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Thursday, September 28, 2006REG originally posted this as a comment responding to the post below, but the comments box isn't really designed for something so big. I've extracted it here so that I can continue the dialog.
A bit of background: A few days before I posted, REG suggested to me that he might guest-blog an article having something to do with the Pope's recent comments on Islam. I enthusiastically agreed, and in emails we exchanged some preliminary thoughts.
REG's comments here, I gather, are following up on our email exchange, the Pope's comments, and possibly Callimachus's -- but not so much the Benzene post it was originally attached to (which is the other reason I've extracted it).
I want to take a very rough shot at one specific element of this controversy. In doing so, I am leaving aside the issue of whether Islam is historically more or less violent than Christianity. The Pope's argument is, I think, that disorder and violence are enemies of humanity and certainly human-ness, and that Islam seems to make a place in its philosophy, as an affirmative value, for disorder and violence. Your point, which seems to be that such a strain in Islam, to the extent it exists, is not characteristic of all of Islam by any means, is not really responsive to his concern, or to the real point of his historical example. If I read you correctly, you say that there are many (if not most) communities of Islam that are not characteristic of the jihad side of things, and you expand that critique to show how historically this was also true: just as jihad is a minor element, in your view, of worldwide Islam, so the warlike and "foreign" element of Islamic culture historically is only a small part of a broader civilization, or civilizations, which are not only more similar to "ours" in many ways than we imagine, but perhaps are even more legitimately the inheritors of the antecedent cultures of which we claim to be the sole heirs.
This either begs the question, or keys off wrongly from a distinctly minor part of the Pope's address. I think it's very clear from reading the whole lecture that the "controversial" passage is strictly an example, and whether it's a good example or a bad example of what the Pope was trying to say or should have been clearer about, what seems to me undisputed is that, within Islam, there is sanctioned permission for violence and destruction; contemporarily that thread of Islam is not only growing, but is growing without the threat of significant opposition or anathematization within the religion. Now, both the Old and New Testaments have real episodes of sanctioned violence, obviously, but at least for contemporary Catholicism there is a doctrine which is clear about the place of violence and destruction in society. I do not see a religious center in Islam which opposes strongly the jihad movement (incorporating, for the purposes of this little essay, all of the "mob rule" elements we see in the news).There are of course uncounted millions who don't support this personally and politically, but there is no strong bulwark of authority which dares or wants to speak out against the jihad movement of which I am aware. In fact, the only force I see which tends to oppose it, in the Arab part of the Islamic world at least, are strong authoritarian governments which seek to repress jihad on the basis of secular stability, and for the good of the ruling class.
So, the language the Pope uses is "wrong", but not wrong in a serious way, I don't think, because you can't step back and say that there is stong internal and effective religious opposition to the jihad movement. This does not mean that the populations of even countries such as Iran and Afghanistan, much less Syria, are all blithely happy with jihad -- surely many people suffer under it, or want it removed. But the effective arm of the religion, the growing arm, seems to reasonably be one of violence and destruction, as well as of a kind of mob based destruction (thus, I think, the Pope's concern with reason). There seems to be, within the Islamicist movement, a kind of valorization given to intolerance and to the righting, by any means desired, of any sense of shame which the religion feels it is subjected to. You see this with Salman Rushdie and in many other situations I don't need to name, and particularly you see it in terms of the place of women in such societies.
The Pope was naive to assume that a discussion such as the one he had would not trigger off the reaction it did ... but what upsets me far more is the ultimate backing down of the Pope, and the Church, from the position he originally took. It is not that I don't think it was necessary or wise to back down, at least in the short run, but from the standpoint of the mob (the religious mob and their religious leaders), if even the Pope will back down, then mob violence and the theat of mob violence are only encouraged. In backing down, the Pope in essence relinquished rationality for fear and destructiveness, and though he had to do it, I suppose, in a practical sense, I think he has only encouraged this element to threaten, and encouraged them (whoever 'them' is) to believe that in fact others will back down.
Me:
There's a lot to address here. I know REG will want a turn again, so I'll just pursue a few points without attempting to wrap up everything all at once.
First of all, in case my introduction hasn't made it clear, my post was in response to one paragraph in Callimachus's post that I thought was errant, and only very tangentially related to the Pope's comments. So when you say my post "is not really responsive to his concern" or "keys off wrongly from a distinctly minor part of the Pope's address", you're absolutely right. I was not intending to answer the Pope at all.
In fact, when I wrote that, not only had I not yet read the Pope's address, I had even managed to miss almost all of the news and commentary about the Pope's words, so I was quite in the dark about the whole thing. That was your topic, and I was waiting for you to start it ... which I guess is what you've done now.
And so I took Callimachus's advice and read the entire address myself (and I forward the advice to anyone else out there who hasn't joined us yet).
