David Weddle is Chair and Professor of Religion at Colorado College.

Timothy Fuller (discussant) is a Professor of Political Science, Colorado College.

Ruba Salih (discussant) is a Visiting Professor of Political Science at Colorado College.

“September 11 -- One Year Later: Responding to Global Challenges” took place from Thursday, September 12, to Saturday, September 14.

Professor David Weddle: Good morning. Welcome to the final session of the William Jovanovich Symposium for 2002, September 11: One Year Later, Responding to Global Challenges. My name is David Weddle; I teach Religion here at Colorado College, and I am pleased to be able to welcome you here to our final session. And I will resist the temptation to refer to the biblical statement about the last shall be first, and so on.

Our topic this morning is "Can Liberal Democracy Accommodate Religious Fundamentalism?" It is my honor to introduce the members of the panel. We are very pleased to welcome to Colorado College Dr. Milner Ball, Harmon W. Caldwell Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Georgia; Professor Law holds his AB from Princeton, STB from Harvard, and his doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Georgia. He has taught at Rutgers, spent a Fulbright year at the University of Iceland, and has held distinguished lectureships in Buenos Aires and Lyon. Among his many books and articles are two volumes available for purchase at the Colorado College Bookstore; Lying Down Together – apparently the law, like politics makes for strange bedfellows, and Called by Stories – Biblical sagas and their challenge for law.

Professor Ball is imminently and doubly qualified to address the morning's topic. After his paper, I will offer a few remarks and then we will turn to our two discussants. Our first discussant is well known to the college and to the community of Colorado Springs. Dr. Timothy Fuller is Lloyd Edson Worner Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science. He served as Dean of the Faculty and was co-acting president of the college with our present dean, Richard Storey. Professor Fuller earned his BA from Kenyon College and was honored by his alma mater with an honorary degree in 1983. He received his MA and PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Among his many achievements, publications and awards, Professor Fuller is currently President of the Michael Oakeshott Society.

Our second discussant is Dr. Ruba Salih, visiting professor of Political Science at Colorado College. Professor Salih earned her undergraduate degree cum laude at the University of Bologna and recently completed her PhD at the University of Sussex. Her research is on migration in the Middle East and draws upon work in Anthropology. She teaches courses in Islam and the Muslim populations in the West.

We are looking forward to an informative session and in matters of introduction, since brevity is the better part of mercy, let us proceed directly to Dr. Milner Ball.

(Applause)

Professor Milner Ball: Thank you very much, David. It was a special privilege for me to be allowed to attend a class taught by Dr. Weddle the other morning. What an impressive and gifted teacher he is. It was a remarkable opportunity for one professional to see another at work, and I was grateful for that, grateful for the opportunity. This symposium will have demonstrated once more in a different way how great a loss I and my university suffered when Lief Carter moved west to Colorado College. I know I saw Lief earlier; I don't see him in the darkness now. But Lief – this symposium has been grandly and imaginatively conceived and wonderfully executed, not the least genius of it was the fact that you selected Joseph Sharman to be your strong right arm, but it's a remarkable achievement and I am thankful to you for it and I congratulate you on a job excellently well done.

(Applause)

And I want to thank also the students and the faculty and the staff of this college for the lively and thoughtful consideration they have accorded me and I thank you especially for the shining example that you have offered of how a decent civilized and learned people can celebrate life in the face of death. It has been a remarkable celebration – please let me – I have been sitting in the audience too and have failed to hear people from time to time. Please put hands to ears if you cannot hear – part of it is not the microphone, part of it is South – a Georgian accent.

I shall speak this morning largely in the declarative, but I want you to understand that it is animated by the spirit of the interrogative. I have questions, not answers. That would be true anyway with respect to this subject, but it is especially so since I am in the process of rethinking some of what I have thought and written in the past that now looks very different to me. I am in the process of constructing a bridge to some new place. But some of the things that I shall say this morning are said a step or two beyond where the bridge is completed, so I solicit your doubts and your questions and I shall regard your criticism as a help to me in this adventure of rethinking of where I am.

I begin with politics. On the broad spectrum of human interaction, politics occupies a very limited middle range and excludes much at both ends. For example, there is no room in politics for Osama Bin Laden at one end, but there is also no room for Jesus at the other. Hannah Arendt explores the point with reference to Herman Melville's short novel Billy Budd. The evil Claggart does not belong among the ship's company, but when the innocent sailor Billy Budd strikes him dead, Billy too must die. Politics can include the passion of the pure, no more than the passion of the defiled. Establishing what is included and what excluded from the political realm, setting the limits on the spectrum, setting the boundaries of the political space – in other words, the founding. The founding is accompanied by violence. Arendt observes that Cain slew Abel and Romulus slew Remus, but I need not resort to myths of origin for the point. I need only to remind you of the violence in America's beginning; the killing of native Americans and the seizing of their lands, the enslavement of Africans, the Revolutionary War and later the land war against Mexico and the seizure of Hawaii. It is the violence of the founding.

But violence does not end there, for it is necessary too to the ongoing maintenance of the polis after its founding. We need military force to repel enemies from outside and police force to curtail internal disruption. Law, as a whole, depends ultimately on the exercise of violence; legitimate violence, we hope, but violence nonetheless. What takes place within the political space so founded and maintained, at least in a liberal democracy and at least in theory, what takes place in the performer is the performance of a commitment to persuade and be persuaded. We argue. This campus has been a kind of polis these last several days. We required force to ensure that there could be rigorous debate, both outside Armstrong Hall and within it. Force allows the polis to carry on this argumentation, this persuading and being persuaded. I need not say to you that argument can take many forms other than the decent discourse we've had here. And I'd rather not dwell on some of the other forms of argument that take place in a democracy. But basically it is the robust art of persuasion.

Now, what about politics' accommodation of fundamentalism? Let's talk about that. Fundamentalism was invented in America by American Protestant Christians after World War II and was the strict adherence to certain beliefs, chiefly the inerrancy of the Bible. Think of William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial, for example.

In the meantime, the word "fundamentalism" has taken on a far broader range of meanings. I've heard people speak, for example, of "first amendment fundamentalists." The American version of liberal democracy has accommodated – certainly always accommodated – fundamentalism in its original, as well as in its most recent forms. And this has been effortless in instances of insular religious communities whose historic response has been, as the Amish say, to sell their farms and remove. It has been easy too in the instance of mainstream fundamentalists, like Presbyterian fundamentalists, who certainly wouldn't sell their condominiums and remove, but do generally confine their activities within the church. And it has also been easy to accommodate those fundamentalists who have not removed but have left the private sphere and have engaged in politics. Pat Robertson for President, for example, and anti-abortion lobbyists.

So accommodation has been unremarkable in the liberal democracy of America, perhaps because the majority has understood that it's in their own best interest to do so. It is good for liberal democracy to have the fundamentalists' example of commitment and the willingness to die for their beliefs. And it is good to have the example of those fundamentalist communities who perform exemplary public service to others like Jubilee Partners outside of Athens, Georgia, who have wonderfully served refugees from all over the world and have themselves gone to Jordan to build homes and to Iraq to deliver medical supplies. And it is good too to accommodate fundamentalists for their expressed or implied critique of society's established ways of doing things. The political realm omits much but it forgets that it's limited; and it may forget the violence of its beginning, it may lose perspective and may become unable to recognize its failures to its peril. It's therefore in the self-interest of the polis to be challenged by those who test our commitments and our beliefs to what we really think is fundamental.

So liberal democracy accommodates fundamentalism for the good of liberal democracy. But – and this gets us to a second topic – does fundamentalism accommodate politics? I turn to that issue. The Amish create no problem for liberal democracy when they remove; neither do Presbyterian fundamentalists who confine their religion to the church; nor do the Pat Robertsons who run for office but play by the rules when they do so.

The case is different in two instances. The first is fundamentalists who engage in politics but only as an interim strategy for advancing religion. Now, there's certainly nothing illiberal or undemocratic about playing politics with your fingers crossed; we do it all the time. Unless doing so is a put-on, unless it is an attempt to persuade with an absolute unwillingness to be persuaded. So that when you lose, you abandon the power of persuasion and undertake the power of force.  Acts of terrorism – anti-abortion lobbyists have been remarkably effective and successful in legislatures and certainly in the courts. But some elements in the movement will be satisfied only with total victory, and when less is achieved they have resorted to intimidation and terrorism, as Eric Rudolph allegedly has done.

