Noah Feldman on the Fear of an Islamic Nuke

Noah Feldman has the cover story from today’s NY Times Magazine on the fear over an “Islamic bomb.” His essay not only covers the oft-cited “Iran bombing Israel” scenario, but also mentions the risk of Sunni-Shiite war across the Middle East, concerns of the results of a Saudi break-up, and more.

But, unlike some essayists who simply spin nightmare scenarios, Feldman wants to dig into the practices of (nominally) Islamic states and non-state actors and ask if how they approach the nuclear question leads to any particular concerns. Keeping in mind that “[r]aising the question of Islamic belief and the bomb, however, is not a substitute for strategic analysis of the rational interests of Islamic governments,” he explores the question of how one views the world affects how one uses violence. He explains:

During the last two decades, however, there has been a profound change in the way violence is discussed and deployed in the Muslim world. In particular, we have encountered the rise of suicide bombing. In historic terms, this development is new and unexpected. Suicide bombing has no traditional basis in Islam. As a technique, it was totally absent from the successful Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union…

Since [the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon], suicide bombing has spread through the Muslim world with astonishing speed and on a surprising course. The vocabulary of martyrdom and sacrifice, the formal videotaped preconfession of faith, the technological tinkering to increase deadliness — all are now instantly recognizable to every Muslim. And as suicide bombing has penetrated Islamic cultural consciousness, its list of targets has steadily expanded. First the targets were American soldiers, then mostly Israelis, including women and children. From Lebanon and Israel, the technique of suicide bombing moved to Iraq, where the targets have included mosques and shrines, and the intended victims have mostly been Shiite Iraqis. The newest testing ground is Afghanistan, where both the perpetrators and the targets are orthodox Sunni Muslims… Overall, the trend is definitively in the direction of Muslim-on-Muslim violence. By a conservative accounting, more than three times as many Iraqis have been killed by suicide bombings in the last 3 years as have Israelis in the last 10. Suicide bombing has become the archetype of Muslim violence — not just to frightened Westerners but also to Muslims themselves.

What makes suicide bombing especially relevant to the nuclear question is that, by design, it unsettles the theory of deterrence…

Further in the essay, Feldman tells the history of the laws of war in the Shariah. He begins the narrative as follows:

[T]he Shariah never followed the Roman adage that in war the laws are silent. Because jihad is a pillar of Islam, and because in Islam God’s word takes legal form, the classical scholars devoted considerable care to identifying the laws of jihad. In common with the just-war doctrine developed in Christian Europe, the law of jihad governed when it was permissible to fight and what means could lawfully be adopted once warfare had begun. There were basic ground rules about who was fair game. “A woman was found killed in one of the battles fought by the Messenger of God,” runs a report about the Prophet Muhammad considered reliable and binding by the Muslim scholars. “So the Messenger of God forbade the killing of women and children.” This report was universally understood to prohibit the deliberate killing of noncombatant women and children. Some scholars interpreted it to mean that anyone incapable of warfare should be protected and so extended the ban to the elderly, the infirm and even male peasants, who as a rule did not fight. Muslims living among the enemy were also out of bounds. These rather progressive principles were broadly accepted by the Islamic legal authorities, Sunni and Shiite alike. For well over a thousand years, no one seriously questioned them.

Further on he notes:

In the bloody 20th century, when mass exterminations took place in Europe, Africa and Asia, Muslim states had a relatively better record, marred of course by Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds. And there have been the genocidal killings in Darfur in this new century. Even these horrific events, however, were not dignified by the claim that they were permitted under the law of jihad.

But what are we to make of this in light of the rise of suicide bombings and catastrophic terrorism, such as the 9/11 attacks? This is the heart of Feldman’s essay and I recommend that it be read in its entirety. Feldman has a nuanced view:

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was sometimes asserted in the West that there were no Muslim voices condemning the attacks. This was never true. Prominent Muslim scholars expressed their disapprobation in public arenas like television and the Internet…

The position of the Muslim scholars and observers who condemned the 9/11 attacks was simple and consistent across the Sunni-Shiite divide: this was not jihad but an unlawful use of violence…

At the same time, it is important to note that in 2001 few prominent Muslim scholars — the Saudi grand mufti was the main exception — condemned the use of suicide bombings in all circumstances…

What has happened since then is that the Islamic laws of war have come under stress from demagogues like bin Laden and certain radical clerics who want to open the way for broader leeway of action. Feldman writes:

If the Islamic laws of war are under revision, or at least the subject of intense debate, what does that mean for the question of the Islamic bomb? The answer is that the expanding religious sanction for violence once thought unacceptable opens the way for new kinds of violence to be introduced and seen as legitimate in turn.

In his discussion, Feldman eschews pat answers for an appreciation of the complexities of the question as to Islamic thought and nuclear bomb. A thought-provoking essay.