Robert Redeker is a writer and philosophy teacher in France who made some self-evident points critical of the behaviour of certain Muslims but he also laid the blame on Islam-as-a-religion itself…
But Redeker expanded his critique from these examples to a broadside against Islam as a religion. He acknowledged that violence was commonly committed in the name of Christianity, but claimed that “it is always possible to turn back to evangelical values, to the mild personage of Jesus, from the excesses of the Church.” Muhammad, he claimed, offered no such recourse: “Jesus is a master of love, Muhammad is a master of hate.”
As a result, even though he lives in France and was just expressing his views, he is a hunted man in fear for his life. Time reported that Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Mosque of Paris and president of the French Council of the Muslim Religion spoke of “grave errors” in treating questions of religion in a “purely subjective manner.” Yet surely that is exactly what Redeker did not do. He is looking at our old chum ‘root causes’ and finding that Islam itself may be the problem. That is not a subjective proposition.
People need to start thinking of Islam in the same manner as they thought of Communism. Islam may be a religion but it is also has an imposed ‘whole life’ view that makes it indistinguishable from a political ideology. If Muslims want their religion to be treated with tolerance, they need to de-secularise it in the same way Christianity has (largely) done. But for as long as Islam advocates an imposed political order based on religious principles, it must not be treated either legally or socially as being above critique on any level whatsoever.
Islam is the problem and, just like Communism and Fascism, it is simply incompatible with western post-Enlightenment civilisation. And also just like Communism and Fascism, it must be contained or defeated militarily when it threatens us but it must also be defeated as an ideology as well. The PLO and Ba’athism were regional threats but they were also largely secular and had political objectives that could at least be discussed (for example even Israel managed to eventually do deals with the PLO).
Islam’s morality, theology or weird prohibitions should only be of interest to Muslims, just as Kibbutznik Communism is only of interest to people on Kibbutzes playing at Communism on a strictly voluntary basis… but whereas Communism has been defeated and discredited as a global ideology, Islam is very much alive and kicking and because of Islam’s political imperatives to impose its values by force on everyone (i.e. either become a Muslim or submit as a dhimmi), that makes it of concern to everyone. Until Islam is defeated ideologically, Western Muslims have to be regarded much the way communist sympathisers were regarded during the Cold War. Islam needs to be treated as a political ideology that needs to be confronted and defeated. The pretence that “oh, it is not about Islam, it is just about terrorism” is simply untrue. It is all about Islam.
Is there any english translation of his actual artical?
Here is a full translation:
http://www.france-echos.com/actualite.php?cle=10346
Mild, eh? Mark 7 anyone?
26The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
27″First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”
28″Yes, Lord,” she replied, “but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
29Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.”
30She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
How about Matthew 8?
21Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
22But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”
Matthew 10?
32″Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. 33But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.
34″Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35For I have come to turn
” ‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her motherinlaw—
36a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’
Obviously, the old testament is filled with stronger and bloodier moments. It’s easy to compare Mohammed with Christ and decide that good muslims have to be violent, but there’s not so much difference between Mohammed and Moses or Joshua. Anyway, there’s a whole bunch more references to Christ not being mild. It’s much tougher to find quotes in which Christ was not strident.
Redeker’s “turning back to Christ” is like Gordon Brown’s occasional reference to following the values of Adam Smith.
Perry,
You are so absolutely right about the total incompatability between Islam and Western values.
I learnt this when I visited Speakers Corner and was told by a group of Muslims that I had “absolutely no right” to talk about Islam or the Middle East situation. (I was told this was because I was English!)
And this was in the UK bastion of democracy and free speech.
Amazing. I continue to be amazed by the Chamberlain-esque attitudes people have about Islam. People are incredibly tolerant of their intolerance.
The significance of Mark 7 appears to have passed unnoticed. The whole point of the parable is that Jesus *does* indeed cure the gentile – He changes his mind and abandons the ancient prejudices of His own culture.
That was a revolutionary act and a huge leap forward in the development of the concept of individual rights – happily consistent with other developments in pagan philosophy.
James of England, your comments confuse me.
How is casting out demons violence against innocence? Should we consider pschotherapists to be violent persons for casting out another kind of demon? Seems to me, his technique was rather mild.
And I think you are putting a weird twist on the ‘dead burying the dead’ statement. My understanding was that it meant let non-believers bury non-believers. I’m not a theologian though.
As for Christ disowning people in heaven, are you comparing that to violence on earth?
And as for fathers and sons against each other, my father and I debated these things to his last rational moments on earth. And never did the possibility that I should be killed for what I believe or don’t believe come up. Of course, maybe you just think he was an atypical Christian who didn’t understand the Bible.
“Western Muslims have to be regarded much the way communist sympathisers were regarded during the Cold War…”
I.e. awarded prominent positions in politics, media and academia. Prominent ? No ! Key positions !
The significance of the Bible quote is obvious. The brutal, oppressive, intolerant, capitalist Jesus was casting out the poor, innocent, misunderstood demon who had been in peaceful possession of the girl, just as some evil intolerant Europeans want to cast out the poor innocent representatives of the Religion of Peace who just want to peacefully plant bombs and peacefully kill Jews in peace.
Infidel753 wins the prize for “Today’s Best Channeling of Noam Chomsky”. Keep up the good work, my friend.
