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Saturday, May 05, 2007
Authenticity, The West, And Islam
Recently, your Curmudgeon has been flogging a particular pair of questions in every appropriate forum:
He considers them the keys that will unlock the chest of answers to all our other questions about the attitude Westerners, most particularly Americans, should take toward this aggressively evangelistic politico-religious creed. The answers are not elusive, but neither are they widely agreed upon. Needless to say, there are folks out there to whom the questions themselves are offensive; never mind the answers.
Courtesy of the esteemed Russell Wardlow, we have this incisive Lawrence Auster essay on the subject:
"Islam versus Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center," a movie that was produced by Frank Gaffney for the current PBS series on Islam but was then rejected by PBS, was shown in a special screening in a Manhattan movie theater last evening to which I was invited. The movie is very good, and it is a scandal that PBS has spiked it. It consists largely of interviews with various hard-line Muslims in North America and Europe who explain very clearly what they're about: the Islamization of the societies in which they live, something to which they are commanded by their religion and which, as one of them happily puts it, their host societies have given them the "margin" to pursue. Alongside these very confident and articulate exponents of sharia, several moderate Muslims, the heroes of the movie, are featured. In a telling pattern (the significance of which the filmmakers themselves don't seem to catch, see below), after the movie describes and interviews each of these moderates, we are told that the entire Muslim community in the city where each moderate lives is against him, is hostile to him, and sees him as not a true Muslim. In one instance, the moderate Muslim in Paris has a 24 hour a day security detail to protect his life from his fellow Muslims who he revealed in a film he made about them.After the movie was over, Gaffney, two of his fellow filmmakers, Martyn Burke and Alex Alexiev, and one of the moderate Muslims who was featured in the movie (I forget his name), spoke about the movie and answered questions from the overflow audience. It immediately became apparent that there was a total disconnect between what the movie was plainly showing us about Islam and what its makers were telling us that it was showing. This was most evident from what was said by the moderate Muslim (hereinafter the MM), who spoke the most of the four men. As the MM put it, the exponents of jihad and sharia are a tiny, unrepresentative slice of the Islamic community. These "Islamists" are not real Muslims, and they only have the power and visibility they have because they are favored by Western leftists and Saudi money. According to the MM, 94 percent of Muslims in the West do not even attend mosque and have absolutely no interest in an Islamic agenda; they just want to enjoy the West's freedom and secularism. Real Islam, he said, is moderate Islam like his own, consisting of nothing but a relationship between the individual and God, and having nothing to do with the actual authoritative teachings that have defined Islam for 1,400 years....
The movie was telling us that Islam is lethally dangerous. The movie makers and the moderate Muslims in the audience were telling us that Islam is a religion of love....
On one hand, there is the leftist, anti-Western view, institutionalized at PBS, which sees Muslims as culturally enriching victims of Western meanness whom we must embrace. And there is the "right," "pro-Western" (actually pro-modern secularism) view, which does criticize Islam--but the Islam it criticizes is this supposedly tiny and unrepresentative group of "Islamo-fascists," while it imagines that Islam itself is a nice, good thing that we must embrace. The left says Islam is good, period; the right says that apart from the tiny group of the "Islamists," who are dangerous but who are not real Muslims, Islam is good, period. This latter view of Islam so informs the minds of "conservatives" than even when they make a movie explicitly showing that the real power within Islam is jihadist and pro-sharia, they will interpret that movie as saying that moderate Muslims are the true Muslims....
And that, as I said, is the landscape of mainstream American politics when it comes to Islam: on one side, the anti-American, pro-jihadist left, and on the other side, the deluded, neocon "right," which imagines that it is defending America from its jihadist enemies, but in reality is legitimizing and empowering jihad by telling people that the vast majority of Muslims are moderates whom we should welcome into our country.
Now, one who desires not to be troubled by such possibilities is likely to feel the urge to dismiss Auster's concerns as "scare-mongering" or "extremism." But the point he made -- that the movie and the filmmakers literally contradicted one another about the distribution of power between "moderate" Muslims and those of Islamist views -- is not to be evaded. Reality has a way of treating such evasions harshly.
Islam as a doctrine flows from a set of scriptural sources: the Qur'an, the Sunnah (the hagiography of Muhammad's life), and the ahadith (collections of Muhammad's extra-Qur'anic sayings). Islam as it's practiced varies somewhat, though the scriptures provide a strong foundation for dismissing persons who omit certain practices or violate certain proscriptions as not "authentic" Muslims. Since there is no Islamic papacy or comparable body with unquestioned doctrinal authority, the situation presents an uncomfortable degree of ambiguity to Westerners straining to deal with this insular and aggressive creed.
