His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind

with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion,

but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by

setting up factitious excellencies—belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies,

not connected with the good of human kind—and causing these to be accepted as

substitutes for genuine virtue: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals;

making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of

adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.

—JOHN STUART MILL ON HIS FATHER, IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

(To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.)

—LUCRETIUS, DE RERUM NATURA

I magine that you can perform a feat of which I am incapable. Imagine, in other words, that you

can picture an infinitely benign and all-powerful creator, who conceived of you, then made and

shaped you, brought you into the world he had made for you, and now supervises and cares for

you even while you sleep. Imagine, further, that if you obey the rules and commandments that

he has lovingly prescribed, you will qualify for an eternity of bliss and repose. I do not say that I

envy you this belief (because to me it seems like the wish for a horrible form of benevolent and

unalterable dictatorship), but I do have a sincere question. Why does such a belief not make its

adherents happy? It must seem to them that they have come into possession of a marvelous

secret, of the sort that they could cling to in moments of even the most extreme adversity.

Superficially, it does sometimes seem as if this is the case. I have been to evangelical

services, in black and in white communities, where the whole event was one long whoop of

exaltation at being saved, loved, and so forth. Many services, in all denominations and among

almost all pagans, are exactly designed to evoke celebration and communal fiesta, which is

precisely why I suspect them. There are more restrained and sober and elegant moments, also.

When I was a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, I could feel, even if I could not believe, the

joyous words that are exchanged between believers on Easter morning: “Christos anesti!” (Christ

is risen!) “Alethos anesti!” (He is risen indeed!) I was a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, I

might add, for a reason that explains why very many people profess an outward allegiance. I

joined it to please my Greek parents-in-law. The archbishop who received me into his

communion on the same day that he officiated at my wedding, thereby trousering two fees

instead of the usual one, later became an enthusiastic cheerleader and fund-raiser for his fellow

Orthodox Serbian mass murderers Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who filled countless

mass graves all over Bosnia. The next time I got married, which was by a Reform Jewish rabbi

with an Einsteinian and Shakespearean bent, I had something a little more in common with the

officiating person. But even he was aware that his lifelong homosexuality was, in principle,condemned as a capital offense, punishable by the founders of his religion by stoning. As to the

Anglican Church into which I was originally baptized, it may look like a pathetic bleating sheep

today, but as the descendant of a church that has always enjoyed a state subsidy and an

intimate relationship with hereditary monarchy, it has a historic responsibility for the Crusades,

for persecution of Catholics, Jews, and Dissenters, and for combat against science and reason.

The level of intensity fluctuates according to time and place, but it can be stated as a truth

that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and

sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or

adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in

this one. This is only to be expected. It is, after all, wholly man-made. And it does not have the

confidence in its own various preachings even to allow coexistence between different faiths.

Take a single example, from one of the most revered figures that modern religion has

produced. In 1996, the Irish Republic held a referendum on one question: whether its state

constitution should still prohibit divorce. Most of the political parties, in an increasingly secular

country, urged voters to approve of a change in the law. They did so for two excellent reasons.

It was no longer thought right that the Roman Catholic Church should legislate its morality for

all citizens, and it was obviously impossible even to hope for eventual Irish reunification if the

large Protestant minority in the North was continually repelled by the possibility of clerical rule.

Mother Teresa flew all the way from Calcutta to help campaign, along with the church and its

hard-liners, for a “no” vote. In other words, an Irish woman married to a wife-beating and

incestuous drunk should never expect anything better, and might endanger her soul if she

begged for a fresh start, while as for the Protestants, they could either choose the blessings of

Rome or stay out altogether. There was not even the suggestion that Catholics could follow their

own church’s commandments while not imposing them on all other citizens. And this in the

British Isles, in the last decade of the twentieth century. The referendum eventually amended

the constitution, though by the narrowest of majorities. (Mother Teresa in the same year gave

an interview saying that she hoped her friend Princess Diana would be happier after she had

escaped from what was an obviously miserable marriage, but it’s less of a surprise to find the

church applying sterner laws to the poor, or offering indulgences to the rich.)

A week before the events of September 11, 2001, I was on a panel with Dennis Prager, who is

one of America’s better-known religious broadcasters. He challenged me in public to answer

what he called a “straight yes/no question,” and I happily agreed. Very well, he said. I was to

imagine myself in a strange city as the evening was coming on. Toward me I was to imagine that

I saw a large group of men approaching. Now—would I feel safer, or less safe, if I was to learn

that they were just coming from a prayer meeting? As the reader will see, this is not a question

to which a yes/no answer can be given. But I was able to answer it as if it were not hypothetical.

