There's a little something for everyone in the latest FrontPage Magazine debate on the possibility of reforming Islam, except perhaps for the hard core ritualists of Islam.
While interesting in parts, the discussion doesn't really get anywhere much; but how could any such discussion? If a reformed Islam were possible, it certainly couldn't be anticipated in any serious way in advance. No doubt the safer and stronger arguments, at present, are with those who doubt any great change is possible, than with those yet rather lonely entrepreneurs coming up with their own particular schemes for a new Koran.
But all of this is somehow besides the point, as I see it. It's not for us to ask Muslims whether they can change their political-religious ideology so that it is not such a threat to those of us who get labeled evil kafirs, or worse, by nasty Islamic preachers. No, it is for us to advance the main story, to shape the global conflict according to the demands of our shared modernity, liberal democracy, and personal freedom. It is for us to insist that only those beliefs (and in their proper place or reasonable limits there are many) which are conducive to maintaining the security of a now global human economic community be seriously valued. But this is much more a process of eliminating the publicly unacceptable (e.g. the resentful labeling of people as "kafirs"; or the "politically-correct" leftist denunciation of those who rightly deny a public political role for old-world tribalists and their anachronistic resentments) than trying to predict the full range of what in future will be acceptable to those defending modernity and human freedom.
It is for us to realize what kinds of lived values are necessary to maintaining the global market system (and also sovereign nations), on which the stomachs and reasonable dreams of humanity, in the now deeply interconnected world from which we cannot withdraw (without condemning billions), depend. And once we show the knowledge, will and ability to embody and defend certain values, then we will let those who still see themselves as resentful outsiders, not (yet) satisfactorily initiated into modernity, to decide whether they are going to be the hunted or easily ignored enemies of those within the system, or willing participants in modernity, living up to the obligation to respect and defend the minimal conditions for sharing in our global humanity. There certainly can be no tolerance for those who declare their political-religion to be inherently opposed to modernity and freedom, unless such people are of some marginal cult of consequence only (or largely) to its members.
Only when we consider the speculative question "can Islam change?" of less interest than "how do we embody and defend modernity?" will we know what Muslims, as followers of Islam, can and cannot do in order to adapt to a world in which it is not acceptable to pronounce a jihad against the free individual, no matter what scapegoats one holds up as the "root cause" of terrorism against the freer and leading nations of the world.
While interesting in parts, the discussion doesn't really get anywhere much; but how could any such discussion? If a reformed Islam were possible, it certainly couldn't be anticipated in any serious way in advance. No doubt the safer and stronger arguments, at present, are with those who doubt any great change is possible, than with those yet rather lonely entrepreneurs coming up with their own particular schemes for a new Koran.
But all of this is somehow besides the point, as I see it. It's not for us to ask Muslims whether they can change their political-religious ideology so that it is not such a threat to those of us who get labeled evil kafirs, or worse, by nasty Islamic preachers. No, it is for us to advance the main story, to shape the global conflict according to the demands of our shared modernity, liberal democracy, and personal freedom. It is for us to insist that only those beliefs (and in their proper place or reasonable limits there are many) which are conducive to maintaining the security of a now global human economic community be seriously valued. But this is much more a process of eliminating the publicly unacceptable (e.g. the resentful labeling of people as "kafirs"; or the "politically-correct" leftist denunciation of those who rightly deny a public political role for old-world tribalists and their anachronistic resentments) than trying to predict the full range of what in future will be acceptable to those defending modernity and human freedom.
It is for us to realize what kinds of lived values are necessary to maintaining the global market system (and also sovereign nations), on which the stomachs and reasonable dreams of humanity, in the now deeply interconnected world from which we cannot withdraw (without condemning billions), depend. And once we show the knowledge, will and ability to embody and defend certain values, then we will let those who still see themselves as resentful outsiders, not (yet) satisfactorily initiated into modernity, to decide whether they are going to be the hunted or easily ignored enemies of those within the system, or willing participants in modernity, living up to the obligation to respect and defend the minimal conditions for sharing in our global humanity. There certainly can be no tolerance for those who declare their political-religion to be inherently opposed to modernity and freedom, unless such people are of some marginal cult of consequence only (or largely) to its members.
Only when we consider the speculative question "can Islam change?" of less interest than "how do we embody and defend modernity?" will we know what Muslims, as followers of Islam, can and cannot do in order to adapt to a world in which it is not acceptable to pronounce a jihad against the free individual, no matter what scapegoats one holds up as the "root cause" of terrorism against the freer and leading nations of the world.
See also: Ali Eteraz on Tarek Fatah on why Mohammed didn't conceive a specifically Islamic state.
