ColumnistRather than dance around the issue or pad what I’m going to say, I decided to just come out and say what has been on my mind this summer. More than American unilateralism, more than the semi-insane behavior of the ruler of North Korea, or any other unstable, well-armed dictatorships around the world (often backed up by the U.S., to its shame) or anything else, the great threat to the world is to be found in the Muslim world. No, I’m not trotting out the half-baked “Muslims are all terrorists” argument. This is hardly the case. But I am saying that Islamism (the turning of Islam into an all-encompassing ideology) thrives in part because mainstream Muslims and others refuse to condemn it outright, as they should, and the world should be concerned.
When a group of young Muslims set off a number of bombs in London this past summer, many people hurriedly set about jumping through scholarly hoops to de-emphasize the connection between these terrorists and certain rabidly militant mosques in England. These mosques have been preaching the need for Muslims to re-establish—by force—a theocratic Islamic Caliphate. To be clear: these people advocate a violent re-establishment of a medieval theocracy at the point of a sword, body counts be damned. Surprisingly, these men have had a number of apologists lately. According to many sources, often Muslim (I’ll let you guess what side of the political aisle they sit), these young terrorists felt compelled to blow innocent civilians to bits because of limited economic and social mobility for Muslims in Great Britain.
Excuse me for saying this, but my response to a Muslim complaining of limited opportunity for minorities in the United Kingdom would be: get in line. Jamaicans, Indians, and a host of other groups living in Britain today suffer just as much as the Muslims, and they manage to deal with their problems without resorting to high explosives. Why are excuses being made for these Islamist bombers?
Why are so many Muslims (and their apologists) so eager to make excuses for Islamist thugs? Far too often, responses from that community have been busy equivocating and emphasizing how victimized Muslims are worldwide. Once again, Africans, Asians, and a host of other oppressed groups have a right to be outraged. Yes, the Arab-Muslim world has been colonized by Europeans, but far less so than most of the rest of the world. Oppression does not have to lead to fanatical, theocratically tinged terrorism. If so, Angolans would have buried Lisbon, Portugal long ago. When rioting broke out in Afghanistan in response to allegations that the U.S. military defaced a Koran in prisoner interrogations, many commentators focused on the impropriety of the American military. Not nearly enough people asked why it is OK to riot if you’re Muslim and you get offended. After Sept. 11, a bunch of rednecks in a Chicago suburb attacked a group of Sikhs, who they ignorantly mistook for Arab Muslims. To my knowledge, nobody attempted to defend the racist mob as reacting to social and economic conditions.
Enough is enough. It is up to Muslim intellectuals and ordinary members of the Muslim world community to take a firm stance against the hijacking of their faith. If Muslims of the world stopped complaining about stereotyping and instead stood up and said loudly “we are not supporting those Islamists” instead of “well, they’re just upset, because after all, they are victims of American-Israeli oppression and lack economic opportunity,” then perhaps terrorists—who are counting on outside support—would not be nearly as active.
Islam is currently not dealing with the Islamist terrorist problem in a responsible way. To claim there is an active, organized, and influential progressive Muslim movement dealing with Islamism is like saying that the United States has a strong socialist party. Al Queda, Hamas, and their ilk cannot be dealt with by external governments, no matter how many planeloads of bombs America drops. What is needed is social change within the Muslim world, possibly funded and even protected by outside militaries.
Is Islam inherently violent? Of course not. Religion is a body of ideas, and ideas change over time. To say that “to be Muslim is to be a terrorist” is just as stupid as saying that “to be Christian means you are sexist.” Most people of both religions are unfortunately complacent and apologetic on behalf of their faiths, and it is that apologia that leaves room for Islamic maneuvering.
Some people reading this will, in true Bill O’Reilly fashion, misinterpret this article as somehow pro-Bush, pro-war, pro-imperialist, or anti-Muslim. They will suggest that my criticism of Muslim apologia for Islamist violence is somehow hate-driven. But to do this is perhaps the most anti-Muslim thing someone could do. Are we saying that Muslims don’t know any better? That they can’t think of a better response to their own domestic issues than to blow up civilians in far away places? I think, and hope, that they can do better. For the sake of everyone.
Posted by Neal F. '78
Mr. Saxine mistates the problem as one involving a few bad apples who have hijacked a religion. The evidence for that proposition is entirely lacking.
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The problem here is that the Islamists address Muslims in the traditional language of Islam, using traditional arguments for violence against infidel. Islam is an evangelical religion which permits the use of violence to spread itself politically. Which is why the ordinary Muslims are unable to address the arguments presented by the Islamists.
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Mr. Olliff assumes, wrongly, that the Islamists are a mere reactive force. Such view is contradicted by the record. The Islamists seek to re-establish the Caliphate. Why? Because the Caliphate was traditionally the source of political power for Islam. That, not the Americans and the Israelis, is what drives Islamists. The Americans and the Israelis, among others, are merely in the way. Also, the Islamists seek to spread the region of the world under Muslim rule and Muslim law. Why? Because Islam is evangelical.
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Missing from Mr. Olliff's litany of woe is a list of attrocities committed by the Islamists. One should begin with Sudan, where in a declared Jihad, 2 million Christian and animist Sudanese died, in massacres and from intenationally created famines, hundreds of thousands were sold into slavery (including into the Gulf states) and 4 million people were displaced from their homes, children were forced to convert to Islam (by means of food deprivation). Such actions had the support of the Islamist movement in the Middle East and the Gulf region.
