America: The Midwife of Islamic Fundamentalism

For nearly eighty years, America has armed faith to fight reason. After the Second World War, the United States adopted religion as a weapon against Communism, transforming Islam into an ideological ally. What began as a strategy of containment against the Soviet Union became a theology of empire. The world’s first secular republic became the sponsor of the most anti-secular creed in history. Washington built its global network not around Enlightenment rationality but around revelation. It sought to outpray Marx, not outthink him.

The Cold War made the sacred profitable. The CIA turned Pakistan into a laboratory for jihad, Saudi Arabia into a bank for faith, and Afghanistan into a battlefield of metaphysics. Operation Cyclone, the longest and costliest covert operation in American history, armed the most reactionary forces in the Muslim world to destroy the secular state in Kabul. In those years, America did not export democracy; it exported dogma. Oil dollars flowed into madrassas; Qur’anic literalism became Cold War policy. A civilization born of the Enlightenment chose theology over dialectic and congratulated itself for winning.

The philosophical irony is staggering. Marxism, though flawed, was dynamic — self-critical and dialectical. It believed in contradiction as the engine of progress. Islam, as reshaped by the Wahhabi and Deobandi clergy America empowered, was static and immune to doubt. One could argue with Marx; one could only submit to God. Yet Washington preferred dogma to reason. It found in Islam a spiritual counter-ideology to atheism and mistook divine certainty for social order. The architects of American power understood everything about weapons and nothing about metaphysics.

By the 1980s the delusion had become divine. Ronald Reagan, welcoming Afghan mujahideen in the White House, called them “the moral equivalents of our Founding Fathers.” The Founders were deists who believed reason governed the universe. They wrote constitutions, not fatwas. Reagan’s comparison was not a metaphor but a confession: America had abandoned its own philosophical ancestry. It had mistaken fanaticism for freedom and jihad for Jefferson. That handshake between Reagan and the mujahideen was not a footnote of history; it was the funeral of secularism in the Islamic world.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, America imagined itself victorious. In truth it had enthroned theology. The jihadists it once armed became the monsters it would later bomb. September 11 was not an inexplicable tragedy but the recoil of history — the dialectic of faith returning to strike its maker. Yet instead of re-examining its theology, the United States doubled down on it. In the name of fighting Islamic fundamentalism, it destroyed the only secular regimes left in the Arab world. Iraq, Libya, and Syria — none of which attacked America — were annihilated as moral theater.

In Iraq, the Ba’athist state, brutal but secular, was replaced by sectarian militias. In Libya, Qaddafi’s regime, which suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood, was obliterated, leaving chaos. In Syria, Washington armed rebels whose ideology mirrored al-Qaeda’s. America’s crusade for freedom became a jihad against reason. Each invasion killed another strand of Arab modernity: scientists fled, churches emptied, and secular education collapsed. The Enlightenment perished not in theology’s name but in liberty’s. The empire murdered secularism while reciting the language of democracy.

All the while, Washington armed the very monarchies that incubated extremism. Saudi Arabia, where atheism is punishable by death, remained America’s closest ally. The Gulf Cooperation Council — a confederation of hereditary theocracies — became the Pentagon’s client network. Oil paid for arms; arms paid for loyalty. America preached women’s rights while arming regimes that forbade them to drive. It spoke of tolerance while protecting kingdoms built on clerical tyranny. The result was a world where every secular Arab reformer died with American bullets in the background.

Even Christianity found no protector in Washington. The ancient Christian communities of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon — some older than the Vatican — were erased under American occupation. The same evangelicals who claim biblical fidelity remained silent as the birthplace of their own faith was destroyed. America defended Israel and courted Saudi Arabia while abandoning every Christian between them. It is the first empire in history to betray both Athens and Jerusalem in the same breath.

The same theology it armed abroad eventually came home. The United States, once the sanctuary of reason, turned into a nation of televised prayer and algorithmic crusade. Presidents invoked God before launching wars; generals quoted scripture; journalists moralized geopolitics. The War on Terror became a war on doubt. Patriotism fused with piety. To question the state became blasphemy. The same dualism that defined jihad — believer versus infidel — reappeared in domestic politics as right versus evil. The empire that had armed clerics abroad began to manufacture its own.

