Heresy and History

The war on terror will be won only when Islam's Wahabi heresy is defeated -- by orthodox Islam. Europe's own religious history shows why. From the latest American Spectator. HAZILY, AMERICAN ELITES PERCEIVE that modern terrorism has something to do with the Wahabi sect of the Arabian Peninsula. But they lump that sect with "radical" or "fundamentalist" Islam, and throw up their hands over whether terrorism is a natural consequence of Muslim fervor or not. In fact, anti-Western terrorism results from a war within Islam that is more serious for Muslims than for the rest of us, because the Wahabis' ideas imply irreconcilable enmity against other Muslims first, and then against others. Western elites, religiously challenged as they are, don't understand the mixture of threat and temptation that the Wahabis pose to the Muslim world because they do not know how analogous Christian heresies have roiled Western civilization. Between the 11th and the 17th centuries, Europe suffered arguably more from heresies than from plagues. In Islam as well, heresy has arisen out of moral outrage and matured into murderous political enterprises. The history of Christian and Muslim heresies teaches the combination of sword and sermon that is necessary to defeat them. In the debates surrounding the great religions, charges and countercharges of heresy are motivated as often by secular motives as by religious differences. However, violence tends to follow only when religious differences become the basis of political quarrels. The wars in the 16th and 17th centuries between what came to be known as Catholics and Protestants turned on theological points that had coexisted peaceably until they were taken up by rivals for power. The wars between what became known as Sunni and Shi'a Muslims in the 18th century were strictly about power. The theological differences came later. Some religious differences, however, necessarily imply political violence. These are the ones that concern us. Some ideas...