I’m always amazed that Leftists seem to genuinely believe that Christian fundamentlists are just as much of a problem as wahabists. There’s some mental blind spot that requires them, in the interest of “fair-mindedness” to sputter “but… but… Christians!” every time someone points out that those who value things like women’s rights and gay rights and free speech might possibly, just possibly, have an interest in defeating Islamists.
I don’t envy the lot of European freedom-lovers. In between the socialists, the wahabbists and the reflexive anti-Americanism, you are indeed in a target-rich environment.
I’m with Midwesterner on this and I’m an agnostic. I have no idea what casting out demons has to do with not being mild. I’m certainly less of a theologian than MW but clearly the “dead burying the dead” thing has got to be meant in something other than the literal sense.
Both Jesus and Mohammed were apart from anything else historical figures and reasonably well documented ones at that for the time. If you compare the personalities and personal actions of the two figures then there is an unbelievable contrast.
In both religions striving to be like (as much as possible) the founder of the religion is what you’re supposed to do. The Gospels tell of the life of Jesus – they’re not rule books as such and I very much doubt many muslims would challenge the importance of the Hadiths and Sunna.
This is possibly a little disorganised… but I’m in a rush.
Agreed in general, but in some ways I submit you have it slightly back to front. It is not that Islam appropriates the secular. It is because most forms of Islam admit no concept of the secular that there’s so much of a problem.
Traditional forms compromised with the real world without quite admitting it. (Eg the extension of people of the book status to Zoroastrians, even though they don’t really qualify, and at least one prescription for beards in the hadith is explicitly made in order to contrast with the moustaches of the magi.) Fundamentalists in other faiths react against modernity, but they grant it a place and see secular authority as distinct from religious authority, even if they believe that the religious shoudl control in the event of conflict. The Islamist cults cannot cope with ambiguity or difference.
reflexive anti-Americanism
I was once debating with a woman who launched into a tirade of anti-Americanism (all the usual) so I asked her if she’d ever been to the USA. She said “I’d never want to go there!!!”.
Perry’s most important point is the one about the way that Islam has taken over from where Imperial Communism left off.
The same alienated westerners who supported the CND in the UK and SANE/FREEZE in the US now support the rights of Iran and Iraq to WMD. In those days the relationship between the US and Europe was strained but not broken. Today I’m afraid the relationship is alomost completely wrecked and Europe will have to cope with the Islamist onslaught by itself.
Even without America, it has all the power needed to win, the question is, does it have the will?
It was bad enough when they went berserk over The Satanic Verses, the Danish cartoons, piggy banks, the Berlin opera, the English flag, and the Pope…..but now they want to stamp out G-strings?! This means war!
Seriously, these people are not going to be happy until the entire planet looks like Saudi Arabia. That would be reason enough to fight back, even if they didn’t have this distressing habit of threatening to cut off the head of anyone who accuses them of being violent.
The Islamic cults cannot cope with ambiguity or difference.
To paraphrase Oriana Fallaci:
Are there different kinds of Muslims? — Is there more than one Koran?
Suadi Arabia isn’t even good enough because of the house of Saud. That’s the point — nothing is good enough. These guys will continue to threaten the West, true. However, they will also continue to rot from within — there is always a reason to hate — even fellow Muslims.
Great dialogue here. BTW, dead burying the dead is most likely a reference to the belief that when you die, your soul ceases to exist unless you believe in Christ. Thus, to experience the afterlife you need to believe, otherwise it’s all pointless.
James of England’s claim that Jesus was similar to Mohammed is false – Jesus did not sack cities, Jesus did not enslave people, Jesus was not a rapist, Jesus was not mass murderer.
However, the attack on Joshua has more merit. The historical reality may have been that the Jews slowly took (or retook) a land that had been ruined by the taxes and other aggression of the Egyption Empire (at its height this went all the way to modern Syria), but the Bible does give an account of plunder and mass murder.
Joshua is in the same “this voice in my head justifies any crime I commit” league as Mohammed. The basic theological-philosophical doctrine that if a voice claiming to be God orders a crime that voice is either not God or the order is not meant to obeyed, was not a principle that Joshua seems to have accepted. He seems more like the legal positivists who consider the defintion of law to be the will of the ruler (in this case God) or rulers so any order from the ruler or rulers is “law” and any action following such an order (to steal, rape. murder and so on) can not be a crime.
Although (of course) Joshua did not found a religion that spread (within a few years of his death) to the violent conquest of vast areas of the Earth.
Mohammed thought of the whole world (and it was the whole world, Mohammed even sent a message demanding the submission of the Emperor Heraclius in Constantinople) in the way that Joshua thought of the Holy Land. Mohammed was no better than the Mahdi in the 19th century, or O.B.L. now.
G-strings infidel753?
Showing your age. Surely you mean thongs!
Where does that gem come from anyway?
Although I do recall that the Iranian government banned men from lingerie shops. And they’ve been “arresting” indecently dressed shop window mannequins for a while now. In fact they have to bring down the shutters so nobody sees them “naked” while they’re being dressed.
Perhaps Mr Armanidinnerjacket is a fan of Frank Zappa:
From: http://tinfoilhat.quickseek.com/
My personal feeling is tending towards the idea that muslims are all a bunch of tin-foil hatters…
…and you could get a fair bit of foil under a hijab or turban.