“Just to stay within the letter ‘B,’ I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay,

Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons,

why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in

the dusk were coming from a religious observance.”

Here, then, is a very brief summary of the religiously inspired cruelty I witnessed in these six

places. In Belfast, I have seen whole streets burned out by sectarian warfare between different

sects of Christianity, and interviewed people whose relatives and friends have been kidnapped

and killed or tortured by rival religious death squads, often for no other reason than

membership of another confession. There is an old Belfast joke about the man stopped at a

roadblock and asked his religion. When he replies that he is an atheist he is asked, “Protestant

or Catholic atheist?” I think this shows how the obsession has rotted even the legendary local

sense of humor. In any case, this did actually happen to a friend of mine and the experience was

decidedly not an amusing one. The ostensible pretext for this mayhem is rival nationalisms, butthe street language used by opposing rival tribes consists of terms insulting to the other

confession (“Prods” and “Teagues”). For many years, the Protestant establishment wanted

Catholics to be both segregated and suppressed. Indeed, in the days when the Ulster state was

founded, its slogan was: “A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People.” Sectarianism is

conveniently self-generating and can always be counted upon to evoke a reciprocal

sectarianism. On the main point, the Catholic leadership was in agreement. It desired clerical

dominated schools and segregated neighborhoods, the better to exert its control. So, in the

name of god, the old hatreds were drilled into new generations of schoolchildren, and are still

being drilled. (Even the word “drill” makes me queasy: a power tool of that kind was often used

to destroy the kneecaps of those who fell foul of the religious gangs.)

When I first saw Beirut, in the summer of 1975, it was still recognizable as “the Paris of the

Orient.” Yet this apparent Eden was infested with a wide selection of serpents. It suffered from a

positive surplus of religions, all of them “accommodated” by a sectarian state constitution. The

president by law had to be a Christian, usually a Maronite Catholic, the speaker of the

parliament a Muslim, and so on. This never worked well, because it institutionalized differences

of belief as well as of caste and ethnicity (the Shia Muslims were at the bottom of the social

scale, the Kurds were disenfranchised altogether).

The main Christian party was actually a Catholic militia called the Phalange, or “Phalanx,”

and had been founded by a Maronite Lebanese named Pierre Gemayel who had been very

impressed by his visit to Hitler’s Berlin Olympics in 1936. It was later to achieve international

notoriety by conducting the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in

1982, while acting under the orders of General Sharon. That a Jewish general should collaborate

with a fascist party may seem grotesque enough, but they had a common Muslim enemy and

that was enough. Israel’s irruption into Lebanon that year also gave an impetus to the birth of

Hezbollah, the modestly named “Party of God,” which mobilized the Shia underclass and

gradually placed it under the leadership of the theocratic dictatorship in Iran that had come to

power three years previously. It was in lovely Lebanon, too, having learned to share the

kidnapping business with the ranks of organized crime, that the faithful moved on to introduce

us to the beauties of suicide bombing. I can still see that severed head in the road outside the

near-shattered French embassy. On the whole, I tended to cross the street when the prayer

meetings broke up.

Bombay also used to be considered a pearl of the Orient, with its necklace of lights along the

corniche and its magnificent British Raj architecture. It was one of India’s most diverse and

plural cities, and its many layers of texture have been cleverly explored by Salman Rushdie

especially in The Moor’s Last Sigh—and in the films of Mira Nair. It is true that there had been

intercommunal fighting there, during the time in 1947–48 when the grand historic movement for

Indian self-government was being ruined by Muslim demands for a separate state and by the

fact that the Congress Party was led by a pious Hindu. But probably as many people took

refuge in Bombay during that moment of religious bloodlust as were driven or fled from it. A

form of cultural coexistence resumed, as often happens when cities are exposed to the sea and

to influences from outside. Parsis—former Zoroastrians who had been persecuted in Persia

were a prominent minority, and the city was also host to a historically significant community of

Jews. But this was not enough to content Mr. Bal Thackeray and his Shiv Sena Hindu nationalist

movement, who in the 1990s decided that Bombay should be run by and for his coreligionists,

and who loosed a tide of goons and thugs onto the streets. Just to show he could do it, he

ordered the city renamed as “Mumbai,” which is partly why I include it in this list under its

traditional title.