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Without belittling America or Israel's sins, what the US is accused of doing in Iraq and the Israelis are accused of doing in Israel are, by the standards of the Islamist Jihadis - and think Sudan and Kashmir, among other places -, trivial transgressions. And the Israelis have, contrary to what Mr. Olliff has written, worked responsibly to defend themselves in reply to a campaign of terror directed almost exclusively at civilians. There is no nice way to respond to illegitimate war tactics such as those used against Israel.
Posted on September 22, 2005 07:39 PM
Posted by Dennis sinneD
Hello Neal -
I think it' great that alumnaue continue to engage discussion on-campus, and I hope Neal continues to participate. That being said, I wish to comment on a couple of items here, and an echo of Neal's comments in the past that bear on this particular issue.
The problem with this discussion is that it involves piling through the disparity between dogma and political reality, in which there is often a wide gulf. Neal has commented somewhere else that one problem in this crisis is Islamists living in a religious domain that has been largely left behind by the rest of the world (which I presume to actually mean the West).
However, to borrow words from Neal, that proposition is entirely lacking. The idea that the United States lacks an influential religious sphere, while not technically a theocracy but nevertheless functioning with some parity to it, is absolutely without merit. US government is one currently filled with Christian evangelicals (Christianity being an evangelical religion), it has a significantly complex matrix of faith-based initiatives through which substantial American dollars are funneled through, and both the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice have been headed, if not currently so, by evangelicals who have not hesitated to articulate their policies in the vernacular of religion, Neal should more elaborately defend this argument, as lacking evidence, is at is articulated here lacking all qualification.
Furthermore, conflating evangelism with violence is problematic. Islam being inherently evangelical speaking to any innate violence would also have to follow for Christianity, the major influence in a society determined by multitudinous social theorists to be the most religious in the Western world, if not THE world.
Neal is on firmer ground if he actually quotes religious dogma to justify his statements about Islam allowing for violence as an effective proselytizing tool. Quoting the Qur'an will not suffice, because there is also significant hadith to plow through, as well as the multitude of fatwas existent that debate the issue from every possible angle. Even if he succeeds, he will have to contend with Christianity, which while violence is not explicitly enjoined in the Evangel, finds signficant precedent in the myriad of religious rulings and literature that, for many influential Christians, are as sacrosanct and authoritative as the Evangel. Neal conflates dogma with political reality when it fits, and distinguishes between them when it doesn't, and that does violence to the reality of the situation. Lacking explicit injunction to violence does not in of itself remove the inherently violent nature of American Christianity.
It is possible that Neal may be distinguishing between Islam and Islamism, which may help his arguments, but the distinction is dubious and violently attacked by religious scholars of all dogmatic stripes. Rather, the tenor of his comments leads me to believe that Neal is actually speaking about Islam and not so-called "Islamism," and that opens up all kinds of problems on its own that I am loathe to comment on until Neal clarifies his remarks.
Posted on October 7, 2005 10:36 AM
Posted by Neal '78
Dennis, I wrote you a long email letter which you are free to place on line, if that suits you. Here is the short version.
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To understand evangelicalism in Islam and the use of violence to support that evangelism, a person learns very little by studying Christianity and then claiming all religions use violence and thus are the same in that regard. Islam has its own doctrine, central to the faith, which is rather different than the Christian doctrine and which has played out in different ways, historically speaking, than evangelical violence in Christianity. That does not make one religion better or worse; only different.
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Whether or not the US is or is not religious in some fundamental sense tells me (or anyone else) about the US, not about the Muslim regions. Even if the US were the most religious nation on Earth in the midst of a religious revival or home to 285 million atheists dedicated to Christianity's demise, the Muslim regions would still be whatever they are. Islam, which is self-described as a "way of life" and not merely a religion, is and remains a totality.
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I think that most Muslims in the Muslim regions are accurately described as being highly religious and that the process of secularization has not much affected those regions. With that all in mind, I think it appropriate to claim that much of Muslim regions is akin, for purposes of developing a very, very crude working descriptive model, to Medieval Europe. I believe the evidence supports my view.
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I reiterate what I already said. One problem facing the world is that the Islamists address Muslims in the traditional language of Islam, using traditional arguments for violence against infidel. Islam is an evangelical religion which permits the use of violence to spread itself politically. Which is why the ordinary Muslims are unable to address the arguments presented by the Islamists.
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Your argument that I should justify what I said about Islam allowing violence in connection with evangelical activity by arguing about particular ayas and sura in the Qu'ran or particular ahaditha is, to me, an erroneous argument. Religions have dogma or theology or the like. Islam is no exception. It is the dogma, not this or that quote, which is decisive as the dogma expresses how the Qu'ran and ahaditha are interpretted.
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The Jihad doctrine, allowing the use of violence to spread Muslim rule under Islamic law, is well established based on Muslim, not Western, interpretations of the Islamic texts. And non-Muslims are more than capable of discerning doctrines well established in Islam over the course of millennia.
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Such doctrines have had substantial impact on the history of the Muslim regions. To deny that such is the case amounts to denying the immaculate conception doctrine is a doctrine of importance to Christianity.
Posted on October 20, 2005 05:26 PM