Nick M — I was referring to the English translation of Redeker’s original article (see 2nd comment in this thread for link), which uses the term “G-strings”. However, it was clearly not done by a native speaker of English. I freely admit that I am not fully up to speed on current beach-fashion terminology. When I was a young man (back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) and first started noticing such things, I vaguely recall the word “thongs” being associated with the type of sandals which are now called “flip-flops”, but perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me. There may also be trans-Atlantic differences in usage.
I’m afraid the Islamists do the tinfoil-hatters one better. Not content to wear a tinfoil hat to screen out evil influences, they are more like someone who insists on having every object in the universe that might conceivably radiate evil influences covered with tinfoil to stop it from doing so. In their case, they want to cover up women, hide mannequins of women, ban pictures of women, ban pictures of Muhammad, ban anything that reminds them of pigs or the Crusades, etc., rather than simply averting their eyes from what displeases them. Perhaps they should be called “tinfoil-planeters”.
Freeman:
Are there different kinds of Muslims? — Is there more than one Koran?
Yes. Which is why I wrote “Islamist cults” rather than as you misquote me “Islamic cults”. The Islamists assert that there is only one kind of Muslim, that there is an intrinsic unity and agreement within Islam that makes all visions but theirs heretical. As I also wrote before, they can’t tolerate ambiguity.
But it is plainly the case that there’s more than one kind of Muslim, since people who hold incompatible views and engage in incompatible practices describe themselves as Muslim. Some sufis use music and dance specifically as religious rite; the taliban hold it to be contrary to Islam.
Equally only a fundamentalist, or someone very literal-minded, would hold that there is only one Koran from the point of view of interpretation. We are unfortunate, and it may be one of the roots of the problem, that unlike Jesus, or any of the religious leaders of the Axial Age, Mohammed was able to dictate a revelation that was written down directly and survives, as far as we know, intact. Hermeneutic problems and the status of competing texts therefore aren’t as insistent in Islam as they are in other faiths. But they still exist, and were historically well-recognised by Muslim scholars, few of whom until very recently felt obliged to live eternally in the seventh century (or first, as they would see it).
The Koran is in practice interpreted differently by different people (even though the nasty combination of Saudi money and modern communications has worn that away a bit) so there is in practice more than one Koran.
Mr Cameron has just (a couple of hours ago) said (in his closing speech to the Conservative party conference) that “something must be done” about the Sudan (where forces loyal to the Islamic government are busy killing both Christians and Muslims who will not go along with things).
Of course if the United States (the only nation strong enough) sent in a force to fight the modern Mahdi, Mr Cameron would not help (indeed he would be “critical friend” as he is on Iraq and everywhere else).
Still at least Mr Cameron did not say something that I heard a lady from the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard) say (in a television interview) a couple of weeks ago.
People would care about the Sudan, the lecturer said, if it had oil. Of course the Sudan does have oil and is one of the biggest suppliers of oil to the People’s Republic of China.
It is good to know that my judgement of academics is not determined by my own bitterness (over various personal matters long ago) – they really are the ignorant scum I think they are.
Further on the Sudan: One must remember that the recent killings have been mostly of Muslims – nor is it really a matter of “Arabs V Africans” (as many of the killers have been as black as the people they have been killing).
It is a matter of certain tribes not being willing to go along with the full agenda of the Islamic government. There are lot of good people who happen to be Muslims (in Sudan and everywhere else) – the trouble is that “true Muslims” tend to kill them.
It is the same in Iraq. The very leftists who complain about civilian deaths in Iraq do not seem able to understand that the killers (the bombers and so on) are the very “resistance to the American occupation” that they support.
It is true that some American soldiers may indeed have been murderers (the trials are on going), but the vast majority of murders have been committed by “the resistance” so beloved by the “Independent” newspaper, the B.B.C. (and academia).
Guy made an observation earlier,
He’s picked up on a key point here. Most Christians believe there is a secular (fallen) realm. But it is important to note a philosophical difference between the Christian and the Islamic conversions. Christians try to persuade sinners to turn away from dangers and temptations.* The Koran requires a somewhat different approach. Which we see most often used against other Muslims. This is why literalists are taking over the religion.
* The Christian method of seeking converts is called “evangelization”.
I, too, think that it is good that your bitterness over personal matters from long ago does not preclude you from making an measured analysis of all academics and their thought. Indeed, had it not been for your citing an unnamed lady (was she really a lady, though? Or just a woman?) without actually quoting her, I might have continued to believe that there was some benefit in continuing to read, think and argue, especially in an institution where others do the same.
Fortunately, now I can discount them all I shall not have to read any more Hayek (Friedrich, not Salma, of NYU, LSE and the University of Chicago), Von Mises (University of Vienna, and graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva), Milton Friedman (Rutgers, University of Chicago), Niall Ferguson (Harvard, Jesus College, Oxford – which, whilst almost entirely populated by those who are mentally disturbed or Welsh, still, I believe, counts as an academic institution…)
Ignorant scum to a man.
The comparison between the Old Testament/New Testament and the Koran are specious ones. I would recommend anyone read Robert Spencer’s Truth about Mohammad which explains Mohammad and his mentality using his own words and those of his contemporaries.
