Me:

I wonder if you and Mr Lewis aren't talking about quite the same thing. His argument, which you present well, is about the culture in the Middle East today when compared to the West, and pretty much every point seems reasonable to me in that context. You, however, have inflated this to "the fundamental difference between Islam and Judeo/Christian belief". I don't see that it's a matter of belief at all. At the very least, you need to say "belief for the past 150 years". Before the mid 1800s, any significant difference between treatment of women in the Christian world and Islamic world disappears, so if you're trying to make any connection to the religions you should at least make clear that you're throwing out 90% of the history of each and discussing the modern religion only.

This brings me back to my same complaint about blaming violence in the Islamic world on the religion. The factor is quite simply not as strongly correlated as other more obvious ones. Even aside from the fact that the religions were just as different 200 years ago and didn't yield the same result, there's the geographic variation. Treatment of women in the Islamic world varies enormously. On the one extreme you have the cultural reactionaries of Arabia and Afghanistan who want to treat women almost like animals. (And by the way, I think America's perception of Islamic culture has been distorted by the fact that we allied ourselves with Saudi Arabia and therefore called it a "moderate" Arab state, encouraging Americans to believe Saudi standards were somehow gentler, when in fact they're the most illiberal of all.) At the other end, you have areas with a strong liberal tradition, like Iran and Mesopotamia. As late as 1950 women in Iran were no more disempowered than they were in, say, Italy. Likewise, in the Christian world, you have an equally enormous variety, with Scandinavia at the progressive extreme and Latin America (which is far more Christian than any NATO nation) at the other.

So how can you identify the religion as the indicator here? Doesn't treatment of women correlate far more strongly with economic status? Are women in Morocco or Indonesia really any worse off than women in Sri Lanka or Colombia? It's not clear to me that they are. Women's rights correlate very strongly with a modern economy, both historically and geographically. Equality came (or at least started to come) to European women more or less simultaneously with the industrial revolution. Cultural patterns for political status of women persist even longer than religion. Iran's history of relatively strong rights for women predates even Christianity, going back to when the classical Greeks were horrified at the independence of Persian women. In contrast, women have never fared well in India. You used the word purdah, which today we associated with Islam, but the word and the concept are both Indian in origin.

I wholeheartedly agree that an excellent way to make a nation more peaceful and prosperous is to promote political rights for women, but I see this as a worldwide and non-religious phenomenon, tailored no better for the Middle East than it is for sub-Saharn Africa.

You mention Khomeini, who is certainly the most influential figure in Islam in the past 50 years. It can't be stressed enough what a radical Khomeini was -- not in the sense of taking traditional ideas to new extremes, but in the sense of overturning traditional thinking and introducing foreign and original concepts.

I'm inclined to see Khomeini's hatred of women, and that of his followers, as a symptom, not a cause. Empowerment of women correlates with modernity; modernity correlates with economic success, and with democracy. The Muslim men who would push back women (and it's more a regression than a "continuation") do so in an effort to push back modernity. I think the question we keep dancing around is this: What is it about the condition of Islam in the 20th century that caused it to create such a strong anti-modernist backlash? I don't know the answer to that -- I have a vague recollection that Malcolm Yapp's book on Middle Eastern history since WW I, which I started years ago but never finished, shed some interesting light on this question; I'll have to put that one back on my list -- but I think that's the better question than asking about religious teachings.

I suppose I should be pleased that people are taking an interest in understanding Islamic culture at all, but I think facile generalizations about the religion itself are barking up the wrong tree. Religion gets a bad rap in America, and Islam gets it from both sides. The two dominant cultural biases in the West are secularism and Christianity, and both have reason to despise Islam. I think that's why we're always so quick to pin their social, economic, and cultural problems on their religion.

A second point: I don't want to harp on this because we've already discussed it, and I don't want my emphasis to make it sound like I'm denying the violent trend in modern Islam, which I'm not -- but you're still getting your proportions off. You suggest that I put too much emphasis on the supposed and theoretical truth as opposed to the reality. OK. I'm not sure I agree, but I hear your criticism. On the opposite side of the coin, you put too much emphasis on anecdotal impression.

