Just after the Oct. 7 attacks, world leaders called for peace and restraint. They appealed to the better judgment and the conscience of all involved.
I knew that those words would be wasted on Hamas, because their view of conscience is very different from the one most of us share.
I will be forever haunted by an interview with a would-be suicide bomber. When he was asked what he thought of being sent to maim and kill innocent women and children, he replied, “I knew it was wrong but my commander said it was ‘the will of God.’”
That sort of warped moral reasoning is seen among many religiously motivated terrorists today.
To be clear, it is not the way that the majority of reasonable Muslims think. But it is the way that violent extremists think.
Sadly, many Western political leaders do not get that point. Until they realize that violent extremists do not think the way that we think about morality, Western leaders will continue to be surprised by events such as the Oct. 7 attacks.
In extremist Islam, the “law of God” overrides human conscience and our human sense of morality.
In theoretical terms, this means that in Islam we have the reverse of what we believe in our society. We regard law as the codification of morality or the collective conscience of a people.
However, in extremist Islam, morality is dictated by law.
Practically, this means that behaviors that one should find morally repugnant, like terrorism, can be justified and mandated by religious law.
That viewpoint takes its support from a harsh interpretation of parts of the Quran such as this one:
“Fighting is ordered for you even though you dislike it, and it may be that you dislike a thing that is good for you and like a thing that is bad for you. Allah knows but you do not know.” (2:216).
The extremists believe that God does not respect human conscience.
In that respect, extremist Islam is not far off the beliefs of some extremist sects of other faiths or political systems.
The extremists believe that human reason is unable to know the will of God—in fact, human reason is unable to know what is truly right or wrong.
This is unlike mainstream Judaism and Christianity, which both hold that human beings have a moral conscience that can teach them right from wrong.
We see an illustration of that contrast in the “Adam and Eve” stories in the Bible and the Quran.
In the Jewish-Christian story, Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They realized that they were naked and felt ashamed, and were cast out of Eden for their disobedience.
‘Just Following Orders’
The extremists exaggerate that viewpoint and teach their followers that they do not have a valid conscience—and that if they do feel that they have a conscience, they should distrust it.Instead of acting from conscience, they should instead obey the “will of God,” which is mediated by the authorities who supposedly speak on God’s behalf.
In other words, the violent terrorists, who claim the authority of God, teach that ordinary people do not have reliable knowledge. So they expect people to believe that it is their responsibility to imitate and follow those scholars of the law who do know.
The terrorists thus reincarnate the “Nuremberg” defense put forward by many war criminals after World War II. They claimed that they knew what they were doing was wrong, but that they should be absolved of guilt because they were “just following orders.”
Today’s terrorists teach their followers the same thing.
The terrorists’ way of thinking says a lot about their conscience. In short, they don’t have one.
Instead of conscience, they only have authority and obedience, which is often blind obedience.
It is interesting to compare that warped form of conscience with the unthinking blind obedience demanded in totalitarian regimes like Naziism or communist regimes today.
One can only lament the fact that many Western leaders do not realize that religious terrorists and their supporters do not think, or make moral decisions, the way that we do.
The results have been manifested when well-intentioned pleas have been made for terrorists to act in good conscience, but then they do the opposite of what was expected.
