The West and the Rest
Chapter 1

The Social Contract
The word "religion" derives from the Latin religio, the root of which, according to a disputed ancient tradition, is ligere, "to bind." Looked at from the outside, religions are defined by the communities who adopt them, and their function is to bind those communities together, to secure them against external shock, and to guarantee the course of reproduction. A religion is founded in piety, which is the habit of submitting to divine commands. This habit, once installed, underpins all oaths and promises, gives sanctity to marriage, and upholds the sacrifices that are needed both in peace and in war. Hence communities with a shared religion have an advantage in the fight for land, and all the settled territories of our planet are places where some dominant religion has at some time staked out and defended its claims.

But religion is not the only form of social binding. There is also politics, by which I mean the government of a community by man-made laws and human decisions, without reference to divine commands. Religion is a static condition; politics a dynamic process. Whereas religions demand unquestioning submission, the political process offers participation, discussion, and lawmaking founded in consent. So it has been in the Western tradition, and at least one thinker has seen the contest between the religious and the political forms of social order as the process that formed the modern world.1

However, the contest between religion and politics is not in itself a modern one. This we know not only from the Bible, but also from Greek tragedy. The action of Sophocles' Antigone hinges on the conflict between political order, represented and upheld by Creon, and religious duty, represented in the person of Antigone. The first is public, involving the whole community; the second is private, involving Antigone alone. Hence the conflict cannot be resolved. Public interest has no bearing on Antigone's decision to bury her dead brother, while the duty laid by divine command on Antigone cannot possibly be a reason for Creon to jeopardize the state.

A similar conflict informs the Oresteia of Aeschylus, in which a succession of religious murders, beginning with Agamemnon's ritual sacrifice of his daughter, lead at last to the terrifying persecution of Orestes by the furies. The gods demand the murders; the gods also punish them. Religion binds the house of Atreus, but in dilemmas that it does not resolve. Resolution comes at last only when judgment is handed over to the city, personified in Athena. In the political order, we are led to understand, justice replaces vengeance, and negotiated solutions abolish absolute commands. The message of the Oresteia resounds down the centuries of Western civilization: it is through politics, not religion, that peace is secured. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; but justice, says the city, is mine.

The Greek tragedians wrote at the beginning of Western civilization. But their world is continuous with our world. Their law is the law of the city, in which political decisions are arrived at by discussion, participation, and dissent. It was in the context of the Greek city-state that political philosophy began, and the great questions of justice, authority, and the constitution are discussed by Plato and Aristotle in terms that are current today.

However, two great institutions intervene between the modern world and its premonition in ancient Greece: Roman law, conceived as a universal jurisdiction, and Christianity, conceived as a universal church. St. Paul, who transformed the ascetic and self-denying religion of Christ into an organized form of worship, was a Roman citizen, versed in the law, who shaped the early church through the legal idea of the universitas or corporation. The Pauline church was designed, not as a sovereign body, but as a universal citizen, entitled to the protection of the secular and imperial powers but with no claim to displace those powers as the source of legal order. This corresponds to Christ's own vision; in his parable of the tribute money, Caesar's public jurisdiction is tacitly contrasted with the inner authority of religion, governing the person-to-person relationship between the individual and God: "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" (Matthew 22:21). And it contrasts radically with the vision set before us in the Koran, according to which sovereignty rests with God and his Prophet, and legal order is founded in divine command.

The Christian separation of religious and secular authority recalls Aeschylus's solution to the dilemmas thrust upon mortals by the gods. This Christian approach was developed by St Augustine in The City of God and endorsed by the fifth-century Pastoral Rule of St Gregory, which imposed the duty of civil obedience on the clergy. The fifth-century Pope Gelasius I made the separation of church and state into doctrinal orthodoxy, arguing that God granted "two swords" for earthly government: that of the Church for the government of men's souls, and that of the imperial power for the regulation of temporal affairs. This idea persists in the medieval distinction between regnum and sacerdotium, and was enshrined in the uneasy coexistence of Emperor and Pope on the two "universal" thrones of medieval Europe. Much wise and subtle argument was expended by medieval thinkers on the distinction between the two sources of authority in human affairs, with the early fourteenth-century thinker Marsilius of Padua expressing what was to become the accepted Western view of the matter in his Defensor Pacis. According to Marsilius it is the state and not the church that guarantees the civil peace, and reason, not revelation, to which appeal must be made in all matters of temporal jurisdiction.

With the breakdown of papal jurisdiction and the rise of the Reformed churches, ecclesiastical law had less and less influence on the business of government. This result did not come about without conflict, and in several cases (England being the most striking instance) there resulted an explicitly "national" church, under the authority of a secular monarch. Nevertheless, throughout the course of Christian civilization we find a recognition that conflicts must be resolved and social order maintained by political rather than religious jurisdiction. The separation of church and state was from the beginning an accepted doctrine of the church. Indeed, this separation created the church, which emerged from the Dark Ages as a legal subject, with rights, privileges, and a domestic jurisdiction of its own. And it was through his theory of conciliar government that Nicholas of Cusa, in 1433, introduced the modern understanding of corporate personality, and made it fundamental to our understanding of the church.

No similar institution exists in Islamic countries. There is no legal entity called "The Mosque" to set beside the various Western churches. Nor is there any human institution whose role it is to confer "holy orders" on its members. Those Muslims who have religious authority—the 'ulama' ("those with knowledge")—possess it directly from God. And those who take on the function of the imam ("the one who stands in front"), so leading the congregation in prayer, are often self-appointed to this role. Islam has never incorporated itself as a legal person or a subject institution, a fact that has had enormous political repercussions. Like the Communist Party in its Leninist construction, Islam aims to control the state without being a subject of the state.