Belgrade had until the 1980s been the capital of Yugoslavia, or the land of the southern

Slavs, which meant by definition that it was the capital of a multiethnic and multiconfessionalstate. But a secular Croatian intellectual once gave me a warning that, as in Belfast, took the

form of a sour joke. “If I tell people that I am an atheist and a Croat,” he said, “people ask me

how I can prove I am not a Serb.” To be Croatian, in other words, is to be Roman Catholic. To be

a Serb is to be Christian Orthodox. In the 1940s, this meant a Nazi puppet state, set up in Croatia

and enjoying the patronage of the Vatican, which naturally sought to exterminate all the Jews

in the region but also undertook a campaign of forcible conversion directed at the other

Christian community. Tens of thousands of Orthodox Christians were either slaughtered or

deported in consequence, and a vast concentration camp was set up near the town of

Jasenovacs. So disgusting was the regime of General Ante Pavelic and his Ustashe party that

even many German officers protested at having to be associated with it.

By the time I visited the site of the Jasenovacs camp in 1992, the jackboot was somewhat on

the other foot. The Croatian cities of Vukovar and Dubrovnik had been brutally shelled by the

armed forces of Serbia, now under the control of Slobodan Milosevic. The mainly Muslim city of

Sarajevo had been encircled and was being bombarded around the clock. Elsewhere in Bosnia

Herzegovina, especially along the river Drina, whole towns were pillaged and massacred in what

the Serbs themselves termed “ethnic cleansing.” In point of fact, “religious cleansing” would

have been nearer the mark. Milosevic was an ex-Communist bureaucrat who had mutated into a

xenophobic nationalist, and his anti-Muslim crusade, which was a cover for the annexation of

Bosnia to a “Greater Serbia,” was to a large extent carried out by unofficial militias operating

under his “deniable” control. These gangs were made up of religious bigots, often blessed by

Orthodox priests and bishops, and sometimes augmented by fellow Orthodox “volunteers” from

Greece and Russia. They made a special attempt to destroy all evidence of Ottoman civilization,

as in the specially atrocious case of the dynamiting of several historic minarets in Banja Luka,

which was done during a cease-fire and not as the result of any battle.

The same was true, as is often forgotten, of their Catholic counterparts. The Ustashe

formations were revived in Croatia and made a vicious attempt to take over Herzegovina, as

they had during the Second World War. The beautiful city of Mostar was also shelled and

besieged, and the world-famous Stari Most, or “Old Bridge,” dating from Turkish times and listed

by UNESCO as a cultural site of world importance, was bombarded until it fell into the river

below. In effect, the extremist Catholic and Orthodox forces were colluding in a bloody partition

and cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina. They were, and still are, largely spared the public shame

of this, because the world’s media preferred the simplication of “Croat” and “Serb,” and only

mentioned religion when discussing “the Muslims.” But the triad of terms “Croat,” “Serb,” and

“Muslim” is unequal and misleading, in that it equates two nationalities and one religion. (The

same blunder is made in a different way in coverage of Iraq, with the “Sunni-Shia-Kurd”

trilateral.) There were at least ten thousand Serbs in Sarajevo throughout the siege, and one of

the leading commanders of its defense, an officer and gentleman named General Jovan Divjak,

whose hand I was proud to shake under fire, was a Serb also. The city’s Jewish population, which

dated from 1492, also identified itself for the most part with the government and the cause of

Bosnia. It would have been far more accurate if the press and television had reported that

“today the Orthodox Christian forces resumed their bombardment of Sarajevo,” or “yesterday

the Catholic militia succeeded in collapsing the Stari Most.” But confessional terminology was

reserved only for “Muslims,” even as their murderers went to all the trouble of distinguishing

themselves by wearing large Orthodox crosses over their bandoliers, or by taping portraits of

the Virgin Mary to their rifle butts. Thus, once again, religion poisons everything, including our

own faculties of discernment.

As for Bethlehem, I suppose I would be willing to concede to Mr. Prager that on a good day, I

would feel safe enough standing around outside the Church of the Nativity as evening came on.

It is in Bethlehem, not far from Jerusalem, that many believe that, with the cooperation of animmaculately conceived virgin, god was delivered of a son.

“Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise. When his mother, Mary, was espoused to

Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.” Yes, and the

Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danaë as a shower of

gold and got her with child. The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother’s flank.

Catlicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom,

and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived. The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from

the tree watered by the blood of the slain Agdestris, and laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to

the god Attis. The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in

a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan. Krishna was born of the virgin

Devaka. Horus was born of the virgin Isis. Mercury was born of the virgin Maia. Romulus was

born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia. For some reason, many religions force themselves to think of the

birth canal as a one-way street, and even the Koran treats the Virgin Mary with reverence.

