Following up my post of Oct. 21, here is an arresting comment about militant Islam and the notion of holy land. Noah Feldman’s NY Times Mag piece on nuclear arms and the Muslim world includes reflections on bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam — specifically his treatise “Defense of Muslim Lands”:
In it, Azzam argued that not a single hand span of Muslim territory anywhere could ever be ceded to the enemy “because the land belongs to Allah and to Islam.” Though Azzam would never have acknowledged it, his account of the divine ownership of Muslim lands was probably influenced — unconsciously, to be sure — by religious-Zionist claims about the holiness of the Land of Israel.
In this post-9/11 symposium, Robin D. G. Kelley opined that U.S. foreign policy should be based, among other things, on “respecting Islamic concerns regarding Western occupation of sacred land.” But such occupations are right or wrong for political, not religious, reasons. The context here is the U.S. troop presence on Saudi soil. The militants’ objection is political — they are angry at the Saudi regime for colluding with the U.S. military, most notably during the first Gulf War. The religious claim — that the U.S. is profaning Muslim holy sites — is basically demagogic in nature, useful for recruitment purposes. Of course, there is conviction behind it, but it is a profoundly illiberal conviction — indeed, ideologically akin to the claims of the most right-wing Zionists. Moreover, the idea that the entire Arabian peninsula is “holy” is tendentious, and not shared uniformly among Muslims. So when Kelley invokes “Islamic concerns,” he’s being reductive and not very helpful.
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