Freedom of conscience requires secular government. But what makes secular law legitimate? That question is the starting point of Western political philosophy, and is now mired in academic controversy. But, to cut an interminable story indecently short, the consensus among modern thinkers is that the law is made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey it. This consent is shown in two ways: by a real or implied "social contract," whereby each person agrees with every other to the principles of government; and by a political process through which each person participates in the making and enacting of the law. The right and duty of participation is what we mean, or ought to mean, by "citizenship," and the distinction between political and religious communities can be summed up in the view that the first are composed of citizens, the second of subjects.

This account of legitimacy may not be endorsed by every Western philosopher. But it is endorsed by almost every Western politician, at least when out of office. There seems to be no better justification for imposing a decision on a group of people than to show that the decision is theirs. The social contract and the participatory process are envisaged as mechanisms for transforming the choices of members into the choice of the group. And what better guarantee can I have that a choice made in my name is legitimate than that I myself have made it?

It is for this reason that politicians, asked to define what they mean by the "West," and what the "war against terrorism" is supposed to be defending, will invariably mention freedom as the fundamental idea. Without freedom there cannot be government by consent; and it is the freedom to participate in the process of government, and to protest against, dissent from, and oppose the decisions that are made in my name, that confer on me the dignity of citizenship. Put very briefly, the difference between the West and the rest is that Western societies are governed by politics; the rest are ruled by power.

The idea of the social contract helps us to see both the strengths of Western systems of government and their weaknesses. Although the social contract exists in many forms, its ruling principle was announced by Hobbes, with the assertion that there can be "no obligation on any man which ariseth not from some act of his own." My obligations are my own creation, binding because freely chosen. When you and I exchange promises, the resulting contract is freely undertaken, and any breach does violence not merely to the other but also to the self, since it is a repudiation of a well-grounded rational choice. If we could construe our obligation to the state on the model of a contract, therefore, we would have justified it in terms that all rational beings must accept.

Contracts are the paradigms of self-chosen obligations—obligations that are not imposed, commanded, or coerced but freely undertaken. When law is founded in a social contract, therefore, obedience to the law is simply the other side of free choice. Freedom and obedience are one and the same. This was the thought that so excited Rousseau, and the thought Kant was to develop into a comprehensive theory of secular morality.

Contracts create vetoes. If there is a party to an arrangement who cannot agree to its terms, then the contract will be void. Another way of seeing the social contract, therefore, is as a device that endows the ordinary citizen with a veto. Laws to which the citizen cannot consent are illegitimate, and the state must therefore be maintained in a constant state of vigilance, lest it lose the consent of the citizen and the right to command him. A state founded on a social contract is therefore maximally respectful of the autonomy, freedom, and dignity of the individual. Those things which no rational being can agree to surrender—life, limb, and conscience—become, in the contractarian view of things, absolute entitlements or "human rights." And when communities find their happiness and neighborliness through their distinctive ways of life, these too must be protected, by guaranteeing the rights of acknowledged minorities.

The contractarian view of legitimacy takes a decisive step away from the religious conception of the world. Even if I believe that the state was divinely ordained, and that God's commandments already incline me to civil obedience, it is not this which endows the law with its legitimacy. For my fellow citizen, who believes no such thing—perhaps because he is an atheist, or because he inclines to other gods—also has a veto over the contract. His consent too must be secured, and the law must be such that he could see reason to accept it. God's commandment is not a reason for him as it is for me, and therefore cannot be the ultimate ground of the law's legitimacy. The law must be grounded in considerations that provide a reason for everyone, regardless of religious beliefs.

Hobbes took the view that self-interest was the clue to rational choice, in this as in every other sphere, and that the social contract would be binding just so long as it was in the interest of each citizen to subscribe to it. Since life in a state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," all of us have a reason to put ourselves under the protection of a sovereign power, and everything necessary to the exercise of that power will be rationally acceptable to the subject. Religion, ideals, even moral principles play little or no part in the reasoning of Hobbes's subject—at least when it comes to the foundations of political obligation. The be-all and end-all of politics is rational self-interest, and it is this which establishes both the legitimacy and the limits of a secular rule of law.

Later contractarian philosophers differ from Hobbes in their theory of rational choice, and in the nature of the contract that they derive from it. But they tend to share Hobbes's view that the social contract must be acceptable to all rational beings, and can therefore make no reference to matters over which there might be reasonable disagreement—religion being the first and most important of these. In its latest version, that articulated by John Rawls, the social contract theory goes a step further, removing all reference not merely to religion, but to the individual "conception of the good" which might distinguish one group of citizens from their neighbors.

Rawls's aim is not to give grounds for political obligation, but to develop a theory of distributive justice. Moreover, his social contract is a highly artificial construction, existing (at least in its original version) as a hypothetical thought-experiment, against which moral intuitions can be measured and adjusted, and corresponding to no actual or implied agreement between citizens in a modern body politic. Nevertheless, it exemplifies the project initiated by the early contractarians—the project of removing from the legal order all reference to the sources of division and conflict between human groups, so as to create a society in which no question can arise that does not have a solution acceptable to everyone.

If religion, culture, sex, race, and even "conceptions of the good" have all been relegated to the private sphere, and set outside the scope of jurisdiction, then the resulting public law will be an effective instrument for the government of a multicultural society, forbidding citizens to make exceptions in favor of their preferred group, sex, culture, faith, or lifestyle. And while one may reasonably wonder at the miraculous correspondence between the "just society" as it emerges from Rawls's thought-experiment and the received ideas of liberal New York, this simply reinforces the status of the theory as the theology of a post-religious society. Rawls has taken to the limit—or rather, to one of its limits—the Western idea of a purely political order, in which all bonds of membership are contained within the abstract rights and duties of the citizen.

