HOW TO WIN A COSMIC WAR

Published by Arrow Books 2010

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright © Reza Aslan 2009

Reza Aslan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by William Heinemann

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099538899

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Also By Reza Aslan

Praise for How to Win a Cosmic War

Introduction Us Versus Them

Part One
THE GEOGRAPHY OF IDENTITY

CHAPTER ONE The Borderless Self

CHAPTER TWO A Land Twice Promised

Part Two
GOD IS A MAN OF WAR

CHAPTER THREE Zeal for Your House Consumes Me

CHAPTER FOUR An Army of Believers

CHAPTER FIVE The Near and the Far

Part Three
THE END OF THE WAR AS WE KNOW IT

CHAPTER SIX Generation E

CHAPTER SEVEN The Middle Ground

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Notes

Select Bibliography

FOR AMANDA, OF COURSE

HOW TO WIN A COSMIC WAR

Reza Aslan is assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and senior fellow at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His first book, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, has been translated into thirteen languages, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, and placed on Blackwell’s list of the one hundred most important books of the last decade.

www.rezaaslan.com

ALSO BY REZA ASLAN

No god but God

Praise for
How to Win a Cosmic War

“Intelligent [and] thought-provoking … the chapter on the radicalisation of Europe’s young is particularly useful.”

—Jason Burke, Observer

“Aslan’s new book—his second, after the bestselling No god but God, about the origins and evolution of Islam—provides more than just historical precedent; it also offers a very persuasive argument for the best way to counter jihadism and its many splinter groups, such as al-Qaeda.”

—The Washington Post

“Insightful … well-argued … tracks the history of antiestablishment thinking in the Islamic world, and explains that al Qaeda is really a social movement for Muslim middle-class youth.”

—The Daily Beast

“Reaches across a world chasm that too many regard as unbridgeable—with balance, eloquence, and rare wisdom.”

—JAMES CARROLL, author of Constantine’s Sword

“[Aslan’s] book asks all the important questions. … Writing with a critical sense of urgency, Aslan wants us to bring struggles between religious outlooks down from the skies.”

—Slate

“Eloquent … Up-and-coming populist thinker Reza Aslan wastes no time in his … thesis to dismantle what he refers to as myths that some Americans believe about everything from Islamo-fascism to jihad.”

—Roll Call

“Aslan makes the case that the War on Terror is an unwinnable one, precisely because it is the wrong war to fight. A war between religions, a battle between good and evil, a ‘cosmic war,’ fails to address the underlying social and political roots of conflict and terror. For people of faith and all those concerned with peace in our world, Aslan’s exacting prose and depth of discernment create an enticing and necessary read.”

—JIM WALLIS, author of The Great Awakening

“An eloquent plea for defanging terrorism with rights for Muslims, both in the West and the Middle East. … Even readers who believe a fight with terror requires throwing some military punches will learn from Aslan’s endorsement of soft-power approaches.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Absorbing, thought-provoking and illuminating … Few writers are as well qualified to tackle the terrain. . . . Even readers who believe a fight with terror requires throwing some military punches will learn from Aslan’s endorsement of soft-power approaches.”

—The Guardian

“Terror’ is never going to show up with a pen to sign a peace treaty ending the ‘War on Terror.’ The use of that phrase has created a black hole into which serious talk about serious topics—including, by all means, Islam, but also Christianity and Judaism—has disappeared. Reza Aslan’s elegant, incisive book breaks the spell cast by the emperor’s new talk and signals that the conversation the world has been waiting for may at last be about to begin.”

—JACK MILES, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of God: A Biography

“Hovers confidently over a vast historical terrain, landing where it must to explore how common and terrible apocalyptic thinking is—how it plagues every religious tradition, every inspired nationalism, and cannot be defeated with brute force, upon which it thrives. A unique primer for pragmatic leaders whose patient enlightenment is the real antidote to terror.”