However, this made no difference during the Crusades, when a papal army set out to recapture

Bethlehem and Jerusalem from the Muslims, incidentally destroying many Jewish communities

and sacking heretical Christian Byzantium along the way, and inflicted a massacre in the narrow

streets of Jerusalem, where, according to the hysterical and gleeful chroniclers, the spilled blood

reached up to the bridles of the horses.

Some of these tempests of hatred and bigotry and bloodlust have passed away, though new

ones are always impending in this area, but meanwhile a person can feel relatively unmolested

in and around “Manger Square,” which is the center, as its name suggests, of a tourist trap of

such unrelieved tawdriness as to put Lourdes itself to shame. When I first visited this pitiful town,

it was under the nominal control of a largely Christian Palestinian municipality, linked to one

particular political dynasty identified with the Freij family. When I have seen it since, it has

generally been under a brutal curfew imposed by the Israeli military authorities—whose

presence on the West Bank is itself not unconnected with belief in certain ancient scriptural

prophecies, though this time with a different promise made by a different god to a different

people. Now comes the turn of still another religion. The forces of Hamas, who claim the whole

of Palestine as an Islamic waqf or holy dispensation sacred to Islam, have begun to elbow aside

the Christians of Bethlehem. Their leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, has announced that all

inhabitants of the Islamic state of Palestine will be expected to conform to Muslim law. In

Bethlehem, it is now proposed that non-Muslims be subjected to the al-Jeziya tax, the historic

levy imposed on dhimmis or unbelievers under the old Ottoman Empire. Female employees of

the municipality are forbidden to greet male visitors with a handshake. In Gaza, a young woman

named Yusra al-Azami was shot dead in April 2005, for the crime of sitting unchaperoned in a

car with her fiancé. The young man escaped with only a vicious beating. The leaders of the

Hamas “vice and virtue” squad justified this casual murder and torture by saying that there had

been “suspicion of immoral behavior.” In once secular Palestine, mobs of sexually repressed

young men are conscripted to snoop around parked cars, and given permission to do what they

like.

I once heard the late Abba Eban, one of Israel’s more polished and thoughtful diplomats and

statesmen, give a talk in New York. The first thing to strike the eye about the Israeli-Palestinian

dispute, he said, was the ease of its solubility. From this arresting start he went on to say, with

the authority of a former foreign minister and UN representative, that the essential point was a

simple one. Two peoples of roughly equivalent size had a claim to the same land. The solution

was, obviously, to create two states side by side. Surely something so self-evident was within the

wit of man to encompass? And so it would have been, decades ago, if the messianic rabbis and

mullahs and priests could have been kept out of it. But the exclusive claims to god-given

authority, made by hysterical clerics on both sides and further stoked by Armageddon-mindedChristians who hope to bring on the Apocalypse (preceded by the death or conversion of all

Jews), have made the situation insufferable, and put the whole of humanity in the position of

hostage to a quarrel that now features the threat of nuclear war. Religion poisons everything. As

well as a menace to civilization, it has become a threat to human survival.

To come last to Baghdad. This is one of the greatest centers of learning and culture in

history. It was here that some of the lost works of Aristotle and other Greeks (“lost” because the

Christian authorities had burned some, suppressed others, and closed the schools of philosophy,

on the grounds that there could have been no useful reflections on morality before the

preaching of Jesus) were preserved, retranslated, and transmitted via Andalusia back to the

ignorant “Christian” West. Baghdad’s libraries and poets and architects were renowned. Many of

these attainments took place under Muslim caliphs, who sometimes permitted and as often

repressed their expression, but Baghdad also bears the traces of ancient Chaldean and

Nestorian Christianity, and was one of the many centers of the Jewish diaspora. Until the late

1940s, it was home to as many Jews as were living in Jerusalem.

I am not here going to elaborate a position on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in April

2003. I shall simply say that those who regarded his regime as a “secular” one are deluding

themselves. It is true that the Ba’ath Party was founded by a man named Michel Aflaq, a sinister

Christian with a sympathy for fascism, and it is also true that membership of that party was

open to all religions (though its Jewish membership was, I have every reason to think, limited).