Like Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant, Rawls relies on principles the validity of which he believes to be universal, and therefore acceptable to all people, whatever their history and condition. However, human societies are not composed of all people everywhere, and are indeed by their nature exclusive, establishing privileges and benefits that are offered only to the insider and cannot be freely bestowed on all comers without sacrificing the trust on which social harmony depends. The social contract begins from a thought-experiment, in which a group of people gather together to decide on their common future. But if they are in a position to decide on their common future, it is because they already have one: because they recognize their mutual togetherness and reciprocal dependence, which makes it incumbent upon them to settle how they might be governed under a common jurisdiction in a common territory. In short, the social contract requires a relation of membership, and one, moreover, that makes it plausible for the individual members to conceive the relation between them in contractual terms. Theorists of the social contract write as though it presupposes only the first-person singular of free rational choice. In fact it presupposes a first-person plural, in which the burdens of belonging have already been assumed.

Even in the American case, in which a decision was made to adopt a constitution and make a jurisdiction ab initio, it is nevertheless true that a first-person plural was involved in the very making. This is confessed to in the document itself. "We, the people . . ." Which people? Why, us; we who already belong, whose historic tie is now to be transcribed into law. We can make sense of the social contract only on the assumption of some such precontractual "we." For who is to be included in the contract? And why? And what do we do with the one who opts out? The obvious answer is that the founders of the new social order already belong together: they have already imagined themselves as a community, through the long process of social interaction that enables people to determine who should participate in their future and who should not.

Furthermore, the social contract makes sense only if future generations are included in it. The purpose is to establish an enduring society. At once, therefore, there arises that web of non-contractual obligations that links parents to children and children to parents and that ensures, willy-nilly, that within a generation the society will be encumbered by non-voting members, dead and unborn, who will rely on something other than a mere contract between the living if their rights are to be respected and their love deserved. Even when there arises, as in America, an idea of "elective nationality," so that newcomers may choose to belong, what is chosen is precisely not a contract but a bond of membership, whose obligations and privileges transcend anything that could be contained in a defeasible agreement.

There cannot be a society without this experience of membership. For it is this that enables me to regard the interests and needs of strangers as my concern; that enables me to recognize the authority of decisions and laws that I must obey, even though they are not directly in my interest; that gives me a criterion to distinguish those who are entitled to the benefit of the sacrifices that my membership calls from me, from those who are interloping. Take away the experience of membership and the ground of the social contract disappears: social obligations become temporary, troubled, and defeasible, and the idea that one might be called upon to lay down one's life for a collection of strangers begins to border on the absurd. Moreover, without the experience of membership, the dead will be disenfranchised, and the unborn, of whom the dead are the metaphysical guardians, will be deprived of their inheritance. The mere "contract between the living" is a contract to squander the earth's resources for the benefit of its temporary residents. And critics of Western societies do not hesitate to point out that that is exactly what is happening, as the contractual vision of society gains ground over the experience of membership that made it possible.

We are rational beings and have an inherent need to look for rational foundations for our institutions and laws—a need to which the various theories of the social contract answer. But we are also religious beings, with a need to submit to divine imperatives and to find comfort in the community of our fellow believers. And we are social beings, who live within boundaries dividing "mine" and "thine," and who join together to protect our common territory. As for the "conceptions of the good" which Rawls wishes to remake as private ideals, for the mass of mankind these reflect the desire for membership in a world larger, more meaningful, and more consoling than the realm of individual choice. A "conception of the good" will, in the normal case, be rooted in religious beliefs, rituals, customs, and primary loyalties. Few people with a genuine conception of the good believe it to be a private idiosyncrasy of their own that can and should be set aside in all matters of public decision-making. On the contrary, for most people a conception of the good is a necessary starting point for the building of a true society, and the knowledge that they live among people with different conceptions of the good is disturbing, alienating, and in the last analysis destructive.

Conceptions of the good console us because they come wrapped in certainty, rescued from the arbitrariness of choice, and pointing us with confident commands along the path of our salvation. The liberal thought-experiment is in fact the attenuated reflection of a particular kind of membership, and it is one that simply lacks credibility in societies where the political idea of membership has failed to replace the warm demands of religion. It is not possible for a Muslim to believe that the conception of the good that is so clearly specified in all the intricate laws and maxims of the Koran is to be excluded from the social contract. On the contrary, in Muslim eyes this conception, and this alone, gives legitimacy to the political order: a thought which has the disturbing corollary that the political order is almost everywhere illegitimate, and nowhere more so than in the states where Islam is the official faith.

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Membership
People become conscious of their identity, and of the distinction between those who share it and those who do not, in many ways. Language, kinship, religion, and territory are all important, and all have fed into the various national and transnational ideologies that have animated modern politics. Political organization presupposes membership; but it also affects it, and many of the artificial states of the modern world have attempted to shape a "body politic" that will correspond to their borders and their laws through the invention of a "nation" of which they are the legal and political guardians. This process can be witnessed in the new states of Africa and Asia, formed from disintegrating empires. It can also be witnessed in the Middle East. But beneath the artificial divisions drawn on the map lie other and more visceral differences—differences of tribe, sect, language, loyalty, and lifestyle—which constantly threaten the web of laws and powers and boundaries that have been laid across them. When these visceral differences subvert or extinguish the secular law, cancel the rights of citizenship, and set group against group within the community, a country ceases to be part of the West and joins the rest—as is happening now in Zimbabwe.

