William Inboden: Religious Freedom and the Anniversary of 9/11

Another reflection that is in order concerns the nature of those who attacked us, in particular the ideological commitments of jihadism and the perverse circumstances in which it thrives. Central to this is jihadism’s abiding hostility to religious liberty. For religious persecution’s role in September 11th, consider the two countries most implicated in the attacks, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. In the late 1990s when the Taliban first took power in Afghanistan, its religious intolerance – whether violence against missionaries and Muslims who would seek to leave Islam, or destruction of the Buddhist statues, or most often persecution of other Muslims who rejected the Taliban’s extremist interpretation of Islam – was a central attraction for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, who found Afghanistan under Taliban rule a congenial safe-haven.

If the Taliban’s Afghanistan provided the safe-haven, Saudi Arabia provided the shock troops. Fifteen of the nineteen September 11th hijackers were Saudi citizens, whose formative years had included inculcation in Wahhabi ideology from Saudi mosques. This ideology included teachings that Christians, Jews, and Shi’a Muslims were subhuman and that fidelity to Islam meant participation in violent jihad. And that even Sunni Muslims who do not embrace such militancy are themselves of suspect piety. The wonder is not that so many Saudi citizens raised in this environment took up the mantle of terrorism, but that so few did. After Al Qaeda’s May 12, 2003 attacks on the residential compounds of expatriates living in Riyadh, the Saudi Government awoke to its internal problem and embarked on a fierce and thus far largely successful effort to kill, arrest, or reform Saudi citizens who had embraced jihadism. But Saudi Arabia’s core problem remains: state propagation of a version of Islam that denies the religious liberty of both non-Muslims and Muslim dissenters.

The connections between religion-based terrorism and religious persecution are not coincidental. Both define themselves by intolerance of persons of different religious identities; both seek to employ coercive (often violent) measures; both claim a monopoly on truth that denies any rights of dissent; both regard religious dissent as a first-order threat to their goals. Likewise, often the most effective voices against religion-based terrorism are other religious persons themselves who advance a peaceful, tolerant interpretation of their faith.

Yet while religious intolerance forms a core pillar of the jihadist worldview, the promotion of religious freedom as a strategic antidote still remains curiously neglected by the US Government. Winning the “war of ideas” – or even making progress in it – will depend on protecting and empowering those religious voices who contend for peaceful interpretations of their faith and who refute the versions that support terrorism. Promoting religious freedom is the most effective way to do this. It not only provides space for reformist voices, but also helps ameliorate the “enabling environment” of religious intolerance in which extremist ideologies often thrive. On this tenth anniversary of September 11th, as we remember our nation’s dreadful losses that day, we would do well to also dedicate ourselves anew to the realization of founding vision of religious liberty as a universal and inalienable right.