The Founding Fathers’ deism, skeptical and scientific, was replaced by evangelical absolutism. The First Amendment, which once separated church and state, now protects the church from the mind. Universities, once engines of skepticism, became timid bureaucracies of faith and feelings. Television preachers dictated policy. Politicians replaced dialectic with moral theater. The philosopher was exiled; the preacher enthroned. America, which once produced Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin, now worships certainty as if ignorance were authenticity.

The result is theological symmetry. The mullah and the populist preacher share the same metaphysics. Each promises paradise for obedience and damnation for doubt. Each fears the philosopher. Both are priests of revelation: one quotes the Quran, the other the Constitution, both uncritically. Theocracy and populism are now two names for the same phenomenon — faith without introspection. The jihadist straps on a bomb; the nationalist wraps himself in a flag. Each dies for a god he never questioned.

The West’s complicity goes beyond policy; it is civilizational. Britain launders Wahhabi money and calls it trade. Europe, ashamed of its own rational heritage, treats criticism of superstition as intolerance. Cathedrals become museums while mosques multiply. The continent that once produced Voltaire and Darwin apologizes for its own Enlightenment. The theological conquest of the West required no armies — only its guilt. The gods it thought buried now rule its capitals through oil, media, and multicultural sentimentality.

America and Islam are not opposites but reflections. Each claims divine sanction; each demands submission. Islam froze thought in revelation; America froze reason in mythology. Both worship their origins and fear revision. The Quran cannot change; the Declaration cannot be re-interpreted without scandal. A society that sanctifies its founding texts ceases to think. The only difference is that one bows toward Mecca and the other toward Wall Street.

Civilization cannot survive on revelation. Every empire that replaces reason with faith decays. Marx understood that truth is dynamic, not divine; it moves through contradiction. That dialectic is absent from both mosque and market. The philosopher alone remains revolutionary. Socrates, Buddha, Spinoza, and Marx belong to the same lineage of heresy — those who dared to think without permission. Their creed was doubt. Their altar was the mind. Their scripture was evidence.

What the modern world needs is not another god but a philosophy: Dharma, Dialectical Materialism, and Logical Empiricism. Dharma, because ethics must precede ideology; Dialectical Materialism, because truth arises through conflict, not revelation; Logical Empiricism, because knowledge must be verified, not believed. Together they form the trinity of secular redemption. They restore what both Islam and America have lost — the courage to reason.

Until that revolution of thought returns, the United States will continue to arm the zealots it fears, destroy the secularists it needs, and preach freedom while sanctifying obedience. It will call theocrats allies and philosophers threats. It will keep mistaking faith for morality and power for virtue. The empire of reason will remain a cathedral of contradictions. Its final epitaph will not be written by theologians but by history itself: They armed God to fight doubt — and were destroyed by both.

Citations

1. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden (Penguin Press, 2004).
2. John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (Pluto Press, 2002).
3. Zbigniew Brzezinski interview, Le Nouvel Observateur, 15–21 Jan 1998.
4. “Remarks of President Reagan to the Afghan Resistance Leaders,” Public Papers of the Presidents: Ronald Reagan 1983, Book I, pp. 212–213.
5. George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).
6. Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (Oxford UP, 2006).
7. Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State (Verso, 2015).
8. Seymour M. Hersh, “The Redirection,” The New Yorker, March 5 2007.
9. William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain (Vintage, 2012 ed.).
10. Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy (Viking, 2006).
11. Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism (Oxford UP, 2005).
12. Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American Christianity and the Shaping of the Nation (Penguin, 2007).
13. Isaac Kramnick & R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution (W.W. Norton, 2005).
14. Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (University of California Press, 1951).
15. Maurice Cornforth, Dialectical Materialism (Lawrence & Wishart, 1951).
16. B. R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma (Government of India Press, 1957)

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