Islam is a religion of war; Mohammad meant it to be that way. To say otherwise is a nonsense.
Aas a recovering academic I have to put in my two cents worth.
Paul, your condemnation reminds me of that oft quoted and horribly wrong saying – those who can do; those who can’t teach – duh. Just tell that to Rostropovitch or Renee Fleming the next time he and she give a master class. There are many snake oil sellers in the academic world but there are plenty of people actually passing on ‘the best that has been known and thought in the world’. I know that I was in the value added to knowledge business and not in the kind of speculation and horoscopic pretension that goes on in the average poli-sci class.
Yes, but.
When Paul refers to ‘academics’ it should be obvious to all that he is using it in the same way that I, for example, use ‘politicians’.
Yes, there are good and great ones. Why are they never the ones out front claiming the title ‘academic’ or ‘scholar’? Or taking over departments and setting policy?
Mid: they tend to be too busy doing useful things like teaching, doing real research and writing books not prancing about in the press.
That would be Rutgers University of New Jersey… New Brunswick campus if you want to be a stickler for details
The Islamicist/fascist critique of western civilization and culture is complete, and completely negative. No aspect is left unchallenged, and no area is found to be acceptable.
Until those who immediately jump to the defense of Islamism, including some on this board, confront that basic fact, no progress in forming a coherent response to Islamo-fascist aggression is possible.
It is very clear that a coalition of those whose negative view of western culture, especially its economic system and political structures, have adopted the Islamo-fascists as allies of convenience, hoping to use the violence of the Islamists to destabilize western culture, and attempting to undermine any strong response from the west by constantly citing moral failures and alleged injustices on that side, while ignoring or justifying the bizarre excesses of their new buddies.
This brings us to the question raised by Paul about academics. Some of the responses have been indignant, others in denial, but there is a distinction that needs to be made here that isn’t, and it’s is fouling the discussion.
I have known some true scholars, true academics, true intellectuals, whose main focus in life, and whose consuming passion above all else, is their primary subject of study. They share certain characteristics, just a true artists, or true spiritual leaders, also do.
Integrity, and a ruthless committment to their subject at its highest level of expression, are a couple of the most fundamental. These are people for whom the shape of some shell, or the life cycle of a microbe, or some other esoteric bit of information is as exciting as the Super Bowl, or the World Cup.
However, there are in our culture, and around the world, a very large and influential group of people who, although they claim the title of intellectual, or scholar, are in fact nothing more than imposters.
Just as the gallerys are filled with the pap produced by poseurs who vehemently proclaim their artistic talent and committment, while producing such things as piles of sticks, or cut up cows in formaldahyde, so the halls of academia have become cluttered with pseudo-scholars, people who have never had an original thought, whose research is slipshod and derivative, and whose purpose is life is not scholarship and the advancement of knowledge, but politics, and the advancement of their ideology.
I suppose it is one of the penalties for living in a culture whose wealth is so unprecedented that it can support thousands of people whose lives are shams, utterly non-productive, and, in fact, counter-productive, who spend their entire lives trying in every waking moment to destroy the source of every bite of food they eat, every priviledge they enjoy, and abuse, and which provides them with a protected pulpit from which to preach their own version of “Death to the Great Satan” in screeching lectures and unreadable theses.
We spent a decade exulting in the collapse of the last viral strain of irrationality with which we did battle, both literally and figuratively, and are now understandably reluctant to acknowledge that another utterly irrational form of violent ideology has reared up to kill us and ours in any way it can.
Western, liberal, enlightenment culture is an abberation in the history of the human race. It is not natural in any traditional sense, and causes intense reactions in those whose basic personal and cultural truisms it challenges.
Islamic-fascism is the reaction we are faced with now, joined by the hangers-on from the last conflict who think they have found a new horse to ride.
Wishful thinking that, “Oh, they don’t really mean it”, or “If we just placate them, they will come around”, is dangerous and unrealistic. These are fanatics who would kill each and every one of us, man, woman, and child, without a moment’s hesitation if they could.
The time for PC nuance and apologetics is long past, if it was ever justified at all. It is a time for very serious and realistic assessments of the threat, and time for some aggressive steps to eliminate it as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
Well well, that from the man who responded with “Rubbish” to my assertion, just a few months ago, that there are no moderate muslims. No apology needed Perry, I take it as implied.
Is there any agreed definition of what “moderate muslim” means?
The term has had more use than is “proportionate” in the last few years and… well I just don’t know what the hell it means.
I suspect “moderate muslim” discussion is to be had over at Islamica Forums. I’ve trawled that a bit and some of it is barking and the scary thing is that on certain issues there is a very broad consensus towards being barking – it’s not just individual nutjobs.
What was the name of that guy who got banned from here a while back for trying to make every thread into a discussion on “racial realism”? Every forum, blog etc has the odd one but this is different. There certainly seems to be within the anglospheric muslim populations widespread moonbattery on certain issues.
The issues are the usual supects but someone also posted about a racist incident directed to a hijabed girl on a British train and the consensus seemed to be along the lines of the sisters shouldn’t go out without mehrem or if possible stay at home!
I’ve hinted before before that Islam reembles a mental illness. Islam in the west resembles a form of schizophrenia. There is a real dissonance between the handles of the Islamicans and their avatars and some of the deeply back in the ol’ country guff they come out with.
