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By Root 1459 0

antecedents and in its premodern and preliberal forms is not necessarily at odds either with fundamentalist Islam nor with fundamentalist Christianity. The City of God for Christians and Muslims alike is constituted by brother believers who are equal in their filial posture vis-à-vis God. But unlike democracy, which can be compatible with religion (Tocqueville actually thought it depended on religion), modernity is tantamount to secularism and is almost by definition corrupting to all religion, above all to that religion that assumes the “comprehensive and universal nature of the message of God as presented in the Qur’an.”12 This comprehensive and universal sovereignty of God creates thorny problems for Islam that Christianity circumvented by postulating a “two swords” doctrine in which God ruled in His domain and Man, through kingship, ruled in his own. Pope Gregory’s use of the New Testament accommodationist maxim, “Render unto God those things that are God’s and unto Caesar those that are Caesar’s,” represented a preconstitutional separation of church and state that has no analog in Islam, which prefers that men render everything unto Allah, ecclesiastic and worldly, spiritual and temporal alike. Such a monolithic arrangement may discomfit democrats, although it also discomfits kings (since neither have a domain exclusive of Allah’s in which to practice their sovereignty or their despotism; Allah does not tolerate rivals).

Nevertheless, democracy has always found a way to accommodate religion, and Jihad’s war has been less with democracy than with McWorld. In the 1920s, Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was railing against “the wave of atheism and lewdness” engulfing Egypt, a wave that “started the devastation of religion and morality on the pretext of individual and intellectual freedom.”13 Al-Banna could be reproaching Rupert Murdoch or Barry Diller when he assailed Westerners for importing “their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theaters, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices.” He had taken the measure of McWorld long before McWorld had jelled sufficiently to take the measure of itself. Grasping the superior corrosiveness of knowledge over arms and of communications over armies, he warned in the 1920s that the culture of the West “was more dangerous than the political and military campaigns by far.” Where colonial empires failed, he seemed to prophesy, McWorld would succeed.

Al-Banna’s indignation goes to the very heart of Jihad’s campaign against the modern, the secular, and the cosmopolitan. It captures the essence of fundamentalism as it has existed since the seventeenth century, growing up alongside the devil modernity to which it has played angel’s advocate for Puritans and Muslims, Buddhists and born-again Baptists alike. Compare al-Banna’s fiery rhetoric with the mad sermonizing of the British Puritan Prynne. In his nearly hysterical genealogy of theatrical vices called “Histriomastix,” Prynne condemns stage plays as “the very pompes of the Divell which we renounce in Baptisme … sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious Corruptions,” and then goes on to asperse as “wicked, unChristian pasttimes” a host of modern pursuits including “effeminate mixt dancing, Dicing, lascivious pictures, wanton Fashions, face-painting, health-drinking, long haire, love-lockes, Periwigs, womens curling, pouldering and cutting of their hair, Bone-Fires, New-yeares gifts, Maygames, amorous Pastoralls, lascivious effeminate Musicke, excessive laughter, luxurious disorderly Christmas keeping …” and a dozen other amusements that together compose a catalog of McWorld’s progenitors.14 Is there a single item here a fervent mullah could not also condemn? We can also hear al-Banna’s outrage in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s calculated rant against capital cities as coffins of true justice and morals, cities full of scheming, idle people without religion or principle.15 Rousseau