However, at least since his calamitous invasion of Iran in 1980, which led to furious accusations

from the Iranian theocracy that he was an “infidel,” Saddam Hussein had decked out his whole

rule—which was based in any case on a tribal minority of the Sunni minority—as one of piety

and jihad. (The Syrian Ba’ath Party, also based on a confessional fragment of society aligned

with the Alawite minority, has likewise enjoyed a long and hypocritical relationship with the

Iranian mullahs.) Saddam had inscribed the words “Allahu akbar”—“God Is Great”—on the Iraqi

flag. He had sponsored a huge international conference of holy warriors and mullahs, and

maintained very warm relations with their other chief state sponsor in the region, namely the

genocidal government of Sudan. He had built the largest mosque in the region, and named it the

“Mother of All Battles” mosque, complete with a Koran written in blood that he claimed to be his

own. When launching his own genocidal campaign against the (mainly Sunni) people of

Kurdistan—a campaign that involved the thoroughgoing use of chemical atrocity weapons and

the murder and deportation of hundreds of thousands of people—he had called it “Operation

Anfal,” borrowing by this term a Koranic justification—“The Spoils” of sura 8—for the

despoilment and destruction of nonbelievers. When the Coalition forces crossed the Iraqi border,

they found Saddam’s army dissolving like a sugar lump in hot tea, but met with some quite

tenacious resistance from a paramilitary group, stiffened with foreign jihadists, called the

Fedayeen Saddam. One of the jobs of this group was to execute anybody who publicly

welcomed the Western intervention, and some revolting public hangings and mutilations were

soon captured on video for all to see.

At a minimum, it can be agreed by all that the Iraqi people had endured much in the

preceding thirty-five years of war and dictatorship, that the Saddam regime could not have

gone on forever as an outlaw system within international law, and therefore that—whatever

objections there might be to the actual means of “regime change”—the whole society deserved

a breathing space in which to consider reconstruction and reconciliation. Not one single minute

of breathing space was allowed.

Everybody knows the sequel. The supporters of al-Qaeda, led by a Jordanian jailbird named

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, launched a frenzied campaign of murder and sabotage. They not only

slew unveiled women and secular journalists and teachers. They not only set off bombs in

Christian churches (Iraq’s population is perhaps 2 percent Christian) and shot or maimedChristians who made and sold alcohol. They not only made a video of the mass shooting and

throat-cutting of a contingent of Nepalese guest workers, who were assumed to be Hindu and

thus beyond all consideration. These atrocities might be counted as more or less routine. They

directed the most toxic part of their campaign of terror at fellow Muslims. The mosques and

funeral processions of the long-oppressed Shiite majority were blown up. Pilgrims coming long

distances to the newly accessible shrines at Karbala and Najaf did so at the risk of their lives. In

a letter to his leader Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi gave the two main reasons for this

extraordinarily evil policy. In the first place, as he wrote, the Shiites were heretics who did not

take the correct Salafist path of purity. They were thus a fit prey for the truly holy. In the second

place, if a religious war could be induced within Iraqi society, the plans of the “crusader” West

could be set at naught. The obvious hope was to ignite a counterresponse from the Shia

themselves, which would drive Sunni Arabs into the arms of their bin Ladenist “protectors.” And,

despite some noble appeals for restraint from the Shiite grand ayatollah Sistani, it did not prove

very difficult to elicit such a response. Before long, Shia death squads, often garbed in police

uniforms, were killing and torturing random members of the Sunni Arab faith. The surreptitious

influence of the neighboring “Islamic Republic” of Iran was not difficult to detect, and in some

Shia areas also it became dangerous to be an unveiled woman or a secular person. Iraq boasts

quite a long history of intermarriage and intercommunal cooperation. But a few years of this

hateful dialectic soon succeeded in creating an atmosphere of misery, distrust, hostility, and

sect-based politics. Once again, religion had poisoned everything.

In all the cases I have mentioned, there were those who protested in the name of religion and

who tried to stand athwart the rising tide of fanaticism and the cult of death. I can think of a

handful of priests and bishops and rabbis and imams who have put humanity ahead of their

own sect or creed. History gives us many other such examples, which I am going to discuss later

on. But this is a compliment to humanism, not to religion. If it comes to that, these crises have

also caused me, and many other atheists, to protest on behalf of Catholics suffering

discrimination in Ireland, of Bosnian Muslims facing extermination in the Christian Balkans, of

Shia Afghans and Iraqis being put to the sword by Sunni jiahdists, and vice versa, and

numberless other such cases. To adopt such a stand is the elementary duty of a self-respecting

human. But the general reluctance of clerical authorities to issue unambiguous condemnation,

whether it is the Vatican in the case of Croatia or the Saudi or Iranian leaderships in the case of

their respective confessions, is uniformly disgusting. And so is the willingness of each “flock” to

revert to atavistic behavior under the least provocation.

No, Mr. Prager, I have not found it a prudent rule to seek help as the prayer meeting breaks

up. And this, as I told you, is only the letter “B.” In all these cases, anyone concerned with human

safety or dignity would have to hope fervently for a mass outbreak of democratic and

republican secularism.