To put the point in another way: Western civilization is composed of communities held together by a political process, and by the rights and duties of the citizen as defined by that process. Paradoxically, it is the existence of this political process that enables us to live without politics. Having consigned the business of government to defined offices, occupied successively by people who are the servants and not the masters of those who elected them, we can devote ourselves to what really matters—to the private interests, personal loves, and social customs in which we find our satisfaction. Politics, in other words, makes it possible to separate society from the state, so removing politics from our private lives. Where there is no political process, this separation does not occur. In the totalitarian state or the military dictatorship everything is political precisely because nothing is. Where there is no political process everything that happens is of interest to those in power, since it poses a potential threat to them. In Saddam's Iraq, as in Soviet Russia, social life is carried on furtively, under the vigilant eyes of a secret police force that can never be certain that it has discovered the real conspiracy that may one day destroy it.

Totalitarian states and military dictatorships are abnormalities. But so too, judged from the historical perspective, are states founded on the Western model. The political process is an achievement—one that might not have occurred and has not occurred in those parts of the world where Roman law and Christian doctrine have left no mark. Even today most communities are held together in other ways—by tribal sentiment, by religion, or by force.

The tribe is often described as "natural," meaning that it arises spontaneously and is never the result of a decision—certainly not of a political decision. Members of a tribe are joined by marriage and kinship, and the first-person plural is coextensive with the sense of kin (which may be amplified by the imagination to include all neighbors and familiars). Tribes can grow and take on a quasi-political structure, as their members move to foreign parts or lose touch with their ancestral community. Moreover, the majority of members of the tribe are either dead or unborn, and yet just as much members as those who are alive. This is what relations of kinship mean: you and I are descended from a common source, and owe our membership to the fact that our common ancestor is also a member. All tribal ceremonies in which membership is at stake—marriages, funerals, births, initiations—are also attended by the dead, who in turn are the guardians of those unborn. And the consolation of tribal membership resides partly in this union with absent generations, through which the fear of death is allayed and the individual granted the supreme endorsement of existing as a limb of the eternal organism.

Communities bound by religion—or "creed communities," to use Spengler's term—grow naturally from the tribe, just as religion grows naturally from kinship. Through ceremonies of membership, in which the dead bear witness to our need of them, the gods enter the world. Every invocation of the dead is a transition to the supernatural; and whatever it is that people worship is located in the supernatural sphere: which is not to say that it is wholly outside nature or in any way inaccessible. On the contrary, the gods of the tribesman are as real and near to him as the spirits of his ancestors, and may be carried around in tangible form, like the household gods of the Romans. But that too is a sign of their supernatural character. For only what is supernatural can be identical with its own representation, as the god is identical with the idol, which exists nevertheless in a hundred replicas, each endowed with the same supernatural power.

The creed community is, however, distinct from the tribe. For here the criterion of membership has ceased to be kinship and has instead become worship and obedience. Those who worship my gods, and accept the same divine prescriptions, are joined to me by this, even though we are strangers. Moreover, creed communities, like tribes, extend their claims beyond the living. The dead acquire the privileges of the worshipper through the latter's prayers. But the dead are present in these new ceremonies on very different terms. They no longer have the authority of tribal ancestors; rather, they are subjects of the same divine overlord, undergoing their reward or punishment in conditions of greater proximity to the ruling power. They throng together in the great unknown, just as we will, released from every earthly tie and united by faith.

Creed communities can expand beyond the kinship relation most easily when they enjoy a sacred text, in which the truths about the divine order are set down for all time. The existence of such a text sanctifies the language in which it is written: the language is lifted out of time and change to become immemorial, like the voice of God. Hence, true creed communities resist not only changes to the ceremonies (which define the experience of membership), but also changes to the sacred text and to the language used in recording it. By this means Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, and the English of King James I have been lifted out of history and immortalized. Membership in the creed community may often require an apprenticeship in the sacred language: certainly no priest or mullah can be allowed to ignore it. But the creed community inevitably grants privileges to the native speakers of that language, and endows them with a weapon that permits them to rule the world (or at least the only bit of the world that matters—the world of the faithful). The neighboring occurrence of two of the sacred languages—Arabic and Hebrew—as spoken languages in today's Middle East is of enormous socio-political importance. Although Hebrew has been strenuously revived in order to become a modern vernacular, and although spoken Arabic everywhere differs from the classical archetype, both languages resound with a message of religious membership. The fact that the languages are close cousins serves to fuel the conflict between those who speak them. For it is the one who is near to me, not the one who is far away and unrelated, who poses the greatest threat to my spiritual territory.

The initial harmony between tribal and credal criteria of membership may give way to conflict, as the rival forces of family love and religious obedience exert themselves over small communities. This conflict has been one of the motors of Islamic history, and can be witnessed all over the Middle East, where local creed communities have grown out of the monotheistic religions and shaped themselves according to a tribal experience of membership. There is at least one such community—the Druze—in which a credal idea of membership has come to depend on a tribal criterion. Each child of a Druze is held to be a member of the sect solely by virtue of his or her birth, and each new member of the sect is believed to inherit the soul of a Druze that died. The community can neither grow nor dwindle, but is an eternal communion of the unborn and the dead, each member of which is simultaneously in both conditions, while also being alive!

