I’m going into far more detail about this article than simply posting a blink because I think it’s urgently important to understanding the basis for current U.S. policy in the conflict. Blind Faith: Dubya’s official advisor on Islam, David Forte, is not Muslim, does not speak Arabic, and describes himself as a “student and not an expert”, but Dubya has adopted his line whole hog. He’s also a conservative Catholic who serves on a Vatican committee to strengthen the family and whose scholarship is in Catholic legal theory, although he has reportedly become passionate about Islamic persecution of Christians. His insistence that al Qaeda are theological heretics who take their inspiration from a “seventh-century sect of puritan thugs called the Kharijites” may be motivated by the ulterior desire to

“redeem religious orthodoxy… or, at least, cleanse it of the extremist stain. ‘Nothing this evil could be religious,’ he is fond of saying. It’s a bromide that jibes perfectly with Bush’s own unabashed fondness for religiosity of all stripes. Unfortunately, it may be wrong,”

writes political commentator Franklin Foer in The New Republic. Serious scholars of Islam scoff at his analysis as mistaken and oversimplified, and he ignores the influence of

“Wahhabism, one of modern Islam’s central movements. Emerging in eighteenth-century Arabia, Wahhabism called for a new asceticism, violently opposing decorations in Mosques and celebrations of the prophet’s birthday. And it has at times sanctioned violence against “infidels,” both outside the religion and within.

For decades the Saudi royal family has aggressively promoted Wahhabism by, among other things, financing Wahhabi religious schools throughout the Muslim world. Bin Laden was born Wahhabi, and the Taliban–who graduated from some of those Saudi-funded Wahhabi schools–have undergone a period of what Olivier Roy, an Islamologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, calls “Wahhabisation.” (Witness their destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha, in keeping with Wahhabi prohibitions against graven images.) You can even see traces of the sect’s influence in hijacker Mohammed Atta’s will, which requests Wahhabi burial rites. But you wouldn’t pick up any of this from Forte, who never mentions Wahhabism in his analyses. As Deeb told me, “He misses the real story.”

Perhaps that’s because, unlike the Kharijites, Wahhabis aren’t marginal. Within the United States, according to Hisham al-Kabbani, head of the Washington-based Islamic Supreme Counsel, almost 80 percent of mosques are presided over by Wahhabi Imams. The vast majority of them, of course, don’t support bin Laden. But understanding Al Qaeda’s Wahhabi roots exposes the simplicity of Forte’s distinctions between good and bad, or real and fake, fundamentalist Islam.

Understanding that bin Laden and al Qaeda are not as demonic and marginalized in the Muslim sphere as we would prefer to see them will help us understand what to expect from the Islamic world.

Contrast the trouble we’re getting ourselves into from the mistaken appeal — and influence — of a rigid failure of imagination unable to embrace relativism (if you believe the signs and symptoms and the diagnosis) with this important apologia for postmodernism by Stanley Fish, from this New York Times op-ed piece: Condemnation Without Absolutes:

During the interval between the terrorist attacks and the United States response, a reporter called to ask me if the events of Sept. 11 meant the end of postmodernist relativism. It seemed bizarre that events so serious would be linked causally with a rarefied form of academic talk. But in the days that followed, a growing number of commentators played serious variations on the same theme: that the ideas foisted upon us by postmodern intellectuals have weakened the country’s resolve. The problem, according to the critics, is that since postmodernists deny the possibility of describing matters of fact objectively, they leave us with no firm basis for either condemning the terrorist attacks or fighting back.

Not so. Postmodernism maintains only that there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one. The only thing postmodern thought argues against is the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies. Invoking the abstract notions of justice and truth to support our cause wouldn’t be effective anyway because our adversaries lay claim to the same language. (No one declares himself to be an apostle of injustice.).

Later, he adds:

But of course it’s not really postmodernism that people are bothered by. It’s the idea that our adversaries have emerged not from some primordial darkness, but from a history that has equipped them with reasons and motives and even with a perverted version of some virtues. Bill Maher, Dinesh D’Souza and Susan Sontag have gotten into trouble by pointing out that “cowardly” is not the word to describe men who sacrifice themselves for a cause they believe in.