I DID NOT HAVE TO TRAVEL to all these exotic places in order to see the poison doing its work. Long

before the critical day of September 11, 2001, I could sense that religion was beginning to

reassert its challenge to civil society. When I am not operating as a tentative and amateur

foreign correspondent, I lead a rather tranquil and orderly life: writing books and essays,

teaching my students to love English literature, attending agreeable conferences of literary

types, taking part in the transient arguments that arise in publishing and the academy. But even

this rather sheltered existence has been subject to outrageous invasions and insults and

challenges. On February 14, 1989, my friend Salman Rushdie was hit by a simultaneous death

sentence and life sentence, for the crime of writing a work of fiction. To be more precise, the

theocratic head of a foreign state—the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran—publicly offered money, in

his own name, to suborn the murder of a novelist who was a citizen of another country. Those

who were encouraged to carry out this bribed assassination scheme, which extended to “allthose involved in the publication” of The Satanic Verses, were offered not just the cold cash but

also a free ticket to paradise. It is impossible to imagine a greater affront to every value of free

expression. The ayatollah had not read, and probably could not read, and in any case forbade

everyone else to read, the novel. But he succeeded in igniting ugly demonstrations, among

Muslims in Britain as well as across the world, where crowds burned the book and screamed for

the author to be fed to the flames as well.

This episode—part horrifying and part grotesque—of course had its origins in the material or

“real” world. The ayatollah, having flung away hundreds of thousands of young Iranian lives in

an attempt to prolong the war which Saddam Hussein had started, and thereby to turn it into a

victory for his own reactionary theology, had recently been forced to acknowledge reality and

to agree to the United Nations cease-fire resolution that he had sworn he would drink poison

before signing. He was in need, in other words, of an “issue.” A group of reactionary Muslims in

South Africa, who sat in the puppet parliament of the apartheid regime, had announced that if

Mr. Rushdie attended a book fair in their country he would be killed. A fundamentalist group in

Pakistan had shed blood on the streets. Khomeini had to prove that he could not be outdone by

anybody.

As it happens, there are some statements allegedly made by the Prophet Muhammad, which

are difficult to reconcile with Muslim teaching. Koranic scholars had attempted to square this

circle by suggesting that, in these instances, the Prophet was accidentally taking dictation from

Satan instead of from God. This ruse—which would not have disgraced the most sinuous school

of medieval Christian apologetics—provided an excellent opportunity for a novelist to explore

the relationship between holy writ and literature. But the literal mind does not understand the

ironic mind, and sees it always as a source of danger. Moreover, Rushdie had been brought up

as a Muslim and had an understanding of the Koran, which meant in effect that he was an

apostate. And “apostasy,” according to the hadith, is punishable only by death. There is no right

to change religion, and all religious states have always insisted on harsh penalties for those who

try it.

A number of serious attempts were made to kill Rushdie by religious death squads supported

from Iranian embassies. His Italian and Japanese translators were criminally assaulted,

apparently in one case in the absurd belief that the translator might know his whereabouts, and

one of them was savagely mutilated as he lay dying. His Norwegian publisher was shot in the

back several times with a high-velocity rifle and left for dead in the snow, but astonishingly

survived. One might have thought that such arrogant state-sponsored homicide, directed at a

lonely and peaceful individual who pursued a life devoted to language, would have called forth

a general condemnation. But such was not the case. In considered statements, the Vatican, the

archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief sephardic rabbi of Israel all took a stand in sympathy

with—the ayatollah. So did the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious

figures. While they usually managed a few words in which to deplore the resort to violence, all

these men stated that the main problem raised by the publication of The Satanic Verses was

not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy. Some public figures not in holy orders, such as the

Marxist writer John Berger, the Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the doyen of espionage

authors John Le Carré, also pronounced that Rushdie was the author of his own troubles, and

had brought them on himself by “offending” a great monotheistic religion. There seemed

nothing fantastic, to these people, in the British police having to defend an Indian-born ex

Muslim citizen from a concerted campaign to take his life in the name of god.

Sheltered as my own life normally is, I had a taste of this surreal situation when Mr. Rushdie

came to Washington over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1993, in order to keep an appointment

with President Clinton, and stayed for a night or two in my apartment. An enormous and

forbidding security operation was necessary to bring this about, and when the visit was over Iwas asked to pay a visit to the Department of State. There I was informed by a senior official

that believable “chatter” had been intercepted expressing the intention of revenge on me and

on my family. I was advised to change my address and my telephone number, which seemed an

unlikely way of avoiding reprisal. However, it did put me on notice of what I already knew. It is

not possible for me to say, Well, you pursue your Shiite dream of a hidden imam and I pursue

my study of Thomas Paine and George Orwell, and the world is big enough for both of us. The

true believer cannot rest until the whole world bows the knee. Is it not obvious to all, say the

pious, that religious authority is paramount, and that those who decline to recognize it have

forfeited their right to exist?