20 comments:
"It is for us to realize what kinds of lived values are necessary to maintaining the global market system (and also sovereign nations), on which the stomachs and reasonable dreams of humanity, in the now deeply interconnected world from which we cannot withdraw (without condemning billions), depend."
That is what religion does.
One thing that is constant is that all people claim their "values" are the truth.
The root of the problem is that people stop there and are unhappily willing to concede that there are multiple truths.
While the reality of each situation may be different, there is only one truthful answer for each.
Life exists in absolutes. Proof of anything proves that. Shades of grey only exist in the confusion of our minds.
While confusion may be some peoples unfortunate reality, it isn't the truth.
Frankly, I'd love to know how to expose lies without offending liars or further confusing the issue.
If you know the solution, please share it with me. Until that time, the truth must take priority.
Discerning the truth through honesty, intelligence, logic and science isn't terribly difficult, but it does require conviction to achieve.
There are no doubt "many truths", and on a personal level many of these can do a job in keeping a person relatively ordered or balanced. To each his own.
But to say that is a kind of higher truth, one with some anthropological awareness, i hope, of what all religion is for. It is this kind of awareness that becomes more important with modernity.
Not all values are conducive to acknowledging and guaranteeing the personal freedom that is essential to modernity and the global market system. Many people still have totalitarian tendencies. Thus, not all values or religions can be deemed equal or essentially the same. We have to be able to discriminate based on our sense of purpose and history, on our responsibility to maintain the only kind of system (an open one) that can hope to keep a now global and populous humanity alive and from terribly ripping itself apart.
To defend this truth will offend some people. As a general rule, showing is better than telling, when it comes to unveiling a lie. If, after due thought, the truth one is defending is the need to maximize freedom, one does not so much claim "the truth" for oneself as give it the reverence and observation due something greater than any one of us, and thus to deny any one's claim to possess it absolutely.
To do that confidently, one can't be in love with false moral equivalences, which is the great weakness of our age for left-liberal Westerners. Yes, we have to give up our desire to possess the truth, but that's in order better to know it, since it is rooted in the need to maximize human exchange. One should hope to become ever patient and open to the (never final) truth, to its study and exchange (to its ongoing revelation in history), without need of totalizing or relativizing dogmas. But to forego dogmas takes a strong kind of faith, if not a particular form of religion.
Except truth is not a human creation. We merely perceive it. There are many perceptions.
Truth is the stuff that drives evolution for all life on earth, the alternative, extinction.
The internet provides the opportunity to share our perceptions of truth like never before in history.
I think the truth is certainly greater than any one of us. But I would not go on to say that it is not at least partly a human creation.
Whether or not you believe in God, I think it's clear that we humans have some freedom to communally create (through a process of exchange) shared transcendent truths. And in the first place, these (never final) truths have to do with the needs of the human community, not with humanity's relationship to nature.
What is sacred and divine to human beings is something known in culture. We can certainly value nature as sacred, but this process of sacralizing is distinctively human, cultural. I've never seen an animal worrying about the truth.
"But I would not go on to say that it is not at least partly a human creation."
That would be a bold and unproveable claim, similar to the claiming or denying the existence of God.
What would be the benefit from such a claim? Personal corruption?
Suggesting that man creates truth would only inspire conflict with no possible benefit.
rob,
I think you have it backwards.
If I didn't believe discovery/creation of truth were a collective human effort, then why would I bother listening to you or anyone else? Why would I bother to write a word?
I am not out to inspire conflict, but conflict is a fact of human existence. We seek out further truth as a means of deferring present conflicts, recognizing that shared human truth is not anything anyone can own outright, but that it emerges from a common and creative process that we can collectively engage and thus turn from our destructive conflict to more productive forms of competition.
And in this process of sharing in the productive deferral of human conflict, we enter into history and discover a certain degree of truth about ourselves there, a new degree of truth that as far as we know has never existed anywhere in the universe before; e.g., before Shakespeare, where did the distinctively neo-classical truths that he (at least in part) helped to discover exist? Did they exist in classical times? No, not fully. A classical tragedy is different from a Shakespearean one. The latter brings Christian light to bear on classical tragedy. Thus, in synthesizing the classical and the Christian, some new "neoclassical" truth was somehow created by human beings, around Shakespeare's time.
In this sense, we create, just as we discover, truths about our shared humanity, even as it is evident that as creators of human historical truths, we are not the creators of the universe as a whole. In the study of the human, there really is little meaningful distinction between "discovery" and "creation".
