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February 28, 2002
Reading this Atlantic Monthly article
Reading this Atlantic Monthly article about the state of Koranic studies made me recognize anew the freedom we have here in America. Offended folks may protest or try to close an exhibition that's showing Serrano's “Piss Christ.” But nobody shoots the man. In the Muslim world, the mere suggestion that perhaps the Koran isn't the unadulterated word of Allah spoken to Muhammad and recorded verbatim by his followers is enough to get you exiled or worse. Time after time, intelligent, respectable academics have been forced to flee in fear for their very lives after attempting to apply the tools of reason to the Koran.
I have a dozen books on my shelf that approach the study of Christian scripture from every angle. These include a book of Nag Hammadi scroll transcripts that contains early, pre-Canonical versions of New Testament Scripture, and a book that suggests keeping Christianity, but getting rid of God. I don't have to hide these volumes. I can buy as many copies of them as I want from Amazon.com. I don't have to worry that some fundamentalist is going to order the authors' heads cut off. Jerry Falwell might flap his flabby jowls with displeasure. Pat Robertson might close his squinty beady eyes in fevered effort as he prays for the salvation of sinful America. But (with few exceptions that prove the rule) no one's going to get killed.
That's a good, good thing.
My favorite quote from the Atlantic article, uttered by scholar Gerd-R. Puin:
“The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear.' But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims -- and Orientalists -- will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible.”
Highly amusing!
A new poll shows that
A new poll shows that (surprise!) most folks in the Muslim world don't like us Americans. I was particularly amused by the bit that characterized us as “easily provoked.” Let's see...in 1979 there was that Iranian hostage thing...1982, some folks blew up our embassy in Beirut...in '83 241 U.S. soldiers were killed, again in Beirut...in 1985, it was deemed good politics to kill crippled American Leon Klinghoffer aboard a hijacked cruise ship...in 1988, there was Pan Am 103 (270 dead)...in 1993, we had the first World Trade Center bombing...1996, an Air Force barracks in Saudia Arabia was bombed...in 1998, our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed...there was the USS Cole bombing in 2000...and then (lest we forget) 3,000 dead at the World Trade Center just six months ago.
And what had our response been up to that point? A few carelessly lobbed cruise missiles that did squat.
Perhaps the fact that Muslims, by and large, are used to shorter life spans, higher infant mortality rates, and young suicide bombers makes them think that mass death is really no reason to get upset.
As far as doubting whether Arab folks were behind 09/11…well, I suppose from an epistemological point of view we can't really be sure of anything, can we? Radical skepticism and all that. But in that case, Atta and his boys certainly were in the wrong places at the wrong times. What luck!
March 03, 2002
Six years ago, a prescient
Six years ago, a prescient Daniel Pipes produced this piece on the Western influences within militant Islam. It's worth reading more than once.
Like many of the Islamist leaders cited by Pipes, Mohamed Atta studied in the West. He studied architecture at the University of Hamburg-Harburg in Germany, producing an analysis of Alleppo, a town in Syria. His professor gave him the highest possible mark for his defense of it. Given its subject--the preservation of Islamic architecture in the face of modernism--I can only image the sublime aesthetic pleasure with which he anticipated the destruction of the quintessentially modern World Trade Center towers.
I knew of Atta's education. What I didn't know was the extent to which the very foundations of the Islamist movement have been Westernized. We must resist the tendency to regard the radicals as atavistic, superstitious, God-fearing simpletons. Pipes points out that the melding of Western-style notions of political ideology with Shari'a has produced a revolutionary movement that closely resembles twentieth-century Western totalitarianism. This is an ideology of a completely different order than the blustery, eternally offended and easily mocked fundamentalism we know and love here in America. Pipes write, "Islamism's potential grows as do its numbers." That's truly frightening. One of the reasons the Marxist left offers to explain the failure of a socialist revolution to materialize in America is that there simply weren't enough revolutionaries to make it happen here. There are nearly a billion Muslims on the planet, and while they're certainly not all Islamists, it seems to me that the ground is fertile for the planting of the radical seed.