Let's discuss the Pope first, and then I'll get to your points, REG. Reading the Pope's words, what strikes me overwhelmingly is that he really isn't talking about Islam at all. He's talking about the relationship of reason to faith. Islam only comes up at all so that the Pope can quote Emperor Manuel II (not a Catholic, by the way) in dialogue with a particular Persian scholar. The words that criticize Islam are in fact not the Pope's words at all, but rather they are Manuel's. Furthermore, the Pope introduces the words with the comment that Manuel speaks "with a startling brusqueness ... which leaves us astounded", and the whole thing is prefaced by the Pope's acknowledgment that the Qur'an speaks ambiguously on the topic of holy war, even to the point of quoting the Qur'anic verse that contradicts Manuel's assertion.
So I must say I have no problem whatsoever with the Pope's comments. He is discussing an interesting, if perhaps somewhat academic, theological point, and he is entirely responsible in how he quotes his source. I don't blame the Pope at all that some fool extracted Manuel's 600-year-old words, imagined them to be the Pope's, and then claimed offense. I think it's stupid that the Pope had to apologize for it, just as it's stupid that American politicians are sometimes obliged for a supposed gaffe that actually made perfect sense in context.
To the extent that the Pope does involve Islam, it is as a contrasting example in his general pondering of what should be the role of reason in religion. That's an interesting question, and certainly something Muslim thinkers need to consider (as indeed they do). Some commenters (this one, for example) argue that rationalism was squelched in Islam. It's certainly true that the mu'tazilah lost the big theological/political battle in the 9th century, but it's way too facile to say that was the end of rationalism in Islam. Not only was mu'tazili never really extinguished -- to this very day you may find Muslims who self-identify with the school -- but it's also not accurate to characterize the 9th century traditionalists who defeated them as anti-rationalist.
(You can read about this in copious detail in the Wikipedia article on Mu-tazili. This article, by the way, is one of the best arguments I've seen for Wikipedia's superiority to traditional encyclopedias. I have here in my home two volumes of Britannica and several thick books on Islamic history and philosophy, and, on this particular topic at least, this astoundingly informative wiki article is better than anything in any of them.)
So much for the Pope. There now remains Manuel's arguments and REG's.
What Manuel said to the Persian scholar is, "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
I think it's patently false that Muhammed failed to bring anything new that was neither evil nor inhuman. I could discuss this more, but I don't think anyone here is actually arguing that point.
The idea that Islam was spread primarily by the sword, a notion which Manuel pursues further in conversation quoted by the Pope, I partly covered in my last post and also in another post in Benzene two years ago. In brief, I don't think it's an accurate picture of Islamic history. Given Manuel's situation as a monarch at war with an Islamic foe, I think he can be forgiven for his skewed perspective.
Aside from that, I would point out that this particular debate -- interesting though it is to me -- is not particularly pertinent to the current world situation. Those Muslims who are at war with our civilization are not engaged in "conversion by the sword". The perpetrators of the 9/11 attack did not seek to convert those 2,750 people; they sought to kill them. Al-Qaeda's fatwa does not advise Muslims that it is their duty to convert Americans; it advises them that it is their duty to kill Americans. Furthermore, according to Osama and his fellow radical Islamists, the reason Americans must be killed is not simply because they reside in the dar al-Harb, but specifically because they are (according to him) engaged in aggressive war against Islam, and it is the Muslim's duty to defend their culture by repulsing the enemy who is attacking them.
This is a crucial point. None of the terrorists deny the fundamental Islamic tenet that it is wrong to wage war unprovoked and it is wrong to kill innocents. That is why they build their theology around an argument that the West is the aggressor who was first to make war against them. (Hence the obsession with Israel, U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, and now the occupation of Iraq.) The idea that real Islam teaches that all unbelievers must be persecuted is a chauvinistic fantasy of the West. Regardless of what selective quotes you can pull out of the Qur'an, no one in the Islamic world actually accepts that. Not even the terrorists. The terrorists want to kill us, and they want to persuade other Muslims to join them. To do so, they must -- as a legal and theological matter -- portray us as the aggressors. They can't just shout, "Death to the unbeliever!" because no one would ever buy that. In spite of the recent outburst of violent extremism, the standard interpretation of Islam as a peaceful religion which only defends itself stands unopposed ... in the Islamic world. Inciters of violence cannot sell that caricatured view of Islam to their fellow Muslims; and yet fearmongers in the West do succeed in peddling it to us here in the West.
I'm not even close to done here. There are several questions I still need to address, and I haven't even touched REG's comments (with which I disagree on almost every detail). But I wrote this several days ago, and since then it's been sitting on the shelf waiting till I find time to "finish". That could be a while. Better to post it now and come back for another installment later.
10:04:47 PM [permalink] comment []
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