Is this always symptomatic of pains of assimilation?
If so, we don’t have a long term problem. Or perhaps a few decades ago that would have been the case and the multi-culti crowd are holding this people in a limbo between assimilation and tradition and that tension finds it outlet in violence.
PS. I kinda wish you’d come up with a better term than the blanket one – academics. I did physics and then astrophysics at university and the academics I met never tried to indoctrinate me with commie claptrap*. As any physicist knows the Universe has an overwhelming right chirality anyway.
*Joe Stalin himself at one point was distainful of Fermi-Dirac statistics because he objected to the idea that all fermions were distinguishable (a technical term which is not too far off from it’s usual meaning) and therefore failed to collectivise!
PPS. Perhaps “crapademics” might be suitable? Especially when like Granpappy Noam they start shouting the odds in fields other than those of their own expertise. Mind, on the subject of Mr Chomsky, my soon to be wife (a translator) in five years at three universites never found a single linguist who didn’t think chumsky shouldn’t have been fed to the sharks years ago. Perhaps he needed a second career?
Just posted and was smite-controlled and this time I suspect I know exactly why…
Can someone tell me what I am suppiosed
to do about
this
Renewed Activity Seen at Suspected North Korea Test Sites, U.S. Intelligence Says
egetg,
I suppose you could buy a kevlar helmet. And hope the NORKs get taken down first.
Which might just send a message to that camel-fucker in Iran.
Your use of paragraphs was odd, was it haiku or something?
Was James of England accusing Jesus of being too prescient about the conflicts that would arise in his name? Evil man, Jesus, loving conscience over tradition. 🙂
Finally, an article that gets to the root, to the evil man that is inseparably holy from that religion. I’d like to see a non-brain-dead counterargument to it.
Bless you Paul Marks for calling “Sudan” “the Sudan.” My current number one language pet peeve is people who have adopted “Ukraine” for “the Ukraine.”
“Ukraine”, without the definite article, is the usage preferred by the Ukrainians themselves. The name originally just meant “borderland”, a reference to its location on the edge of (but part of) the Russian Empire. It is felt that the omission of the definite article makes the name sound more like a proper noun, the name of a real country, as opposed to a designation for a mere region.
This distinction applies only to nomenclature used by Westerners, since the Ukrainian language, like most Slavic languages, does not itself have a definite article.
I see no reason not to adopt the designation for a country preferred by its inhabitants, within reason. And most country names in English do not use a definite article.
As for “Sudan” or “the Sudan”, I’m sure we can all think of many better things to call it, none of them suitable for a website where ladies may be present.
I think Taylor raised the most important question…..Does Europe have the will to resist? I’m not optimistic.
NickM:Is this always symptomatic of pains of assimilation?
AFAICT second and third generations assimilate quite well in most cases, Muslims being the prime exception. Even when assimilation does not occur to a great extent with the Chinese there tends to be no issue as they are quietly confident in their own perceived cultural identity and superiority…and of course no faux “divine authority” saying that they are the master race/creed!
The people I feel for the the Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs who get mistaken for Muslims by the lumpen illiterati.
Two (boring maybe) truisms about religion and human nature:
Religion (no matter how irrational to the non-believer) is like a nail, the harder you pound it, the deeper in you drive it.
You’ll never succeed in talking people into killing a sacred cow. It’s quite possible to distract them long enough so that it starves to death.
It’s far more advisable to talk about Muslims and not Islam.
Attacking Islam, as a religion is pointless and merely provokes an automatic defense mechanism. Not a very useful approach (unless you really enjoy digging for water in dry holes).
Also, most national cultures that are predominantly Muslim thoroughly believe in collective guilt and honor. Pointing out the shortcomings of fellow group members is probably far more effective than attacking their religion (which like all religions has more than one voice and like all middle eastern religions is harsher in its literalist orientations than in its metaphoric ones. The scientific decline of the once advanced Muslim world can be traced directly to the rise of literalism and suppression of those that favored a more abstract, reasoned reading of the Koran.
What kind of arguments might work (not quickly, but over time)?
In Britain on the whole are the most poorly performing religious group in terms of non-religious (including academic) achievement.
Why aren’t Muslims doing about their fellow believers who are shaming them, _shaming_ them in front of the rest of the world????
In the world, why are Muslims are the only followers of a major religion to persecute apostates, the only followers to legally discriminate on the basis of religion are they really that insecure in their faith?
Keep it close and personal.
Which is of course what the powers-that-be are trying to do. And failing. The problem we have here is that Islam really is the problem and there is just no getting around it.
guy herbert:
Thanks for your deconstruction of a central theme of Oriana Fallaci. This simple theme formed one of the key points cited by the Italian judge Armando Grasso in June this year in her ludicrous trial on a charge of defaming Islam. I don’t see it as needing any deep analysis.
The issue is essentially as Perry has just put it: “Islam is the problem. . . It is all about Islam.”
“The problem we have here is that Islam really is the problem and there is just no getting around it.”
The problem is literalism, there’s enough examples of assimilated, reasonable Muslims to realize the sacred text isn’t the problem but literal and limited interpretations of it.
