One of the grave failures of this generation of American foreign policy makers is their blindness to the power of religion. The veil that both caused and justified this blindness goes by the name of “secularization theory,” which since the 1960s has been promoting as fact the fiction that religion would recede as modernity advanced.
As Madeleine Albright points out in her book “The Mighty and the Almighty,” while she was Secretary of State under President Clinton she had dozens of economic experts at her beck and call but only one informal religion expert. And I have heard of no change in this policy. As far as I know there is no requirement that U.S. ambassadors to Muslim-majority countries know anything about Islam. And I know of no mass hiring of experts in Hinduism or Buddhism or Islam inside the Department of State. In fact, according to Iraq Study Group Report of December 2006, only six of the thousand employees in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad speak fluently the language in which the Qur'an is written.
All this makes sense if the world really is going secular, if people around the world are motivated primarily by their economic and political interests, if religion is purely a private affair. But is that the case? Was the Iranian Revolution just about money and power? Are Hinduism and Buddhism impotent in the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka? Was the Reagan Revolution just about politics and economics?
Regardless of how you answer these questions, it must be admitted that the Middle East is home to the Mother of All Religious Conflicts. Here the three great western monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have been locked for centuries in an undeniably religious contest. Here what is at stake is not simply political control over this piece of land or economic opportunities for that population but the eternal promises of Yahweh or God or Allah.
This religious conflict is of course worsened by the rise of nationalism and by economic deprivations. But religious conflict it is. And you cannot understand it without understanding the back story, which in this case goes back not just centuries but millennia, and deep into the pages of three of the world’s great scriptures.
It may be hopeful to imagine that what the Palestinians really want is land. Or that what the Israelis really want is security. But to harbor such naivete is to remain in the dark. On all sides of the various conflicts in the Middle East—and they are legion—lie religious fears, religious beliefs, and religious aspirations. We in the United States ignore these factors at our peril.
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