The second problem is caused by fundamentalists who refuse any involvement in politics at all, turn first to force, and then if they are successful, rule like the Taliban by pronouncement rather than by persuasion. Whether liberal democracy can accommodate fundamentalists who resort to force, it seems to me, is not a question. For they have excommunicated themselves from politics and assaulted from outside.

The polis defends itself by conventional means of police force or military force. Nations and the international community in the past were able to assert control over piracy on the high seas by the conventional use of force. But fundamentalist militants now are not like pirates then. For one thing, the increasing equality of access to the means of mass destruction, means that all kinds of groups outside of any polity may become able fairly soon in effect to kill as many people as nations can. And this devaluing of the comparative superiority of national force arrives at a time of shrinking national political power. And it is not just the government but also ruling institutions that are losing persuasive weight. The last gathering of the World Economic Forum was shifted to New York to demonstrate that although the World Trade Center towers were not longer there, the ruling structures of wealth, influence and celebrity were still in place. But the assuring conservative purpose of that assembly was dismantled by Enron, Arthur Anderson, WorldCom, Martha Stewart, the stock market, Catholic clergy pederasty, and the threat of a strike by the steroidal celebrities who play baseball.

So the days of piracy are different from the present by radical reduction of the comparative superiority of nations' force and by the compromise of their political power. These two differences raise questions, thank goodness, that are not assigned to this session. The question of whether liberal democracy can successfully make war against rogue religious fundamentalists or subject them to criminal prosecution and the question of whether it can do so without surrendering its liberalism and its democracy. These are open questions, but it is not an open question whether liberal democracy can accommodate rogue religious fundamentalists because they simply cannot; that's not a question.

There's a third difference between piracy then and rogue religious fundamentalism now, and that is greed and adventure motivated pirates but religion motivates rogue militants now. There are some instances when greed and adventure are much to be preferred to religion. So that gets me to the issue of religion. The critical word in religious fundamentalism is religious, not fundamentalism. The problem lies more in religion than in zeal for fundamentals, even within the political sphere. Even within its limited segment of the spectrum, some zealotries are not only accommodated but are even mandated. My profession, for example, requires that I represent clients zealously – that's the word and the rule of professional responsibility. I must be a zealot. And some forms of patriotism are forms of fundamentalism, forms of zealotry in the American civic religion.

And outside the realm of politics, zeal for religious fundamentals is not only accommodated, but what many religions urge their adherents to have. In the Hebrew scriptures, zeal is a positive attribute of God. And Paul urges Christians, "do not lag in zeal." So it is not zeal, but what one is zealous for that is critical; not the zeal but the religion.

Religiously inspired conflicts appear to be the most intractable of all, as witnessed those we've been hearing about the last couple of days, and many others we haven't heard about. Their resistance to resolution cannot be attributed solely to the zealous, for religious conflict lives also among unexceptional believers. What makes fundamentalists fundamentalists after all is only an intensification of what ordinarily makes us religious. The original fundamentalists strictly adhered to certain religious tenets out of apprehension; fearful of a modernity and unsettled by the secularization of their world. It's the sort of thing that turns people to religion in general.

9-11 had that effect, but according to recent polls, it was a short lasting effect.

I discern in my own experience among fundamentalist Christians an underlying sense of embattlement and hurt and rejection by the culture despisers of religion. And this sense never leaves them, no matter how much power they may gain. But I find this to be true also of ordinary religious believers who are not fundamentalists. One powerful governmental figure thinks of himself as under duress and held in contempt because of his beliefs. "We are fools for Christ's sake," he said in a 1996 speech. "We must pray for the courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world." Those are the words of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, not known to be a religious zealot.

Fear, hurt, embattlement, apprehension, a sense of inadequacy or incompleteness or some other need – in short, need seems to account for our resort to religion, whether zealously or with gentile restraint. We draw God into the picture from beyond. The greater our fear or weakness or frustration or guilt or failure, the more we call upon the intervention of God; and the more we can attribute to God's action or inaction, the less answerable we are for what happens. And that, it seems to me, is why religious conflict is so intractable. It arises out of our fear and weakness; and God is brought in and made the responsible party. And what then to do? How to work out a compromise with God, how to negotiate a settlement between different gods? A god from beyond, the god of religion, is not a god of politics. So I think the time is ripe for revisiting the critique of religion.

Secular critique of religion began in the 19th century and continued to develop in the 20th, but there is a much older history of biblical theological critique of religion that begins at least as early as the story of the children of Israel gathered at the foot of Mt. Sinai, grown anxious in Moses' absence, when their chief priest responding to their need leads them in religious worship of an idol, an early indication of religion's capacity for catastrophe.

Karl Barth introduced theological critique of religion to the 20th century, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and martyr of World War II, pursued it further. Bonhoeffer distinguished the biblical faith from religion. Religion is concerned with religion while the biblical faith is concerned with life. The god of religion is the god beyond the boundaries of human experience, beyond what we know and can do outside the spectrum of humanity off the charts. And as human experience, knowledge and capacity expand, the space for this god beyond the periphery retreats further and further into the distance. To contend with the increasing distance of the god it imagines, religion summons this god from beyond as a deus ex machina. It summons god to solve seemingly insoluble problems or to supply strength to human weakness.

The religious approach then requires convincing people that they have the problems for which God is the solution. It depends upon an exploits their weaknesses, rather than addressing and encouraging their strength, and it makes God dependent on our needs and limits. God is what we lack and cannot do, and God then becomes a vessel into which we pour our responsibility.

Bonhoeffer said there is a companion strategy. Religion tries to preserve a place for God in individuals' private interior space. This move assumes that our innermost intimate life is more central than our public relationships. And then it addresses individuals, he said, as sinners only after their weaknesses and meannesses have been spied out, as though Goethe and Napoleon were sinners because they weren't faithful husbands – add Bill Clinton.

This strategy too demeans humans by emphasizing their private sins and weaknesses, rather than their political sins of strength and it demeans God by making God out to be a spy in our personal secret places. Bonhoeffer thought that Christianity may be the truest form of religion and he tried to imagine what it would mean for the biblical faith if the world were to become religionless. And he concluded that it would be a positive development because if God could no longer be the object of religion, the God of the Bible would be more clearly seen. This god is deeply engaged in life, doing what it takes to make and to keep human life human in the world. In the expression of Bonhoeffer's friend and my mentor Paul Lehmann, "A religionless world would not be a sinless one but would be a world come of age, a world in which mature people accept responsibility because they're no longer the wards of a guardian god; a world in which humanity develops its own resources for taking responsibility. And in such a world," Bonhoeffer said, "the church would not run people down in their worldliness but would confront them in their strength and nurture them in it." Religiosity makes us look in our stress to a deus ex machina; the Bible directs us to a god transcendent in the midst of life in our neighbor, teaching that authentically human is political life lived in existence for others.

Bonhoeffer lived what he wrote. The Nazis seized power in Germany and no deus ex machina appeared to do something about them. Humans had to take responsibility and to act. Although Bonhoeffer was a pacifist, he joined the military conspiracy against Hitler. An assassination attempt failed and he was hanged for committing treason. "Only the suffering God," he once said, "Only the suffering God can help."

The conspiracy against Hitler was a zealous act of violence, but it was not a religious act of terrorism. It was an exemplary act of modern responsibility, born of strength not fear. Bonhoeffer made no claim to act for God; he sought neither present justification nor future glorification. He sought only solidarity with the oppressed and forgiveness. "Free responsibility," he wrote, "depends upon a god who demands responsible action in a bold venture of faith and who promises forgiveness and consolation to the person who becomes a sinner in the process."

In an interpretive comment on Bonhoeffer, Jean Bethke Elstain adds, "One acts in full knowledge of guilt. One knows one cannot expiate the wrong one has committed but one embraces forgiveness," what Hannah Arendt called Christianity's greatest contribution to politics. Forgiveness frees us to take responsibility.

Earlier I said that liberal democracy accommodates religious fundamentalism, even when it goes political, so long as it does so playing by the rules and does not eventually employ violence. I also said that the American polity accommodated Pat Robertson for President, but he lost. Can liberal democracy accommodate religious fundamentalists when they engage in politics, do so peacefully, and win? Their rate of success is, after all, increasing in the polls, in the courts and in presidential appointments; all by peaceful means.

