The debate about Islam seems to have snapped me out of my non-blogging funk. There are certain topics I can't help ranting about, and that one hadn't come up in a while.

Along the way, I've been inspired to change my top-of-the-page quote for the first time since the beginning of Benzene's fourth incarnation. Those are the words of the Prophet Muhammad, according to one of the hadith (traditions). As a historical matter, it's most likely apocryphal, invented about a century after the Prophet's death, but of course that doesn't make it any less significant to the religious tradition. One might say the same about pretty much anything that Jesus says in the Bible. Anyway, I like the sentiment, and it's something I like to cultivate here in Benzene.

The previous quote, for those who want to keep track, was from Balzac. ("The world is mine because I understand it.") I saw it many many years ago as a quote, but I never found the original source. Among other things, I was curious to know if the "because" was "car" or "parce que". Now I can't even remember where I found the quote.

My email box has filled up with several recent exchanges (on candidate gaffes, evolution, British words, and free trade) which would fit nicely in the letter column if I can get them up here before they spoil. Peering deeper into the mailbox, I see plenty more from before the funk. Less than half of it needs to be sent to the compost bin. The rest is old but still good. As I've said so often, our philosophy at Benzene is that anything which stops being interesting a month later probably wasn't worth discussing the first time. No fresh produce here.

At this point in the stack of email, I encounter several readers telling me about TinyURL. Evidently, I didn't make myself clear. Here on the blog, I can make URLs in links as long as I want. The links are implemented as HTML, so the URL only appears in the code and not on the screen. The problem (which really isn't a problem) arises only when someone sends me a non-HTML email which includes a long URL spelled out. Because I'm reprinting the email, I feel a certain obligation to accurately transcribe what I was sent. That would mean actually displaying the text of a URL if the writer spelled it out. That's what causes display problems -- not the link itself, but the text of the URL. The purpose of TinyURL is to provide a shorter URL for a medium in which one cannot make a real link out of it. Here on the blog, I can make a real link, which is in fact exactly what I did. My parenthetic about it -- which evidently confused many readers -- was simply an apology for the inaccurate representation of the email I received that resulted from converting the plain URL into a simple HTML link.

In case you've forgotten my overreaction, when responding to the same comment Darcy quotes the entire paragraph:

That brings me up to date through July. Most of what I threw out was political commentary, especially on the presidential election. That stuff doesn't keep very long. There's a lesson there, I think.

2:52:00 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

Passerby had a number of follow-up questions in the comment box over on that Sciolist post. (See previous item.) My initial attempt to keep my answers brief was an utter failure, so I'm continuing this peculiar practice of posting my half of the dialogue here on Benzene.

Passerby's questions are in three separate comment posts, one of which was written before he read the post here. I'm quoting them out of order and incomplete. The assumption is that anyone seriously following the discussion will read the comments there, but at the same time I need to provide some context for those who won't.

These two go together, because in both cases you suggest the idea of being a "good" Muslim, by which I assume you mean true to the faith. I disagree with your idea that ObL is a "good Muslim". I think he's a terrible Muslim, and I'm ready to quote chapter and verse to back that up, just as so many other mainstream Muslims have done.

The larger point here is that to think of Islam or any other religious as having one correct interpretation from which adherents might stray is terribly simplistic. Christianity has evolved a great many forms and most of the mainstream ones today adapt the spirit of the religion to create a good system of morality suited for the current world and society, even if that means ignoring a whole lot of old traditions and literal interpretations. Islam has done the same thing at various times, and it has been what I consider a very positive force during those times. I see no reason why it shouldn't do the same thing now. For historical reasons, Islamic reform has some catching up to do, relative to Christianity, but it doesn't require anything that hasn't been tried before.

As for Harun al-Rashid, his era was one of a relaxed interpretation, very much the opposite of what you call "good Muslim" in the ObL context. Yes, they worshipped God and prayed and did good, but they didn't go around murdering peaceful infidels, stoning people for adultery, wrapping up women in burlap sacks, etc. (Personally, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Harun al-Rashid were an atheist, in a Dostoyevskian grand inquisitor sort of way, but of course I can only speculate.)

Yes, that's right, except that Küçük Kaynarca is a river, not a town. (Küçük means "little"; there's also a Büyük Kaynarca.)