The ideal solution would be for Muslims to be more like (modern) Catholics who don’t much read the sacred text, leaving that for theologians. Catholic theologians, meanwhile, stress the metaphoric non-literalness of the Bible, God talking to humans in a way they could understand at the time rather than laying down his final message to be taken literally.
IIRC Mohammed said there was such a thing as delayed conception (I forget what it’s called, but the idea was that a widow might become pregnant with her dead husband’s child several years after his death). As science, it’s obviously nonsense. But the practical consequence of this nonsense was good: pregnancy was not enough to convict a widow of adultery.
It might also be a good place to begin with to convince Muslims that maybe not every word of Mohammed was _literal_ (as opposed to mystical and/or metaphoric) truth.
Michael,
A good place to begin as you suggest IS tackling Islam, but so as far as I can see you have contradicted yourself (focus on muslims not islam). Maybe I misunderstand. Still, to me it needs to be explored as a viable path.
As an example, Allah is said to have said that Allah predetermines man’s actions and fate. He has control. Allah also says that those who do not follow or obey will end up in hell. Allah says he is there in hell tormenting wrongdoers and those who did not submit.
So, Allah creates men on purpose who will transgress, end up in hell and then be tortured for eternity by Allah. At least that can be called a sadistic nutcase. Religions have a word for that too – Satan. One suspects this is the character, and not Gabriel, that Mohammed met in the desert…in fact Mohammed originally raved that he was being bewitched by the Devil. Maybe like an Alzheimers sufferer, after a while the grip tightens so the distress falls away and resistance is futile. The mind submits.
As for the problem not being the text, far from it IMHO. The less a Muslim knows of the Koran, the aHaddith and Sunnah, the more likely that they are a reasonable person influenced by national culture and not religion. Once they start to study and understand the message…well we see what happens.
TimC, criticising the behavior of muslims is different from pointing out inconsistencies in literalism.
But, crucially, neither criticises the holy text as such, but rather human ways of interpreting and acting on it.
This allows people a way to change, if they desire change while maintaining face. Grand pronouncements that “Islam is the problem” do not allow Muslims to simultaneously tone down the rhetoric and save face.
And there are Christians who firmly believe that Anne Frank (and other holocaust victims) are in hell, burning in a lake of fire even as I type this because they didn’t accept Christ as their savior. What kind of god would do _that_?
Michael Farris,
1. A great many muslims don’t read the sacred texts because they are illiterate. In many countries a translation of the Koran out of the original C7th Arabic is illegal. This makes it inaccesible to all but specialists. I think the real analogy with Catholics is with medieval Catholicism.
2.In Britain on the whole are the most poorly performing religious group in terms of non-religious (including academic) achievement. Which is of course because of racism and discrimination. The MCB et al have been banging that drum for a while. An attempt to put a collective dunce’s cap on UK muslims would back-fire spectacularly from your intended aim.
3. But Islam is literalism. The Koran is literally the word of God. Mohammed expressly forbade innovation in religion. If you are to be a muslim in any meaningful way you’ve gotta believe this.
There is a mystical side to Islam – Sufism – but the Sufis are few and have been persecuted throughout their history. They only allowed the Dervishes to whirl in Turkey again quite recently and then purely for the tourist dollar.
Islam is not a religion of personal salvation through faith and love or anything like that. It’s about following myriad bewildering rules on all aspects of life. Go to a online “fatwa bank” and see the number of bizarre rules.
Perhaps that’s why Tony Blair likes Islam so much. Build a perfect society through regulating everything.
Is this not the kernel of the problem? Regardless of what the texts say, there are many, many Muslims who found 9/11 and all the other atrocities abominable, who revile the likes of Bin Laden and Sadda – just as there are deeply religious Catholics who practice birth control.
So how do we give those people a voice? Well we don’t do it by limiting them to a single identity as a member of a religious community.
Amartya Sen “Identity and Violence” quoted here
What is needed is a sect calling itself (say) ‘Western Islam’, reconciling the need many Muslims feel to maintain an identity and certain moral strictures, but in a way that is compatible with modernity and liberal tolerance. Other Muslims may say “but that is not really Islam”… but so what? If they call themselves Muslims and can co-opt the identity, power to them I say. Christians manage to gloss over the daft things said in the Old Testament, so why can Muslims not do the same with the Koran if it suits them? If there is a ‘market’ for ‘Western Islam’, all it needs is some Muslims with the balls to make it happen.
However until such a sect appears and gains significent traction, I am going to continue to call myself ‘Islamophobic’.
Perry,
And you can be the Grand Ayatollah and live in a gingerbread madrassa!
It ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. Look at the tortous history of Christianity since Martin Luther. And the muslims aren’t even at that stage.
Well what do you expect when Gordon Brown states that he is proud that London is a global center of Sharia banking.
“Which is of course because of racism and discrimination. The MCB et al have been banging that drum for a while. An attempt to put a collective dunce’s cap on UK muslims would back-fire spectacularly from your intended aim.”
Except that racially identical hindus don’t have the same problems…. why can’t SAsian Muslims match SAsian Hindu performance in the UK? Especially since many who belong to neither group can reliably tell them apart?
Education is a senstive area, but keep the focus on the people and not the faith.