Here is the problem as I see it: Religion's concern is religion. And the aim of religious politics is to make government religious -- governmental practice of and support for prayer, for religious education, for display of the Ten Commandments, for faith-based social services, for ceremonial deism, for presidential inaugurals as religious rituals, for presidential prayer breakfasts. It is the longing for the religious state that Pat Robertson and most American presidents since Harry Truman share with the Mullahs of Afghanistan.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer ventured his life, not to make the German state religious, but to make it human. The more religious and religious reflective government is, the less it is government. Religion plays to human weakness and diverts attention away from the world; government is a way in which we take responsibility for the world and what happens in it. And what does happen in it requires strength if it is to fulfill its task. Religion would undermine government just when it needs shoring up, just when we do need to take responsibility for remedying oppression, greed, racism, poverty, the absolutely atrocious gap between rich and poor, environmental catastrophe, epidemics, AIDS in Africa, and the undermining of international cooperation and the rule of law in international affairs.

Liberal democracy is neither self-sufficient nor self-sustaining. It is not free of violence, it is not free of ideological blindness to its wrongdoing. It absolutely needs the critique from the church, the mosque and the temple; critique, not of its religionlessness, but of its injustice. The Federalist Papers employ the word "religion" not at all, and the world "religious" only once, in Madison's reference to the political advantages of a multiplicity of religious sects. Nor does the word "God" appear, although two references are made to the Almighty; once in a metaphor and once to suggest that the pious might perceive the Almighty to have been at work in the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention.

The Federalist is areligious and is instead an essay in human accountability. The first paragraph sets the tone. It does not invoke God, it invokes the responsibility of the people of this country "to whom it has been reserved," Hamilton writes, "to decide the important question whether societies are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." That was the challenge put to the people and in response the people adopted the Constitution, which nowhere mentions God, uses the word "religious" only to forbid religious qualifications for public office, and in the Bill of Rights speaks of religion only to prohibit its establishment and interference with its exercise.

Instead, we have the Preamble: "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution." The people meet the challenge put to them by the Federalists and step forward to accept themselves responsibility for their own political life together. My country, right or wrong. And I must take responsibility for it as forgiveness allows me to do. That is humanity coming of age. Can liberal democracy flourish under a religious alternative to such human maturing?

R.E.M., the best rock and roll band in the United States, gave us this song: "Losing My Religion." I shall be interested to learn whether you think that's not only a good song but also a good idea. Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Professor Weddle: Now, here's an interesting twist: the professor of law speaks about religion; the professor of religion is going to mention the First Amendment.

Can liberal democracy accommodate religious fundamentalism? And the question we have been assigned for this panel has two versions: one domestic and one international. That is, can we accommodate the beliefs and practices of religious fundamentalists within our democratic society; and second, can our democratic nation sustain constructive relationships with fundamentalist states.

The answer to the first question is usually some formula of balance between free exercise of religion and prohibiting its establishment. That balance has traditionally been achieved by separating beliefs as private convictions from practices as public acts regulated by some specification of the common good. For example, as a sky-clad Jain priest, I may fully believe that wearing clothes compromises my ascetic dependence upon the divine. But as a citizen I am prohibited from preaching naked in public. In this case, the limit of accommodation is the threshold of my own home.

This distinction between private and public was favored by the Founders who understood religious beliefs to be matters of individual conscience and religious practices to be mainly private devotion punctuated by occasional circumspect rituals performed within the confines of houses of worship. It is a distinctly continental Protestant view of religion, as the decorous exercise of a private disposition that issues in a public life or earnest charity and honest work. All in all, the sort of religion that allowed for great individual variations in pursuit of the common good; exactly the view of religion that is compatible with a secular democracy. And if that were all the free exercise of religion meant, there would be no problem at all.

But the rise of religious fundamentalism has brought with it the rejection of this Protestant division between what Luther called the two kingdoms or private religious life and secular governmental authority. The fundamentalist disposition is to unify private belief and public practice as a witness to the power of faith to integrate all of life under the will of God. Fundamentalist Christians, for example, extend their belief in the sanctity of life into the public act of picketing clinics where abortions are performed. Fundamentalist Jews act out their belief that the occupied territories of the West Bank are the biblical lands of Judea and Sumeria by building settlements there and defending them by force of arms. Fundamentalist Muslims project their belief in the divine authority of the Qur'an into civil laws that punish thieves by amputation and heretics with death.

Now, these are only a few examples of the challenges that religious fundamentalists pose for governments and societies across the globe. What the Fundamentalism Project of the University of Chicago, which has been going on now for over a decade, concluded is that in our time every religious tradition in the world has produced some strain of fundamentalism. It boggles the mind to think what Buddhist fundamentalism would be, but it does exist.

This attempt to retrieve elements of a tradition critical of modern views with the determination, in the words of the Fundamentalism Project, "to assure their future in a world of their own defining." But how can such passionate insistence on enacting religious beliefs in public be accommodated in a democracy where such acts are offensive or otherwise harmful to other citizens?

I think there are two possible answers here:  One, the wall of separation; no religion in the public square. Second, open dialog; all religions in the public square. There are problems with both alternatives. First, the wall. Memorable presidential utterances, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," "The buck stops here," "I am not a crook," gain their force from the clarity of exaggeration. For that reason, and not for its historical accuracy or its judicial efficacy, Thomas Jefferson's phrase, "wall of separation between church and state," lingers in our national jargon. To its intended audience of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, the notion of a solid barrier between religious institutions and the coercive power of civil authority was welcome reassurance that the new republic would be free from the power of persecution that lurks as an unwritten dogma in every established church. The radical Reformation, after all, shaped Baptist memory. And Jefferson's image drawn from the vocabulary of European polity was a signal that the new world would not suffer the ravages of state-sponsored religious wars. The wall would protect not only children of martyred Anabaptists, but also deist heirs of Michael Servetes, including Jefferson, himself.

Like many political reassurances, however, the wall of separation is an imaginative construction. As the church historian Sidney Mead pointed out, Jefferson's image is of two distinct and settled institutions in the society, once and for all times separated by a clearly defined and impregnable barrier which has solid foundations in the Constitution. But there never was an established church in the New World. The very thought of the Anglicans coming put the Protestants of Massachusetts in a cold sweat. There was never a single institution that could be separated from a correspondingly definite state. Rather, the United States is a lively experiment in the republican form of democratic government, a social order of voluntary associations, including religious ones, of free press, and a dynamic political process regularly reshaped by forces of persuasion on an electorate of constantly shifting interests and loyalties. The static image of a stolid wall restraining two monolithic authorities within their respective domains of power is a fanciful work of hyperbole. The wall is a phantasm and the history of judicial interpretation of the First Amendment demonstrates that separation has never been more than an ill-defined an inconsistently applied mechanism for striking balances between special religious interests and governmental responsibilities for the common good.

Much more helpful, as Sidney Mead has also pointed out, is James Madison's observation. "It may not be easy in every possible case," he wrote, "to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on certain points." Indeed. Drawing and redrawing that fine and wavering line is the responsibility of the courts of the land and it has been difficult to trace in cases dealing with holiday displays, ritual use of peyote, animal sacrifice and denial of medical care to children.

Where religious practices violate civil code, do they not transgress the limits of accommodation? Well, not always. In fact, the history of judicial decisions demonstrates that civil disobedience of legal regulations in the name of religious faith is often rewarded by the courts redrawing the line. For example, Jehovah's Witnesses won the right to refrain from saluting the flag after the Supreme Court reversed itself. They have the right to conduct door-to-door solicitation without burdensome licensing and to refuse life-saving blood transfusions; all practices required by their beliefs. In these ways democracy has accommodated the peculiar practices of many minority religious groups. Professor Ball called it in fact unremarkable, it is so routine.

So why are fundamentalists any different? Fundamentalists are driven by the conviction that the vision of life revealed in their sacred texts must be literally realized in world history. Not content with personal transformation as the basis of new community, fundamentalists seek to use the power of government to impose their religious visions on others to shape "a world of their own defining." They seek to erase, or at least to step over the line. How is that possible? Because the Constitution allows for freedom of speech in debates that shape public policy. And lawmakers are free to pass laws that satisfy their own consciences which may in turn be swayed by their constituents' convictions, including their religious beliefs. And if those beliefs are strong enough to affect voting preferences, then the religion that was barred from entering through the front door of government quietly slips back in through the window of public opinion.

