“So when you meet those who disbelieve [in battle], strike [their] necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds, and either [confer] favor afterwards or ransom [them] until the war lays down its burdens. That [is the command]. And if Allah had willed, He could have taken vengeance upon them [Himself], but [He ordered armed struggle] to test some of you by means of others. And those who are killed in the cause of Allah – never will He waste their deeds.” ^[1]

“And it is not for the believers to go forth [to battle] all at once. For there should separate from every division of them a group [remaining] to obtain understanding in the religion and warn their people when they return to them that they might be cautious.” ^[2]

The above verses from the Quran are not taken out of context. They’re taken as representative of a prominent doctrinal thread that runs across the scripture. It can be summarized as follows:

1. It is incumbent upon Muslims to wage Jihad.

2. The end goal of Jihad is to provide non-believers the opportunity to save themselves from eternal hell fire by surrendering to the one true God.

3. Those non believers who do not succumb to Islam may be killed or violated by those engaged in Jihad.

4. Not all of the Muslim population must engage in Jihad all at once and some must stay back to master the scripture and act as ideological guides for society.

Islam related global violence

The last few decades have seen a meteoric rise in armed violence in the name of Islam. Even before the emergence of the spectacular depravity of the ISIS, the world had suffered enormously at the hands of Jihadists hijacking planes ^[3], carrying out bomb blasts ^[4], demanding azaadi ^[5] or flying planes right into skyscrapers. Each such new episode triggers global public outcry and condemnation from various sections of the society before things revert to business as usual. In all debates on the issue of Islamic terrorism, one question that is almost always asked and never answered is the one about the silence of the moderate Muslims ^[6]. Moderates are obviously those Muslims who do not condone acts of terror and are quick to distance themselves from the horror perpetrated by their co-religionists. But if prodded for justifications for verses in the Quran that so obviously extol the virtues of wiping out non believers from the face of the earth, they turn into classic apologists and accuse others of being Islamophobes, of cherry picking verses and quoting them out of context. However, just a cursory reading of the Quran clearly shows that their defence is untenable, even if widely accepted.

Muslim attitude towards jihadi violence

This contradiction between seemingly irreconcilable moral attitudes (condemning acts of terror and yet unquestioningly rationalizing all the violence espoused by the Quran) finds expression in the political opinions of Islamic society. According to a survey of Muslim opinion in Britain conducted a decade ago, 28% of Muslims hoped for the UK to become a fundamentalist Islamic state one day and roughly a quarter of those interviewed justified the London train bombing because of British support to America’s war on terror. ^[7] Similarly, a much more comprehensive research carried out by the Pew Research Centre a few years back throws up startling results about Muslim attitudes to violence and inter-faith relations. 47% of Bangladeshi Muslims say that suicide bombings and violence are justified to “defend Islam”. Only 57% of Muslims worldwide disapprove of al-Qaeda and a mere 51% disapprove of the Taliban. Most pertinent to this essay, around 90% Muslims in South Asia, Middle East and North Africa believe that only Islam can lead to heaven and nearly the same proportion believe that converting others to Islam is their religious duty. ^{[8] [9]}

From the above data, the following conclusions can be safely drawn:

1. An overwhelming majority of Muslims believe that Islam is the one true faith and believe that followers of other faiths are destined to suffer in the afterlife. (It may be noted that this is consistent with the summary of the two quranic verses presented at the beginning of this piece.)

2. A large number of moderate Muslims disagree with the methods adopted by extremists and denounce these acts even while a significant number of them find valid reasons to justify violent acts by the more radicalized members of their community.

Is there a relationship between these two patterns of behaviour? In the following analysis, I argue that the two are not just related but in fact causally connected.

How morality works

Before we try to make sense of the above claim, it is important to keep in mind the following maxim from cognitive psychology:

“Moral intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second.” ^[10]

In other words, faced with a given moral situation, our intuitions are instinctively triggered, after which our reasoning faculty gets to work in telling ourselves why the emotions we feel are an appropriate reaction for the particular set of stimuli. This can be easily tested by putting oneself in a disturbing hypothetical circumstance and imagining how one would behave. If someone were to ask you if you were willing to donate your dead friend’s corpse to the local meat shop for selling it to human meat connoisseurs, chances are that you would first deliver a few hard blows to the pervert before you could articulate the reason as to what got you so enraged.

The Trolley Problem

Now, let us investigate the mechanism of moral intuitions a bit more by considering three common scenarios of the famous thought experiment called the Trolley Problem:

Switch case: Suppose you’re standing near a double track railway line on which five workmen are working on one track and a single workman on the other. A railway trolley is fast approaching the five workmen, who are totally unaware of the approaching danger. There is a switch/lever nearby, pulling which will divert the trolley to the other track and save the five men but sacrifice the lone workman on the other track. Would you pull the switch? (78% approve) ^[11]

Footbridge case: You’re standing over a footbridge that stands over the same railway line described in the previous scenario. However, the lone workman, in this case, is standing right next to you on the footbridge, smoking a cigarette. Instead of pulling the switch, you have the option of pushing over the man standing next to you, which would definitely result in the trolley changing tracks. You would still save five lives at the cost of one like in the switch case. Would you push the man? (31% approve) ^[11]

Remote Footbridge case: This is just like the footbridge case, except that you’re standing next to a switch that controls a trapdoor beneath the lone worker on the footbridge and by pulling the switch, you allow him to drop onto the track, resulting in his death but again, saving the other five. Would you operate the switch? (63% approve) ^[11]

