In part one of our colloquy, REG commented,

If this complaint is true -- and I do hear it a lot -- I think it's not so much a failing of Muslim leaders as a failing of us in the West for our lack of awareness. It's not as if there aren't scores of Muslim leaders out there expressing their opinions. (Bear with me. I'll get to that ... eventually.) For that matter, it's not as if the basic teachings of Islam are shrouded in mystery and held in a secret temple somewhere. If you want to know what Muslims believe, you can easily find it in any encyclopedia, in a book at the library, or on any number of websites.

Why is there a presumption that the teachings of the religion are a hoax? If a politician or celebrity gets caught cheating on his wife, we don't need a newspaper article to tell us, "Oh, by the way, Christians still believe that adultery is wrong." And yet, after any act of violence by a Muslim terrorist it is apparently necessary to say, "Oh, by the way, Muslims still believe that murder is wrong" ... and even then most Americans won't believe it.

I'm honestly not sure if this is a failing of the media or of the public. It is undoubtedly true that newspapers and TV shows are full of accounts of Muslim violence, with hardly any stories of Muslims at peace. Is this just yet another example of the media's natural bias toward whatever is sensational? Or is it satisfaction of a national prejudice that readers like to have reinforced?

To take a recent example, MEMRI puts out a press release reporting that a Muslim writer on a certain blog has complained that Apple Computer's trendy new store in New York is an insult to Islam due to its intentional similarity to the Ka'ba in Mecca. There's no reason to doubt that the simple press release is factually accurate (even though MEMRI fails to give a link to this unnamed blog). But it would be just as accurate to report that at least one non-anonymous Muslim blogger attended the opening of the store back in May and wrote a long and happy post about how much he loved it. And it is furthermore true that after MEMRI's press release dozens of Apple-loving Muslims came out of the woodwork to write to Apple giving assurance that they disagree with, and in many cases are plainly baffled by, MEMRI's unnamed agitator.

And yet, within a day of the publication of the press release, there were hundreds of stories in blogs and newspapers about how those crazy Muslims are outraged again. Some played the story hard, defiantly insisting we shouldn't be cowed by Muslim threats. Many played it as humor, as if to laugh at the ridiculously trivial thing that has got those over-sensitive Muslims riled up this time. But nearly all embraced unquestioningly the idea that the Muslim community as a whole was upset by this supposed insult to their religion -- notwithstanding the complete lack of evidence for such an idea, and in spite of the fact that the soberly worded press release never actually claimed to report on any Muslims but the one anonymous blogger.

Why does an idea take off like that? I think our culture has a predisposition to see in Muslims a certain caricature which projects unflattering attributes on their religion in the same way (and for similar reasons) that the World War II media projected similar attributes on the Japanese race. Fifty years from now, I think (and hope), this will be recognized for the war-fear-induced cultural distortion that it is, and it will seem as absurd then as 1940s caricatures of the Japanese seem to us now. In the meantime, we as a culture latch onto any report that affirms our prejudice and are blind to any report that contradicts it.

Which brings me back to the REG's statement. If we never hear any Muslim leaders condemning Muslim terrorism, I think it's largely because our media culture (including we ourselves) fail to broadcast them.

And so to do my small part in correcting that, I'll now bring to your attention a wonderful open letter addressed to the Pope, signed by no less than 38 leading Muslim theologians from around the world. The original letter is web-published (as an attractive PDF in the lovely Ehrhardt typeface) by Islamica Magazine. As I write this, that link is down -- due to high traffic from readers eager to read the letter, I can only hope. [Update: That link is working now.] Fortunately, with a little Googling it's easy to find one of the many web-reprints, such as this one.

Those who are genuinely desirous of an authoritative opinion of mainstream Islam on the question of violence in Islam, along with various other topics raised in the debate that grew out of the Pope's lecture (including the one about the original Islamic conquest being "by the sword"), can find it in this letter. If you're in a hurry, you can jump straight to the bullet points ... but alas, I see the reprint I've linked has lost its bullets, so I'll quote and reconstruct the typography to the best of my memory:

This, and the rest of the letter, is not any earth-shaking news. These are the same Islamic principles you could have found in Britannica, Wikipedia, or even here on Benzene, but I guess some people find it fascinating to discover that Muslims actually believe that religious conversion is only meaningful if it is voluntary, or that non-combatants shouldn't be targets in war. The main difference is that you don't have to take my word for it, nor that of some academic orientalist. You've got the word of 38 Muslim leaders with fancy titles after their names. (Again, in the reprint I linked the typography is messed up, but you can still read it.)