For these reasons one might argue it is futile to try to exclude any religious view from the public square. It is the fragile nature of democracy, after all, that it risks its own future in every election. One must simply trust that religious people, even fundamentalists, will participate in public debates by replacing their special religious appeals with common rational discourse. That trust in the second strategy, open dialogue, can be found in a recent article by Daniel Conkle of Indiana University. Conkle argues that fundamentalists should participate in public debate, but he requires them to engage in multilingual dialogue, in which all participants attempt to translate their own views into the moral languages of the others; the public square as liberal arts college.

The degree of intellectual respect and personal generosity required for this project is utopian. Conkle's dream is of a public square filled with people all trying to understand each other's deepest beliefs with the sincere willingness to change their own minds if convinced by the other. It is difficult to image by what psychological dynamics such conversions would be achieved, for example, on a subject like abortion. His proposal brings to mind that the term utopia in Greek carries two meanings; a good place and no place at all.

Conkle's proposal is idealistic because it requires fundamentalists to deny their own identities as formed by particular divine revelations, yet his ideal reminds us that public policy in a democracy is the result of open dialogue in which no viewpoint religious or secular, can be excluded, and therefore any viewpoint enjoys the possibility of proving persuasive. We turn quickly to the second version of the question: Can our democratic nation sustain constructive relationships with fundamentalist states? To be specific, the only states in our world with religious law as the basis of civil law and in which religious authorities control political institutions are Islamic. Samuel Huntington famously argued that the future holds a deadly clash of civilizations between Islamic nations and the liberal democracies of the world. But is that clash inevitable on Islamic principles? Does the unity of politics and religion in Islam require hostility toward non-Muslim nations?

This is a complex question obviously, and I have neither the time nor the audience for going into it in detail. Let me make a couple of short remarks about it and perhaps we can discuss it further in the Q and A session. Unlike Christians whose early founders, Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus, never held political office, Muslims do have a historical paradigm of political order. It is Mohammed's governance of Yathrib, a city north of Mecca that became known as the city of the prophet Medina an Nabi. Mohammed's flight from Mecca in 622 marks the beginning of his organizing the first Islamic government there. As Mohammed organized his administration, he was engaged in a series of battles, both defensive and offensive, against opposing forces from Mecca. And under those desperate conditions, Mohammed lived in a world of allies and enemies with no middle ground. Any betrayal threatened the very survival of the community and was met with decisive retaliation; national security is not a recent concern.

The violence required to establish a unified Islamic community, of course, makes non-Muslims nervous, especially since some Islamic fundamentalists cite the prophet's warfare as the model for their own violence. But most Muslims recognize that Muhammad also counseled his followers to accept every offer of peace, to limit their combat to other warriors. They recognized that the Qur'an forbids forced conversions to Islam; it forbids suicidal attacks; it forbids aggressive warfare. On Islamic principles, imitation of Mohammed entails negotiation and alliance with other states, resorting to Jihad only as a last defensive resort.

Further, following the model of Medina literally is now impossible because there is no authoritative successor of Mohammed since the death of Ali and his son Hussein. No longer can any one person claim to rule the entire House of Islam. The community that Mohammed had labored to make, the political reflection of divine unity, was irrevocably shattered in the division between Suni and Shia. Nevertheless, Mohammed's ideal is still pursued by Islamic fundamentalists who strive to regain the unity of religion and politics that Mohammed achieved in Medina. For that reason, Omar Mohammed of the Taliban at one point wrapped himself in an old cloak claimed to be that of Mohammed, literally assuming the mantle of the prophet.

In the real world, however, on the plain of history, both Suni and Shia countries, despite their rhetoric of the unity of politics and religion, have adopted various modes of the separation of religion and politics. Saudi Arabia, a strict Suni nation, distinguishes the power of the king and the royal family from the authority of the religious teachers. The king consults with both religious leaders and a council following the traditional Islamic practice of consultation that Mohammed followed in Medina. Such consultations aim at consensus, one of the traditional sources of guidance in Islam.

Now, I'm not arguing that these principles are identical with democratic ideals, but I am arguing that they are compatible with democratic ideals. Even the Shi'ite Islamic Republic of Iran distinguishes the political leader from the supreme religious leader; and that difference at the moment manifests itself in a struggle between the two over the range of allowable reforms in Iran.

All of this is to say that the political vision of Islam is not monocular. As Frederick Denny points out, there is no prescribed form of Muslim government, either in the Qur'an or in the traditions about the prophet. As a result, Malise Ruthven notes, Islam lives in the constant tension between the ideal and the practical, the dream of the Medinese utopia and the actuality of the Muslim state. In that tension, a variety of Islamic governments have emerged, some of which are open to constructive relations with the West.

None of those, however, are fundamentalists. Like religious fundamentalists in American society, however, Islamic states cannot be excluded from the arena of global political dialogue. In one sense, the world of competing ideologies is like the American public square. The reward of political power depends finally on who proves to be most persuasive. Thus, the answer to our two questions resolves itself into one because the polity of the world is necessarily democratic.

Thank you.

Now I invite Professor Salih to make her response. Perhaps if you come here and use this.

Professor Ruba Salih: Thank you. I must say, it's very difficult of course to follow these two very interesting and fascinating talks, and I'm going to try to be brief and to introduce some kind of thought-provoking questions myself.

First, I think I will draw from the journey that Professor Weddle has brought us into when he was talking about the tension that exists in the Middle East and the Islamic world. And I was going to actually say that as an anthropologist myself I think it's very important to look at facts on the ground. Of course, I'm very happy that today we were dealing with fundamentalism in its kind of – you know, in a wider sense, and looking at the values of fundamentalism, not only religious fundamentalism but I think we should also consider political and ethnic fundamentalism, which may draw from religion but not always do so.

And I think that in the Middle East now we are also kind of facing sometimes a paradox whereby we have – on the one hand we have the West, which continues to depict Islam as the main actor within the fundamentalist – (interruption) -- So, I just wanted to say that we have to start trying to deconstruct the idea that Islam itself is homogeneous and starting to look at facts on the ground and look how Islamist movements themselves – (interruption) – okay – Islamist movements themselves are actually very diverse and have come to terms or have not come to terms with states and governments in different ways. Some scholars have started to differentiate, for example, between conservative, radical and political Islamist movements and these differences are very important and crucial in order to understand how and whether Islamists can be accommodated within Middle Eastern – I wouldn't say liberal democracies, but somehow, you know, political arenas and within government politics.

I think that what is emerging is that whereas, for example, conservative Islamist groups are actually – they predate radical Islamists and they are actually very much co-opted by the states. For example, very often the states use them to legitimize themselves against radical Islam. And this can be basically like groups of the ulam or the mullah; even businessmen and professionals are representative of this category.

Radical Islam – we may define radical Islam as an Islam which aims to overthrow by means of violence and impose itself by constructing an Islamic state. But I should say that many of the radicals had been actually defeated by governments and by government regimes, whether in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or elsewhere.

The third current, which I think is actually the most interesting one, is the current which I would define as the political current, which presents very often problems for social, economic and government reforms and very often attempts to mobilize constituencies on that basis. And this kind of political current, I think it draws on Islam for a kind of general ethic and legal guidance, but it does not want to kind of impose an Islamic state by means of violence. Some of these have been – you know, we've been seeing these like in Turkey, where some of these groups have taken the shape of parties and are willing to partake in a pluralist system. And indeed there are very interesting experiences, like in Iran itself, where there is an active political Islam, a reformist Islam which is challenging, in fact, the institutional power of the mullah and is using the language of Islam to actually critique the Islamic state and arguing for a kind of secularization of society.

Of course, you know, very often we find that Islamist groups use the language of democracy, but then we have also to look at what are the practices within these groups. And very often, not only within Islamist groups but also in governments and regimes we find that democratic practices are lacking anyway. So another issue that we should look – one thing is the language that groups use and another matter is the practice of democracy. And anyway, these phenomena are actually taking place from Morocco to Egypt itself, and so on and so forth, where Islamist groups have very often taken the shape of parties and are actually willing to partake in the political system.

So, I think we find ourselves facing a kind of paradox whereby very often the threat of Islamists as being groups who want to subvert the system, who want to utilize the peaceful means of democracy, between inverted commas there, to impose an Islamic state is actually used or instrumentalized by regimes to slow down processes of democratization or to carry on imposing their authoritarian regimes on these societies. And I think we should kind of reflect on these paradoxes as well.