—BERNARD AVISHAI, author of The Hebrew Republic

Introduction

Us Versus Them

After the towers had buckled and collapsed and the concussive shock—the raw, unfiltered reality of it all—had settled along with the rubble and ash, a curious document was discovered in the baggage of one of the 9/11 hijackers, detailing the final instructions for carrying out their gruesome sacrifice. I say sacrifice because the anonymous document reads like the script of a ceremonial rite, every mindful act, every rehearsed moment meant to underscore the ritual drama taking place in the minds of the hijackers.

Purify your soul from all unclean things, the hijackers were told. Tame your soul. Convince it. Make it understand. Completely forget something called “this world.”

Pray the supplication as you leave your hotel. Pray the supplication when riding in the taxi, when entering the airport. Before you step aboard the plane, pray the supplication. At the moment of death, pray.

Bless your body with verses of scripture. Rub the verses on your luggage, your clothes, your passport. Polish your knife with the verses, and be sure the blade is sharp; you must not discomfort your sacrifice.

Remember they may be stronger than you, but their equipment, their security, their technology—nothing will keep you from your task. How many small groups have defeated big groups by the will of God?

Remember, this is a battle for the sake of God. The enemy are the allies of Satan, the brothers of the Devil. Do not fear them, for the believer fears only God.

And when the hour approaches, welcome death for the sake of God. With your last breath remember God. Make your final words “There is no god but God!”

There is, in these final instructions, a grotesque yet inescapable truth. The hijackers who murdered more than three thousand souls on that September morning were carrying out a liturgical act. They cast their victims as sacrificial lambs being forcibly led to slaughter. They framed the event in cosmic terms, as a battle for the sake of God. In all things, they strove to maintain their purity—from the moment they awoke to the moment of their deaths and the deaths of their victims. Their faith was their strength.

The events of 9/11 by no means inaugurated the debate over religion and violence in the modern world, but they did render the issue unavoidable. It is easy to blame religion for acts of violence carried out in religion’s name, easier still to comb through scripture for bits of savagery and assume a simple causality between the text and the deed. But no religion is inherently violent or peaceful; people are violent or peaceful.

Still, these men were Muslim, and their vicious crime does not negate that fact. Islam may be neither a religion of peace nor a religion of war but simply a religion like any other, inspiring both compassion and depravity, but these men read the Qur’an and assured themselves that it was not innocents they were sacrificing but the allies of Satan, the brothers of the Devil. Whatever else may have been at stake, whatever social or political motivations may have been behind their abominable act, there can be no doubt that these nineteen men believed they were acting in the service of God. They were engaged in a metaphysical conflict, not between armies or nations but between the angels of light and the demons of darkness. They were fighting a cosmic war, not against the American imperium but against the eternal forces of evil.

A cosmic war is a religious war. It is a conflict in which God is believed to be directly engaged on one side over the other. Unlike a holy war—an earthly battle between rival religious groups—a cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens. It is, in other words, both a real, physical struggle in this world and an imagined, moral encounter in the world beyond. The conflict may be real and the carnage material, but the war itself is being waged on a spiritual plane; we humans are merely actors in a divine script written by God.

A cosmic war transforms those who should be considered butchers and thugs into soldiers sanctioned by God. It turns victims into sacrifices and justifies the most depraved acts of destruction because it does not abide by human conceptions of morality. What use does the cosmic warrior have for such ethical concerns when he is simply a puppet in the hands of God?

A cosmic war is won not through artifice or strategy but rather through the power of faith. Cosmic warriors need not be burdened with tactical concerns such as force of arms or strength of men. It is enough to align one’s will with the will of God, to strike at the enemy with the full force of God’s wrath, confident that the end rests not in the hands of men.

A cosmic war partitions the world into black and white, good and evil, us and them. In such a war, there is no middle ground; everyone must choose a side. Soldier and civilian, combatant and noncombatant, aggressor and bystander—all the traditional divisions that serve as markers in a real war break down in cosmic wars. It is a simple equation: if you are not us, you must be them. If you are them, you are the enemy and must be destroyed.

