Customer Reviews

How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

With his second book, How to Win a Cosmic War, Reza Aslan has solidified his place as the voice of moderation in the battles of Christian vs. Islam. As an American-born Muslim, he has insights for his fellow citizens about the history and perspective of those whose hearts and minds we are trying to win in the Middle East.

Unlike his previous book, No god but God, which was more of a history lesson in Islam for those of us in the West, this book focuses more specifically on the issues of fundamentalism and terrorism with which we are dealing today. He describes the growth of radical groups throughout the twentieth century. He shows how the idea of jihad was perverted by certain Muslims and what that means for us today.

Ultimately, he is trying to convince us to take what is too often articulated as a "cosmic war" (often unthinkingly) and bring it back down to earth. The terrorists we battle are dangerous because they don't have attainable, negotiable goals. The overthrow of the West, worldwide Islamic rule--these are not likely to happen and are certainly not things we can negotiate. This rhetoric elevates their struggle to the cosmic plane. The image becomes one of Good vs. Evil, God vs. Satan. Yet, when we allow ourselves to echo this rhetoric and inflame tensions by using words like "crusade," we are fighting a cosmic battle, not a real one. Cosmic battles cannot be won. Mr. Aslan reminds us that only by focusing on real, attainable goals can we make progress and reduce terrorism. By changing the "real world" around the terrorists for the better, they cannot recruit. There will always be radicals, but they are criminals, not warriors, however they see themselves.

Mr. Aslan has a rare point-of-view. Perhaps it arises from the mistrust he often feels all around--some Americans don't trust him because he is a Muslim of Middle Eastern decent and Middle Easterners don't trust him because he's American. But this perspective gives him an amazingly reasonable view of our world and he is often right on target. He has a tendency to be over-generous in his judgments sometimes--he is optimistic about everyone--but he is fair. That is a point-of-view we can use more of in our world.

Reza Aslan has done remarkably well in explaining the philosophy that drives Islamist terrorism. How collective guilt is assigned and collective punishment is justified. How the apparent injustice of killing innocent civilians and innocent children is explained away.

These ideas have been touched on by others as well (like Fawaz Gerges), but Aslans book connects the dots between different ideas and puts them together to make sense.

The war on terror cannot be won by bombs. This is an ideological war. It requires a different approach.

So unlike what most of the detractors here claim, this book is not an apology for terrorism. Its essential point, as the the title suggests, is that if we accept the battle as defined by the Jihadists -- as a cosmic war-- then it is unwinnable, and pursuing it on those terms will inevitably distance us from the Muslim world.

My sense is that Aslan's most fundamental allegiance is to the Muslim world, which he would like to see become democratic, but that he genuinely believes in the American dream as well and wants to be one with it. He is doing his best to make a positive contribution toward a better world by describing the world through his eyes, and he is not stupid. His description of the young jihadist mindset as acting out of misguided love rather than hate - was subtle, accurate and brave, and a real contribution to the discussion. He does a good job of explaining the difference between Jihadists vs. Islamists, and why we fail to understand the dynamic between them at our peril. I think he describes the wound so effectively, because he is wounded himself, and that in itself doesn't diminish the book.

But in failing to overcome the wound, he fails to convince the unconvinced. In what follows, I overemphasize the negative. The book is mostly fair, and he has a point, but I'm trying to explain what will set people off. He is upset that Western countries don't have more toleration for Muslim cultures, despite the fact that the degree of toleration they do display would be unthinkable in many Muslim majority countries. Consider:

"Even in Europe and the developed world, the idea of secular nationalism was problematic. That is because membership, or rather citizenship, in the nation-state requires submission to the state's sovereignty over all aspects of life. Max Weber's axiom that the state is the entity that claims monopoly on the legitimate use of force has proven a woefully inadequate description of the nearly absolute powers claimed by even the freest and most liberal nation-state. The modern state holds a monopoly not only on force, but also on identity. It assumes meticulous control over every aspect of social life, both private and public. It is the primary repressive force for controlling human impulses. It declares what is and what is not proper religious or political expression. It demands consent over all activity - social, sexual and spiritual. Above all, it decides who can and cannot share in the collective identity it has itself demarcated. The state's sovereignty over life and death is absolute and unavoidable." (p.21)