The truths that concern us most often are not about nature, e.g. not whether the theory of the big bang is correct or meaningful, but about what it will take to get two warring human parties to agree to engage in more productive activity. And we can only have an answer to this latter kind of question by going forth and creating the new degree of truth that both parties can share in good faith.
If human freedom is not about both creating AND respecting truth, then what is this freedom?
Something for everyone?
I did, in the FP article, notice arguments for sectforming and linguistic hyperforming of islam, but nothing ultimately transformative. (which may have been your point) Honest students shall seek out missing pages as well as missing proofs of logic as they already have. Reformation of islam has already happened.
While, I think your plan to, advance the main story, to shape the global conflict according to the demands of our shared modernity, liberal democracy, and personal freedom, is a welcome, I refuse to be limited in my criticisms. Is it not, for us, to challenge violent ideologies by all fringes, fashions and, foundations?
Your call to allow reform or transformation, whichever will out, to happen without our most direct crtiticsm would be more forceful, if you didn't close with a link to a review of reformist fantasy written by that particular weasel. Shall we have the ridiculous discussion about what the murderous pedophile did "intend," or are we happy enough that a particular weasel's capriciousness is already well established?
Is it not, for us, to challenge violent ideologies by all fringes, fashions and, foundations?
-yes, but when the cult is well isolated it's understandable that it not be everyone's priority.
if you didn't close with a link to a review of reformist fantasy written by that particular weasel.
-do you mean Eteraz or Fatah? I have to admit that while I vaguely know Eteraz has stirred the dust, I don't really know much about him. I just put that link in there to see if anyone would have a go at it. Fire away.
No, I think we just perceive the truth from two different perspectives.
You perceive it as a human creation that requires conflict to determine ownership.
I perceive it as a life force, like the air, that nobody owns but everyone shares.
Because the answer can never be determined, our perceptions of it (like religion) merely drive our personal convictions and intellectual contributions to our social environment.
Claiming that humans create the truth serves no useful purpose for humanity.
I suggest you consider that the most intelligent of us merely perceive truth.
If learning the truth isn't enough compensation for you, you might expect to receive your pieces of silver for perceiving it first...
Truepeers,
I did understand your point to be about subordinating any speculation of liberal transformation of islam to our own embodiment, and defense, of liberal values. I agree with that prioritization. But you did stray into delineation of what is "not for us" to ask. That I did object to.
As your point was about such prioritization, I fail to see why you should want, in closing, to provoke discussion of the subordinated speculation. And to clarify, I know very little about Fatah and wished to know less about Eteraz.
But with my objections noted, and having been encouraged to fire away, this reform fantasy leaves unspoken that Caliphate is not necessary for the implementation of sharia.
Islam came to free humanity from the clutches of the clergy. Instead, the religion of peace has become a prisoner of war, held captive by the very priesthood it came to eliminate. ~ Tarek Fatah
I have made a similar point referring to "prevaricating episcopy," but to the realistic approximation that muslims would then be more reliant on the, oft proven dangerous, source materials of koran and historical accounts of mo'. Fatah's is an argument copied from Western Reformation ("back again" -away from preistly innovations-) of Christianity and mis-applied to the already reformed islam.
Not every jihadist is the Shi'a that he attacks. Would we really rather that true islam be unleashed from the agakhani immamate? The Sunni, the Wahabi, the Salafi are already independently reading, and acting, devotees of a decentral islam. Otherwise who is this preisthood?
You perceive it as a human creation that requires conflict to determine ownership.
-not exactly; the truth transcends humanity, in the sense that God does.
But humans have been granted/have discovered freedom and they use it to create/discover truths about themselves that give them, over time, greater understanding of the infinite, though of course by its very nature this understanding is never complete.
Our conflict does not determine ownership of what cannot be owned (truth) because the truth transcends any one of us. Over time, humanity creates more and more language and culture, i.e. more and more transcendent understandings of an infinite truth that are both immaterial, that no one owns. But it's true that in the process of deferring our conflict, there has to be something material at stake, something that the parties can divide up and consume; we remain animals with natural appetites after all; but that material element, that question of ownership, is hardly the whole of "the matter" at stake, for our conflict is ultimately about the immaterial, about the terms by which we will understand the truth of our desire for transcendence, the desire that transcends mere appetite.
As for your wording "human creation that requires conflict..." This suggests that humans actively will conflict in order to get at the truth. That's not what I am saying. I'm saying that it is our fate, whether we want it or not, to be in conflict with our fellow humans. The basis of this conflict - our mimetic capacities that make it impossible for us to be ordered like animals in some kind of stable pecking order - is something we did not create. I do not require conflict. Conflict is just a fact, a fundamental datum for any student of humanity to respect.