Such uncompromising bifurcation not only dehumanizes the enemy, it demonizes the enemy, so that the battle is waged not against opposing nations or their soldiers or even their citizens but against Satan and his evil minions. After all, if we are on the side of good, they must be on the side of evil. And so the ultimate goal of a cosmic war is not to defeat an earthly force but to vanquish evil itself, which ensures that a cosmic war remains an absolute, eternal, unending, and ultimately unwinnable conflict.

Of course, if a cosmic war is unwinnable, it is also unlosable. Cosmic wars are fought not over land or politics but over identity. At stake is one’s very sense of self in an indeterminate world. In such a war, losing means the loss of faith, and that is unthinkable. There can be no compromise in a cosmic war. There can be no negotiation, no settlement, no surrender.

The men who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, were fighting a cosmic war. Any hesitation they might have had about carrying out such an immoral and un-Islamic act was quieted by their firm conviction that it was not they but God who was directing their actions. These were not men lashing out at an occupying power that had left them jobless and hopeless. They were not dispossessed, marginalized, or poor. They attacked the United States not to advance a particular cause or to redress a specific wrong but, as religion scholar Bruce Lincoln notes, simply to make a point, to demonstrate that, “all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, [they] possessed a power infinitely superior to their adversary’s and of an entirely different order.”

How many small groups have defeated big groups by the will of God?

To be sure, those responsible for the attacks of 9/11 have unveiled a litany of grievances against the United States and the Western world: the suffering of the Palestinians, U.S. support for Arab dictators, the presence of foreign troops in Muslim lands. These may be legitimate grievances. But for the Jihadists, they are more symbolic than real. They are not policies to be addressed or problems to be solved but abstract ideas to rally around. At no point did the hijackers assume their assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would bring peace to Palestine or result in the removal of U.S. troops from the Middle East; in fact, they hoped it would bring more troops to the region.

These cosmic warriors, it must be understood, are fighting a war of the imagination. They are waging a battle they know cannot be won in any real or measurable terms. That is not to say that they have no goals. On the contrary, their goal is nothing less than global transformation. But how such a transformation will take shape, who will lead the new order, and what that order will ultimately look like are questions that need not be addressed until after this world has been swept away. That is why they so rarely speak of achieving any kind of “victory,” at least not in the sense of enacting some specific social or political agenda. Despite the anxious cries of alarm about an impending global takeover by radical religious groups such as al-Qa‘ida, it is remarkable how infrequently these groups make such claims themselves. In all of bin Laden’s writings, speeches, and declarations, for example, no attempt is ever made to provide anything akin to an alternative social program. There are no proposals, no policies, no plans, nothing save for a hazy commitment, embedded in al-Qa‘ida’s constitution, to “establish the truth, and get rid of evil.” Indeed, the zealous devotion to the glories of martyrdom that so indelibly marks an organization like al-Qa‘ida is itself an implicit recognition that its objectives, unformed and indeterminate as they may be, are impossible to achieve in this life. Al-Qa‘ida knows it is incapable of erasing all borders and reestablishing a worldwide Caliphate. * It will never seize control over the Arab and Muslim world. It cannot defeat the United States, let alone dispel its influence from the region. It has no hope of “wiping Israel off the map.”

That these absurd ambitions have been embedded in our public consciousness, despite their sheer lunacy, has far less to do with the capabilities of al-Qa‘ida terrorists than with the awe-inspiring efficacy of the terrorism industry, a term coined by the political scientist John Mueller to describe the nexus of political, military, economic, media, and religious interests that, for a variety of disparate reasons, seeks to convince Americans that “terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon,” to quote the Department of Homeland Security manifesto.

Ignoring for a moment that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist, what such breathless declarations reveal is how effective terrorism can be in providing the illusion of power, in giving the impression that the terrorists’ goals, no matter how preposterous, are nevertheless achievable. They are not, of course. And in that fundamental truth lies the purpose and power of cosmic war: it provides hope for victory when none exists. All the cosmic warrior need do is forget something called “this world” and focus his sights on the world beyond.