This paragraph does not represent my experience of life in America, (though despite adding `and the developed world', I realized later that he was really talking primarily about Europe). At our founding, a great deal of thought was put into the rights of subcultures and the separation of powers. Subcultures whose laws do not conflict with the Constitution, like the Orthodox Jews and the Amish, have maintained their way of life within our borders for hundreds of years. Later in the book, I realized he was talking about the mindset of the European Generation E from whom the Jihadists spring. But it could also be an argument for tolerating subcultures whose laws are inconsistent with the Constitution of the land, and whose members are subjected to those alternative laws against their will. The case of Muslim women who want to live Western lives and who cannot break out has proven to be a problem in Europe. The European court must have jurisdiction in those cases or society collapses.

Other examples:
* He says that the Islamists and Jihadists who gathered to repulse the Soviets in Afghanistan were a diverse lot, and in other contexts emphasizes (correctly) the diversity in the Muslim world. But why aren't there 30 diverse Chinese or Christian or European extremist groups who can be recruited into a program of mudering everyone who isn't Chinese or Christian or European?
* He talks about European Islamophobia -- how it's time they got over it considering regions in Holland are nearly half Muslim. Why does he not in this context address the fact that the immigration goes all one way? Would the inverse situation in Esfahan be handled more equitably? He attributes it offhandedly several pages later to de-colonization, but that doesn't explain the explosion of Muslim populations in the Germanic countries - certainly not Scandinavia. I feel that if he is to convince Europe, he needs to address more effectively both Muslim culpability for their own situation and the the emotion a Frenchman has for la République.
* In his discussion of American Christianity, he describes evangelical Christians as extremists on a par with Jihadists, and then says that evangelicals make up about 50% of the American population, which may be true, because mainstream Methodists and Congregationalists are (I believe) evangelicals. The mainstream American Christian is left after this section feeling, "Wait a minute."
* He sometime indulges in name-calling. Oriana Fallaci is a pseudo-liberal. Geert Wilders is worse. I think Fallaci is at least as articulate and incisive as he is, though quite a bit more prone to pull punches. Rather than insulting her back, I'd like to see him address her point by point in a fair-minded way.
* Early in the book, he offhandedly dismisses the notion that these bands of transnational terrorist riff-raff have any real military power. Later on, he correlates them with the Zealots of the first Century who were easily crushed by the Romans. What bothers me about this analogy is that the hydrogen bomb had not been invented yet in 70 AD. I kept waiting in vain for him to mention the word `atom'. Some reasonable people like his beloved Obama appear to be far more concerned than he about big bombs in the hands of riff-raff. He's not sensible enough to the fact that Hitler was democractically elected riff-raff, and that that figures into Western calculations.

Anyway after all that whining, I want to conclude by recommending the book, especially if you have a different view, because I think he's a good and intelligent man, and I think you'll learn something worth learning.

I finished reading Reza Aslan's "How to Win a Cosmic War" yesterday when the WHO, World Health Organization, raised the level of influenza pandemic to five. In my mind, both Albert Camus' "The Plague" and the orange alerts raised by the Homeland Security's "War on Terror" collapsed into one war waged against our deepest fears.

Against this landscape, both real and imagined, Aslan's book speaks volumes. Through a critical analysis of the violence committed in the name of religion and renamed as politics from Judaism, Christianity to Islam, Aslan contends that the "War on Terror" cannot be won, for it is a cosmic one at the level of ideology. No armies, no nations, no treaties can solve a war between good and evil. Rather, Aslan posits, an honest, down to earth, and diplomatic discussion of the grievances is what is necessary. Not in the heavens of religion nor invention, could a cosmic war be won.

Aslan's astute analysis and conclusion comes at a crucial time when we need to imagine alternative ways of interaction than to demonize and dichotomize. Only by refusing to fight one, by bringing disputes to the flesh of the real, of the terrestrial, can we begin to have a real conversation. By reading "How to Win a Cosmic War," one takes a profound step towards beginning this dialogue.

A facetious reviewer might subtitle this book "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Islamism." I won't, because I'm not sure whether even a panel of experts on the book's subject could agree on how many stars to give it. In its favor, the book is a short, easy-to-read 173 pages asserting first a difference between Islamism and Jihadism and looking at a history of religious-inspired social movements from Masada to the present (not in that order).

