War's first several casualties

I have just read the 15th op-ed piece to remind me that "truth is the first casualty of war." What editorial writers generally mean by this is that the Pentagon — or is it now the Quadrangle? — does its best to control the war news and manipulate public opinion. For these folks it's a big news story that Condoleezza Rice asks the major networks to think for a few minutes before running al-Qaida propaganda tapes.

I do perceive a frontal assault on the truth, but it's one in which our trendier political leaders and our elite press are fighting shoulder to shoulder. Silvio Berlusconi, the premier of Italy, recently said that contemporary Western civilization was superior to contemporary Islamic civilization. About the same time Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Great Britain, complained that many British Muslim leaders had been timid and equivocal in their condemnations of the recent terrorist outrages. Now these statements, though about as debatable as the fourth postulate of Euclid, were generally received by 'opinion makers' with the disapproval that might greet a loud belch in the middle of the adagio cantabile of Beethoven's Pathétique. They simply couldn't be true. It wasn't just that the wrongest possible people had uttered them; they contradicted the strange consensus strangely articulated by the strange allies on Pennsylvania Avenue and at the Washington Post that the present world crisis (1) has nothing to do with religion and (2) more especially has nothing to do with Islam and (3) most especially is not an episode in a 'war' involving large swaths of Islam generally. These propositions are as inconveniently false as the two adduced above are inconveniently true.

Our crisis is very much about religion and about Islam, and although the issue has to be carefully framed, it is even about a 'war' in which much of Islam, and not just a few of its practitioners in Afghanistan, is quite broadly engaged. There are many comparisons that graph the superiority of the West to the Islamic world: GNP, per capita income, worker productivity, agricultural efficiency, education, human rights, gender equity, political liberty and stability, artistic production, housing, medical care and so on. But I am an English professor, so I shall limit myself to books. After all, the events of Sept. 11 were adumbrated by a literary event of sorts — the "fatwa" inviting the murder of Salman Rushdie, the author of a book called The Satanic Verses. Though this appalling warrant originated with fanatics in Iran, it was widely defended by anglophone Muslims in Britain, where Rushdie lived at the time. In this country I heard it defended on NPR by Cat Stevens!

According to an illuminating article in Newsweek, there were about 4,000 books published in Israel (population of 6 million) last year and about 375 in Egypt, a country of 70 million that is often described as a center of Islamic learning. There were perhaps more books published in Princeton than in Egypt. Narrow the comparison to scriptural studies. Compare the number — and more importantly perhaps the nature — of books published about the Koran and about the Bible since, say, 1800. The experience of Salman Rushdie suggests why there might be few books about the Koran, but there are lots about the Bible. In America alone there appear to have been more books published last year about the Bible than were published in Egypt on all subjects. For well over a century the major trends in biblical scholarship — much of it the work of believing Christians and Jews but with major contributions from agnostics and atheists — have been historical, scientific and critical in nature. No question has escaped its scrutiny, and its effects have naturally been demystifying and demythologizing. There are numerous international journals of biblical studies in which the highest standards of critical scholarship are demanded and met. Modern Christians are of course free to think whatever they wish about the Bible, but unless they choose to ignore a vast library of scholarship they are unlikely to believe that the book was traced by God's right index finger in Elizabethan English. It is unimaginable that any Western nation would today erect its civil code upon such a supposition.

There is not and must not be a Western 'war against Islam' such as that of which our enemies yearn to accuse us. Yet by the very fact of its existence, the West must bring a kind of 'warfare' to Islam — 'warfare' as used in the title of a great book published more than a century ago by Andrew Dickson White, a Christian intellectual who was the first president of Cornell. His title is The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. This important monument of American historiography is recommended reading for all, and 'must' reading for people who regard religion — their own or other people's — respectfully. It traces the long, arduous "war" fought by Western rationality and intellectual tolerance not against religion but against the perennial human pretension to know the will of God with a certainty that justifies every form of social and mental crime. Rationality and intellectual tolerance are not values different only by their accident of social construction from obscurantism and fanaticism; they are better than obscurantism and fanaticism. That may be politically difficult for 'opinion makers' to say, but it ought to be reasonably easy for people privileged to live and work in one of the world's great universities. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.