So in a way we have a civil society which is also using Islam as a language to critique authoritarianism and is one of the many languages in the opposition, and is using Islam as a language to pursue a kind of democratization within these societies. But I think drawing from – kind of going to the main topic of my discussion that I wanted to pursue today, and drawing from Professor Ball's insight that liberal democracies need the critiques of the temple, of the church, of the mosque to be developing and to develop themselves and to remain so, to remain liberal, I was wondering whether we should reverse the question of the panel which asks whether liberal democracies are able or should be able to accommodate religious fundamentalism and start to ask whether Western liberal democracies have been actually enough liberal to accommodate difference. Because I think that very often what we face is a definition of fundamentalism which is very ideological and very subjective, and therefore very often the discussion which takes place in the West or in Western and European countries is this, you know, can we accommodate fundamentalism? But, in fact, you know, what we should talk about is whether we can, as liberal democracies, accommodate religious minorities' rights, cultural difference, and so on and so forth.

And I think this question is a kind of key – it's a key issue to analyze the extent to which liberal democracies are actually liberal. And I think that looking at migrants' issues or minority rights issues nowadays is one of the really a kind of mirror of these. Of course, so I would kind of rather pose the question in these terms; are Western traditions tolerant and democratic enough to guarantee, for example, Muslims, not only freedom of religion and the right to propagate their faith, but also to enjoy cultural difference. Is multiculturalism, which is a very kind of – nowadays a very used word – creating room for these differences to be expressed in both the political and the private arenas. Or rather, Muslims will continue to be misrepresented, ostracized and perpetually considered as the other.

And I think that the very presence – someone yesterday was mentioning the fact that nowadays there are tens of millions of Muslims who are living in the West for whom the West is not anymore Dar al-Marb – it is Dar al-Islam.  And they define themselves as American Muslims, European Muslims. I just cite you one example of a famous and well-known scholar who is Tariq Ramadan, who is a scholar who lives in Switzerland, whose latest book is actually a manifesto for European Islam. And all his work, actually all his previous work has been precisely an attempt to show that one could be at the same time Muslim and European in a kind of balanced way. And I think that these phenomena are actually also not only urging a redefinition of the meanings and tools of political culture and social pluralism in these societies, in liberal societies. But they're also challenging classic notions of membership and citizenship in these societies. And here I'm referring to the classic Marshallian notion that to be a citizen of a state you have to be a national of that state; I think this has been completely overcome by the presence of so many people who are citizens but who don't perceive themselves as Italians, Americans only, but who add something else to that identity, who enjoy multiple identities.

And therefore I think that in a way Muslims and other minorities are actually questioning also the ethnocentric assumptions upon which most of these modern liberal nation states have been based. And they are urging the states to – they are asking to be accommodated, I think, within these democracies. However, I think despite this trend, which I think is a trend which is representative of what the majority of Muslims believe in the West, despite this trend, Muslims, as I was saying before, carry – especially after 9/11 – they are still portrayed as the other part, they are still portrayed as the other side of the dichotomy, a modern tradition, they are still portrayed as people persevering in their anti-modern and anti-democratic conceptualization of society and gender relations and as obstinate observers of rigid static traditions, and so on and so forth. And I think that, you know, also intellectuals, somehow, every often have contributed to this image, if you think that a scholar like Giovanni Sartori, who is a famous Italian political theorist who actually teaches in this country, was actually in his late book claiming that Muslims are actually too different to be possibly integrated in the European countries where they reside. And he was opposing them to Asians, who share some kind of basic essential anthropological similarities with Europeans, which I think is really very dangerous.

Of course, this tendency has dramatically intensified after 9/11 and this tendency of portraying the word in black and white is kind of boasting a language which rather than shedding light on an acknowledging that Islam is now living amidst Europe and the West and is actually – and instead of acknowledging the fact that the very existence of a European Islam and an American Islam is actually – and instead of acknowledging the fact that Muslims themselves are being shaped and shaping very much the new societies where they live is targeting marginalizing Muslims and denying them full citizenship.

I think that Muslims themselves – and just to quote another example, Prime Minister Berlusconi in Italy – I come from Italy – in this climate was happy to say that not only we are living in words of separated civilization, which I think is also something we should question, but that Western civilization is superior to Islamic civilization. And I think the only reason why he was then criticized is that there was a political kind of embarrassment, but not because people did not think so.

So, I think nevertheless to conclude that also Muslims themselves share a responsibility in this pattern, it's not only that they are victims. Although I still think that despite – there is a silent majority of Muslim migrants who are actually redefining, renegotiating, shaping their religious identities and coming to terms with liberalism in many ways, and they are adopting yet not assimilating into the new societies where they live or where they were born.

Some Muslim migrants – I'm talking here about migrants – have responded to this displacement by reverting to a politicized radical Islam which has been constructed as an ultimate safe place against Western civilization and the ultimate safe place of resistance, refusing, creating a kind of Occidentalism and depicting the West in essentialized terms themselves.

However, I think that a radical Islam in this context is also fooled by the economic and cultural marginalization that especially second- and third-generation Muslim suffer in Europe and the West in general. And therefore, my last comment and to conclude this – I don't know how to define it – is that the extent to which Islam can or cannot be accommodated within liberal democratic societies in a way has to do with the way in which these societies are actually able or ready to fully implement their liberal ideals, accepting difference not in terms of inequality or exclusion, but in terms of recognition of minorities' right and full access to citizenship.

Thank you. I hope to have thrown some more questions on the table.

Professor Timothy Fuller: Well, what I hope to do is offer a few observations on what Professors Ball and Weddle have said and to end with some questions which seem to me, what they have said, that require us to think about. Professor Ball begins with an Aristotelian description of politics as representing the in between character of human beings – that is, not quite divine, not quite beasts, but capable depending on circumstances of moving closer to one or the other. And he refers also to the fact that the founding of political orders is in violence, that founding and violence go together, and that the proper outcome of that is the establishment of an order that precludes violence – I'm sorry, did you not hear what I was saying? Do I need to repeat myself? All right.

So, the point for the moment is that there's the connection of the founding of orders to violence, and then what might be called the process of forgetting the manner in which the founding took place, the forgetting of the violence in the establishment of an order, which might be called a civil association in our experience, where persuasion replaces compulsion and the development of authority replaces command. So, there's both an achievement and a forgetting about certain of the characteristics of the achievement.

He goes on to cite the fact that the term "fundamentalism" arose specifically in an American context but of course quickly acquired a much larger connotation and it's a word which we now all know is used widely to describe all sorts of phenomena that we don't particularly care for; and it's a term that has become used for general criticism. But he rightly reminds us that fundamentalism can mean commitment, courage and self-sacrifice and the insistence on raising questions as to what is fundamental to our identities, to our self-understanding. So there is both a good and a bad connotation to this term.

Now, in the American context, I would like to suggest that there is another kind of forgetting besides the one that Professor Ball referred to, and that is that the history of America has been a history of the intersection of religion and politics from the beginning to the present, and that it's easy to forget the fact that one of the shaping characteristics of the American tradition is the dominance of Protestant millennialism in the early American period. It's true that the founding was based on the development of a constitutional order insisting on the dispersion of power on the rule of law and on the agreement to disagree or the creation of what might well be called a civil association of individuals. And it is also I think right for him to say that we could not accommodate a rejection of those fundamental premises in a confrontation with those who would alter them.

On the other hand, there has to be made a distinction between the separation of institutions, such as church and state, and the inevitable intersection of religion and politics which has been a part of the American reality from the beginning, remains so to this day, and I can see no prospect that it will cease to be the case.

Now, it is also a global age, so that we are aware of religious differences, we feel the pressure of religious differences in a manner in which sometimes under other circumstances might not be so stark. And this should suggest to us something of the structure, the complex structure of the reality of the world in which we live, and therefore the distinction that I would make is between those who embrace the complicated structure of reality which is revealed in a global age and those who resist it. One of the features of that complex structure of reality as I see it is that there is no religious insulation – insulation of religion from the rest of life – but there is also no insulation of the rest of life from religion. Which means, in practical terms if we're trying to understand ourselves as well as the world that we inhabit, that we are forced, whether we like it or not, to assess the enlightenment heritage as well as the deeply held religious convictions of those about whom we have suspicions.

We bring out into the open the violence of beginnings, as Professor Ball did, but we also risk the intellectual and spiritual paralysis that may result when we must defend values we believe to be true, while regretting that we cannot instantiate them in pure innocence. I think that's the fundamental question revealed by the circumstances of our time. We make the distinction between the proper use of force and terrorism but we must use force at the same time that we're trying to establish the meaning of the distinction in a situation in which there is no prospect of eliminating the necessity of the resort to force from world history.

