OLITICIANS AND commentators are going to great lengths to affirm the religion of Muslims, rejecting the terrorists' claim that the heinous crime of Sept. 11 was an act of Islamic devotion. That is as it should be. Islam is a noble religion that emphasizes ''surrender'' to God and compassionate love for the neighbor. It is a source of meaning for millions, and, as the commentary insists, all but the smallest fraction of those millions reject violence and the savagery of terrorists.
Islamic religious leaders have been forthright in condemning the murderous assaults against America. But something is lost in the well-intentioned assertion that Islam is a pure religion entirely unrelated to evil acts committed in its name. With so much violence being inflicted in the name of God by religionists of various kinds around the globe, an old question presents itself, and not just about Islam: Is religion the solution or is it the problem? Or is it both?
Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair said last week that the attacks were no more a reflection of true Islam than the Crusades were of true Christianity. Fair enough. But the comparison is instructive. Latin Christians would like to be able to say that the rampaging fanatics who, to cite only one instance, assaulted Jerusalem in 1099 were acting in ways that had nothing to do with Christian belief or practice but in fact - and this is what makes the Crusades so chilling - that holy war was integrally tied to theology (the violence of God), liturgy (the sign of the cross), and authority (crusader popes).
Today, we like to think of ''religion'' as one of those purely positive aspects of life, and we are quick to dismiss negative acts or attitudes spawned by religion as not ''really'' religious. The Vatican does this in asserting that the Catholic Church is entirely sinless, which means the crimes of the church (Crusades, Inquisition, etc.) were committed by ''sinful members,'' never by the church ''as such.'' Religion is good. If religion prompts bad behavior, then it is not ''real'' religion.
But this way of thinking lets religion off the hook. It means we can deplore the ''sins'' of sinful members without asking hard questions about where those sins came from. To stay with the Christian example, were the endless acts of Christian anti-Semitism aberrations, or were they tied somehow to anti-Jewish texts in the New Testament, or to the fundamental way Christianity defined itself against Judaism, and so on? If anti-Semitism were an aberration, then an apology for acts of ''sinful members'' would be enough. If anti-Semitism grew out of core beliefs and practices, then apology would not be enough. Core beliefs and practices would have to change. If crimes committed in the name of religion could be easily separated from religion ''as such,'' then a full understanding of those crimes, and a way to resist them at the source, may elude us.
Obviously, I am talking here about all religions. It is misleading and unproductive to think of religion as purely good. Religion, like everything of the human condition, is ambiguous - partly good and partly bad; part solution, part problem. Religion has enabled major improvements in human life and still supports some of the world's greatest works for good. But religion also easily confuses the object of its worship - God - with itself, often prompting human beings to make absolute claims that lead inevitably to absolute disaster.
Feelings of religious superiority can and do lead to ranking by race, nationality, gender, and class. Religion can make unholy alliances with commerce and with conquest, as happened throughout the era of European imperialism. The univocal claims of monotheists can lead to contempt for human beings who do not share them, and the open-endedness of polytheism can undermine the distinctions essential to thought. And the certainty that often accompanies the phenomenon of ''true belief'' seems always to result in a cruel rooting out of what - or who - might threaten it. The religious impulse to die for the faith slides all too quickly into the impulse to kill for it.
There is no crime of which Muslims acting as Muslims have been accused that Christians, to cite only one other religion, do not also stand accused by history. To be religious is, first, to be repentant. The danger of a ''clash of civilizations,'' or even of a new holy war between the remnants of a Christian West and ''the Islamic world,'' will be far less if we all understand that we are alike as human beings. Our noblest impulses come inevitably intertwined with opposite inclinations that betray them. We religious humans must constantly submit to the judgement of history, practicing self-criticism, always seeking the reform that will drawn us closer to our best ideals.
Certainly, Islam is engaged in such a reckoning today. But this task belongs to all religious people - the only way to honor God and love our neighbor as ourselves.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
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