A key compromise of the treaty was that the sultan was acknowledged as having spiritual authority over Muslims outside his realm (to offset the tsar's claim over Christians within the realm). This revived the notion of the caliphate, which had been dead for centuries. The myth that the Mamluk sultan had conferred the mantle of caliph upon Selim I way back in the 1500s was invented shortly after the treaty was signed. It was subsequently taught as fact and is widely repeated today, but there's no record of it before KK in spite of 250 years worth of well-documented history.

No. I don't think the two are even roughly analogous; it's certainly not a "direct equivalent". Ummah translates fairly well as "community", in several senses of the word. Church does not.

Reformers will continue to debate what exactly the extra ecclesiam doctrine implies, but if you reduce ecclesia to the "worldwide family of Christians", it's barely a doctrine at all. Surely that's not what the Catholic Church meant. Clearly it refers to the institutionalized religion, and that is exactly what is absent in the meaning of umma.

Velayat-e faqih (roughly: rule of the clerics) is the political institution whereby there is a council of men empowered to rule on religious law and this council gets to overrule or "interpret" all laws passed by the parliament, sort of like a Supreme Court gone mad. The significance of this is a huge topic, and there's plenty of literature on it. In brief, the novelty is that such a group has been formally organized as an administrative unit. As a technical matter, that hadn't been done before. The reason it hadn't been done before relates directly to the modern and Western idea of separation of church and state. Traditionally, the ruler of an Islamic state is the religious authority, whether he rules in a religious way or not. This is the essence of Islamic political philosophy: if he were illegitimate he would be deposed; if he's not, then God works through him. (See the chapter on royal authority in ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah.)

The doctrine of velayat-e faqih implicitly acknowledges that the state does not represent God's will, which is a thoroughly radical idea. Khomeini knew that, of course, but he felt that modern world was so profoundly different that it called for a radical response. Basically, he was conceding to the Western idea of separated church and state in order to declare the state lost and invent a church to recapture it.

The huge consequence of this radical position is that fiqh (roughly: interpretation of religious law) is now entrusted to a single body, which it hasn't been in the Islamic tradition. In the Christian culture, there has always been some sort of official religious authority. Sometimes there's more than one and they compete, but the idea of institutional religious authority is natural to us. In the Islamic world, religious interpretation is a lot like scientific inquiry is for us here in the West. Yes, there are certain orthodoxies, and occasionally we get stuck in a wrong-headed one; scholars who are well-credentialed and respected by their peers get more respect than those who don't; there is an established body of knowledge which any student is expected to draw on unless he has good reason to question it; and so forth. But even though this loose system sometimes takes the form of a rigid establishment, at its root it respects free thinking by all; there is no single authority appointed to pronounce the official interpretation which everyone must accept.

That is the tradition which velayat-e faqih overturns, and that is why a great many conservative Muslims are among those who oppose it. It is a radical system, at odds with Islamic tradition.

One more thought about tradition and fundamentalism, which hearkens back to your (Passerby's) idea that "religion is only tolerable when the adherents don't quite believe it". Perhaps this is a matter of how one chooses to define the true tradition of a religion, but it drives me crazy that Western commentators so readily accept the ultra-Wahhabi notion that shari'a is a rigid code of rules which has remained unchanged over 40 generations. Commenting on a more recent post, Doug describes Iran as one of the few places "where shari'a has been applied completely in modern times." I realize he didn't say so, but the implication is that shari'a has been similarly applied in non-recent times. When? During the life of the Prophet? Even if we accept the highly dubious proposition that the law as practiced in Iran faithfully mimics the law as practiced by the Prophet's community during his lifetime, so what? Why is that the standard of Islamic tradition? Are the next 13 centuries just an aberration? Did God cease to guide the faithful after the seal of the Prophets ascended to Heaven?

Even if we accept that the door to ijtihad was closed in the 10th century, there still remains a thousand years of Muslims practicing their faith with that door shut. Why doesn't anyone acknowledge this as the weight of Islamic tradition? Those thousand years look nothing like what today's supposed traditionalists are trying to impose. Radical Islam is ... well, it's radical. No one seems to get that.

11:48:39 AM  [permalink]  comment []