Anders Hesselbom

Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft. It really isn’t hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery—you just put in a few lines like “Don’t take sex slaves!” and “When you fight a war and take prisoners, as you inevitably will, don’t rape any of them!” And yet God couldn’t seem to manage it. This is why the approach of a group like the Islamic State holds a certain intellectual appeal (which, admittedly, sounds strange to say) because the most straightforward reading of scripture suggests that Allah advises jihadists to take sex slaves from among the conquered, decapitate their enemies, and so forth. 

Imagine that a literalist and a moderate have gone to a restaurant for lunch, and the menu promises “fresh lobster” as the specialty of the house. Loving lobster, the literalist simply places his order and waits. The moderate does likewise, but claims to be entirely comfortable with the idea that the lobster might not really be a lobster after all—perhaps it’s a goose! And, whatever it is, it need not be “fresh” in any conventional sense—for the moderate understands that the meaning of this term shifts according to the context. This would be a very strange attitude to adopt toward lunch, but it is even stranger when considering the most important questions of existence—what to live for, what to die for, and what to kill for.

These two groups share a vision, except that for one, it manifests—in its most extreme form—in the terrorist Anders Breivik, and for the other, in the 7/7 jihadist terrorists in London. I was not surprised to learn that Breivik quoted al-Qaeda extensively in his terrorist manifesto. One of these extremes is opposed to a “Muslim takeover,” and the other is in favor of it, but they both subscribe to that divisive, sectarian apocalyptic vision.