It was, as it happens, the murderers of the Shia who forced this point upon the world’s

attention a few years later. So ghastly had been the regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which

slaughtered the Shiite Hazara population, that Iran itself had considered invading the country in

1999. And so great was the Taliban’s addiction to profanity that it had methodically shelled and

destroyed one of the world’s greatest cultural artifacts—the twin Buddha statues at Bamiyan,

which in their magnificence showed the fusion of Hellenic and other styles in the Afghan past.

But, pre-Islamic as they undoubtedly were, the statues were a standing insult to the Taliban and

their al-Qaeda guests, and the reduction of Bamiyan to shards and rubble foreshadowed the

incineration of two other twin structures, as well as almost three thousand human beings, in

downtown Manhattan in the fall of 2001.

Everybody has their own 9/11 story: I shall skip over mine except to say that someone I

slightly knew was flown into the wall of the Pentagon having managed to call her husband and

give a description of her murderers and their tactics (and having learned from him that it was

not a hijack and that she was going to die). From the roof of my building in Washington, I could

see the smoke rising from the other side of the river, and I have never since passed the Capitol

or the White House without thinking of what might have happened were it not for the courage

and resourcefulness of the passengers on the fourth plane, who managed to bring it down in a

Pennsylvanian field only twenty minutes’ flying time from its destination.

Well, I was able to write in a further reply to Dennis Prager, now you have your answer. The

nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any

doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how

“people of faith” possess moral advantages that others can only envy. And what is to be

learned from the jubilation and the ecstatic propaganda with which this great feat of fidelity has

been greeted in the Islamic world? At the time, the United States had an attorney general

named John Ashcroft, who had stated that America had “no king but Jesus” (a claim that was

exactly two words too long). It had a president who wanted to hand over the care of the poor to

“faith-based” institutions. Might this not be a moment where the light of reason, and the defense

of a society that separated church and state and valued free expression and free inquiry, be

granted a point or two?

The disappointment was, and to me remains, acute. Within hours, the “reverends” Pat

Robertson and Jerry Falwell had announced that the immolation of their fellow creatures was a

divine judgment on a secular society that tolerated homosexuality and abortion. At the solemn

memorial service for the victims, held in the beautiful National Cathedral in Washington, an

address was permitted from Billy Graham, a man whose record of opportunism and anti

Semitism is in itself a minor national disgrace. His absurd sermon made the claim that all the

dead were now in paradise and would not return to us even if they could. I say absurd because it

is impossible even in the most lenient terms to believe that a good number of sinful citizens had

not been murdered by al-Qaeda that day. And there is no reason to believe that Billy Graham

knew the current whereabouts of their souls, let alone their posthumous desires. But there was

also something sinister in hearing detailed claims to knowledge of paradise, of the sort that binLaden himself was making on behalf of the assassins.

Matters continued to deteriorate in the interval between the removal of the Taliban and the

overthrow of Saddam Hussein. A senior military official named General William Boykin

announced that he had been vouchsafed a vision while serving earlier during the fiasco in

Somalia. Apparently the face of Satan himself had been detected by some aerial photography

of Mogadishu, but this had only increased the confidence of the general that his god was

stronger than the evil deity of the opposition. At the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs,

it was revealed that Jewish and agnostic cadets were being viciously bullied by a group of

unpunished “born again” cadres, who insisted that only those accepting Jesus as a personal

savior were qualified to serve. The deputy commander of the academy sent out e-mails

proselytizing for a national day of (Christian) prayer. A chaplain named MeLinda Morton, who

complained about this hysteria and intimidation, was abruptly transferred to a faraway base in

Japan. Meanwhile, empty-headed multiculturalism also contributed its portion, by among other

means ensuring the distribution of cheap and mass-produced Saudi editions of the Koran, for

use in America’s prison system. These Wahhabi texts went even further than the original in

recommending holy war against all Christians and Jews and secularists. To observe all this was

to witness a kind of cultural suicide: an “assisted suicide” at which believers and unbelievers

were both prepared to officiate.

