home countries. Some of these teachers were members of, or were influenced by, the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 by a schoolteacher, Hassan al-Banna. The Brotherhood was initially a religious-minded movement opposed to British colonial rule in Egypt; later, following Britain’s withdrawal from the region, the Brotherhood’s leaders continued their struggle against the secular, socialist Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, who took power in 1952. …

In Saudi Arabia during the nineteen-sixties, King Faisal welcomed exiled teachers from Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, even if they were influenced by the Brotherhood, because he believed that they had been unfairly persecuted for their religious and political beliefs. He also hoped that their emphasis on Islamic teachings might help to inoculate Saudi Arabia against ideas such as socialism and secular pan-Arab nationalism, which were then spreading through Arab societies. Moreover, as he expanded Saudi Arabia’s schools, Faisal faced a shortage of qualified instructors of all kinds.

Bin Laden’s classmate says a lot of boys joined at first just because the group leader had the keys to the sports cabinet, and he promised to let them play soccer. But as they went along, the lessons grew more radical and scary. Finally, after hearing a story praising a teenage boy for killing his heathen father, the source bailed out of the group. But bin Laden stayed on, and, he says, started dressing in traditional clothes and hectoring everybody else about their decadent lifestyles.

The story is, I admit, somewhat shakily sourced, but it strikes me as credible because it is so familiar. Heck, in general outlines it’s not that different from me falling under the influence of Telford Work. It’s not so much a question of mysticism as of authority. Who is your most convincing teacher — the one who seems to explain reality in a way that fits with how you live it, and with what you aspire to be?

And in a sense, the account both agrees with and confounds common explanations for terrorism. Was it caused by Western colonialism? Sort of. The teacher’s radicalism was forged in an anti-colonial Muslim movement; but bin Laden himself came from a privileged background and had little or no personal experience of oppression from the West. It was by no means determined that anyone from his general environment should become what he became, since most of his classmates were still more interested in soccer. But to focus only on his rational self-interest would be to miss the point. In every social unit, there are going to be certain people who take it upon themselves to defend, reform and/or revolutionize society. The religion does not create this, but it definitely provides the interpretive framework for why and how this is carried out.

Ralph Peters recognizes social context enough to blame the media for creating a bad environment (that ever-popular conservative fallback). But apart from the fact that his attacks are both caricatured and basically useless, I wonder if the large-scale media really has as much power over this kind of thing as he thinks. The story of Osama bin Laden was one of old-fashioned face-to-face contact, and especially in the developing world I suspect that that is still the key conduit of social attitudes. Which is why rooting out the “root causes” will probably be a matter of generations, not of days or even years.