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The Religious Psychology of the Middle East Conflict
(a 50 page statement of the main theory in The Ishmael Factor)
Chapter 7 "The Attackers" as a Web Page or in PDF format
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The
Ishmael Factor:
Seeing
the Heart of the
by
Jerry
L. Sherman. Ph.D.
Introduction
Americans were jolted into a new kind
of awareness by the 9-11 attack. We knew
that someone out there hated us. We did
not know why, but neither did we try hard to fully understand this new
“War
against the West.” It was easier and
more natural to fall quickly into positions that made us feel
comfortable about
ourselves.
The most popular position was that we
are innocent, and those who are attacking us are evil.
Our President said, “There will always be
evil in the world.” But others said that
we must be doing something wrong, that we somehow had this coming. Without actually supporting terrorism, these
people said that our powerful policies in the world were creating this
backlash.
We knew that
Twelve years later, little has
changed. Global terrorism continues,
while the Arab-Israeli conflict is as tense and intractable as ever. The “two-state solution” for the Jews and the
Arabs, obviously fair solution that it is, seems less likely with each
passing
year. And our ways of understanding the
conflict have not changed. We remain in
our comfortable positions, except for those who expected to have things
fixed
by now, who are scratching their heads, sure they are right, but
wondering why
no one on the other side can see it.
Twelve years later, though, I feel I
have been on an amazing intellectual and spiritual adventure. I could not rest in any of the possible
positions by which we try to understand this conflict, but was drawn
into a
struggle to learn if there is any clear understanding, any genuine
wisdom,
about the
Once I began to examine the motives of
those who had taken their comfortable positions about the Middle East
crisis,
they blew up into seven positions, not two, though they lump
themselves
together as two. Those who are being
attacked feel they are innocent and justify defending
themselves, while
some of them also apply the principles of Western thought to correct
the
Islamists. Partly sharing these thoughts
but with their own unique angle are the Jews and Israelis
(many of them), and some of the Christians,
together making up the point of view known as Zionism, which
holds that
Israel has a destined and justified future in her promised land. Thus we have the Defenders, the Correctors,
and the Zionists.
On the other side, the Islamists are attacking
Given these many points of view, all
motivated by the need to see oneself as one of the good guys and fix
the blame
elsewhere, one wonders if there can be real wisdom here, or if the
whole mess
reduces to nothing but points of view and power struggles.
I am a fairly traditional person, a
Christian, a Zionist, and a conservative, but I am also a philosophy
professor
working at the outset of the 21st century, and I cannot easily dismiss
the
postmodern relativism and amoralism that
is raising
its head here. I have to wrestle with
it, seeing its true strength as critical thinking, and then see what
remains,
where traditional views still stand.
That has been the adventure of this book.
The most surprising thing I learned was
about right and wrong, in our world today.
The question of whether there is objective moral truth is itself
at
issue in this conflict. I mean, we are
arguing not about what is right according to agreed standards, but
about what
those standards are, that is, whose standards should apply, or
even whether
there can be standards at all. Those who
oppose the power of the West also oppose the idea structure of the
West,
including its moral tradition, so what the West says about justice will
be
taken as nothing but the assertion of Western power.
Those who oppose the existence of
This battle against transcendence
clearly puts the Zionists in a special position, because they are not
only one
of the parties to the conflict, but they are the holders of the keys,
so to
speak, the ones most connected with the principles of justice and
beneficence
by which the conflict might be adjudicated.
But they and their principles are being powerfully resisted.
These turn out to be complex facts,
needing several qualifications. First,
the Jews and Israelis are the people group most connected to Zionism,
but in
the real world they represent both Western ideas and the objection to
those
ideas, Zionism and anti-Zionism. Theirs
is not a united witness. The Correctors
and Defenders are a more homogenous group, basically the Western world
standing
up for its beliefs, but they are not single-minded about it. They call upon the transcendent principles of
the Western and biblical tradition, but they actually employ
those
traditions for purposes of their own, rather than being fully submitted
to
them. Under pressure, they will turn out
to be more interested in human autonomy than in submission to
transcendence.
A third proviso is about the
Attackers—the Islamists and Islam itself.
As fundamentalists they would seem to be fully committed to
transcendent
truth and morality. Yet they are
bitterly opposed to the Jewish and Christian views of God and God’s
will. In my treatment of the problem, the
Muslims
also are opposed to transcendence, but they have set up an “alternative
transcendence,” as I will be calling it.
Their religion supports them in thinking that they are totally
committed
to the will of God, and from the world’s point of view there is simply
an
argument between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition about what
they think
God said. But I believe biblically
informed
analysis can get beneath the surface and tell a much more interesting
story.
Looking closely at the conflict, we can
see the basis of the surprising partnership between Islamist
fundamentalism and
Western Liberalism. The Attackers and
Excusers are in bed together, and anyone can see this, but it seems
impossible. How can Liberals and
Leftists be sympathetic with the religious fundamentalism that drives
the
Islamist attack on the West? To
understand this requires seeing the actual forces at work and the true
lines of
the battle. It is not between secularism
and religion, but it is between humanism, which has both secular and
religious
forms, and the transcendence within biblical theism.
