There are some background topics I know I want to address, but they'll come up soon enough if I just go straight to REG's letter and answer point by point.

In his second sentence, REG finds two assertions in the Pope's address:

Agreed.

I don't think the Pope was saying that at all -- at least not in the University of Regensburg lecture that I read, where I thought he was mentioning Islam only tangentially. I also think that's a distorted view of Islam.

We're already back within spitting distance of the Islam-is-a-violent-religion debate, so let's spit at it a bit. I understand that recently we have seen a lot of ugly violence in Islamic clothing over the past few years, so it's easy to jump to that conclusion -- but even aside from any academic debate of history and religion, it's just bad logic.

Right now we see a significant movement in the world espousing, and acting upon, a philosophy of violence. Naturally, we look for correlations. One thing we notice right away is that these people are acting in the name of Islam, so it's natural to think there's a connection. Hence, Islam is a violent religion.

But look a little closer and the connection just doesn't stand up. For example, it doesn't explain why this movement has erupted now but it didn't 25 years ago. Was Islam not a violent religion then? Was it violent the whole time but just didn't get a chance to express itself till now? Over 1,300 years of Islamic history you have some significant spells of violence, but you also have long stretches of peace, both the peace of prosperous and successful empire and the peace of humble and uneventful servitude. Any theory that seeks to explain the current movement of violence through religion ought to have some answer for the question of why these Muslims are violent but those Muslims are not, or why these Muslims now are violent but the same Muslims then were not. It just seems to me that the asserted connection is vague to the point of ignorance.

A more serious investigation would notice that, yes, today's terrorist movements are predominantly in the Islamic world, and then would proceed to examine the more narrow correlations, like political and economic environments, demographics, educational influences, etc. These are the sort of studies that are going to illuminate why some groups express themselves in violent terrorism and some don't. An interesting clue can come from those terrorist organizations today which come out of a non-Islamic culture, whether it's secular Hindu (eg, the Tamil Tigers) or Christian millennialist (eg, the Lord's Resistance Army). But I really don't think you're going to learn much from making sweeping generalizations about the violent nature of Islam as a whole.

As I said to REG in our email correspondence, I think religion gets blamed for way too much. Personally, I'm a complete non-believer, but unlike many of my liberal friends, I don't think religion is a bad thing. In my view, religion has a large and mixed record, but on the whole it is a force for good in the world. I certainly don't blame it for all the evils of the world that get pinned on it.

To take the Crusades as an example, I just don't see that as a movement that religion created. I interpret it as a phenomenon prompted by various realities of human nature, demographics, social structure, etc. Yes, of course, it was a religious phenomenon, but religion is a blanket that we wrap around pretty much anything we do. Large religions are large blankets which can be wrapped around so many various things that it's hard to think of it as a cohesive ideology. Liberal religion-bashers always want to see the bad stuff. They never see the joy it brings to simple people, the sublime inspiration it gives to happy intellectuals, the solace it gives to miserable people.

That's where I'm coming from. I suppose I have a rare perspective in that I bring pretty much the same prejudice to my view of Islam that I do to my view of Christianity. Both are religions that I neither subscribe to nor hate, and I don't feel any more connected to one than the other. Both have had an enormous influence on the history of the world, and I happen to have studied their respective parts of the world almost equally. It's easy for me to view them side by side for contrasting and comparing. To me, calling Islam a violent religion seems exactly as stupid as calling Christianity a violent religion.

That should bring me to Callimachus's observation about early Islamic history, but I'm going to set that aside for now. (Maybe in part 3....) Getting back to REG's words, we now come to the first of several references to "jihad", and I can't continue until we address the question of what we mean by that word.

Based on the context, I assume that REG is using the word in approximately the same sense as the U.S. Department of Justice does in a recent indictment, where it says,

As evidenced by the quote, this is not an uncommon interpretation of the word in America today. Nevertheless, it's a very specific definition that limits jihad to one particular kind of jihad (ie, the violent kind) and a specific political theory of violent jihad at that. It's certainly not what I think of when I say "jihad", and it's not what any Arabic speaker means by it either. Even the jihadist so defined, were he to proclaim, "Jihad means using violence to destroy those people and governments who stand in the way of our vision of a fundamentalist Islamic world state," would understand that he is making a philosophical statement rather than providing a useful definition -- in the same sense as if one were to state, say, "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

I honestly don't know whether this is just a semantic distinction or a conceptual one. I'm trying very hard not to be a word snob here. I understand that a word can have a different meaning when imported to another language. If pizza or piano can have a meaning which is perfectly clear to any American but bears only a distant relation to the same word in Italian, so too can jihad stray from its Arabic meaning when coming to America.

(But I draw the line at fatwa, which is not even close to a synonym for "death sentence" except by the accident that the one and only fatwa that grabbed the attention of average Americans happened to be one. You can read hundreds of non-death-sentence fatwas here.)

I also understand that objecting to the label REG has chosen for a certain sort of movement that we both recognize does nothing to answer his argument. I quibble only because it sticks in my craw when I read his assumption that "jihad is a minor element, in your view, of worldwide Islam." As I understand jihad, that's a ludicrous claim. Of course jihad is central to Islam. Just not the sort of jihad that you (and the Department of Justice, and Osama bin Laden) are talking about. That's like saying that, in your view, freedom is only a minor element of American policy ... if you happen not to share my definition of freedom as, say, using economic pressure to force foreign markets to open up to multinational corporations. Freedom is a central ideal of America, but it's so central that it's definition has been stretched nearly to the point of incoherence.

So too with jihad. Once again, I am happily amazed at Wikipedia's excellence on topics of Islamic culture. In their article on jihad you can read all about the word and it's meaning in Islam (and see the little bits that I've cribbed from them). My abbreviated summary: The literal meaning of jihad is something like "struggle". Islam teaches that said struggle is part of one's duty as a Muslim, so naturally the question arises, what is this jihad that we must do? Over the centuries, different interpretations competed and traditions became established. There are several types of jihad. Violent warfare is one of them, and the history of Islamic philosophy includes an unending debate about whether such violence is the only jihad that matters, not real jihad at all, or somewhere along the lengthy spectrum in between, with debaters on all sides lining up scripture and hadith to support their views.

If I'm understanding REG correctly, that's pretty much the same question he's asking when he discusses how important "jihad" is to "Islam".

REG again:

I don't think that's true at all. It's not only not undisputed -- I guess I'm disputing it right here -- it's just plain wrong. There are very strong traditions in Islam that proscribe violence and destruction. (I won't elaborate, but there's quite a bit of discussion about this in the Wikipedia article I cited above.) Frankly, I don't think a civilization could last as long as Islam has if it didn't have some sort of curb on violence. Violence is part of human nature, and finding ways to socially constrain it is one of the things that a successful religion must do. One might just as easily argue that the current eruption of violence evidences a failure of Islam.

Yes and no. To a very large extent, you don't see a "religious center" in Islam at all. That's one of the ways in which Islam and Christianity are different. Except for occasional aberrations, most of which are Western influenced, Islam has no hierarchy. That's yet another topic I need to address here some day. (Hint: The clergy of post-revolutionary Iran is one of the aberrations, and it is decidedly and radically Western.)

This I agree with, except that I would replace the word "religion" with something else. There is a class and culture that is experiencing this, but it's not the religion as a whole.

That's all for now. I have plenty more to say, but I want to get this posted tonight.

10:01:01 PM  [permalink]  comment []