So who are these guys? In the flagging denouement of my response to REG, I made a brief comment hinting that part of the reason he doesn't see a "bulwark of authority" taking a stand on Islam's attitude toward violence is that Islam does not have such a religious authority. Islam has no hierarchy at all, and the reason it doesn't is fundamental to the nature of the religion.

As I've argued here before, I think Christianity and Islam are more alike than they are commonly credited. But there are real differences. Nearly all of them, I think, can be traced back to two fundamental disagreements between the religions. First, Islam rejects Christianity's notion of original sin (and thus of the need for redemption through the Christ the Savior). All of the theological differences come back to that, I think -- as well as the Christian tendency to view spirituality as something outside the physical world -- though whether it is the cause or the result of the rejection of Christ's divinity I couldn't say.

The second is that the Christian world is built upon the idea of a religious institution separate from any political institution, and Islam is not. Today we tend to confuse this with the familiar ideal of separation of church and state. Said separation is fundamental to American political culture, but it takes only a cursory glance at history to see it is not fundamental to Christian political culture.

The difference between Christian and Islamic cultures is deeper than that. In America, we tend to think simply: "There is a church and there is a state. Here in the West, we believe in keeping them separate, but in Islam they don't." Thus we imagine that in the Islamic world there is a church and a state and they aren't kept separate. The reality is more profound: Islamic thought traditionally doesn't even conceive of any institution of the church. God's law is God's law, and it ought to be everywhere -- not just in "church", but in the home, on the farm, in the schools, and in the government.

To us, with our cultural concept of church as an institution, that sounds like theocracy, and our minds naturally alight on the theocracy of Iran, which really does have a government ruled by clerics. But Iran's theocracy is a radical modern invention. The Iranian clergy has almost no precedent in Islamic history. It is in fact a Westernism, the introduction of which was deliberately advocated by Ayatollah Khomeini during his exile. Having spent years in the West, Khomeini observed the Western institution of an organized clergy and came to see it as a political tool for revolution in Islam.

Before the Iranian Revolution, such a thing was foreign in the Islamic world, and in most of the Islamic world it still is. Traditionally, there are many roles resembling religious leaders. There are those who lead prayers in the mosque, there are lawyers who debate and settle points of Islamic law, there are administrators who regulate and enforce Islamic law, and there are scholars who research and build upon Islamic law. None of these individuals can easily be distinguished as members of the "church" or of the "state" because such a distinction isn't recognized.

We're all familiar with the Muslim fundamentalists whose political argument is that government law needs to be more in line with shari'a, which we know as "Islamic law". That, clearly, is an example of traditional Muslims striving to make church and state one. Less familiar is the flip side of that. Just as religious law ought to be political law, so ought political law to be religious law. Part of Islamic law is loyalty to legitimate leaders. If a leader or government is legitimate (and that can be disputed, of course), whatever law that government promulgates -- whether liberal or conservative, traditional or radical -- is God's law. That doesn't make the leader a theocrat. Indeed, he might not even be religious at all (as evidenced by plenty of libertine and liberal Abbasid caliphs). It simply means that, in Islamic thought, God expresses Himself through political society just as much as He does through nature.

Here in the Christian world, our model of a church imagines a leadership, with individuals who are empowered to speak with authority for the religion as a whole. Even if there isn't a high pontiff as in the Catholic church, we still expect an organization or convention that speaks for "the church". In Islam there is no such organization nor the expectation of it.

The best analogy I know is to the way the scientific community is structured in the West. There is no official leadership ordained to speak scientific truths with authority. There are many independent scientists, each proposing ideas. On most points of debate there is something approaching a consensus within the scientific community, but it is never completely uniform, the details are always debated, and there are often fringe participants with ideas that are espoused by a few but rejected by the establishment. A scientist who is a respected authority becomes one by reputation and experience, and more generally by knowing his subject well.