For a long time Europe existed as a kind of creed community —but one in which sovereignty had crystallized in the hands of individual families, whose claims were either endorsed by the Pope or asserted against him. But Christianity was a creed community with a difference. From its beginning in the Roman Empire it internalized some of the ideas of imperial government; in particular, it adopted and immortalized the greatest of all Roman achievements, which was the universal system of law as a means for the resolution of conflicts and the administration of distant provinces. Although Islam has its law, it is explicitly a holy law, laying down the path to salvation, and dealing with all the minute particulars—from the times of prayer to the rituals of personal hygiene—through which a person makes and unmakes his relationship with God. Moreover, this law derives its authority exclusively from the past, either from the word of God as recorded in the Koran or from the exemplary acts of the Prophet, as related in the Sunna. Jurisprudence is limited to tracing a decision back to those authoritative sources, or to some hadith of the Prophet that will fill the lacuna. The four orthodox schools (madhahib) of jurisprudence that emerged from the great period of Islamic civilization admitted the possibility of independent judgment or ijtihad (literally "effort," from the root jahada, "to strive," from which is derived also jihad, the "struggle on behalf of the faith"). But ijtihad must be based on the four roots or pillars of Islam—the Koran, the Sunna, qiyas ("analogy") and ijma' ("consensus") —and could not be used to introduce secular ideas of authority. Besides, it has long been accepted among Muslims that "the gate of ijtihad is closed," meaning that the divine law, the shari'a, can no longer be adjusted or added to, but merely studied for the meaning that it already contains.

The Roman law by contrast was secular, unconcerned with the individual's religious well-being. It was an instrument for governing people regardless of their creedal differences; and its decisions were not validated by tracing them to some sacred source, but by autonomous principles of judicial reasoning and an explicit statement of the law. The law itself could change in response to changing circumstances; and its validity derived purely from the fact that it was commanded by the sovereign power and enforced against every subject.

That conception of law is perhaps the most important force in the emergence of European forms of sovereignty. It ensured the development of law as an entity independent of the sovereign's command, and the maintenance of a kind of universal jurisdiction through the courts of canon law. At the same time, each sovereign, through his own courts, was able to qualify and narrow the universal law so that it adapted itself to his territorial claims. Thus there arose the idea of kingdoms, not as local power centers, but as territorial jurisdictions the monarchs of which were constrained by the law and also appointed by it. Often the law was, as in England, the creation of judges: and the common law principles (including those of equity) have ensured that, wherever the English law has prevailed, it is law and not the executive power that has the last word in any conflict between them.

Under the European experience of the sovereign state, therefore, territorial jurisdiction has had at least as much importance as language and religion in shaping people's attachments. Following the Reformation, three distinct conceptions of membership exerted their forces over the European imagination. First, religion, particularly those fine differences of doctrine and practice that distinguished Catholic from Protestant and sect from sect. (Fine differences are always more important in determining membership than large differences, precisely because they permit comparisons. The person whose religion differs from mine by a tiny article, or a barely perceivable gesture, is not a believer in other gods, but a blasphemer against my gods. Unlike the person with other deities, he is automatically an object of hostility, since he threatens the faith from a point within its spiritual territory.) Second, language, particularly the languages that had attained sanctity through some authoritative translation of the sacred texts (English and German, for instance), and that had been dispersed by the art of printing. And third, the gravitational force of territorial jurisdictions, under which contracts could be enforced, disputes settled, marriages and institutions legalized, with uniform effect over a continuous territory. In the course of time it was this last conception of membership that was to shape the modern world by laying the foundations for secular government, in which neither religion nor tribe nor dynasty would be the arbiter of collective choice, but in which all such factors would be subservient to the political process.

When law is defined over territory, so as to apply to everyone residing there, and when the source of its authority is the sovereign power, the reality of law, as a human artifact, rather than a divine command, becomes apparent. The law is detached from the demands of religion and reconstrued as an abstract system of rights and duties. It begins to show a preference for contract over status, and for definable interests over inarticulate allegiances.9 In short, it becomes a great reformer of membership, coaxing it in a contractual direction. It makes our ties judiciable and therefore articulate; and in doing so it loosens them.

At the same time we must not think of territorial jurisdiction as a merely conventional arrangement, a kind of ongoing and severable agreement of the kind distilled in the social contract theory. It involves, in the normal case, a genuine "we" of membership: not as visceral as that of kinship; nor as uplifting as that of worship; and not as inescapable as those of language and kin; but a "we" all the same. For a jurisdiction gains its validity either from an immemorial past or from a fictitious contract between people who already belong together. In the English case, law comes with the authority of long usage; ancestors speak as clearly through it as they speak through the King James Bible; and the fact that English law is common law, arising from the particular decisions made in concrete cases and not through the impositions of a sovereign, gives to it an added authority as the "law of the land." Around this particular territorial jurisdiction, therefore, there has arisen a remarkable and in many ways unique form of membership, in which belonging is defined neither by language nor by religion nor even by sovereignty, but by the felt recognition of a particular territory as home: the safe, law-governed, and protected place that is "ours." As I have tried to show elsewhere, this sense translates itself into a vision of the enchanted landscape. This vision did not come into being with the Lakeland poets, but has dominated English patriotism at least since Shakespeare's day, and, indeed, owes much of its power to thoughts and images articulated by Shakespeare. From this vision of the enchanted homeland arose the loyalty, the bravado, and also the "conception of the good" that built an empire.

Territorial jurisdictions sit uneasily upon credal communities, which tend to recognize the validity of no law other than the divine commands that shape their identity. This fact has been of great importance in the history of Islam, and also in the emergence of sovereign states in the Middle East and North Africa. For the true Muslim, no law is validated merely by deriving it from the customary law or sovereign edicts that establish a territorial jurisdiction. Laws can warrant our obedience only if they are divinely sanctioned; this means that their validity is established only if they can be derived from the shari'a—the revealed will of God. This conception of law has an immediate intelligibility in a society consisting purely of Muslims, members of a single sect, with an acknowledged tribal chieftain or ruling dynasty. But it is ill adapted to a society where rival confessions compete for a share in the collective assets, and where territorial boundaries between the communities are weak or non-existent. The Ottoman solution—the millet system—is worth considering, since it still survives, in altered form, in Lebanon, and provides an illustration of some of the problems that I shall be addressing in this book.