Doctrine and behavior both matter. Context matters, too; it can legitimately be argued that Muslims in the United States have largely proved their harmlessness by their conduct, or, alternately, that they're merely practicing taqiyya and kitman while awaiting the opportunity to strike. How shall we decide?
Your Curmudgeon has attacked this question from a number of angles. Being mathematically inclined, his first approach was a change of variable: were the creed in question not a self-described religion, but a purely secular prescription, how would we view it? The verdict was highly unfavorable to Islam. But two inevitable rejoinders:
- That few Muslims actually follow Islam's more barbaric prescriptions;
- That one must carefully separate religious from cultural influences in judging the creed;
...still needed to be addressed.
The first objection is the harder one to meet, because of the difficulty of gathering data. Muslims are among the most cloistered of all peoples; they routinely exclude "infidels" from those fora in which we could observe them and their practices directly. This is particularly true of Muslims in America, which is itself grounds for a degree of suspicion. It opens a channel for the counter that were their numbers greater, and were they a local majority or a strong local minority in a large enough region, their behavior could well match that of their co-religionists in majority-Islamic lands.
The second objection is more easily countered. If Islam's aggression, its insularity, its misogyny, its proclivity for violence, and its insistence on special treatment follow it throughout space and time, then one may legitimately answer that no separation of culture from creed is possible. This is clearly the case in Western Europe, Britain, and Australia, and has begun to manifest itself more definitely here on our shores as well. To argue that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson, Andrew Bostom, and Daniel Pipes must live under guard, in continuous fear for their lives, because of a tiny minority of "extremists" strains your Curmudgeon's credulity to the breaking point.
The first of your Curmudgeon's questions has been answered: "authentic" Islam is the scriptural, historical variety.
(A side subject: Consider for a moment the implications of the word "extremists." Doesn't it automatically relegate those whom it describes to a small and generally uninfluential minority? As your Curmudgeon's colleague Michele (AskMom) has written, this setting of the terms of discussion tends to prefigure the conclusion.)
The ultimate fallback of non-Muslims who insist that Islam must be respected on a par with traditional Western faiths is, of course, cultural relativism. The ways of other peoples and other lands are no less valid than our own; our opposition to them is inherently xenophobic; their hostility to us, such as it is, is largely a product of our supremacism and our historical oppressions, which we must labor to redress. And having typed that sentence, your Curmudgeon must congratulate himself for not once touching his overworked "sneer quote" key. A growing number of Americans, who can no longer be deceived about the practical consequences of culturally-relativist happy-talk, are doing your Curmudgeon's sneering for him.
Never once do the relativists allow that, if all cultures and ways are equally valid, it's defensible for any one of them to bar the others from its gates, just as the Islamic states of the Middle East have done to Christians and Jews. Yet this follows as inexorably from relativist premises as it does from absolutist ones. Why, then, may Americans, and Enlightenment cultures generally, not deny ingress to these representatives of an aggressive, oppressive creed that denies each and every postulate upon which Western civilization was built? Yet whenever Muslims are admitted to a non-Islamic society, they immediately begin to agitate for special privileges and accommodations that imply Islam's superiority over our traditional faiths and ways. "Infidels" are told they must tolerate such accommodations, however offensive, even unto paying for them from our public treasuries.
The second of your Curmudgeon's questions has been answered: Islam is not compatible with a society that respects faith and worship as private practices but denies any particular variety the privilege of imposing itself upon others.
The last bastion of Islam's defenders has fallen. The creed's explicit dictates are incompatible with Western axioms. The behavior of Muslims as a statistical aggregate compels us to infer that enough Muslims take those dictates seriously enough to be a threat to our norms and our civil order. The "authentic," Islam-directed Muslim and the "authentic," Enlightenment-formed Westerner are at odds ab initio, with no resolution to be had short of political and geographic separation. Those who call themselves Muslims but disavow Islam's commands to convert, subjugate, or kill all of Mankind until shari'a law should reign over all must be closely watched, for their creed also encourages them to lie about their true convictions and intentions if doing so would advance the interests of Islam or Muslims.
These are not pleasant conclusions, but then, we don't live in pleasant times.