Obviously the analogy isn't perfect, particularly if you're thinking of one of the hard sciences where theories can be proven or disproven by concrete experience. The analogy works a little better if you imagine a softer social science, say like economics. The point is that in Islam anyone can be a mufti, he simply needs to study and preach or publish. If he's a nut, no one will take him seriously. As in Western scientfic academia, it helps to be associated with a university or perhaps a government agency, and if one wants to be mainstream it pays to be well-connected in professional organizations. But ultimately, a mufti's authority is only as good as how many followers he attracts.

In this sense, Islam is much more democratic and populist than Christianity, both for better and for worse. Christianity has its populist strains, too, of course, but on the whole the religion is based on the idea of a clergy empowered to speak for the church. As a result, Islam is perpetually and officially open for debate in a way that Christianity can be only indirectly and behind the scenes.

Two sayings of the Prophet celebrate this. One is the lead-in phrase that has decorated this blog for more than two years now: "Difference of opinion among my community is a sign of the bounty of God." This was the Prophet's response to criticism that his religion did not speak with a uniform voice. According to the tradition, the Islamic community (like Benzene) views differences of opinion as a strength, a vehicle toward better truth-seeking.

Another is, "My people will never agree in error." This hadith has historically been used to lend religious support to any consensus reform. The idea is that Muslims, by definition, are agents of God's will. If a sufficiently broad consensus of them believes something, that must be God's idea. This gives Islam -- in structure, at least, if perhaps not in the hearts of its followers -- a progressiveness that is lacking in Christianity. If the world ummah were to decide, for example, that stem-cell research is a good thing, there would be no church tradition to say otherwise.

The large collection of muftis who have signed the open letter to the Pope, then, do not officially speak for the Islamic church: nobody does. There are, however, some very big names in there, and the very collection of such an unusually long and diverse list speaks volumes.

As you can see, many of them are associated with universities. Al-Azhar University in Cairo is generally perceived as the most prestigious center of Islamic law, sort of an equivalent to our Harvard School of Economics. I'm not familiar with Dr Kahlawi's name, so I couldn't tell you whether he's a mainstream or a fringe professor there. Dr Jumu'ah, 15th on the list, is who I would have named if I had to guess who is the world's most widely respected authority on Islamic law, though that may well say more about my incomplete knowledge than about him.

The "grand mufti" title, which several on this list carry, is not an official church title (again, there is no such thing). Rather, it is a honorific bestowed on whoever is considered to be the highest legal authority in any particular country or region. How one comes to obtain the title is usually determined by the government, so the basis for legitimacy of the appointment is generally correlated with the legitimacy of the government. The grand muftis in Western countries are generally chosen by a quasi-democratic process through an organization of Muslims within the country.

Iran's Ayatollah Taskhiri, who is not called grand mufti but rather given a revealingly Western sounding title, is in fact a close crony of Ayatollah Khamenei. He is the religious ruling clique's primary propagandist to the world, who frequently makes threatening proclamations against Israel. Frankly I'm a little surprised (and impressed) to see him on this list.

The one Saudi, who tops the list, Abdullah bin Bayyah, is a longtime government official in Mauretania who retired from civil service in order to teach law at a university in Jiddah. His specialty is Islamic law as it relates to Muslims living in non-Muslim countries.

Notably absent from the list is Saudi Arabia's grand mufti (appointed by the monarchy), Abd al-Aziz al-Shaykh. Al-Shaykh is an outspoken radical who speaks for those Muslims who are just this side of al-Qaeda, the most "establishment" voice for those views. (And thus he is popular in the Western media. You've probably seen him on TV, he's an old blind guy.) He has spoken aggressively against the Pope, calling him a liar, among other things. No doubt he would vigorously disagree with this open letter, soundly disproving any notion that the letter, broad though its support may be, can be said to be the official view of all of Islam.

At the top of this page we have the words of the Prophet to remind us that that's not a bad thing. It's good that al-Shaykh is free to disagree with the mainstream leaders. He's still wrong, I say, but I'm glad Islam is broad enough to allow a dissenting view.

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