“But Islam is literalism. The Koran is literally the word of God. Mohammed expressly forbade innovation in religion. If you are to be a muslim in any meaningful way you’ve gotta believe this. ”
If that’s your attitude then any attempt at dialogue is doomed to failure before you begin and resigning yourself to extreme Muslim ghettoization or eventual mass violence against Muslims. If neither of those options appeals to you, you might want to find out what kind of dialogue will work in engaging Muslims instead of just deciding what a Muslim has to believe.
Michael:If that’s your attitude then any attempt at dialogue is doomed to failure before you begin and resigning yourself to extreme Muslim ghettoization or eventual mass violence against Muslims. If neither of those options appeals to you, you might want to find out what kind of dialogue will work in engaging Muslims instead of just deciding what a Muslim has to believe.
Literalism is the attitude of the beards and your words are perfectly suitable for them.
Michael,
First point, TimC said it for me. Do you think a little “outreach” is going to make Armanidinnerjacket change his tune.
Second point. S Asian Hindus are not culturally identical to those muslims. That’s why they don’t do as well. There’s lots of reasons for this but the MCB victimologists are not helping and I deplore the fact that so many people in this country are buying into their attempt to change the definition of rascism. How well someone does in life is to a large extent down to their own efforts. We should remember that.
In Islam, the Koran is the (somewhat) equivalent of Jesus in Christianity, it is not the equivalent of the Bible. i.e. the fundamental purpose of any religion is to answer the question “how can I live a virtuous life”. The Christian asks “what would Jesus do?”, and the Muslim asks “what does the Koran say?”. The idea that you can get Muslims to ignore parts of the Koran, or to compromise some of them, is based on a false equivalency. Any Muslims you know who are normal, middle class or peaceful, are bad Muslims.
“What is needed is a sect calling itself (say) ‘Western Islam’, reconciling the need many Muslims feel to maintain an identity and certain moral strictures, but in a way that is compatible with modernity and liberal tolerance. Other Muslims may say “but that is not really Islam”… but so what? If they call themselves Muslims and can co-opt the identity, power to them I say.”
The problem with this approach is the so what? bit…….. there are any number of Muslims that are “non western” who will take the mere existence of such a sect as justification for hunting them down and cutting off their heads.
Thats why such a sect hasn’t already appeared and is unlikely to appear anytime soon.
Nick, I was addressing how to engage in dialogue with Muslim Brits, not the Iranian government (a very separate problem).
And yes, my whole point was that SAsian Muslims and Hindus are mostly the same genetic material separated by religion.
When the victimologist start up, they should be asked why the Hindus are outperforming them. Aren’t Hindus subject to the same racial prejudice (however much that is or isn’t a problem in modern Britain)?
“How well someone does in life is to a large extent down to their own efforts. We should remember that.”
I broadly agree, though just how ‘large’ the extent is is subject to debate (not right here though).
Ah, Perry?
I can’t let this bizarre statement slip by uncommented.
Christians do not “gloss over” things said in the Old Testament. The hold them up for examination. The wonder at the violence of them. They nod and say “Isn’t it wonderful that there is a new law.”
Christianity and Judaism are two different religions. The only parts of the Old Testament that Christians attach more than historical significance to, are the prophesies. In all cases where the New and Old Testaments differ, the New must be followed. No exceptions.
To all the people living in the fantasy of a new, rational Islam, it could be done. And it would be, like Christianity, a whole new religion.
Perhaps there are people on this site than can tell us how Judaism has coped with literalism. I’ve read books on it but am in no way qualified to express any opinions.
Midwesterner,
It’s been done already. It’s called Baha’i and it was invented in C19 Persia.
Its cultural and religious debt to the Shi’a Islamic matrix in which it was founded is seen as analogous to the Jewish socio-religious context in which Christianity was established.
– Wikipedia
There are 6 million of them worldwide and they are heavily persecuted by the Iranian Islamic Republic (so they must be doing something right!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahai
This just in!
Jack Straw says something sensible!
Muslim women should lift the veil
I’m a little disappointed by the consistent misreading of my comment, which I guess should have had more commentary.
Paul Marks: James of England’s claim that Jesus was similar to Mohammed is false – Jesus did not sack cities, Jesus did not enslave people, Jesus was not a rapist, Jesus was not mass murderer.
I intended to state the opposite It’s easy to compare Mohammed with Christ and decide that good muslims have to be violent.
My point wasn’t that he was like Mohammed, it was that he was far from mild. It was impressive, although not revolutionary, for him to treat a girl of a different race to himself. If you’re up on your Josephus you’ll know that a mutual genocide was about to start up due to excess levels of ethnic hatred, but you’ll also know that there was a fair few people who were intermarried and so on.
My point was that he wasn’t mild, at least after infancy when, famously, he was “mild, obedient, good as [himself]. Listen to the kind of demands for submission that are being demanded and approved of here.
Likewise, I wasn’t saying that he was proposing violence in heaven, but trying to point out how uncompromising and unkind he asked his followers to be, although not unloving (they should lovingly abandon their family, leave the dead unburied and so on, whatever it took to engage in discipleship).
Midwesterner, I’m not suggesting that your Father might have been advised toward violence, and there is a difference, but abandonment is also pretty harsh, at least by my standards.
