THE REAL WAR
Artículo de Thomas
L. Friedman en "The
New York Times" del 27 de noviembre de 2001
Con un muy breve comentario al final
Luis Bouza-Brey
If 9/11 was indeed the onset of World War III, we have
to understand what this war is about. We're not fighting to eradicate
"terrorism." Terrorism is just a tool. We're fighting to defeat an
ideology: religious totalitarianism. World War II and the cold war were fought
to defeat secular totalitarianism — Nazism and Communism — and World War III is
a battle against religious totalitarianism, a view of the world that my faith
must reign supreme and can be affirmed and held passionately only if all others
are negated. That's bin Ladenism. But unlike Nazism,
religious totalitarianism can't be fought by armies alone. It has to be fought
in schools, mosques, churches and synagogues, and can be defeated only with the
help of imams, rabbis and priests.
The generals we need to fight this war are people like
Rabbi David Hartman, from the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. What first
attracted me to Rabbi Hartman when I reported from Jerusalem was his contention
that unless Jews reinterpreted their faith in a way that embraced modernity,
without weakening religious passion, and in a way that affirmed that God speaks
multiple languages and is not exhausted by just one faith, they would have no
future in the land of Israel. And what also impressed me was that he knew where
the battlefield was. He set up his own schools in Israel to compete with
fundamentalist Jews, Muslims and Christians, who used their schools to preach
exclusivist religious visions.
After recently visiting the Islamic madrasa in Pakistan where many Taliban leaders were
educated, and seeing the fundamentalist religious education the young boys
there were being given, I telephoned Rabbi Hartman and asked: How do we battle
religious totalitarianism?
He answered: "All faiths that come out of the
biblical tradition — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — have the tendency to
believe that they have the exclusive truth. When the Taliban wiped out the
Buddhist statues, that's what they were saying. But others have said it too.
The opposite of religious totalitarianism is an ideology of pluralism — an
ideology that embraces religious diversity and the idea that my faith can be
nurtured without claiming exclusive truth. America is the Mecca of that
ideology, and that is what bin Laden hates and that is why America had to be
destroyed."
The future of the world may well be decided by how we
fight this war. Can Islam, Christianity and Judaism know that God speaks Arabic
on Fridays, Hebrew on Saturdays and Latin on Sundays, and that he welcomes
different human beings approaching him through their own history, out of their
language and cultural heritage? "Is single-minded fanaticism a necessity
for passion and religious survival, or can we have a multilingual view of God —
a notion that God is not exhausted by just one religious path?" asked
Rabbi Hartman.
Many Jews and Christians have already argued that the
answer to that question is yes, and some have gone back to their sacred texts
to reinterpret their traditions to embrace modernity and pluralism, and to
create space for secularism and alternative faiths. Others — Christian and
Jewish fundamentalists — have rejected this notion, and that is what the battle
is about within their faiths.
What is different about Islam is that while there have
been a few attempts at such a reformation, none have flowered or found the
support of a Muslim state. We patronize Islam, and mislead ourselves, by
repeating the mantra that Islam is a faith with no serious problems accepting
the secular West, modernity and pluralism, and the only problem is a few bin Ladens. Although there is a deep moral impulse in Islam for
justice, charity and compassion, Islam has not developed a dominant religious
philosophy that allows equal recognition of alternative faith communities. Bin
Laden reflects the most extreme version of that exclusivity, and he hit us in the
face with it on 9/11.
Christianity and Judaism struggled with this issue for
centuries, but a similar internal struggle within Islam to re-examine its texts
and articulate a path for how one can accept pluralism and modernity — and
still be a passionate, devout Muslim — has not surfaced in any serious way. One
hopes that now that the world spotlight has been put on this issue, mainstream
Muslims too will realize that their future in this integrated, globalized world
depends on their ability to reinterpret their past.
Muy breve comentario final
Luis Bouza-Brey
Ciertamente,
se nos abre una etapa en la que vamos a tener que hablar de religión. O, mejor
dicho, de la religiosidad laica, la única que puede integrar a todas las
religiones en el objetivo común de la secularización y la libertad espiritual.
El
desarrollo humano habrá de ir por ahí, por una concepción del hombre como ser
espiritual cuya esencia es la libertad compartida, dirigida a desvelar el
sentido de la existencia de esa energía intemporal de la que formamos parte.
Dirigida a desvelar-la-nos.
Hay
que hablar de todo eso, para dar un paso más en nuestro desarrollo y vencer el
miedo y la marcha atrás.
Y
hace falta equiparse intelectualmente para ello: quizá a los politólogos nos
corresponda un esfuerzo más de interdisciplinariedad.