Your Curmudgeon's Last Graf is the same as it's always been: America, the supreme expression of Enlightenment civilization, must not allow its political and philosophical basis to be compromised by an influx of persons whose avowed creed is antithetical to all our assumptions, practices, and public norms, and who've capitalized on every opportunity to impose themselves on excessively "tolerant" others. Europe and Britain have allowed it, and the results are before us. This is not a subject upon which we can afford to refuse to learn from the mistakes of others.
Comments
The danger is not believed widely enough, even if it is a majority opinion. The majority of people probably did not want the 1960’s era immigration law that has brought so many muslims to our shores either; but the law passed, and the likelihood of deportation seems tiny.
All we can do, I fear, is educate, hoping that God has mercy on the United States. We’ll probably be more-or-less okay if we can stop the immigration soon, which is a reason to support the most draconian measures against legal immigration, even though we’d benefit from taking in more people—say, from Hong Kong.
In a national emergency, perhaps we can define Islam as what it is—a political system, a social order, and then a religion—so as to strip away the religion-based civil rights protections being provided to this fifth column.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/05/2007 at 04:18 PMThere are many deep ironies in the historical development of Islam. For instance, while it was Muslim scholars who preserved and translated many of the great works of classical philosophy while Europe underwent the Dark Ages, it was European Christianity that eventually came to embrace those classical doctrines while in Islam they were mostly cast aside. Furthermore, while certain Muslims and Western intellectuals accuse the United States and its allies of launching a repeat of the crusades, it is actually Muslim states that use religious war as an explicit rationale for fighting. It was not European powers that used the idea of the crusade in World War I; it was the Ottoman Empire that called up the banners of jihad in order to motivate its subjects to fight. That religious convictions had to be used to motivate Ottoman subjects to fight is, I think, telling about our current situation.
Theologically speaking, many of the problems in Islam today stem from the doctrinal inflexibility of its largest sect, Sunnism. There are four major schools of theological interpretation in Sunnism, and each has “closed its doors” to evolution of its doctrines since roughly the 10th century. In contrast, Shiism is actually much more structurally flexible, and it may be no coincidence that the states that seem most open to democratic reform, Iraq and Iran (its people, not its government) are majority Shiite. Shiism can adopt is doctrines to democracy and modernism, while Sunnism is still struggling with the question of whether using the internet is sinful. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Muslim world’s only other democratic state, Turkey, achieved that result only after almost completely purging Hanafi Sunnism from public life. People who reflexively view religions as reactionary and inflexible will probably yawn at this analysis, but to a more neutral observer Sunnism’s extreme inflexibility stands in stark contrast to the theological evolution in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity over the course of their histories.
I have always thought that violence was inextricably woven into Islam’s fabric. The first wars of expansion begin in Islam not centuries nor decades after its formation by Muhammad, but within a few years. Four of its first five caliphs were murdered by opposition groups, one while saying his Friday prayers. Fitna, or civil war, occurred among Muslims twice within Islam’s first few decades. The introduction of the Turks to Islamic world only intensified and focused both Islam’s expansionist and its self-destructive tendencies. While the Ottoman Empire the Turks created eventually brought some measure of order to the Islamic world, it appears that even 90 years after its collapse we are feeling the reverberations. In a very real sense, the Muslim world has lost its “Rome” and is proceeding through the Dark Ages much as Europe did. This time, it is not in the context of kings and swords but oil, assault rifles, nuclear weapons, and air planes, which is truly frightening.
Attempting to push the Muslim world through its Dark Ages with force is distasteful to us and may prove ultimately unsuccessful, but letting it burn itself out will be catastrophic. Once a people have given themselves over to dark doctrines like jihad and taqiyya, the results will always be bloody.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/05/2007 at 07:48 PM“Europe and Britain have allowed it, and the results are before us.”
I wish they were before “us”; but “our” mainstream media are seeing to it that no full accounting of the results are placed before the viewers of the six o’clock news.Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/06/2007 at 05:37 PMI think we all need to take a deep breath, and pick up our reason. Several comments here, as well as the post, give ample demonstration that it has apparently been possible for millions of people, across history as well as across space/geography, to practice Islam without feeling compelled to go out and murder strangers, or mutilate women, or bomb anything.
Conversely, it is similarly clear that one can say that Christians have, from time to time, engaged in astonishing lapses from the doctine of “love thy neighbour.” Whatever Islam is, it still has not occasioned the Holocaust (which is not to say it cannot). The people who perpetrated the genocide in Rwanda were Christian—and let the record show that the Muslim community in Rwanda was particularly active in sheltering people hiding from the crazy homicidal murderers.