I’m not suggesting that Christ was like Mohammed, just that Christ does not change with the times in the way Redeker often suggests. Christianity, perhaps, but it’s not a return to some evangelical ideal. It’s a personal bugbear and I shouldn’t have made so long a tangential entry so early in a comment thread, for which I apologise. Likewise for the apparent lack of clarity.
I’d meant to focus more on the other point, that being that Christianity’s support for Joshua, or really for almost any of the patriarchs and kings, does not make it intrinsically violent. Jews have even less theological distance from the same passages. Blaming Islam too broadly seems to render less legitimate, less Islamic, their equivalents of twice-a-year Anglicans.
As a different point, this kind of attack seems to legitimise the terrorists in ways that seem just as unfortunate. Islam does support violence, but it should be violence on behalf of Mohammed/ the Caliphate. UBL and cohorts really aren’t caliphs. To my mind, it’s a much better criticism to say that criminals and murderers aren’t Islamic than to say terrorists are. Parallels to just war theory and all that.
Re: the violence of Joshua;
When I read the Old Testament passages, I get the picture of an area destroyed by Warlords; Amorites, Hivites, Canaanites and others, all merrily raiding, raping, sacking their neighbors. There is one passage where God says that their evil has caused the land itself to “vomit them out” and thus much of it being empty save for some citadels (Jericho et. al.) when the Jews arrived.
Come to think of it, this land vomiting the inhabitants out sounds applicable to the early-mid 1900’s when Zionists and Jews arriving from post war europe found an impoverished and largely abandoned land.
…. hhhmmmmm….
“I am going to continue to call myself ‘Islamophobic’.”
Perry,
A phobia is an irrational fear. Your dislike of Islam is reasoned and therefore rational.
You are not Islamophobic, by definition.
The OT speaks of the entire Hebrew nation as having witnessed miracles – the plagues fo Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea by Moses and of the Jordan River by Joshua, the pillar of fire and the manna in the desert – which served as divine “notarization” of the mission which Moses and later Joshua set forth. Does the Koran claim that all of Medina witnessed miracles that authenticated Mohammed’s leadership?
“Does the Koran claim that all of Medina witnessed miracles that authenticated Mohammed’s leadership?”
The Koran does not, at least in the sense in which we would mean it, but there are a variety of Haddith that talk of invisible angels who terrified or fought off enemies who tried to attack Muhammad. To some degree, they also claimed that their military victories, even when outnumbered, were evidence of God’s support.
Muslims claim the Koran itself is a miracle, and evidence sufficient in itself.
“It is all about Islam.”
No. It is not ‘all about Islam’. It is all about separation of church and state. Christianity is not much of a threat to civil society now, because most Christians largely accept the separation of church and state. Many Muslims, and many Jews, do not. That is where the problem lies.
“Until Islam is defeated ideologically, Western Muslims have to be regarded much the way communist sympathisers were regarded during the Cold War.”
Treating Western Muslims this way will make it much harder to defeat fundamentalists.
If Islam is the problem then what is the solution? Convince people not to believe what they believe? That doesn’t make any sense. If they were logical, would they BE Muslims, would they?
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your points, but I don’t see a prescription for dealing with it.
Make it illegal to practice? What, exactly, would you do to bring about its defeat?
Mrs. du Toit,
Islam has a problem. But we can hardly become Islamic scholars and fix it. And they aren’t going to quit being Muslim. That should seem obvious but it’s amazing how many people who have never held a deep religious belief of their own, can’t understand that. So while it’s obvious to you and me, it doesn’t hurt to point it out occasionally.
Our only option is to treat self identified groups as groups.
We did this initially in Afghanistan. And it was the most successful campaign any outside power has had in that territory in modern history.
The political problem with this, is that in a military campaign against a group, we can’t pick and choose who we want to harm, only what we want to harm.
At present, most anti-terrorism Westerners are willing to let Muslims kill each other in great numbers as a side effect of our actions, but are unwilling to take any actions where we might ourselves kill any who do not meet our definition of criminal. Or even harm any infrastructure that might be used by a non-criminal.
That is not how armies work. That’s how police departments work. We are not as yet at war. As long as we go after individuals, we are treating it as a civilian problem and the machine of war is miss-applied. Civilian and military don’t mix. Military should exclude civilians from territory it holds. If we need to hold something, put in the military and make it a hard target. Keep the military out of mixed interactions with civilians. That’s what police are for.
Without having studied it in any philosophical detail, I think the recent Israel action in Lebanon was probably the only way to handle that kind of problem.
It’s time we lay down expectations on groups and hold them accountable as a group. As a practical matter, after assuring that the people in a group have rejected an opportunity to clean their own house, we should probably start by destroying infrastructure that we can easily restore as an incentive for good conduct. We need to escalate in a manner that makes it clear to people the cause is the terrorists in their midst. We must consider deliberately hitting terrorist groups even when they are shielding themselves with civilians.
We need to keep these civilians small armed so they can deal with the bad guys in their midst. Just because there is a lot of firepower and ordinance in these areas, doesn’t mean that the right people are armed. It should be obvious to people on this site, where we so avidly defend our own rights of self defence, that we should extend that right to others before we start hitting them with consequences for things that may be beyond their power to control.
Given the means, they’ll clean their own house in a darn quick hurry once we get serious.
Veryretired – could you please post an anthology of your writings somewhere? I am a huge fan.