Interpreting moral dilemmas

It turns out that most mentally healthy individuals are willing to pull the switch in both cases but not ready to push the man off the footbridge, even though the end result of all three actions would be the same. From a rational, utilitarian point of view, the difference between the three choices is insignificant but that’s not how people seem to think. To cut a long story short, our brains function in two modes, much akin to the settings of a DSLR camera: automatic (intuitive – faster) and manual (rational – slower) ^[12]. The automatic mode is the one that sends off emotional signals and makes us intuitively predisposed towards a particular moral position, after which we spend a good deal of mental energy in rationalizing the choice we’ve made. It is important to note here that if a situation fails to evoke intuitive emotional reactions from the system, we make decisions using the manual mode, based on rational input. Thus, the difference between the three scenarios is that in the first and last, our intuition does not trigger an emotional alarm while in the second one it does. As is clear from the trolley scenarios, whenever intuitive signals do get generated, they tend to dominate over rational judgement and thus directly control our actions and thoughts.

Based on experimental evidence collected using magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, it can be concluded that our automatic mode is sensitive to a combination of two parameters when reacting to violence: a) means / side-effect distinction and b) use of direct personal force. In other words, violence employed as a means to achieve a desired end generates an inhibiting emotional response and so does a situation that asks of us to apply personal force to harm another person. In contrast, our moral machinery is quite forgiving of violence that comes as a by-product of our efforts to achieve a goal or if the force applied is transmitted indirectly. Most importantly, action plans demanding violence as a means to the desired end AND employed via personal force, generate the strongest intuitive reaction, much stronger than the two individually, to inhibit us from carrying out or approving of any such plans.

Moral intuitions meet Islamic beliefs

Coming back to the peaceful majority of Muslims, the moderates, who believe in the Quran and are unhappy about all the bloodshed that happens in the name of Islam, the question to ask is, do they feel morally and emotionally outraged about these acts or do they only oppose terrorists on politically correct, rational grounds? Here, it is important to clarify that in dealing with the question, we are not passing a judgement on individuals but moderate Muslims as a statistical category.

When moderate Muslims take note of Jihadi violence, it is clear from scores of surveys that many of them view these as ‘us versus them’ situations, where ‘them’ consists of infidels in urgent need of help to save them from serious trouble in the afterlife, for they do not believe in the one true God. Far from calling them enemies, the Sufi view, in particular, asks Muslims to be compassionate towards the non-believers because they’re essentially doomed. To apply the trolley analogy here, non-believers such as Hindus are like the five workmen on the track, unaware of the approaching danger. The Jihadis, when they wage war on infidels, push the unfortunate victims to their death, as in the footbridge case and through the violence inflicted on the select few, they believe that they bring many others into submission before Allah and in this way save them from misery. On the other hand, the position of moderate Muslims is analogous to the remote footbridge scenario by virtue of an absence of participation in direct violence and at the same time, viewing the death of a few infidels as a means to achieving salvation for the many. As we saw in the introduction to the remote footbridge scenario, most people approve of sacrificing the lone worker by pulling the switch to open a trapdoor beneath his feet. There is a general moral ambivalence in this case, as far as the intuitive signals are concerned and as mentioned earlier, post-hoc rationalization is only a loyal advocate of one’s feelings.

Conclusion

The single most important factor that makes a large number of Muslims feel, and think, the way they do lies in Islamic theology and the exclusivist doctrine that denounces all other belief systems as false. As demonstrated above, as long as Muslims believe that infidels are living a life of decadence, whose souls will end up in misery after leaving the earth, there is nothing that can prevent them from feeling bad about the ‘others’ and from ‘helping’ them out. The reason that people of other faiths, especially those who aren’t classified as people of the book, find it impossible to understand the motivations for violence of Islamic terrorists, is that they tend to label the aggressors as evil people, who are out to kill them for their own pleasure though the paradoxical truth is that the aggressors are really going out of their way to ‘help’ the victims. This paradox is equally valid for Christianity as well as Communism, both of which have an illustrious history of ‘saving’ those who don’t subscribe to their worldview by simply eliminating some of them. In its non-violent avatar, this concern for the well being of others finds expression in proselytizing or ideological propaganda, as the case may be and heavenly or utopian ends often encourage employment of unscrupulous and dishonest means. Contrast this with Dharmic belief systems that do not tell their adherents that theirs is the one true path and are therefore, not militant even when engaged in proselytizing missions as Buddhist monks are. Not only is there an acceptance of diverse, even conflicting views about the nature of reality but the feeling of non judgemental camaraderie extends beyond members of the human species too. ^[13]

If people of different faith are to co-exist peacefully on the planet, it is imperative for the followers of Abrahamic faiths, particularly Islam, to give up on their exclusivist claims of superiority and replace the platitudes of tolerance with a genuine appreciation of diversity in views, beliefs and practices. It is only in an environment of mutual respect ^[14] that the moral compass of the vast number of silent moderates will be recalibrated to intuitively reject the temptation of violent interventions in the lives of those who they consider as the ‘other’.

References and related reading:

[1] Quran 47:4 – Muhammad

[2] Quran 9:122 – At-Tawbah (The Repentance)

[3] Indian Airlines Flight IC 814

[4] Mumbai Blasts 1993

[5] Rahul Pandita – Our Moon has blood clots

[6] Ali A. Rizvi – An open letter to moderate muslims

[7] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/many-british-muslims-put-islam-first/

[8] www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31293196

[9] www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/

[10] Jonathan Haidt – The Righteous Mind

[11] Joshua Greene – Moral Tribes

[12] Daniel Kahneman – Thinking Fast and Slow

[13] Beef Against Beef

[14] Rajiv Malhotra – Being Different