What I draw from these and similar examples is not the inherent evil of either Islam or Christianity, nor indeed any other system of beliefs, but rather the dangers of absolutism. Any doctrine that asserts that it is completely and always right, that it has the answers not only to all existing questions but also to those that have not even been asked yet, and that anyone who does not agree is not only mistaken but dangerous and must be killed is, by the simplest expedient of measuring its claims to infallibility, wrong. Locking out immigrants does not shut down the fanatics. Succumbing to absolutism and becoming totalitarian in our views ourselves cannot be the answer. We can agree that the version of Islam that involves brainwashing, hostility to dissent and the subjugation of women is wrong—this is common sense. Do you honestly think that all Muslims think that gouging out people’s genitalia is a good thing? Or that they are all even now strapping on bombs to come to destroy your children? I am black. Should I be afraid of all white people because white people once killed mine for drinking from the wrong water fountain? In the TEXT of the Koran, right there alongside the exhortations to kill the infidels and etc. are also exhortations to take care of the less fortunate, rigourous obligations of hospitality and so forth. The Bible and the Torah also abound with multiple bloodlettings, ritual murders, subjugation of women, and parochial paranoia. The Koran, like the Bible (and, I would imagine, most documents that claim to have the authority to tell you what to do, when and how)is open to interpretation. The problem right now is precisely that those willing to interpret it differently are ignored by us, dismissed us not being “real” Muslims, and are therefore threatened and harassed by the fundamentalists with our complicity. It is a strange thing to be saying, in pitch-perfect harmony with the mad mullahs, that unless you are ready to kill those who disagree, you are definitely not a real Muslim. What could our point possibly be, here? Are we so hard up for enemies that we include even those who wish us no harm?
That the interpretation of Islam that is now the most pertinent to our concerns is a dangerous one is not an excuse for us to become as wilfully absolutist as the maniacs. Those doing the killings, issuing the fatwahs, and terrifying their own people just as much as they terrify us do not have the last word on Islam. Suggesting they do actually furthers their cause, as does, for example, Ms. Ali, who has unilaterally decided what “true Islam” is: she is actually agreeing with the fundamentalist claims. I do not wish to join her. This is a simple and simplistic way of viewing the world. It is born out of intellectual and moral laziness. In effect, it is saying that we cannot be bothered to sort out those who mean us harm from those who do not, so just give us a simple label identifying those we should consider “us” from those we should consider “them”, point us in the right direction,give us a gun, and let’s go. It is fairly insulting to the general intelligence of the population, regardless of whatever side of the divide it is approached from. I do not want fundamentalists in my city, my country or anywhere around me. However, I can’t tell who they are from their passports. Indeed, even if their passports say that they are from the place where those who want to kill me come from, they might very well be trying to escape from these selfsame killers. It would be, in that case, rather silly of me to deny them entrance based on my belief that they are themselves out to kill me. We can do better than this, really.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/07/2007 at 04:11 PMWould anyone care to answer Msafiri for me? I’m a trifle weary today. He appears inclined to dismiss the evidence of the senses, to say nothing of 1400 years of Islamic history.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 05/07/2007 at 04:42 PMMsafiri,
First, “Hoşgeldiniz misâfir, tanıştığımıza memnum oldum!” as they would say in Turkey. I don’t know Arabic, but I recognize your name as the Turkish borrowed word for “guest” and anyone who submits himself as a guest should always be treated honorably.
Introductions aside, you have well-thought out post, but I think you are ultimately attacking a straw man. I will deal with the issue of Quranic interpretation separately, but in essence you are attacking those who stereotype all Muslims as violent, which neither the article nor my comment did, when our claim is somewhat different: that even if most Muslims are not themselves committing violence, they are either silent about their misgivings or ideologically support violent action. Polls taken of Muslims in the Middle East and Europe always show very high levels of support for the attacks committed against both Israel and the United States, and also widespread belief that the “martyrs” involved in these attacks are heroic. I believe these poll results are only explainable by the fact that Islam’s doctrines, as they are taught today and have been taught for centuries, explicitly exhort believers to violence against the infidels.
The fact that not all Muslims actively take up the call is of little moment. Much like Christian knights in Europe, the gazi warriors have historically in Islam, especially Sunni Islam, been considered a select class, and it was not expected that everyone would take up the call of jihad for the faith. In fact, for quite some time in the early Islamic period, ranging roughly from the 9th to 13th centuries, the majority of gazi warriors outside of the Maghreb (North Africa and Spain) were Turkish mamluks, or slave soldiers. In the Maghreb, warriors were more often Bedouin converts or even Greek mercenaries than not. After the Muslim world, in an ironic reversal, came under the control of these very same Turks, the role of warrior actually fell mainly on forcibly converted Christians, who came to be known as janissaries. The jihadist mentality still carries today much of that same exclusivity, which helps to explain why the aforementioned “martyrs” are so revered - they are taking up a burden only a select few are granted the ability by Allah to undertake.
