Political science professor Edward Weisband grew up in New York City and witnessed the construction of the World Trade Center.
“It was a symbol of our economic power. Without comprehending the realities of the World Trade Center, the terrorists attacked the monuments representing our economic, military, and political power,” he told almost 1,000 students attending a panel discussion sponsored by the Model UN at Virginia Tech.
“Two illusions were shattered on September 11. First, that we are safe at home. Second, that to know us is to love us,” he said. “Those who hurt us lived, worked, studied, and played among us and shared in the fruits of our liberty and our way of life. What would prompt these men who share our common humanity to want to hurt us so?”
He suggested that the answer is a clash of cultural values, “not between Christianity and Islam, but between alternative conceptions of redemption and the psychological behaviors that derive from them.”
The room grew particularly quiet as Weisband concluded his six minutes with a succinct but complex explanation of American culture versus that of the Al Qua’ida. “American culture is grounded in notions of redemptive guilt, while the cultural orientation of those who participated in these horrific acts is distorted by a kind of medievalist imagery based on notions of redemptive honor,” he said. “The visions of ‘holy war’ and of the salvation in paradise that comes only to those who die in its name, stem from the conviction that redemptive honor requires a display of virtue — one characterized by personal sacrifice, even suicide.
“This creed of suicide runs counter to the central doctrines of Islam. Nonetheless, in the minds of the hijackers, redemptive honor required saving face,” Weisband said. “Many forms of collective identity based on kinship, blood, or passionate versions of common ancestry adhere to various codes of sacred honor. Sometimes we in the West glorify such codes by linking them to Camelot and to chivalrous knights of honor. But cultural scripts of vendetta, of ‘an eye for an eye,’ of formal duels, all originate from codes of honor in which ‘face’ must be saved,” he said.
How does one save face? The answer revolves around “virtue displayed.” How is virtue displayed? “In the case of this skewed radicalized version of Islam, it is displayed by the willing acceptance of personal sacrifice though battle and self-destruction,” he said.
Weisband, who has lived and conducted research in several Islamic countries, including Turkey and Egypt, explained further in a subsequent interview.
“Redemptive honor demands that a lesson be taught to those who are deemed to dishonor the name, blood, or soil of kith and kin. The culture of redemptive honor is framed by a language of instruction. One saves face by teaching the antagonist a lesson.
“These perpetrators of terror, drawn into a theater of suicide, are acting out of an ugly emotional compulsion to assert or reestablish their sense of honor — one which they come to believe Americans assail through our policies abroad and by our very way of life.”
The Taliban, too, enlists the forces of virtue displayed and of redemptive honor. Rules of Taliban-dominated society include uniformity of appearance among men and the oppression, sequestering, and shrouding of women. “Virtue displayed in the hands of the Taliban signifies the erasure of all public display of feminine individuality,” Weisband says.
This is the opposite of what we in the West believe — that women, like men, must have a public role, and that they should contribute to our public life in all the ways that they can,” he says.
The men who came to America to kill Americans were acting out “a psychotic compulsion to commit suicide for reasons of redemptive honor,” says Weisband. “They saw our way of life as lazy, cheap, tawdry, and loose. All the virtues that we think that we have — particularly our pride in our individuality — would have provoked their contempt, demonstrating their profound misunderstanding of our cultural core.”
They failed to see that Americans are very disciplined and hard working, Weisband says. “America is both a liberal and a religious nation. Our culture adheres, in some measure, to the spirit of redemptive guilt and salvation through grace or good works. The influence of liberalism has led to our cultural emphasis upon rationality, individuality, free will, obligation, and the role of contract in commercial affairs,” Weisband says. “This, in turn, has promoted sets of social values oriented to success, however defined, and achievement as central features of common collective life. Consumerism and market exchange, leisure, even entertainment hedonism, all become the characteristic features of our liberal democracy.
“But more relevantly, ours is a culture that envisions toleration of cultural differences as a form of national strength, not a sign of moral decadence and decay, as would have been misunderstood by the hijackers.”
This clash of cultures is very dangerous and may require a whole range of adjustments, Weisband warns. Certainly it has altered the political center of gravity in US foreign policy.
“I’m not a militant, but I am an existential realist, and we do our fellow citizens, especially our students, no favor if we lull them into thinking that the danger before us is not clear and present,” says Weisband.
“We must act with judicious prudence. To do too little is to dishonor ourselves as a nation, especially those who were tragically lost on September 11. But to do too much, by way of retaliation and vengeance, would be to confirm the worst in the minds of our adversaries.”