The Turkish term millet (which now has the meaning of "nation") derives from Arabic millah, meaning a creed community or sect. The Ottoman Empire included Christians and Muslims of almost every obedience, together with Jews, Druze, and Alawites (the latter two being sects that grew out of Islam but ought now to be regarded as indigenous forms of post-Islamic religion). Each subject of the Ottoman Empire belonged to, or was allocated to, a millet, defined primarily by religious custom and confession. The millets (milletler in Turkish) were represented separately before the Sultan's throne, and rivalry between them was settled by adjudication from the Sublime Porte—in that sense there was an overarching territorial jurisdiction. However, the authority of this jurisdiction depended upon the dominant millet of Sunni Muslims and on the shari'a as interpreted by the Mufti. When, during the nineteenth century, the Ottoman authorities attempted to modernize the law, as an instrument for administering the entire territory of the Empire, the resulting code—the Majalla, as it is known—was explicitly derived from the shari'a: the first attempt, indeed, to codify Islamic law. The Majalla was preserved under the British protectorate of Palestine, and incorporated after independence by the State of Israel: a tribute to Islam that is not often remarked upon.

The Ottoman Empire was a territorial jurisdiction only in the sense that the dominant creed community asserted its overarching control over all local administration. In all matters relating to religious custom, marriage, family, and inheritance the millets were sovereign, and they dealt with conflicts by a system of appeals to the office of their respective religious leader—the Greek Catholic Patriarch in Antioch, for example, or the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople. The ones who suffered most from the Sunni ascendancy were not the Christian minorities (although the Armenians were to pay a bitter price when the Empire finally began to disintegrate), but the Muslim sects judged to be heretical and therefore deprived of a religious leader and communal identity of their own—the Shi'ites being the principal example.

As the Empire declined, the rights and privileges of the millets were continually set aside by a central power that welcomed sectarian conflict as the best guarantee of its own survival. Increasingly, therefore, sectarian loyalties came to prevail over obedience to the Porte, and when, in the wake of the First World War, obedience was cancelled, the subjects of the Empire found themselves with no other lord than that which religious custom or tribal affiliation had bestowed on them. At the same time the Western powers—France and Britain in particular—were staking out their rival imperial claims in the region and dividing up the Ottoman territory into countries that had little or no identity beyond that required by administrative convenience and geopolitical strategy. Even where regions had achieved a kind of autonomy under Ottoman sovereignty—notably Lebanon and Egypt—the claims of history and local loyalty were largely set aside in the interests of imperial gain.

It is easy to blame the subsequent instability of the Middle East on the ambitions of the Western powers. However, it is important to bear in mind that, in a region of creed communities, none of which enjoyed a territory of its own, there was no alternative to empire. Without some kind of territorial jurisdiction imposed from outside, the communities themselves would have been bereft of all methods, other than war, of resolving the disputes between them. The Sykes-Picot accords, agreed between two adventurous diplomats charged with securing a postwar settlement for the region, therefore divided the Ottoman territories into geographical states, and endeavored to attach to each of them a sovereign who would command the common loyalty of the communities who resided there, and a legal system that would underpin the institutions required by political "progress."

These legal systems, derived as a rule by importing ready-made codes from the West, were intended to further the development of the territories as "nation-states," governed according to constitutional principles familiar from the European rule of law.11 Although they frequently paid lip service to the shari'a, these codes harmonized badly with the indigenous legal traditions, and required knowledge and expertise that were not locally available. Hence the temporary imperial administrations under puppet sovereigns (some of whom had no previous territorial connection with the countries over which they nominally ruled) did not make way for genuine political government, still less for democracy in the Western mold, even in those countries—such as Egypt—where there was considerable indigenous support for Constitutionalism, and established interests wedded to the idea of a secular state. For the most part the regimes installed by the European powers crumbled before feudal despotism, hereditary monarchy, or the peculiar combination of gangster terrorism and Leninist one-party rule imposed through the Ba'th party by Hafiz el-Asad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And in place of Western ideas of secular government came the kind of raging ideological politics, influenced equally by Marxism and Islamic millenarianism, that finally gained absolute power with the Islamic Revolution of Khomeini in Iran.

The most telling exception was Lebanon, which had retained a kind of independence since classical times. Thanks to its mountainous hinterlands, Lebanon had been able to protect itself from enemies (including the Sultan), and to survive as a semi-autonomous emirate, offering refuge to the more adventurous tribes of Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent. And thanks to its Mediterranean harbors, Lebanon had enjoyed a freedom and respect for law that are the natural concomitants of maritime trade. Its Christian (largely Maronite) community (probably a majority at the time when Lebanon became a French protectorate) had evolved a territorial claim, a European sense of secular jurisdiction, and a commitment to freedom of conscience made necessary by its many sects.

Bordered by a despotic Syria, occupied by armed refugees from Palestine, invaded by the Israeli and Syrian armies, and beset by a rebellious and growing Shi'ite underclass and an Iranian-backed Shi'ite militia intent on bringing chaos to the countryside, Lebanon was doomed to destruction. Nevertheless, its model constitution and laws, its "national pact" (which distributed the offices of state according to the confessions), and its democratic procedures under a French-style presidency so distinguished it, during its years of relative peace, from every other Arab state as to bear witness to the real and deep difference between a Christian and a Muslim political culture. Territorial jurisdiction takes natural root in the first, but not in the second, and the one remaining example of a Muslim country in which secular jurisdiction and democratic procedures survive—Turkey itself—is notable for the fact that religion is expressly banished from the law, from the offices of state, and from the public life of the country, and that the edict of banishment must be constantly remade by a vigilant and secularized army.