Professor Ball also says that religion should stay out of politics and in the American context it's not too hard to assign a meaning to that. But he also went on to say that US presidents sometimes seem to resemble mullahs. And I guess my question there is whether this is a form of analysis that will lead us to the kind of understanding we need of the circumstances in which we find ourselves if, as I believe to be true, the intersection of religion and politics is an unavoidable fact of our existence.

He mentions the founding and the Federalist Papers and rightly makes the point that the Founders did not intend to create a Christian nation. On the other hand, they obviously understood this to be a nation principally made up of Christians. And one of the things that's interesting to me about the challenge that Alexander Hamilton posed to us in Federalist Paper number 1, which Professor Ball quoted, is this: Hamilton said in defending the ratification of the proposed Constitution of 1987 that this would be the first time in history that a people could by consent chose a government based on deliberation rather than suffering a government based on accident and force. And he's right to cite that.

But it's also important to remember in citing something like that that Hamilton was talking about what came to be known as a new order for the ages. In other words, when we talk about the arrival of political maturity, which was Professor Ball's suggestion, we should remember that there is a millennial character to the Hamiltonian pronouncement itself which, if not religious in the traditional sense of the word, certainly could be taken to assign religious seriousness to the American founding and obviously erect it as a model for the world.

So the question I have, and I will come back to a similar question with regard to Professor Weddle's remarks, is what is the status of this clearly universal claim to be a model for the reformation of world history in light of the circumstances we find ourselves entering into in the beginning of the 21st century?

Professor Weddle rightly directs us both to the domestic and the international aspects of the question before us, and he speaks also of the privatization of religion and the depoliticization of religion as a characteristic of the American tradition. Over against the Protestant millennialism which is a deep-seated and continuing feature of the American character there is also Protestant liberalism, which was formulated in the early modern reaction against the European wars of religion and which is symbolized in such great documents as Locke's letter on toleration.

The question I would have in thinking about what he has to say is this: how far can we imagine a world gradually converging on our way of dealing with the inevitable intersection and interaction of religion and politics? Or, to put it another way, as we all now agree, we live in a global era and some have called it even an ecumenic age – in a way, the ecumenic age is a better description of it because it's inclusive of both politics and religion and economics.

Now, let's put it this way: here we are in the global era; either this is a new revelation about the human situation, or it's showing us that no answer is obviously certified by world history. But it is the character of the Western tradition and not least the Hamiltonian part of that tradition to defend a world historical claim. Thus we confront universality on the one hand, difference on the other. And the question that remains for us is how do we resolve or mediate between these things?

Professor Weddle: We would like at this point, since we're getting very close to 11 o'clock, to invite you to pose questions that you might have in mind to any of the panelists. We have microphones on each side here. 

Yes?

Professor al Faruqi: My name is Maysam al Faruqi, Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. I don't exactly have a question, I have a comment; and you may want to comment on the comment after I am finished with it.

Specifically, one of the issues that I think worries Muslims in general is this definition of democracy, that separation – you can have under the word democracy, which is a catch-all word, several definitions, the most important one and the most ignored one is that of self-determination. The concept of separation of state of church, the concept of several values that are different from religious values, I submit is an empty one and I would like to know how we would call a constitution that is secular, that would arrogate itself the right to grant rights to abortion or prohibit abortion or grant rights to – for instance, as far as Muslims are concerned – rights to polygamy or prohibit polygamy could itself secular? Those are moral values, deeply rooted in religious understandings. And indeed I challenged once Justice Scalia on that matter and asked how it is that Muslims could be prohibited from practicing polygamy – whatever my views on that matter – in the United States while, incidentally, allowing all kinds of marriages or lack of marriages or all kinds of relationships around that would be perfectly legal. And his answer was to brush off the question by saying, polygamy is absolutely immoral.

Regardless of how Justice Scalia sees that, the word immoral indicates a religious value, not just a secular value. And how is it that under the name secularism we can then impose a certain value down the throat of every single religious group that is in America, which we can't do if we were to call it Christian or Jewish or Muslim. I submit to you, this is a list of moral values, a new religion – call it secularism, call it whatever you'd like – which becomes the matter.

And that's precisely where the Muslims become very worried. If we're talking about intelligent modern Muslim movements – and I'm excluding therefore by definition the Taliban, or for that matter the King of Saudi Arabia who has no religious authority – I mean value – in terms of Islamic discourse whatsoever, whatever his political importance may be. The prophet, contrary to what is understood, is not a political leader, never was a political leader, indeed the arch definer of the conservative Hambali movement in Islam, has made that very clear. The Islamic States is not a religious institution and never was and never will be; the prophet is a prophet and his message is a religious message.

The Muslims must create a political order that is moral and valid; that does not mean that there is a fixed order, it is not something that comes by revelation but it is built by the Muslim community. And that's what was done in Yethrid Medina and later. But it isn't a fixed system. And that's the view of the Hambalis, which is a very powerful indeed, the movement that is behind these so-called fundamentalist movements today. What they object to, however, and I remind you that the true – to some extent – Islamic States is not what you have today, Iran barred. But Iran is a Shi'ite situation; it's different since the Shi'ite have a political theory contrary to the Sunis. The Caliphal states of the Abbasis, the Ottomans, was never a religious state; the Caliph never had any religious authority, the Jurists were completely independent in their ruling from the state, and the Christians, Jews, whoever, had their own courts there and ran their own life according to their own wishes there in the Muslim world. According to the ruling of Islamic law they had that right.

What the Muslims worry about is the concept of a civil government today in the Muslim world that would come to them and tell them that it, like the United States government, has the right to tell them whether they may have an abortion or not, whether they may have this or that and arrogate itself that power which really belongs to the individual and should be determined by the beliefs of the individual. That's the fundamental problem. And when a Western world comes in and tells the Muslims that either you become a democracy – God knows what that means. Again, it could be something in which the civil government come in and impose its views on the Muslims – or we will come to war to tell you because that's the best system.

There's nothing that worries me more than the concept of a new order, a universal order that everybody has to share in. I think there is a shiver of worry that runs down the spine of all Muslims. The problem is whether we're given truly the right of self determination or whether at one point in the Crusades we said, oh, we have here the best religion for everyone. We're coming in on the world telling them, oh, here we have the best political system for everyone and we shall go to war until you agree to that. Let everyone have their own world order and let everyone then debate together how to live together, I believe. Thank you.

Professor Weddle: Thank you very much. Professor Carter? Did you have a question?

Professor Carter: No response from the stage?

Professor Weddle: Well, I do appreciate the rather passionate confirmation of my earlier comment that politics and religion are separate in Islam and that the matter of what laws are passed in the United States are a matter of public debate and persuasion. Anyone is certainly free to make a public argument in favor of polygamy; if that argument proved persuasive to the majority of the people, that law might very well be changed.

All right. Do we have another question?

Professor Carter: My question might in a sense be a follow-up. We heard Riffat Hassan yesterday suggest that oppressed women can find in the Qur'an means for their own – if not salvation, at least their own internal hope and resistance to oppression from males and from the system. We heard Maysam al Faruqui yesterday in a passionate call for us to commit to the fact that God requires us to love one another and not to kill. We've heard Milner Ball today suggest that we must in a liberal democracy make a common commitment to engage in the persuasive process to persuade and be persuaded under common rules of justification, and we've heard Ruba Salih just now suggest that we need to commit really to celebrating diversity.

My reading of history – and this is a two-part question, the first part is whether my reading of history is plausible. My reading of history is that such major changes in the way we think about what we can do take rhetorical leadership from very powerful, rhetorically powerful people – a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, perhaps even a Jesus. If you accept that reading of history, there has to be a real authority of some kind to make it possible to feel the strength to make those kinds of very deep changes in how we think about ourselves. It may even be how our brains process thought. If that reading of history is true, does anyone up there – any of you – see any sources in the world for such rhetoric, for such rhetorical leadership? I think there are many dynamics in the world that prevent the emergence of such rhetorical leadership these days.

Professor Weddle: Would you like to address that?

Professor Ball: Lief, that's a very good question and maybe we ought to stop right now. I think you've not only summarized history well, but you've also summarized this symposium well, and therefore you put us back to where all this language that we've been using comes from. And I suppose that we don't really know because we're so steeped in it that we can't quite see it. But all of those things that you said, it seems to me – what we've really heard from some really fine Islamic scholars here as well as elsewhere is that their stories of origin do have sources for critique of present discourse in the dominant language. And that seems to me to be exactly where the source lies, both for informing – giving me my language – but also calling it into question. And it may be that the process of translation itself from the old stories into our languages, it's not impossible it seems to me that the very task of translating is itself the way in which we find these things renewable.