You say that "the societies seem to be largely violent ones". Indeed they do seem to be, but are they really? Or is it just because our casual eye deceives us? I know the metaphor means little to you, but I feel like I'm in baseball's "moneyball" debate, and you're the guy saying, "You pay too much attention to stats. I just look at the game and I can tell you I know that Jeter is twice the player that A-Rod is."

What are these violent societies, the weight of whose evidence causes you to dismiss forty of the world's leading muftis as "a small group of religious"? It seems to me that the supposedly Islam-wide violence boils down to just four hot spots: Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon/Palestine. The first and the last have been a mess for 25 years, give or take. Iraq has been a disaster since we blew it up and was simmering before that. Saudi Arabia has been kept in a tight enough grip that it hasn't ever exploded into war, but only at the expense of throwing out toxic extremists who pollute the rest of the world. If to you (and I'm speaking to REG or any other reader) this seems like a reasonable representation of the entire Islamic world, then I'm afraid you do need to pay more attention to the stats.

You probably don't give much thought to, say, Bangladesh. It's a peaceful nation, so it doesn't get talked about on CNN. It also happens to have the world's fourth largest Muslim population, which happens to be larger than the populations of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel, and Syria combined. The three nations with even larger Muslim populations -- Indonesia, India, and Pakistan -- have each seen small explosions of violence, but again, these characterize the nations as a whole only if you look at the nation only during the week after a terrorist attack hits, and only at the site of that attack, and then go back to ignoring the country again for the rest of the year.

Indonesia, India and Pakistan -- and we can add Egypt and Turkey here, too -- have their problems, but they are not violent societies. Certainly no more so than Congo, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Nepal, Haiti, or Colombia -- all of which get less news coverage even when they do have explosions of violence. Iran has a pugnacious government, but it is not a violent society any more than China, North Korea, Russia, or Venezuela is.

I said I didn't want to rant about this, so I'll drop it now. I'd be happy for our discussion to move on to consideration of the violent streak that we both agree does exist. It's just that whenever I see an absurd sweeping generalization that characterizes the world's billion and a half Muslims based on the 100,000 or so we hear about on the news, it sets me off.

Third point: I almost didn't bring this up, because it's really not pertinent to the argument raised by you and Bernard Lewis, but it's an interesting factoid nevertheless. Of the world's six largest Muslim nations (by population), five have had a female head of state in my lifetime (and it would be five out of five, if Egypt didn't barely edge out Turkey). The similar figure for non-Muslim states isn't even close.

Fourth point [I keep tagging these on...]: You asked about prison conversions. I admit that's something I've never thought about, and until you mentioned it I wouldn't have even guessed that prison conversions are disproportionately to Islam. But when you pose the question the first thing that comes to mind for me is the religions' sharply different attitude toward personal responsibility. Islam is very strong on the idea that every individual is responsible for his own sins, and he alone is answerable to the Creator therefor. Christianity teaches that we are born in sin, we share in the sins of our fathers regardless of our own doings, and redemption can only come by way of the Divine Savior. I'm not a theologian, nor a clinical psychologist, but I should think that sort of thing would be of interest to repentant (or perhaps faux-repentant) criminals.

It sounds like an interesting question to pursue. My first step, I think, would be to collect the data and line it up against the correlation of Islam with poor, urban African-Americans generally. Are the two connected? Does one correlation disappear when corrected for the other? I really don't know.

Fifth point: (I may as well keep going with these.) Here's another thought I had while editing. I was discussing how terrorist violence doesn't correlate to religion nearly as closely as to other factors. It's still crude, but what about pinning the violence just on Arabs? Not all Arabs are Muslim, and fewer than half of Muslims are Arab, yet my unexamined and possibly wrong impression is that most of the terrorists and other combatants we hear about are Arabs. Three of the problem nations I mentioned are Arab nations, and in Afghanistan much of the mujahidin army was recruited from the Arab world. Even in Iran, it seems that many of the militants were born in Iraq (though that would also include Taskhiri, who signed that letter to the Pope). I could be way off on this, but I'd be curious if anyone has good data on that. Can terrorist violence be correlated to Arabs, either racially or linguistically, more strongly than to Muslims? If so, maybe that tells us something.

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