It ought to have been pointed out at once that this sort of thing, as well as being unethical

and unprofessional, was also flat-out unconstitutional and anti-American. James Madison, the

author of the First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting any law respecting an

establishment of religion, was also an author of Article VI, which states unambiguously that “no

religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust.” His later

Detached Memoranda make it very plain that he opposed the government appointment of

chaplains in the first place, either in the armed forces or at the opening ceremonies of Congress.

“The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as

well as of Constitutional principles.” As to clerical presence in the armed forces, Madison wrote,

“The object of this establishment is seducing; the motive to it is laudable. But is it not safer to

adhere to a right principle, and trust to its consequences, than confide in the reasoning however

specious in favor of a wrong one? Look thro’ the armies and navies of the world, and say

whether in the appointment of their ministers of religion, the spiritual interest of the flocks or

the temporal interest of the Shepherd be most in view?” Anyone citing Madison today would

very likely be thought either subversive or insane, and yet without him and Thomas Jefferson,

coauthors of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, the United States would have gone on

as it was—with Jews prohibited from holding office in some states, Catholics in others, and in the

most Catholic state of Maryland a law whereby “profane words concerning the Holy Trinity”

were punishable by torture, branding, and, at the third offense, “death without benefit of

clergy.” Georgia might have persisted in maintaining that its official state faith was

“Protestantism”—whichever one of Luther’s many hybrids that might have turned out to be.

As the debate over intervention in Iraq became more heated, positive torrents of nonsense

poured from the pulpits. Most churches opposed the effort to remove Saddam Hussein, and the

pope disgraced himself utterly by issuing a personal invitation to the wanted war criminal Tariq

Aziz, a man responsible for the state murder of children. Not only was Aziz welcomed at the

Vatican as the senior Catholic member of a ruling fascist party (not the first time that such an

indulgence had been granted), he was then taken to Assisi for a personal session of prayer at

the shrine of Saint Francis, who apparently used to lecture to birds. This, he must have thought,

was altogether too easy. On the other side of the confessional span, some but not all American

evangelicals thundered joyously about the prospect of winning the Muslim world for Jesus. (I

say “some but not all” because one fundamentalist splinter group has since taken to picketingthe funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq, claiming that their murders are god’s punishment

for American homosexuality. One especially tasteful sign, waved in the faces of the mourners, is

“Thank God for IEDs,” the roadside bombs placed by equally anti-gay Muslim fascists. It is not

my problem to decide which theology is the correct one here: I would say the chances of either

being right are approximately the same.) Charles Stanley, whose weekly sermons from the First

Baptist Church in Atlanta are watched by millions, could have been any demagogic imam as he

said, “We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible. God battles with people who

oppose him, who fight against him and his followers.” His organization’s Baptist Press news

service printed an article from a missionary exulting that “American foreign policy, and military

might, have opened an opportunity for the gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

Never to be outdone, Tim LaHaye decided to go even further. Best-known as the coauthor of

the best-selling Left Behind pulp novel series, which readies the average American for the

“rapture” and then for Armageddon, he spoke of Iraq as “a focal point of end-time events.”

Other biblical enthusiasts tried to link Saddam Hussein with the wicked King Nebuchadnezzar of

ancient Babylon, a comparison that the dictator himself would probably have approved, given

his rebuilding of the old walls at Babylon with bricks that had his name inscribed on every one of

them. Thus, instead of a rational discussion about the best way to contain and defeat religious

fanaticism, one had the mutual reinforcement of two forms of that mania: the jihadist assault

reconjured the bloodstained specter of the Crusaders.

In this respect, religion is not unlike racism. One version of it inspires and provokes the other. I

was once asked another trick question, slightly more searching than Dennis Prager’s, that was

designed to uncover my level of latent prejudice. You are on a subway platform in New York,

late at night, in a deserted station. Suddenly a group of a dozen black men appears. Do you

stay where you are or move to the exit? I was able again to reply that I had had this exact

experience. Waiting alone for a train, well after midnight, I had been suddenly joined by a crew

of repairmen exiting the tunnel with their tools and work gloves. All of them were black. I felt

instantly safer, and moved toward them. I have no idea what their religious affiliation was. But in

every other case that I have cited, religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion

and hatred, with members of each group talking of the other in precisely the tones of the bigot.

The Christians eat defiled pig meat and they and Jews swill poisonous alcohol. Buddhist and

Muslim Sri Lankans blamed the wine-oriented Christmas celebrations of 2004 for the

immediately following tsunami. Catholics are dirty and have too many children. Muslims breed

like rabbits and wipe their bottoms with the wrong hand. Jews have lice in their beards and seek

the blood of Christian children to add flavor and zest to their Passover matzos. And so it goes

on.