An interesting quote from Hasan at-Turabi, then ruler of Sudan:
"I am for equality between the sexes...a woman who is not veiled is not the equal of men. She is not looked on as one would look on a man. She is looked at to see if she is beautiful, if she is desirable. When she is veiled, she is considered a human being, not an object of pleasure, not an erotic image."
A provocative defense against Western assumptions about the Repression of the Veil, although Turabi probably wasn't the portrait of feminist enlightenment. But it is something to think about as we contemplate our own culture, in which the bodies of women and sexual images thereof are used to sell everything from cars to shampoo, while the genuinely erotic has been replaced by gynecological fuck tapes, voyeurism, and drunken revelers flashing their tits in Daytona Beach and New Orleans.
March 07, 2002
The Unveiled Reader sends this
The Unveiled Reader sends this ABCNews.com link about the veiling of Muslim women.
Reading it, I was reminded of a scene at a press conference where the Foreign Minister of the Taliban--unaccompanied on his trip to the U.S.--faced the press corps around the time that his fellows were blowing up Buddhas. At one point, a woman in the crowd of reporters leapt to her feet and began screaming--and I do mean screaming--at the hapless Minister, producing a full burqa from beneath her coat, unfolding it and waving it about. She was a total spectacle. I wondered at the time what the Afghani must have been thinking: "Why are you showing this to me? I see them every day. You are a very strange woman." I thought she made a complete and incoherent fool of herself.
The point is made by the article: How important is what a woman wears when the woman hasn't eaten in days? First things first, please!
It is the Western problem: we are so steeped in abstract theory that we ignore the real problems of humanity in the muck.
March 11, 2002
A reader brings this Middle
A reader brings this Middle East Media Research Institute article from December of 2001 to my attention. In it, Benny Morris--author of the fat and mostly balanced treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, "Righteous Victims"--essentially denies his previous, left-leaning support of the notion of total Israeli agression and Palestinian victimization.
This is what happens when a movement hits the same violent note again, and again, and again. They lose any support they might have had, as their barbarity makes even theoretical sympathy untenable. I am simply amazed at the Islamist mindset, the death-orientation, the sheer medievalism. I'm beginning to agree mightily with Our Man Pat Buchanan: just leave them alone. Let them suffer and die in their own struggle to achieve democracy. Let them establish their theocracies, and then let the oppressed populace rise up and throw them down. Let the people see what happens when we totally withdraw all of our support from them. Let them experience the chaos of their own inept leaders and the fiendish results of their own primitive mindsets.
April 30, 2002
A reader calls my attention
A reader calls my attention to this Weekly Standard piece on Sayyid Qutb, rightly called “the most effective Islamic critic of the West and the most eloquent advocate of pan-Islamic revival.”
Qutb believed that while Western democracy is based on freedom, Islamic society is based on virtue. Hence, the repentant adulterers who insisted upon confession to Muhammad and were then stoned to death in accordance with the law of Allah are to be celebrated for their virtue, that is, their desire to be pure when they finally met Allah. Furthermore, the democratic insistence that ‘the People' rule places them above God as a kind of idol, thus making democracy idol worship in the same way that capitalism is market worship.
Author Dinesh D'Souza is quite right in calling for intellectual responses to Qutb's far-reaching and highly influential critique: “To counter this idea will require a full-bodied defense of freedom as understood in the West, as a gift from God and a necessary pre-condition for true virtue.”
There is a problem with that, however. To argue that freedom is a gift from God will require reference to God's words, in some form or another. What form of God's words should be used? The Jewish Torah? The Christian Testaments? The Vedas, perhaps? The only reference acceptable to Qutb's disciples will be, of course, the Koran. Since they will probably reject any Koran-based critique of Qutb offered by a non-Muslim, it once again falls to the Muslims themselves to reform their own religion.
There is no rationally coherent defense of God, which is why a society based entirely on a chosen Book of God will always be incoherent. Freedom, or free will, is indeed a necessary pre-condition for virtue. Convincing the radical adherents of a religion whose very name demands submission to the will of Allah that free will is a necessity strikes me as an impossible task.
