How to Win a Cosmic War

The recent events of the tiijab ban in France and Belgium (a country divided on national identity but united in banning the tiijab), the banning of minarets in Switzerland, the now cancelled burning of the Qur’an and the opposition to Park 51 or the Cordoba House in the USA, are making the idea of a clash of civilizations evolve into that of a cosmic war.

The irony of the discussion about Islam in the West is that the latter’s opposition to Islam is more Eurocentric than Christian. Christianity is a world religion while what is happening in the West is based on Eurocentrist culture and values. It is not the religions of the world that are engaged in a cosmic war. It is rather these religions’ political and cultural interpretations which are fighting each other.

This brings one to the book under review. In light of the current hostile reaction to Islam in the West, one wonders why a cosmic war should be waged only against radical Islam. What about radical Christianity and radical Judaism? In this book, Reza Aslan deals mainly with global jihadism, even though he also touches upon radical religious Zionism and American evangelicalism. One hopes that a similar book be written by a Christian or a Jew about how to confront radicalism in their respective religious traditions.

The book is made up of seven chapters dealing with the political origins of radical Islam which can be traced to the marriage between Salafism and Wahhabism, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Serbian-Bosnian conflict, as well as the conflicts in Chechnya, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan (pp. 27, 29). Thus, by the end of the 20th century, there emerged a distinction between the religious nationalism of the Islamic movements, established during the secular nationalist era, and the religious transnationalism of the Jihadists, which emerged during the Cold War and post Cold War eras (p. 29), and which proposes to wage a cosmic war against the infidels and to build a global caliphate (p. 31).