If those responsible for 9/11 can be said to have had a single overriding ambition, it was, in bin Laden’s words, to “unite the Muslim world in the face of the Christian Crusade” and to maintain, at any cost, the perpetuation of their cosmic war, for there is no more definite means through which their identity can be sustained. As the sociologist Mark juergensmeyer, who coined the term “cosmic war,” writes, “to live in a state of war is to live in a world in which individuals know who they are, why they have suffered, by whose hand they have been humiliated, and at what expense they have persevered.”

The attacks of 9/11 have been called a declaration of war. The truth is, they were an invitation to a war already in progress—a cosmic war that, in the religious imagination, has been raging between the forces of good and evil since the beginning of time. It was an invitation that America’s own cosmic warriors were more than willing to accept.

Eric Hoffer, writing just after the horrors of a world war against one fanatical ideology—Nazism—and just before the start of a cold war against another—Stalinism—wrote, “In normal times a democratic nation is an institutionalized association of more or less free individuals. When its existence is threatened and it has to unify its people and generate in them a spirit of utmost self-sacrifice, the democratic nation must transform itself into something akin to a militant church or a revolutionary party.”

Almost within moments of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, that transformation had begun in America.

These are not normal times. The popular Christian minister and co-writer of the Left Behind series, Tim LaHaye, whose influence over evangelicals is immeasurable, gave voice to millions of Americans when he declared September 11 to be “the focal point of end-time events.”

This is not a normal war. Our very identity as a nation was at stake. The world had been cleft in two, with good on one side and evil on the other, and victory would come, George W. Bush promised, only when we “rid the world of evil.”

This is not a normal enemy. “This is a transcendent evil that wants to destroy everything we stand for and believe in,” declared Senator John McCain. It is an enemy that, we were told, “think[s] the opposite of the way we think.” Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the man who had been charged with hunting down bin Laden, was more specific. “Our enemy is a spiritual enemy because we are a nation of believers,” he told an evangelical congregation in Oregon. “His name is Satan. … Satan wants to destroy us as a nation and he wants to destroy us as a Christian Army.”

They are the opposite of us. This is a metaphysical conflict. Ethical restraints must be set aside (read: torture). The enemy is neither an army nor a state but evil itself. The battle is over civilization. Our identity is at risk. We cannot negotiate. We cannot surrender. We cannot lose.

Nor can we win. In fact, by adopting the religiously charged rhetoric and cosmic worldview of groups like al-Qa‘ida, by viewing such terrorist organizations as a demonic force bent on destroying human civilization instead of as an international criminal conspiracy to be brought to justice—in short, by treating the Global War on Terror like a cosmic war—we have not only played into the hands of these radical Muslim militants, we may have set the groundwork for a new and terrifying age of religious war.

That is because despite all the confident predictions one hears about the death of God, the truth is that religion is a stronger, more global force today than it has been in generations. At the dawn of the twentieth century, one half of the world’s population identified itself as Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Hindu. One hundred years of social progress, technological innovation, and scientific advancement, and that number now stands at nearly two thirds. And while the number of self-professed atheists is also on the rise throughout the world (as is the number of people who profess belief in God yet do not affiliate with any particular religious tradition), of those who do belong to a specific church or religious sect, it is the convervative and fundamentalist believers who outnumber, and increasingly outpace, the moderates and liberals.

How to explain this surge in religious identities? It may have partly to do with the failure of secular nationalism—the core ideological principle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to live up to its promises of global peace and prosperity. Though it is true that religion has been responsible for unspeakable crimes throughout history, it is equally true that the most bestial acts of violence in the last hundred years have been carried out in the name of unabashedly secularist ideologies: fascism, Nazism, Maoism, Stalinism, socialism, even Darwinism. If secularism arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to the erosion of religious certainties, perhaps the rise of religious identities can be blamed on the growing disillusionment with secularism.

Yet there is more to it than this. Globalization has radically altered the way people define themselves, both individually and as a collective. Across the globe, secular nationalism is beginning to give way to new forms of nationalism based on ethnicity, tribe, and above all religion. In an increasingly globalized world, where the old demarcations of nation-states are slowly starting to give way, religion can no longer be viewed as simply a set of myths and rituals to be experienced in private. Religion is identity. Indeed, in many parts of the world religion is fast becoming the supreme identity, encompassing and even superseding ethnicity, culture, and nationality.