With hindsight it is difficult to see the destruction of the Ottoman Empire as anything other than a disaster—a disaster whose consequences threaten to match those of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Hitler. So it is described by David Fromkin, for example. The tragic history of the post-World War I settlement, however, is less relevant to today's world than the enduring failure of the Middle Eastern states to acquire territorial legitimacy. In this they contrast starkly with the successor states of the Austrian Empire, where nationalist aspirations had preceded the breakup of the Empire by a century or more, and where loyalties were already shaping themselves in the nineteenth century according to territorial rather than religious or tribal ideals.

Thus in the Czech and Slovak Republics we witness, following the collapse of communism, the emergence of a fully secular conception of citizenship, based in national loyalty and territorial integrity. Formed by the same kind of administrative fiat that had divided up the Ottoman Empire, the former Czechoslovakia went through all the crises that are now familiar in multi-ethnic states. First the German minority voted en masse for the Nazi idea of an enlarged German homeland, while Hitler offered the Slovaks independence as a Nazi protectorate. Then, following the post-World War II expulsion of the Germans, the reunited Czechoslovakia fell under the Soviet yoke. Within two years of the communist fall from power in 1989, however, the state had split into the Czech and Slovak Republics, without violence and with the retention of a large number of social, institutional, and economic ties. Nothing comparable can be witnessed in the Middle East, where, apart from Turkey and Iran, communities are not defined by language and territory but by religion, tribe, and dynasty. The Czech and Slovak Republics have effortlessly taken on the character of the European Rechtstaat precisely because their pre-political loyalties were already shaped by national, rather than religious, ideals.

It is true that there has been a concerted attempt, beginning with the Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century, to introduce ideas of national rather than religious unity into the Middle East. The philosophy of "Arab nationalism" was designed to facilitate modern forms of government, with the territorially defined nation (qawm) replacing the Islamic umma as the focus of loyalty. The Arab nation was invented in order to provide a pre-political order suitable to the emerging sovereign states, and "arabism" ('uruba) became a nationalist ideology designed to repair the religious and sectarian divisions among the Arabicspeaking peoples. It is perhaps significant that Michel Aflaq, the most influential modern proponent of Arab nationalism and co-founder of the Ba'th Party, was not originally a Muslim but a Paris-educated Syrian of Greek Orthodox extraction, who used nationalist rhetoric in order to uphold the claims of a "Greater Syria" against Lebanon and Israel. When Aflaq, in later life, converted to Islam, it was because he saw this as the logical consequence of his Arabist ideology, rather than the other way around.

In fact the whole idea of Arab nationalism verges on contradiction, being an attempt to shape a local, territorial loyalty from a language that had been spread around the Mediterranean on the wings of a militant religion, and to conscript the religious loyalty that echoes in that most enchanted of languages to a secular cause with which it is profoundly incompatible. The Egyptian case is instructive. The quasi-autonomous Egyptian khedivate under Mehmet Ali and his successors began the Europeanizing process that severed the country from the rest of the Ottoman Empire. British occupation excited local resistance, the most effective and committed of which was that of the Muslim Brotherhood. This was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, initially as a religious charity offering support and comfort to the migrants who were crowding into the cities, but soon developing into a terrorist movement aimed at ridding Egypt of alien powers. Resistance to the foreigner, in other words, came into being as a jihad on behalf of Islam. When Nasser came to power in 1952 by a coup d'état staged by fellow army officers, so ousting the British client King Faruq, he wished to gain legitimacy for a secular government, and therefore preached the Arab nationalist cause. But he found himself in immediate conflict with the real pre-political loyalty of the Muslim majority. The Copts of Egypt, like the Maronites and Melkites of Lebanon, saw the benefits of a secular state and Western systems of law: such is the normal Christian response. Many of the Muslims did not.

Nasser moved quickly to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, by means almost as brutal as those which President Hafiz el-Asad was later to use in Syria. Having taken a step in this Arab nationalist direction, Nasser found himself compelled by the logic of the case to declare a short-lived "United Arab Republic" of Egypt and Syria. If the Arabs really are a unified people, then they deserve and require a unified state. The immediate collapse of the UAR, however, made it clear that there was little more to Arab political unity than a shared antipathy to Israel. The real unity remains today what it was in the time of Muhammad: the unity of a creed community with a common language sanctified by a holy text. And the centuries of fragmentation into rival sects and tribes have ensured that this unity—the only unity that the people really believe in—is also an unrealizable fiction whose political enactment entails bloodshed, tyranny, and war.

Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser as President of Egypt, recognized that the secular republic that Nasser had tried to create was unsustainable. Although the Muslim Brotherhood remained a proscribed organization, Sadat emphasized his own Islamic credentials and made apparent concessions to the mullahs, while at the same time urging a kind of local Egyptian nationalism—msriah—as the true basis of his political legitimacy. His assassination at the hands of religious terrorists was an especially vivid illustration of the fact that the most potent pre-political ideology to have captured the hearts of modern Egyptians has remained that of the Muslim Brotherhood. And it is to the Muslim Brotherhood that the atrocities of September 11 should ultimately be traced.

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The Christian Legacy
The social contract, I have suggested, is a kind of theological abstraction from the experience of territorial jurisdiction. It is a representation in ideal form of a committee, a coming together of people in a single place, in order to agree to the terms of their common protection. But the contract makes sense of Western politics only because of the long history that endowed Western communities with a territorial rather than a religious loyalty. I have referred to the role of Roman law in preparing the way for this. And I have emphasized the Christian distinction between regnum and sacerdotium as instilling the ideal of secular government in a people who are nevertheless bound by a common creed. But the history of the Middle East reminds us of a far more important legacy of Christianity, which is the extolling of forgiveness as a moral virtue.

