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The West deigns to help Islam modernize

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

In defense of Islam (3QuarksDaily) cites a same-named blog post by Ross Douthat (New York Times) in which he uses quite-dense prose to obfuscate the central message: he argues that the fanaticism of ISIS rises directly from Islamic scripture and shouldn’t be treated as necessarily crazy. The first step in ending a needless war is the recognition that the enemy is not crazy, but Douthat’s interpretation is more insidious, I think.

“Western analysts tend to understate not only the essential religiosity of ISIS’s worldview, but the extent to which that worldview has substantial theological grounding. It isn’t just a few guys making up a cult out of random bits of scripture; its political-religious vision appeals precisely because it derives “from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.” And we ignore the coherence of those interpretations at our peril: The Islamic State’s “intellectual genealogy” is intensely relevant to its political strategy, and its theology “must be understood to be combatted.””

He seems to argue, as others did before him—and as contemporaries like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins do—that Islam is inherently violent. This is a spectacularly tone-deaf and unproductive line of argument that fails to recognize the unbelievable level or violence and religious justification for it employed by the society in which Douthat—and all of his tone-deaf contemporaries—find themselves. The U.S. military is an extremely religious organization. It would be much more honest to just argue that humanity is inherently violent, independent of religious affiliation.

Douthat goes on to soften his initial paragraphs to “give the rest of Islam credit for being, well, Islamic as well, and for having available arguments and traditions and interpretations that marginalized this kind of barbarism in the past, and God willing can do so once again.” This is a wonderful sentiment but how is poor Islam to control its worst elements when crusading Christianity is constantly whipping up fervor with its bombs and suffering? And then there is the underlying superiority of these argument in which Douthat talks of “synthesiz[ing] Islam fully with Western modernity” as if there were a natural progression of civilization in which the current Western one was clearly superior to anything else. If we were to dig through objectively, that may end up being the case, but assuming so a priori is not bound to be convincing to those over whom you are claiming superiority—especially when it’s not immediately obvious.

I happened to stumble on an older, unpublished blog post that I wrote in early 2009 that described the exact same attitude of the west toward Islam, in this case as channelled by the late Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens on his friend, Rushdie (Jan. 2009)

Christopher Hitchens is an exquisite writer of English, as is Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s books are, on the whole, amazing reads, and Hitchens’s articles as well, when he’s not raging too hard about some of his more deep-seated, right-wing opinions (the unending justness and rightness of the Iraq war being one particular such hobby-horse). Assassins of the Mind by Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair) talks of his relationship with Rushdie over the years and, in particular, the violent attitude that leads followers of a religion to heed a fatwa issued against a novelist.

It is interesting that the violence of Islamic extremists gets consistent copy from Hitchens while examples abound of similarly violent efforts at suppression by others as well. When he speaks of “a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table”, it is very easy to get confused and think he is talking of the Holocaust, when he is, in fact, speaking of the outbreak of violence one can expect when writing, saying or showing something that may be taken as offensive by extremist Islam. It certainly seems to be granting a tremendous amount of power to a population segment that is (A) much more often getting the shitty end of the stick and (B) on the wane for years now, were it not for the efforts of exactly the governments that Hitchens so wholeheartedly continues to support in their efforts to do the Crusades right, once and for all.

It is especially ironic that the publishing cycle brings this article to the light of day now, two weeks into the latest, ghastly Israeli steamrolling of Gaza, when international commentary has failed to bring any serious form of condemnation to bear against Israel for their having thrown themselves into an attack based seemingly exclusively on tactics that are war crimes. For many that see the problem, that “shadowy figure” of the Holocaust prevents them from speaking out as they would against any other nation that acted in a similar manner.

When Hitchens calls Iran “the prison house that is the Islamic Republic”, he is only partly correct because such a statement can only be an exaggeration with a nation that has such a rich culture. It applies far better to a nation like North Korea, for example. His heart’s in the right place, but his condemnation of an entire nation—the 127 writers he mentions excluded, of course—puts him dangerously close to having his opinion interpreted as an implicit assent to a regime-change in Iran, as has been sought by the same regimes that brought us the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, of which Hitchens still approves, though not unreservedly. So, he’s right, but a bit too enthusiastically and exhibiting a bit of the fanaticism that he so rightly condemns in the target of his ire.

“To indulge the idea of religious censorship by the threat of violence is to insult and undermine precisely those in the Muslim world who are its intellectual cream, and who want to testify for their own liberty—and for ours. It is also to make the patronizing assumption that the leaders of mobs and the inciters of goons are the authentic representatives of Muslim opinion. What could be more “offensive” than that?”