Aslan devotes key parts of his analysis to the mind-set and backgrounds of the better known terrorists - 9/11 and 7/7 - in an effort to dispel Western stereotypes and direct attention to what he feels are the real origins of terrorist acts. Noting that militant jihadists typically spring from middle-class, educated families living in Europe, he ascribes their behavior to a youthful inability to forge a cross-cultural identity, while sympathizing with real and perceived oppression of Muslims everywhere and embracing a kind of religious extremism that actually rejects traditional Islam.

While some may pick up on his criticism of American foreign policies and the Bush/Rice years, many pages of Aslan's book actually sing the praises of American-style democracy, freedom of expression and religious tolerance. While maintaining that the only way to win a cosmic war (where Ultimate Reality is a Struggle between the Forces of Good and Evil) is to not fight one at all, he argues that the best way to deflate the perceived dangers of Islamists is to grant them participation in democratically run governments - an option that oppressive Middle East governments have generally rejected, with the tacit approval of the U.S.

Summed up like this, the argument of the book has the feel of something that could be very thin and insubstantial - more a matter of faith than a conviction based on more thorough analysis and research. Still, for an introduction to the issues, Aslan does a good job of opening up the subject for readers whose knowledge of Islam and the Middle East is no deeper than what can be gleaned from CNN. I'm settling on 4 stars for that reason alone.

With the threat of international terrorism, we need information we can use. This author has the right stuff. Reactions like the botched Afghan War, the immoral Iraqi land grab and ignorance of the Palestinian Occupation only makes things much worse for the uninformed! I liked this book very much.

Reza Aslan has written a most important book that I will be recommending to many of my friends and family. To understand what Reza discusses in this book is to understand from an incredibly valuable perspective (Reza is an American citizen, born Iranian, practicing Muslim) the greatest issue of our time - religious fundamentalism. For those who have felt frustrated by our last president's conservative-evangelical, polarizing rhetoric about the "war on terror", for those who sense they haven't quite grasped the doctrine of jihad, for those who need clarification about Islam and how it differs from the jihadism of Bin Laden, and for those who continue to be angered and saddened by the condition of the Palestinian people, this book is truly insightful. Through in depth discussions of history, philosophy, theology, politcs, and sociology, Reza Aslan offers an informed analysis of religious fundamentalism within Judaism, Christianity and Islam and proposes political solutions for dealing with the latter in particular. So, how to win a cosmic war? "Refuse to fight in it". I couldn't put it down.

I saw Reza Aslan on the Jon Stewart show with this book. I ordered it after sensing how incredibly knowledgeable he was about not just Islam but all of the Middle East. His book is totally engaging and brings light and clarification to the War on Terror for what it truly is. He should be on President Obama's staff! This book should be required reading for everyone on the Obama team, for all military officers, for all military personnel prior to going to the Middle East and for all in Congress. It should be required reading for all Christian and Jewish religious leaders. I wanted to call Reza to say thanks today when I finished reading this enlightening book. i now understand so much of what is going on in the Middle East and the historical developments of jihadism. Would that his solutions for ending the cosmic war would come to fruition for the world!

This is one of the most important books I have read in recent years. Aslan completely decimates our current approach to fighting terrorism -- going so far as to redirect the very definition of who we are up against. It is a very readable primer on how we've gotten into the situation we are currently in and how to get out of it. It's simplicity is genius. To top it off, Aslan provides a glossary of terms with the best entry: Islamofascism - "this means absolutely nothing." It's that kind of cut through the rhetoric and head to the crux of the issue that you will find in this inciteful book. I recommend it for every lawmaker, foreign policy "expert", and citizen!

Reza Aslan's Beyond Fundamentalism provides readers with a well-organized and rational discussion on radical and violent fundamentalism throughout the world with an importance emphasis on Jihadism in the United States. He not only presents an explanation of the origin of Jihadism, but he also contributes a solution to the discussion, something that readers can use to develop their own opinions on the United States government's actions regarding the War on Terror. This solution involves continuing the push for democracy in regions of the world where Jihadism is evident while avoiding the continuation of wars using violence. I thoroughly enjoyed not only the content of the book, but also the way that it was written and I honestly think that he developed a fair and just discussion of all sides of the multifaceted debate. I would suggest this book to anyone that wishes to gain a stronger understanding of Jihadism regardless of whether or not they themselves have a strong background it in.