The debate, therefore, ought not to be about “gifts from God,” but about the very viability of the god-idea as the foundation of a modern society. Can a state based on the premise that one's individual spiritual life is most properly directed by external authorities be a just state? Is it ethical to demand that non-adherents observe religious law? Is the required public observance of religious law more important than private faith and conviction? All of these questions do not presume the existence of God or God's authority. Instead, they are concerned with what constitutes a just and ethical society, and whether or not a theocracy can insure the just and ethical treatment of its citizens. The followers of Qutb and those who sympathize with them are not and will never be interested in what we in the West have to say about his ideas. We must engage those Muslims who are interested in the broader questions about the role of God in secular society. Those who deny the very viability of secular society will not listen to us.
By requiring that the intellectual defense of Western values be grounded in theistic belief, D'Souza dooms the effort from the start.
November 27, 2002
Huh. After my comment to the LGF bit yesterday, the thread expanded from 21 to 80 posts, in the course of which I was soundly trounced regarding my misconceptions about the transmission of Greek texts by Muslims. Ah well--another academic truism bites the dust, keels over, twitches once and farts as it dies.
At any rate, here's my final post on the matter, if you're interested:
Kalle's exhaustive posts regarding Muslim transmission of Greek texts are beyond my expertise, and after a bit of fact-checking I consider myself suitably refuted and educated on that point.
However, if some folks would step back for a moment from their seemingly unalterable conviction that Islam is and has always been an irredeemable barbarity perpetuated upon the innocents of the world, perhaps the basic thrust of my posts might become clear.
Islam was a participating member of the panoply of civilizations, and to categorically claim that it contributed nothing except a uniquely adept form of parasitism does not seem to me to be particularly enlightening, or of help in understanding the current situation. This claim does not make sense to me when I contemplate a florid, gold-leafed panel of Gulzar Arabic script, or the intricate pattern of white and cobalt tiles that cover a 15th century Mihrab. I also find this idea hard to understand while listening to the passionate, lyrical cries of Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan, or reading the work of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi.
It is, in fact, those last two examples that cause me to refuse blanket condemnations of Islamic culture. Whatever the truth of Mohammed's historical personage—camel-driver or shrewd general, prophet of God or select committee of scribes instructed to create a legend—within the Muslim voices of Rumi and Ali Khan I hear the same longing that generation upon generation of human beings throughout the history of this earth have sought to satisfy. While the Q'uran's flaws are its own, the presence of such flaws within sacred scripture is not unique. Many hundreds of millions of Muslims have managed to resolve the conflicts within their chosen sacred text to their own satisfaction without killing or oppressing anyone. They have drawn meaning from their tradition, achieved some measure of internal peace, and perhaps even developed a relationship with the divine. Despite the modern penchant for belittling such relationships, they are no small thing.
Islam, like Christianity and Judaism before it, is a complex and flawed system that meets human needs with varying degrees of success. The nature and severity of its flaws are open to debate, of course. But to declare it irredeemable, and to desire its erasure from the face of the earth (#19), is to participate in the same jingoism which all of us justly condemn.
Today we see Islam as a frightening chimera, and the urge to annihilate this beast in both real and historical terms is not only understandable, it may be necessary. We've got some very nasty business ahead of us, and we're going to have to kill a lot of people before it's over. I can't think of any nation in history that has been able to muster its citizens for war by keeping the essential humanity of their enemies foremost in their minds. People don't work that way. I know I don't—in the months after I fled from downtown Manhattan last year, I wrote quite a few pieces that were just as harsh and condemning as some of what I've seen here and elsewhere. Since then, I haven't surrendered my belief that violent intervention is necessary.
I regret that necessity. But I still listen to Ali Khan, and I still read Rumi.
Happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate it; if not, enjoy your Thursday.
August 19, 2003
 "This clear flaunting of Islamic Law by displaying pictures of scantily clad women will only add fuel to sentiments that the U.S. is trying to undermine Muslim culture in Iraq. It risks alienating the actual population."
Inayat Bunglawala,
of the Muslim Council of Britain
Why is it, I wonder, that so many people are concerned about offending anyone except Americans?
Mr. Bunglawala is talking about the admittedly odd effort to boost troop morale and smoke out B'aathists and Saddam loyalists by postering Photoshopped images of the ex-tyrant all over Tikrit, his former stronghold.