The Muslim faith, like the Christian, is defined through a prayer. But this prayer takes the form of a declaration: There is one God, and Muhammad is his Prophet. To which might be added: and you had better believe it. The Christian prayer is also a declaration of faith; but it includes the crucial words: "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us." In other words, the appeal to divine mercy—which prefaces every sura of the Koran with the beautiful words bism illah il-rahman il-rahim, "in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful"—is made conditional, in the daily prayer of Christians, upon the habit of forgiving our enemies. The "imitation of Christ" is conceived in the same terms: not as a vanquishing of God's enemies, but as a self-sacrifice, a willing oblation, an acceptance—in a spirit of forgiveness—of the worst that human beings can do. Needless to say Christians have not always followed this ideal, the Crusades being but one example. But it is also characteristic of Christianity that its adherents should apologize for the Crusades, taking on themselves the burden of a guilt incurred by their fellow believers, and seeking forgiveness from those whom their faith has wronged. Christianity contains within itself that idea of a political solution which Aeschylus presents in the Oresteia: a solution that steps out of the cycle of vengeance in order to seek peace through conciliation.

The philosopher and critic René Girard sees this transition as critical to the Christian revelation. In the absence of a judicial process, Girard argues, societies are invaded by "mimetic desire," as rivals struggle to match each other's social and material acquisitions, so heightening antagonism and precipitating the cycle of vengeance. The traditional solution is to identify a victim, one marked by fate as "outside" the community and therefore not entitled to vengeance against it, who can be the target of the accumulated bloodlust, and who can bring the cycle of retribution to an end. Scapegoating is society's way of recreating "difference" and so restoring itself. By uniting against the scapegoat people are released from their rivalries and reconciled.

Most religions incorporate this cycle of violence into themselves, and so legitimize it as the will of God. The triumph of Christianity, in Girard's eyes, is to have broken free from the cycle entirely. In the Gospels the scapegoat achieves transcendence and divinity through an acceptance of his fate, through an attitude of serene detachment from the aggressors, and through a manifest awareness that, while the aggressors do not know what they are doing, he does. For the first time the aggression that is at the root of the sacrificial rite is understood and forgiven by the victim, who is able both to accept his sacrifice and to believe in his own innocence. By freely offering himself as scapegoat, therefore, Christ lifted humanity from the cycle of "mimetic desire" and "mimetic violence," and into the realm of conciliation.

That theory is of course highly controversial. Nevertheless, even without going so far as Girard, one must recognize that the idea of forgiveness, symbolized in the Cross, distinguishes the Christian from the Muslim inheritance. There is no coherent reading of the Christian message that does not make forgiveness of enemies into a central item of the creed. Christ even commanded us, when assaulted, to turn the other cheek. Pacifists take this remark to mean that we should not defend ourselves, but overcome violence as Christ did, by example. But it is possible to accept the Christian doctrine and yet to stop short of pacifism. Christ suffered the most violent death, not in order to recommend defenselessness, but in order to redeem mankind. At the same time he bore witness to the fact that it was not through him that evil had entered the world. In enjoining us to turn the other cheek he was setting before us, as always, a personal ideal, not a political project. If I am attacked and turn the other cheek, then I exemplify the Christian virtue of meekness. If I am entrusted with a child who is attacked, and I then turn the child's other cheek, I make myself party to the violence.

That, surely, is how a Christian should understand the right of defense, and how it is understood by the medieval theories of the just war. The right of defense stems from your obligations to others. You are obliged to protect those whom destiny has placed under your care. A political leader who turns not his own cheek but ours makes himself party to the next attack. Too often this has happened. But by pursuing the attacker and bringing him, however violently, to justice, the politician serves the cause of peace, and also that of forgiveness, of which justice is the instrument.

The Christian injunction to forgive is therefore compatible with defensive warfare. But it is incompatible with terrorism, and inimical to those visceral antagonisms that lead one group into a war of extermination against another. To remove the violent core from human societies is no easy task, for the urge to violence is planted in us by evolution, and war is a fact of sociobiology. Nevertheless, the Christian experience gives grounds for hope. Added to the tradition of secular law and territorial sovereignty, Christianity leads to the idea of a political order established without reference to tribe or faith, in which even the most fundamental differences can be accommodated, provided only that the territorial jurisdiction is given absolute sovereignty over those who reside within its borders.

The social contract provides the theology of such a territorial jurisdiction. But it does not, of itself, make such a jurisdiction possible. The political order as we in the West know it requires not only territory, but the sharing of it, and the sense of belonging that makes sharing possible. This sense of belonging does not come all at once, or without conflict. A group of incoming refugees, bound by family ties and religious duties to an amorphous "elsewhere," does not have the sense of belonging that is shared by the native population. It can acquire that sense, but only by renouncing an identity that binds it to another time and another place. Meanwhile it must rely on that habit of forgiveness and conciliation that tells the Christian to see the Other not as a threat but as an invitation to sympathy.

The triumph of America is that it has been able to persuade wave after wave of immigrants to relinquish all competing attachments and to identify with this country, this land, this great experiment in settlement, and to join in its common defense. Many factors have contributed to this triumph: but the hitherto prevailing Christian culture must surely be counted as the most important. In the next chapter, therefore, I shall explore the pre-political loyalty of such a modern democratic state, and point to some of the ways in which that loyalty is being eroded.

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