Ortega y Gasset pointed out that there is no one-for-one correspondence in any translation. Translation does not mean dropping words from one language into places in another. There are, he says both deficiencies and exuberances. We lose something and we gain something in the process of translation. And it may be that the very act of trying to talk to each other – Christian to Jew to Muslim, American to Saudi Arabian to Afghanistani – the very act of doing that may itself hold for us some hope and promise for not only the continuation of the good part of that but also the loss of the bad part of it and things that we don’t see now, things that are totally unexpected. My mentor pointed out to me the distinction between hope and optimism – optimism is a way of reading the facts and hope is something we have in spite of the facts. So I'm not sure that I can give you any optimism, but I could share with you some hope.

Professor Weddle: Thank you. Now, to this side.

Speaker: We were really talking about fundamentalism and not religion, and I want to speak – ask David Weddle a question. We do have in our country a tradition and a set of religious institutions that don't maintain a wall of separation but maintain an atmosphere of separation. And it was done for a good reason. As a good friend of Tim Fuller's said – Mr. Cropsie, Professor Cropsie when he was here – they wanted to sterilize the relationship between church and state to avoid the killing ground of religious wars that they – out of their experience. And we have these traditions and institutions in our country so that the Robertsons and the Falwells and the Dobsons operate within that framework, which gives us a kind of protection when any religious group wants to impose itself using coercion on other people.

Now, I would love to think that the polity of the world is democratic, but there isn't that framework of tradition of institutions in the world. So then what are we supposed to do when there are armed religious fundamentalists out there who are anxious to propagate their views on others by force and violence? Then it's not just a – peace is my passion – but then it's not just a question of debate in some kind of world public sphere. What then do we do?

Professor Weddle: As Professor Ball pointed out, there are many different forms of persuasion, and some of them are pretty ugly. My final comment about the polity of the world is not meant to be idealistic or normative, but strictly descriptive; that in fact political power is gained in the world through powers of persuasion. And some of those forms of persuasion involve the threat and the reality of military force. But I don't see that there is any institution that would eliminate religious fundamentalists in the world from seeking to persuade their constituencies, short of the point at which their violence threatens the lives of others. And then again as Professor Ball pointed out, we have a tradition of using force to meet force.

The separation that takes place and is negotiated is my argument; within the United States polity is one which depends upon the power of ultimately persuasion. We clearly cannot tolerate violence on the part of religious fundamentalists, or as Professor Salih was pointing out, other kinds of fundamentalists – that is, those who would impose their force by means other than persuasion.

I do hope that the world is a democratic polity. I do hope that in fact in the long run those who seek to impose their wills upon others fail. All great autocratic empires have failed. The future of our own is still an open question.

Professor Hassan: I would like to first express my appreciation for this panel which I found very, very stimulating and particularly Professor Ball's presentation. I would like to register a very strong exception to the use of fundamentalism in the context of Islam and I want to seek your indulgence to speak for a minute about my experience of interreligious dialogue. 

I'm one of a handful of people who became engaged in this activity of interreligious dialogue amongst Jews, Christians and Muslims since the mid-70s. And my experience tells me – there were three parties to this dialogue, which was called trialogue – Jews, Christians and Muslims – but I found that – and also my Jewish colleagues found – that the vocabulary of the proceedings were very dominated by Christian categories and Christian terms. From about mid-70s to the mid-80s, a discussion that kept on happening – there were hundreds of conferences on it – was what is the meaning of Islamic revival, because that was the time of the Iranian Revolution and a lot of other things were happening which were causing a lot of anger to be directed toward the Muslim world and this whole anxiety about what's happening here. And so the handful of us who were engaged in this activity kept trying to explain what was the meaning of Islamic revival.

And then from the mid-80s a new word emerged on the scene, and this was the word "fundamentalism." And then these conferences started on the meaning of Islamic fundamentalism. And I was asked to write a paper on this for an important conference at Hebrew College in New York. And when I was in the middle of writing this paper I realized something very important. What I realized was that for ten years I had been engaged in trying to express my own religious experience in terms that were not only alien to my own experience but even antithetical to it.

And I think that that is a tremendous tyranny here, that we are constantly being asked to express what our experience is in terms that are not ours. And I can quote a lot of examples that are not quite relevant to this discussion. But, for instance, I was asked by Professor Dr. Hans Kung, one of the most celebrated theologians, Catholic theologians in the world at an open meeting in Lahore, Pakistan many years ago, what is the Islamic concept of salvation? And I answered him by saying, salvation is not an Islamic concept; because it's not.

So, the point here is that the word "fundamentalism" as pointed out by Professor Ball and others comes from the history of evangelical Protestant Christianity of the 1920s; it was a word that carried a certain baggage of inerrancy of scripture, literal interpretation of scripture, an attitude of militancy. There is no word in any Islamic language that corresponds to the word "fundamentalism." Now, there is however a word called "fundamentalist" that you find in the Oxford English Dictionary, and this word means a fundamentalist is a person who believes in the fundamentals of something.

Now, in that case, if you ask an average Muslim who doesn't know anything about the fundamentalist movement in the United States, are you a fundamentalist, the answer you're likely to get is, yes. You'll say, well, what do you mean? Well, I believe in God, I believe in the prophets, I believe in the sacred books, I believe in the day of judgment, I believe in the five pillars of faith, etc. Well, that's not what I meant. Well, what did you mean? What I was asking you, you know, are you an extremist, are you a terrorist?

Now, that's not what the word fundamentalist means in English. And I think that this has caused a tremendous amount of confusion. One observation I want to make here, I mean, I refuse since that particular historic moment in my life, that I was not going to not only use the word "fundamentalist" in any of my writings or in my talks, but that I realized what has happened is, you know, we Muslims have been colonized, not only politically and economically, but culturally. And one part of this colonialism is we have internalized the vocabulary of the colonizer. And therefore we cannot express our own experiences. I realize that you cannot give authentic answers to inauthentic questions.

So the question must be framed properly; that's one point. The second is that if you look at the history of the modernist movement of the last two hundred years in Islam, the modernists – all the modernists actually, going all the way to Jamal, these were reformers, these were people whose primary – they were critical of the West but they were much more critical of themselves. They kept asking themselves the question, what is wrong with us that we have become colonized? And looking at their internal weaknesses, including the attitude toward women.

Now, what all of these modernists were saying is we must return to the fundamentals of Islam, go back to the Qur'an and go forward with ijtihad, which is independent judgment. So, in a sense, all of these modernists were fundamentalists. So, you know, here is something that one needs to ponder. We tend to distinguish these things as if they were absolutely opposite, and they're not.

Secondly, as I said again yesterday in my talk about women, as a person who has been engaged in the struggle for almost thirty years, the only hope I see for the empowerment of Muslim women is returning to the fundamental teachings of the Qur'an which emphasize justice, which emphasize dignity of all human beings, which emphasize the importance of learning social justice, rights of the disadvantaged people, and so on. So, you know, to me fundamentalism has a very, very – I mean, it's not just positive, it's absolutely essential for the empowerment of women. So that's what I would like to say on that account.

I want to make one brief comment about democracy. Again, it's a matter of language. Language is very critical because language is the means through which we articulate reality. How is it and why is it that all these terms that are understood by the Westerners in a certain way, that that same definition is expected and imposed on everybody else? Because democracy doesn't have a single meaning; democracy can have many, many meanings. What it essentially represents is that the well-being of the majority of the citizens of a state is represented in some way.

Now, again, if you go back to the original principles of Islam, you'll find that there is – the basic political principle of governance in Islam is called shura, governance by consultation, by mutual consultation, a tremendous emphasis on nontotalitarianism. The prophet even was forbidden in the Qur'an to say to the people, do as I tell you to do. And he's ordered to say, you have to obey the laws of God, and many, many other moral mandates and imperatives in the Qur'an which would instill that if in fact a state was based on normative Islamic teachings, it would be preeminently democratic. Now, that is not to contradict the fact, unfortunately – I mean, there is really no Muslim democratic state in the world today; that's a fact. But that there cannot be, is something else. I think that if we were really actually to return to Islam, there would be a different matter.