The whole edifice of the politically correct, multiculteral ethos of sensitivity and tolerance rests on a bastardized post-modern understanding of power, which assumes as an axiom that those with power cannot be oppressed in any way. This means that while it is important for us as Americans to be sensitive to the dictates of what is portrayed as Muslim law and culture so as not to offend, there is no equivalent proscription against doing things that may offend some Americans such as, say, burning our flag or dancing in the streets following the massacre of our citizens.
There is also something else at work here. Examining the CNN article for its quoted objections, I noticed that Bunglawala calls the posting of the Photoshopped Sadaam images a flaunting of "Islamic Law," and an undermining of "Islamic culture."
But just what is "Islamic Law?" And what is its relationship to "Islamic culture?" The Encyclopedia of the Orient reports that,
Sharia is often referred to as Islamic law, but this is wrong, as only a small part is irrefutably based upon the core Islamic text, the Koran. A correct definition would either be "Islam-inspired", "Islam-derived" or "the law system of Muslims".
My own dead-tree reading on the subject bears this out. Modern Sharia as we know it is an amalgamation of old Bedouin law, commercial and agrarian law from seventh-century Mecca and Medina, and law from countries conquered by expansionist Islam, with a smattering of Roman and Jewish law thrown in for good measure. The extreme form of hand-amputating, adulteress-stoning, toppling-the-wall-onto-the-homosexual Islamic Law as practiced by the Taliban and favored by the Wahabbists out of Saudi Arabia is the nineteenth-century iteration of a continually evolving tradition.
While condemning the extremist Muslim elements in his native Britain, Mr. Bunglawala writes,
It would be unfair to make generalised assumptions about a large and diverse British Muslim community that is 1.8 million strong, on the basis of the actions of a misguided few.
Iraq is roughly 60% Shi'ite and 40% Sunni, with a bit of "Christian/Other." It is 75% Arab, 20% Kurdish, and 5% Turkoman, Assyrian and "other." 42% of its population is 14 years old or younger.
And yet, Mr. Bunglawala seems to be objecting to pictures of Zsa Zsa Saddam, Porn Star Saddam, and Billy Idol Saddam on the basis of some all-encompassing, unifying "Law" that is apparently synonymous with Muslim culture. Does a 12-year old Shi'ite have the same objections to a Gabor-breasted Sadaam as a 55-year old Sunni? Or, for that matter, does a make-up wearing, loosely-headscarved female Iranian law student have the same concept of "Islamic Law" as a gray-bearded Saudi Arabian cleric? I suspect not. Although the Koran exhorts Muslims to "Hold fast to the Rope of Allah and do not diverge," [3.103] it is clear that there are many ropes and much divergence within the nominal Muslim world.
Nevertheless, because the Photoshopped posters are creations of America--the primary wielder of power in the world--the issue becomes a matter of our offenses against the supposedly monolithic sensibilities of another culture. I'm fairly certain that Mr. Bunglawala would acknowledge the differences between the various Muslim communities and, if pressed, might even agree with my depiction of Sharia. But CNN didn't ask him about that. CNN's purpose is quite clear: find support for
...there are nonetheless concerns that, far from aiding the American cause, the images will only serve to increase anti-American feeling among ordinary Iraqis.
That's where the story is.
Lately, it seems, that's where the story always is.
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AS I WAS SAYING: On-the-scene Chief Wiggles writes:
Maybe our efforts for the most part are going unnoticed: the schools and hospitals that have been opened, the playgrounds and housing projects that have been started, and the many jobs that have been created. Where is all the talk about the thousands of good things that have been done? Why is the media not assisting to promote the word that many great things are occurring day after day? Where is the truth in reporting that makes good news as sellable as bad news?
AS I WAS SAYING, II: In the course of an interesting bit examining the validity of the KKK's claim to represent Southern culture, and comparing it with Islamic Terror's claim to represent Muslim culture, Lee Harris writes:
"Merely to ask such a question is to reject the paradigm of culture that has come to dominate so much contemporary academic and pseudo-liberal thinking, namely the naïve multiculturalist's simplistic concept of a culture as a single monolithic entity, homogeneous and immutable."
Hey! When do I get a column?
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