The Liberal-Left and Islamism stand against
Jews and Christians because of the anti-humanistic messages that are in
the
Bible. Also, there is a dark side to the
humanism in the Left, so it toys with anarchy and self-negation in a
way that
aligns it with the global terrorism’s frontal attack on civilization
itself. A traditional theist would say
that Satan is trying to destroy humanity.
Seeing the true lines of battle in
global terrorism and the
I have a few hundred pages to make this
audacious claim plausible, and not just for theists, who easily believe
that
humans are fighting God, but for anyone willing to explore the
My starting point a decade ago was the
story in Genesis about Isaac and Ishmael.
If we understand what Ishmael represents, then we will
understand the
“Ishmael Factor,” which is my diagnostic label for the dysfunction we
are
witnessing. I was surprised how fruitful
this hypothesis became. Isaac and
Ishmael exist today in the cultural-religious identities of the Jews
and the
Arabs, and in the biblical view Isaac inherits the blessings that God
has
promised to his people, the Jews.
Ishmael has a blessing, too—the great civilization that is
Islam—but the
focus is on what he does not receive, on his being rejected and
disinherited. So the Ishmaelites
in
The political drama is made intense by
the religious drama lying within it. In
the Christian reading of the Ishmael story we have a teaching about Law
and
Grace, about the power of the flesh (human effort) and the power of
divine
promise. Ishmael represents Abraham’s
attempt to do in a human way what God intended to do miraculously. He represents what I will be calling “human
religion,” which relies on religious and moral effort to solve the
human problem. Religious pluralists today
assure us that
there are no serious differences between any two religions, but I will
be
arguing that beliefs about law and grace, about human effort and divine
provision, are the heart of the crisis.
Human religion protects pride but fails to allay guilt, and
guilt is the
driving force in anti-Semitism, persecutions, suicide bombings, and
global
terror as a whole.
Remarkable details about this appear in
the stories of scripture. Ishmael’s
story is told mainly through his mother, Hagar, who ran away from her
mistress,
Sarah, due to mistreatment brought on by Hagar’s contempt for barren
Sarah. The angel of God asked Hagar
where she was coming from and where she was going, and he commanded her
to
return to her mistress. Then he named
the baby in her womb, Ishmael, “God hears.”
The two questions suggest that human religion
is a reaction to something, a running away, and that those who react
this way
do not know where their response is leading them. There
is a promise here, too, but it is
imbedded in a divine critique of what Hagar and Ishmael represent.
Theists in general, including Muslims,
will tell the world that the guidance of God is not to be feared, for
it is
liberating, not enslaving. They will ask, “What are you running from,
and what
result does this give you?” On a closer
look, a Jew or Christian could tell a Muslim that God’s will as shown
in the
Bible and Torah—including the Zionist return— is not to be
feared, but
embraced. It is easy to argue that
Palestinians suffer from their own resistance far more than from the
presence
of the Jews, that they are “kicking against
the goad.”
This human rebellion is experienced
from within as rejection. In the second
part of Hagar’s story, she and her son are expelled from the household
of
Abraham—this time because of Ishmael’s contempt toward Isaac. So they feel rejected by that against which
they are rebelling. Muslims are being
radicalized today through teaching that the Americans and Jews intend
to
eliminate Islam, which is not true in any practical way.
Yet it is true that what they represent
religiously, the efforts of humans to please God through religious
observances,
has been rejected in the biblical teaching.
Most crucial about Hagar is that she
found within her experience of rebellion-rejection a new basis for her
faith, a
new arrangement with God: the “alternative transcendence” I mentioned
above. Thus Islam stands tall as a major
world religion, but the world’s perplexing difficulties in the
The plan of my presentation is this: we
look first at the difficulty of finding a single point of view that
really
explains the
In Part Two, “Scrimmages and
Skirmishes,” we examine some of the serious intellectual attempts to
get a
handle on the problem, but we find they cannot nail down any decisive
facts. Instead, these treatments show
the stories brewing within their facades of intellectual
objectivity. Each of these has its
agenda and preferred narrative, but the broad agenda of resisting God’s
transcendent guidance for humanity begins to show.
We find in this resistance a destructive
inner core that materialistic theory cannot account for, while theism
understands it well.
All of what I am previewing here can be
easily dismissed by someone thinking in a secular and materialistic
way, but my
aim is to make it accessible to those outside the biblical tradition. In Part Three, “The Best of all Possible
Narratives,” I challenge the assumption that religious claims are only
subjective, having no real truth value.
It has little basis, while its motive is easy to see: to
protect
us all from any truth that hurts. This
defensiveness has its roots in human consciousness, which produces
guilt and
all the religious and humanistic efforts to set it aside.
The Judeo-Christian solution, the idea of
grace, arises also from the nature of consciousness.
So I give a naturalistic account of how human
consciousness develops out of the animal state and leads us into subjectivity,
wherein lie all the truths and errors with which the human race is
struggling. By looking at Cain, Abraham,
Ishmael and Hagar, we find a detailed account of the problem that is
becoming
visible through the intractable conflict in
Chapter 7 "The Attackers" as a Web Page or in PDF format