In a world where religion and politics are increasingly sharing the same vocabulary and functioning in the same sphere, one could argue that religious grievances are no less valid than political grievances and religious violence no less rational than political violence. This means that cosmic wars can sometimes be political wars, in that they may be not only about the obligation to the next world but also about transforming this one. With this one caveat: political wars can come to an end, political grievances can be settled; cosmic wars are eternal wars, without winner or loser.

To truly confront the radical and fundamentalist forces that, with the precipitous rise of globalization and the steady decline of secular nationalism, have permeated the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, and which now threaten to plunge the globe into a century of cosmic war, we must strip the conflicts of our world of their religious connotations; we must reject the religiously polarizing rhetoric of our leaders and of our enemies; we must focus on the material matters at stake; and we must seek to address the earthly issues that always lie behind the cosmic impulse. For although the grievances of the hijackers may have been symbolic, though they may have been merely causes to rally around, to the hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who watched the towers fall—who were, in fact, the intended audience of that theatrical display of violence—they are nonetheless legitimate grievances and must be addressed as such. The Palestinans really are suffering under Israeli occupation. Arab dictators are in fact being propped up by U.S. policies. The Muslim world truly does have reason to feel under attack by a “crusading” West. Addressing these grievances may not satisfy the cosmic warriors of our world, be they Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. But it will bring their cosmic war back down to earth, where it can be confronted more constructively. Because in the end, there is only one way to win a cosmic war: refuse to fight in it.

* The political office of the titular head of Islam, established with the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 C.E. and abolished by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1924.

CHAPTER ONE

The Borderless Self

Ben-Gurion International Airport is a brash, beautiful, strikingly confident construction that, like much of Tel Aviv, looks as though it might have sprouted fully formed from the desert sands of the old Arab port city of Jaffa. Named after the surly general and chief architect of the state, the airport is a testament to Israel’s self-ascribed position as a bastion of social and technological advancement amid a sea of inchoate enemies. In fact, Ben-Gurion’s primary function seems to be to filter out those very enemies by tightly controlling access to the state. This is true of all international airports, I suppose, as anyone who has undergone the humiliation of being scanned, fingerprinted, and photographed to be allowed entry into the United States post-9/11 can attest. In the modern world, airports have become a kind of identity directory: the place where we are most determinately defined, registered, and catalogued before being apportioned into separate queues, each according to nationality.

Still, Israel has, for obvious reasons, taken this process to new and unprecedented heights. I am not two steps off the plane when I am immediately tagged and separated from the rush of passengers by a pimpled immigration officer in a knitted yarmulke.

“Passport, please,” he barks. “Why are you here?”

I cannot tell him the truth: I want to sneak into Gaza, which has been sealed off for months. In 2006, when Palestinians were offered their first taste of a free and fair election, they voted overwhelmingly for the religious nationalists of Hamas over the more secular yet seemingly inept politicians of Fatah, the party founded by Yasir Arafat in 1958. Despite having promised to allow the Palestinians self-determination, Israel, the United States, and the European powers quickly decided that Hamas, whose founding charter refuses to recognize the state of Israel and whose militant wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has been responsible for countless Israeli military and civilian deaths, would not be allowed to govern. Gaza, the sliver of fallow land that has become Hamas’s de facto stronghold, was cut off from the outside world. International aid dried up and a plan was put in place to, as The New York Times put it, “starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections” to the point where new elections would have to be held. This resulted in a violent rift between Hamas and Fatah that split the Occupied Territories in two: the West Bank, governed by Fatah with the aid of Israel and the international community, and Gaza, ruled by Hamas and isolated from the rest of the world, a prison with one and a half million hungry, fuming inmates.