The difference between Christianity and Islam is that in Christianity, the knights eventually faded away and were replaced by a secular and nationalist military order, while in Islam the gazi mentality remains. Our task is to explain why. As I explained above, we cannot simply dismiss the issue because not all Muslims commit violence; to do so merely sweeps the actual historical question under the rug. My thoughts on the subject are above, but as a quick summary my argument stems from the inflexible nature of Sunni Quranic interpretation. Sunnism’s four schools of Islamic law stopped innovating their doctrines roughly a millennium ago, so the Muslim world never experienced the doctrinal reform that Christianity underwent following the medieval period. Shi’ism, however, with its emphasis on the importance of individual imams rather than rigid adherence to set rule systems, is structurally more open to doctrinal reform, and this is part of the reason there is a movement in some majority Sunni countries toward conversion to Shi’ism. This is why I believe it is no coincidence that the two Shi’ite majority countries - Iraq and Iran - seem most open to democratic reform, and it is also why I believe it so critical we encourage that reform in any way we can. I believe only if Sunnism can be given an example to follow will it reform, because it has shown no willingness to do it on its own.
So, you are of course correct that both the Bible and the Quran contain side by side exhortations to both love and kill thy neighbor. The problem is that Sunni Quranic interpretation never got around to minimizing the killing part like Christianity did, and the results of that are before us in all their obvious brutality. The actual commission of violence may be reserved for a specialized and honored class, but the theological framework on which that class rests is a problem with Islam in general, and not a few extremists.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/07/2007 at 08:21 PMMsafiri, we do not worry about Christians today; our bloody history is well behind us.
It is the burden, the duty and the responsibility of muslims to sort out their religion/ideology so they may co-exist with the rest of the civilized world. Until such time as they have, and there is no longer a reason to fear the extremists, or the lackluster performance of the ‘moderates’, we would do better to divorce ourselves from any bearing suspect passports.
As far as Ali goes, although she quotes and condemns ‘true Islam’ from intimate knowledge of Koranic writings and practices, she is no friend of the west in general, nor Catholicism in particular, and as such, we should have no truck with her.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/08/2007 at 03:03 AMAlso, as I’ve thought about my post, I’ve realized my claims about the jihadist mentality and gazi warriors may look contradictory. After all, I’ve just claimed that gazis were simultaneously revered as an exalted class of holy men while also arguing that many gazis were in fact members of the underclass. I should elaborate some more.
First, there is again a direct analogy with Christian knights here. In medieval European militaries, the knights were minor to major nobility, but at the same time most of those under their command were vassals who ranged in rank from serfs to commoners. In much the same way, the military of the caliphate (we are dealing primarily with the Abbasid caliphate here) was made up of Arab nobles giving the orders and then expecting Turkish mamluks and others of the lower class to execute them. This produced a slightly dissimilar situation to Europe, as the mamluks also made up their own officer corps as well as their enlisted, but ultimately the Arab nobility was just as much in control as the European nobility was.
However, that is more of a historical aside than anything, when you consider that often in history it has fallen upon the lower classes to carry out “glorious deeds” when those deeds involve substantial risk of bodily harm or death. The United States, most of whose military is made up of the middle class, is actually quite unique in this regard. On that note, however, it is interesting to point out that a similar development has occurred in the composition of Islam’s modern gazis - most suicide bombers are not poor but are decently educated middle class. Somewhere along the way, jihadism and the glorification of the gazi became so strong that it enticed even the comfortable to participate, and it would be an interesting historical project to figure out why and when that happened. Suffice to say, this development makes jihadism all the more dangerous.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/08/2007 at 04:47 PMWhere to begin…If “moderate muslims” actually exist, but fail to denounce, or worse actually support the supposedly small violent extreme, should they not be be considered as guilty of the slaughter done in their name as those who hold the knife, gun or detonator, as accomplices and accessories? Anyone who didn’t actually oppose the Nazis or the Communists in their slaughters was a collaborator or a prisoner.
Sad, hard, cold fact: As someone by the name of W once said in slightly different context, You are either with us, or you are against us.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/08/2007 at 06:26 PM
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