David Warren wrestles with Islam

Richard Miniter, who gave a speech at the Libertarian Alliance conference described by David Carr, enthusiastically recommends this essay by David Warren, entitled “Wrestling with Islam”, which I missed when it came out during last month.

Choosing paragraphs to excerpt is difficult, because, as Miniter says, it is all so good. Try this:

Elsewhere, we encounter the old elites, but find them like beached whales, still nominally presiding over the societies which they have helped destroy, economically, socially, religiously, and in every other practical way, so that there was nothing left for them but to find a new excuse for holding on to power, and someone else to blame for what happened.

In Pakistan, for instance, the elites are certainly still there, only beginning to be diluted by the arrivistes from the Islamist madrasas. From the other side, they are bled by emigration, for the engineers and the technocrats, and the other functionaries of the New Class, are leaving as fast as they can to the West. It is an economic imperative, there are diminishing opportunities at home; for where there is no oil to pump and refine, there tends to be precious little else in the way of an economy. They wash their hands of all those five-year plans, and get quite peacefully on planes for Europe and America, where they can hope at least to stay solvent. And all they are really leaving behind is the poor of their societies, to fend for themselves.

The New Class that remains, which by now is becoming rather an old class, finds itself enmired in a more and more urgent search for some new silver bullet, some fine new theoretical scheme to replace the tried-and-failed socialism, if for no other reason than to justify their own purchase on elitehood. The alternative is to slide down from eminence, into those mushrooming brick, stick, tin & mud suburbs that they must fear in a way that we, who have not seen them up so close, can never fully understand or empathize with. It is no small thing to lose your place in the social order; and especially in an order with such deep shafts.

Indeed, the genius of Islam, the very warmth in it that I felt as a child in Lahore, is this sense of a vast, extended family — that all men shall be brothers in almost the literal sense. The Muslim route to universalism is through the incorporation of all into this extended tribe, and the exclusion of all outside it. And the customs of Islam, including Muhammad’s brilliant innovation of the “hajj”, or once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to the Kaba stone in Mecca, are designed to reinforce the clan sentiment of an ultimate single home.

Or this:

These are, still today, cultures of the “pre-Enlightenment”; people not incapable of sympathy, for their own, but not yet versed in the imaginative projection of that sympathy into people who are not their own. And at this level, it is not Islam, but the Enlightenment, that stands between East and West in these matters. For we have largely lost the category of an “infidel”, and they still have it.

On this side, the endless effort to understand “where those people are coming from”, mostly missing the main point, that they do not think as we do. On that side, no effort at all, and it is taken for granted that we are “infidels” simply, living “beyond the pale”, even when, as often, there is no desire to harm us. For us, there can be both Israeli and Palestinian victims; for them, only Palestinians feel pain.

I would like to call this an over-simplification — being a child of the Enlightenment myself — but I’m afraid it is not much over-simplified. The gap between us yawns very wide. For the sad truth is that the only people to whom we can appeal for “mutual understanding” from the other side, are the people who have themselves been Westernized, or “Enlightened”.

I must therefore end on a pessimistic note …

As must I. This posting is already quite long enough. There are tangents galore here to fly off at, but I must resist. Simply: if, like me, you missed this the first time around, go and read it now.