NEW POLITICAL RELIGIONS, OR AN ANALYSIS OF MODERN TERRORISM by Barry Cooper

Reviewed by Fritz Wagner

Barry Cooper's New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism, (University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 2004). The title puts the reader in mind of Eric Voegelin's Political Religions, which originally appeared in 1938 and dealt with the murderous mass political movements of that era. In this work, Dr. Cooper has brought his understanding of political theory to bear on what he calls "Islamism," that fraction of Muslim society which believes it has a God-given task to bring the world under Islamic control, using murder and suicide as routine instruments for conquest.

One of the epigrams for the volume is from Graham Greene, "They won't believe the world they haven't noticed is like that"- and it was certainly true for this reader! I thought in the years following 9/11 that I had acquired a good grasp of the problems faced by the West and particularly the US, but it soon became evident to me on reading this book that I knew too little.

The book is divided into five chapters. The first, "Context," brings in Hannah Arendt and Voegelin on totalitarianism, terror and spiritual disease in light of 9/11. The second, "Concepts," explains "pneumopathology" and "second reality" and discusses them in relation to the Japanese revolutionary movement Aum Shinrikyo. This lends needed emotional distance for the analysis because it is not about 9/11 directly. The third chapter, "Genealogy of Salafism," explores the history of Islam and the related topics of Ibn Taymiyya, Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. The fourth chapter, "Genesis of a New Ideology," explores the source of the modern problem in the writings of Qutb in Egypt, the enshrining of scriptural ignorance, and the heating of the pot by Khomeini and other Shiites. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the theological problem of suicide complete the chapter.

The last chapter, entitled "Counternetwar," explores the need to modify traditional military methods in order to deal with the elusive networking of the enemy, made possible in large part by modern cyber technology. There is an astonishing appendix on history and the Koran in which the historiogenesis of Islam is explored as is the problem arising for fundamentalists that there are now several varying manuscripts of the Koran which have not been acknowledged, because while the bible has various texts which cause problems, this is seen to be impossible for the Koran since it was handed down directly by God. Both Voegelin and Leo Strauss are used to set the argument.

Here are a few choice quotations from the book:

". . . societies that are not organized as states do not have armies; rather, they are armies. In principle, therefore, where armed force is directed by organizations that are not states, against organizations that are not armies, by people who are not soldiers, modern Clausewitzian categories are, if not eclipsed, then cast into doubt as the only way that conflict can be understood." p. 28.

"There is, therefore, an inherent friction between commonsense reality, the common reality of worldly existence, within which the terrorist like everybody else must live, and the occult reality within which the terrorist lives imaginatively, an imaginary reality where killing the innocent to impress others is understood to be heroic, altruistic self-sacrifice." P.4O