I wanted to visit the ruined village of Um al-Nasr, in northern Gaza, some miles away from lush Tel Aviv. A few months earlier, a number of villagers, including two toddlers, had drowned in what the press was calling a “sewage tsunami.” The deluge had been triggered by the collapse of a treatment facility just above the village that had been slowly and steadily leaking sewage. For months the villagers of Um al-Nasr had pleaded with Israeli authorities to allow the importation of the pumps, pipes, and filters necessary to stem the flow. But Israel, rattled by a ceaseless barrage of crudely constructed rockets launched daily from Gaza, some of which were—in the sort of grim irony that can exist only in such a place—constructed from old sewage pipes, refused. The villagers built an earthen embankment around what was fast becoming a giant lake of human waste. But the embankment would not hold. On the morning of March 27, 2007, while most of the villagers of Um al-Nasr slept, the embankment gave way. The village was inundated.

This is what we talk about when we talk about Gaza: that human beings—men, women, children—could literally drown in shit.

“Why are you here?”

“To visit the sites,” I say.

It is not a satisfactory answer, and I am taken into a windowless room, where the question is repeated, this time by a slightly older officer. An hour passes, and a third officer walks in with the same question. “Why are you here?”

Thereafter, the question is repeated—in the sterile immigration office; in a smaller, even more sterile office inside the first office; in an even smaller office inside that office; and later, at the immigration queue, at the baggage claim, at customs—until I come to think of “Why are you here?” as a form of greeting.

All of this is understandable. I resent none of it. Though I am a citizen of the United States, I was born in Iran and have spent a great deal of time in countries that do not even recognize Israel’s right to exist—countries that, were I to have an Israeli stamp on my passport, would not allow me to enter their borders, would maybe even cart me off to jail. Israel has every reason to be cautious, considering the battering it has received at the hands of people who look just like me.

The problem is not with Israel. The problem is with me, with the sum of my identities. My citizenship is American; my nationality, Iranian; my ethnicity, Persian; my culture, Middle Eastern; my religion, Muslim; my gender, male. All the multiple signifiers of my identity—the things that make me who I am—are in one way or another viewed as a threat to the endless procession of perfectly pleasant, perfectly reasonable immigration officers whose task it is to maintain a safe distance between people like them and people like me.

Even so, throughout the entire exercise, I could not help but think of the famed French theorist Ernest Renan, who years ago defined the nation as “a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.” Nowhere is that sentiment borne out more fully or with more force than among the relatively new nations scattered along the broad horizon of the Middle East. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the region in which nationalism arose so late, and so often through the will of others, is the region in which it is now being most unmistakably subsumed by the rising tide of globalization.

Globalization means many things to many people. Though the term itself is new, having entered our vocabulary only in the 1980s, the systemic social, economic, and cultural changes that the word conjures have been taking place for centuries. There is a compelling case to be made for considering the process of globalization to have begun when the first humans footslogged out of Africa in search of game and refuge and more temperate climates. The age of empires was in some ways the height of globalization; the Romans, Byzantines, Persians, and Mongols were able to cross-pollinate their trade, communication, and cultures across vast distances with fluidity and ease. The same could be said of the age of colonialism, in which the old imperial model of commercial relations among neighboring kingdoms was transformed into the more manageable, if less ethical, model of total economic domination of indigenous populations. And certainly no single force can be said to have had a greater impact on propelling globalization forward than religion, which has always sought to spread its message across the boundaries of borders, clans, and ethnicities. Simply put, globalization is not a new phenomenon.

In its contemporary usage, however, the term “globalization” refers to modern trends such as the expansion of international financial systems, the interconnectedness of national interests, the rise of global media and communication technologies like the Internet, and the mass migration of peoples—all taking place across the boundaries of sovereign nation-states. The simplest and most elegant definition of modern globalization belongs to the Danish political philosophers Hans-Henrik Holm and Georg Sørensen: “The intensification of economic, political, social and cultural relations across borders.” But I prefer the sociologist Roland Robertson’s view of globalization as “a concept that refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (italics mine).