My plea again today as it was yesterday is, we really do not know each other well and we certainly do not know what Islam is all about. And my plea is, instead of trying to impose this kind of hegemony, not only political and military but linguistic and cultural, we really need to, in the spirit of all our religions return to a spirit of humility and say, let's go back and do our homework and learn the language of the other. And then perhaps we will not see the other as the other. Thank you.

Professor Weddle: Yes?

Speaker: A question for anybody on the panel who wants to take it up. I wonder if you could sort of help to sort out in trying to understand different kinds of fundamentalisms, sorting out sort of universal factors from the local factors, because you've talked about Jewish fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism, but in the Middle East, I mean, it does seem to be unique in terms of the extent and the intensity. And it's a paradox because a generation ago in the Middle East very different ideologies held sway. There was nationalism, there was communism, there was socialism, republicanism, constitutionalism, and the growth of fundamentalism in the Middle East really seems to be linked of this narrowing of political opportunities in almost every country. Even al Qaida, which is not this monolithic organization but is made up of lots of different organizations – I mean, Egyptian Islamists who have been fighting the Egyptian government, Algerian Islamists who have been fighting the Algerian government, Pakistanis who've been fighting in Kashmire. I think it would be helpful for all of us to try to understand how we should separate out the global factors – what makes fundamentalism a shared phenomenon – and the specific factors – what makes it particular to a particular region or particular part of the world and a particular historical moment?

Professor Weddle: Professor Salih, would you like to comment on that?

Professor Salih: I mean, as I said and as many people have said during this symposium, I don't think fundamentalism is specific to the Middle East at all and I don't know whether you kind of implied that there is a particular kind of fundamentalism which is more – but I don't think so. I think that a good definition of fundamentalism – and I mean after Riffat's speech it's very difficult to actually use this term without questioning its very kind of origin, so I think in a way she answered part of your question by saying that fundamentalism is not a political term that is indigenous to the Middle East and therefore of course – I mean, defining some movements in terms of fundamentalism would be thought as misleading for many people.

But I think that in some ways I disagree with Riffat because I think that Islam has always been about politics and since the very beginning. I think in this sense there is no separation between politics and religion, and I think today what you see in the Middle East is not just the revival of Islamic movements but under the language of Islam you see several constituencies using a certain language for very different aims. And therefore, you know, you can see someone like Riffat who has a very important political project which I sympathize with but which I think it's a political project of empowering women through Islam and through a certain interpretation of Islam, which I really sympathize with. But I think that other people will tell you that, you know, they have another political project which also looks at the source of Islam as its own legitimization and it's about something completely different. And therefore I think that we should start to see that politics is kind of embedded in all these processes, both in the Middle East and elsewhere.

I'm not sure whether I answered your question, but I think this is what I would want to say about that.

Professor Weddle: Thank you. Let me just say one other thing because Professor Hassan reminds me of a speech I often give my students about the inadequacy of the term fundamentalism applied to Islam. It is, of course, originally a term that comes out of American church history, it refers to a series of volumes that were produced in the early 20th century that outlined the fundamental beliefs of Christianity. This series of volumes was published and sponsored by two very wealthy evangelical Christians in Los Angeles who saw that it was sent to practically every minister in the United States. So anyone who said that they believed what was written in those books which included verbal inerrancy of Scripture and the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the deity of Jesus and the second coming of Jesus, all of these basic fundamental doctrines then identified a fundamentalist. It was a primarily doctrinal or theological definition.

But in the last ten to fifteen years, primarily due to the work done at the University of Chicago, the term fundamentalism has been expanded and applied globally. This is a certain act of linguistic imperialism; but in some defense of the University of Chicago's project, they have been careful to give it a nondoctrinal or theological definition. What they mean by it is that a fundamentalist is someone who goes to the past of their tradition and retrieves there certain themes, certain values contradictory to modern values, which are then brought into the modern world and used as the basis for building a new kind of community. Fundamentalism is a project of modernity, and that has been the basic thesis of the Chicago Project in thus finding in Islamic contexts, Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist contexts, groups that go to the past of their own tradition, draw some elements of authority from that, bring them into the present, and attempt on that basis to build a new community. That's the way in which the term has been used in these circles – not a defense, just a description.

Yes?

Speaker: Thank you. I would like to say a few comments. I don't have a question; so far all my questions on Islam have been answered, but I don't – I disagree when Professor Ruba Salih said that Islam and politics are inseparable because Islam, in Arabic, means submission, submission to God through peace. And I think this is not a religion, this is an act, act of submission to God. And there is nothing political in it, it's all about us humans for being a better people and serving better things. And religion itself is a product of a human, and human is of course not ideal. So a human product wouldn't be ideal either. And politics is just another product of humans, and religion and politics being together, like today, is also a product of humans. So I don't agree with those two things being together.

But another observation I would like to make is that can liberal democracy accommodate religious fundamentalism? I don't really disagree because these words, liberal democracy, fundamentalism, have been defined according to European standards, and then here are Western scholars, they have these glasses and they look through these European standards and they're trying to discuss Islam and to understand. Because there is a word "liberal" in Islamic context, there is "democracy" in Islamic context, and it's much more different from what it is in European context. And that's why I don't think it's very proper to discuss these issues and use completely different language. And it's probably what Dr. Riffat Hassan said, so … these are just my opinions about it. Thanks.

Professor Weddle: Given our time, I think we'll take one more question. Yes?

Speaker: During the symposium, democracy has come up fundamentally, I guess, across the board. And it strikes me that if one goes back to the apology of Plato, one finds that Socrates claimed that the true champion of justice, if he was to survive for even a short period of time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone. In that context, he was talking about the Athenian democracy shortly before they condemned him to death.

Unlike Mr. Bonhoeffer, he hadn't engaged in conspiracies in secret. He defied the polity openly. The dialogue that he engaged in he claimed was a response that he had to God, and it was an open-ended inquiry from a question that was put to the Delphic Oracle about who was the wisest person. There is a sense in which his criticism of democracy has not been addressed at all, and I think that the claims by the speakers from Islam are serious questions and I think they were raised a really long time ago. And if you could address that particular mindset and the danger that democracy poses, particularly at the present time when it's arrogant and is seeing very few critics except from people who it doesn't recognize.

Professor Weddle: Yes. Professor Fuller, would you like to address that question? We want everyone to speak, of course.

Professor Fuller: Well, it is an important question and I think it requires a lot of thought and not just a brief answer to it, so most of what I have to say is about how I think about the very thing that you're asking. I preface what I say by agreeing with many of what the questioners have said about the dangers of the generalization of terms to cover all sorts of circumstances – democracy, fundamentalism, all of those things. I think one of the things that this symposium has illustrated is the danger of the loose use of terms to cover a wide variety of complex human experiences. And that's why I suggested in my earlier remarks that I personally do not like the use of the word fundamentalism and I also don’t use it if I can avoid it, although sometimes you have to use it. I think the better distinction is between the acknowledgement of the complexity of the human situation and the resistance to its complexity. And the reason I like putting it that way is because that seems to implicate all of us, and not just those we happen not to agree with or to prefer.

Now, with regard to the Socratic issue, I think it's important to realize that the trial and death of Socrates was presented to us principally through the Platonic dialogues as a means to illustrate what I would call a certain kind of tragic disjunction at the heart of the human condition between the search for wisdom and the reliance on the prevailing order for security and self understanding. It seems to me that when Socrates claimed that he was drawn to the search for wisdom, to the search for the eternal things which transcend the temporal changing things of the human condition and that he was eventually tried and executed for what he did, that Plato was trying to encourage us to reflect on the difficulty of mediating between these two things – that is, between the defense of the conventional arrangements that we inherit on the one hand, and the search for what is true, which somehow carries us beyond those things.

One of the remarkable things about Socrates, of course, as you know is that he did not use this as an excuse to create political disruption in the form of political action or rebellion, but refused to do that. And I think that this is one of the sources that we might use within the tradition to reflect on the search for what is fundamentally true without translating it into what might be called fundamentalism. So, if as a great modern philosopher once said, all of Western thought is in some way a footnote to Plato, this is one of the aspects of what he has to tell us that deserves lengthy reflection, that the search for what is true and the search for wisdom, the search for the divine, somehow goes astray when it is translated into a kind of political absolutism. And yet the greatest danger that accompanies that search is that that's exactly what will happen. This is the tragedy of the human condition illustrated in the Platonic dialogues and it's a lesson that we should all learn and relearn today, I think.

Professor Weddle: And with those words, our symposium stops, but the conversation does not end. Thank you very much.

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