Globalization is not just about technological advancement and transnational relations. It is about one’s sense of self in a world that is increasingly being viewed as a single space. The world has not changed as much as we have. Our idea of the self has expanded. How we identify ourselves as part of a social collective, how we conceive of our public spaces, how we interact with like-minded individuals, how we determine our religious and political leaders, how we think even about categories of religion and politics—everything about how we define ourselves both as individuals and as members of a larger society is transformed in a globalized world because our sense of self is not constrained by territorial boundaries. And since the self is composed of multiple markers of identity—nationality, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and so on—if one of those starts to give way (say, nationality), it is only natural that another (religion, ethnicity) would come to fill the vacuum.

For most of the last century, secular nationalism—the political philosophy that places the nation-state at the center of collective identity—has been the dominant marker of identity in much of the world, even in the developing world, whose leaders tend to view the creation of a sturdy national identity as the first step in a country’s economic and political advancement. Nationalism begins, of course, with the idea of the nation, but the nation is not always so easy to define.

A nation is “a community of common descent,” writes Anthony Smith, the foremost theorist on the subject, bound together by a set of shared values and traditions, myths and historical memories, and often linked to some ancestral homeland: “the place where ‘our’ sages, saints, and heroes lived, worked, prayed, and fought.” A state is the bureaucratic mechanism (i.e., government) necessary to organize and control a nation within territorial boundaries. A state has borders; it can be geographically defined. A nation is borderless; it is an “imagined community,” to borrow a much-borrowed phrase from Benedict Anderson. The only borders a nation has are those of inclusion and exclusion: who belongs and who does not.

In a state, membership is defined through citizenship. But membership in a nation requires some other measure of unity: the members must share the same traditions, speak the same language, worship the same god, or practice the same rituals. The modern state can be traced back only to the eighteenth century. But the nation has existed from the moment human populations began to organize themselves as families, clans, tribes, peoples. The Celts, the Aztecs, the Persians, the Jews, the Arabs—all laid claim to a degree of “nationhood,” all possessed a sense of community, and all maintained links to an ancestral homeland long before they were absorbed into various states.

Think of the nation as a grand historical narrative—both mythical and real—written in the memories of generation after generation of a people. The state is the cover and binding that harnesses that narrative, creating a readable book. Thus, when we speak of the nation-state, we refer to the relatively new idea that a nation—a community of common descent—can be contained within the territorial or bureaucratic boundaries of a state. And when we speak of secular nationalism, we mean the even newer idea that the members of a nation-state should be bound together not by religious or ethnic affiliation but through a social contract among free and equal citizens.

When the nation-state was an autonomous, territorially bounded entity governing a community of people who shared some measure of cultural homogeneity—as was the case throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—secular nationalism thrived. But globalization has changed everything. The rise of cosmopolitan cities such as New York, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Hong Kong; the surge in mass migration, dual nationalities, and hyphenated identities; the ceaseless flow of peoples across state borders; all of these have made achieving anything like cultural homogeneity within territorial boundaries almost impossible. The more the world becomes deterritorialized, the more nationalism loses its place as the primary marker of collective identity. Just as a narrative cannot be truly contained within the bindings of a book, so has globalization put the lie to the idea that a nation can be truly bound by the geography of a state.

The truth is that secular nationalism was a shaky idea from the start, one born in post-Reformation Europe, cultivated during the European Enlightenment, then systematically imposed upon the rest of the globe through conquest and colonialism. In large parts of the developing world, the nation-state is a foreign concept. The map of the Middle East is a palimpsest, with arbitrary borders, made-up names, and fabricated nationalities often aggressively imposed by colonizers. In this region, nationalism has never been the primary marker of collective identity. Most Sudanese do not refer to themselves as “Sudanese.” Rwandan identity is based chiefly on the clan, not the state. Whatever their citizenship, a great many Sikhs will always view their national home to be Khalistan. The Kurds have never been a territorially bounded population, and Iraq is a fictive state built upon the myths and memories of peoples with whom modern-day Iraqis have little in common. In these countries, among these “nations,” citizenship is just a piece of paper. And, as Edmund Burke noted a century ago, “men are not tied to one another by papers and seals [but] by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.”

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 famed axiom that the state is the entity that claims a 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 level 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 who cannot share in the collective identity it has itself demarcated. The state’s sovereignty over life and death is absolute and unavoidable.