To deny that conflict will always be a part of our humanity is to live in Utopian fantasy, which is not the best place for a serious student of the human to be. It is to live with a very incomplete understanding of the truth, for your own religious reasons.
Claiming that humans create the truth serves no useful purpose for humanity.
-Well I never said humans create the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They discover/create human truths by being in conversation with the infinite truth: God.
To say this might be considered a secular way of expressing Judeo-Christian understandings of our partnership with God, our gift of freedom. And for you to say that these J-C understandings, and their secular equivalents, serve no useful purpose for humanity is a gross denial of history, a denial of all that people with Judeo-Christian understandings of God-given human freedom have achieved for our shared humanity.
maccus,
But you did stray into delineation of what is "not for us" to ask. That I did object to.
-fair enough; what I was trying to suggest was a sense of political and intellectual priorities. Of course I am not saying there should be forbidden questions, just that some questions are likely to capture us in quick sands from which we will be long in escaping, with little to show for the struggle.
-What Muslims and infidels need right now are unprecedented learning experiences, coming from the novel defense and evolution of liberal modernity, experiences that one way or another will change us all, in recognition of the realities of our global humanity and of what is necessary to keep the (more or less free) market system of free individuals from falling apart, this system on which most of our lives now depend.
Otherwise who is this preisthood?
-Fair question. But if one holds the view that the Islamic world has not yet readily distinguished religion and poltiics, then isn't every politician in some sense a priest? And aren't most members of the Ulema - however much the young and the radicals no longer pay themm much attention - in a country like Egypt still trying to be a politician, some of the time?
this reform fantasy leaves unspoken that Caliphate is not necessary for the implementation of sharia.
-well maybe you don't need a Caliphate, but don't you then need something like the Taleban or the current Iranian regime, or a dhimmi British government? I don't see how Sharia can exist, in any consistent sense, without a political power both to enforce it, and to deny the construction or application of any alternative, more secular, law that does not rely on Sharia first principles.
muslims would then be more reliant on the, oft proven dangerous, source materials of koran and historical accounts of mo'. Fatah's is an argument copied from Western Reformation ("back again" -away from preistly innovations-) of Christianity and mis-applied to the already reformed islam.
-well, the danger is real enough; but maybe it is just that that needs to be faced and felt by many Muslims before they can become more sure of the need to distinguish religion and politics. Maybe we need to make more painfully clear to all the hot heads in the chat rooms of the radical Islamic world the consequences of believing in violent Jihad.
-as for Fatah being a mimic of Western reformation, perhaps, but that is not the whole of the matter. In a more general sense, anyone who is concerned about his stake in any human system cannot but feel, when conflict over that stake arises, that there is a yet better or stronger way for him to understand and re-articulate that stake, unless he gives up. A need to return to the origin and re-articulate it is not simply a Western need, but a universal human one. And if people are truly sincere about returning to that origin to discover new things there, or to refine away misunderstandings that have arisen, then we cannot know in advance what they can and cannot achieve.
But, in general, in order to defend their stake amidst conflict over it, they will either a) have to become more powerful and slay their opponent; b) find some way to increase the freedom in the system, so that both they and their opponent can be reasonably happy to divide the objects in conflict, to both share in some greater freedom.
If Muslims continually have to face the reality that non-Muslims will defend themselves and have the culture, spirit, faith, and technology to do a good job of it, then more and more people who don't want to die or live in hell will be inclined to explore the possibilities of option b, or so I hope. In any case, choosing a also requires you to change, because those who desire more power have to be creative to get it.
But as for my own understandings of priesthood, they would lead me to formulate the issue somewhat differently. I don't think priests are such a bad thing in their proper place - religion, largely walled off from worldly politics. Or to put this another way, democratic politics should be conceived as the realization of a universal priesthood.
In other words, I'd argue that priests are an inescapable fact of life, if a "priest" is understood to be simply a performer of any ritual. Humans are never going to give up being ritualistic beings and so we are never going to give up being "priests", at least part-time ones, though you or I may choose to use a different word for, say, the consultant-leader of a business manager motivational seminar.
But since in the modern West we are all in some sense priests, it may not be such a bad thing to retain the legacy of more traditional priests, in their proper place, church. It may require certain institutions, like the church, to preserve memories and understandings of ourselves that we have discovered in the past and which the universal priesthood always risks forgetting.
If everyone thinks himself a preist, then there is no discernable preisthood. Mo's model is political whether, to whom, of if he intended that political power devovle. Those that submit themselves to the will of an "allah" as revealed by the actions and words of the murderous pedophile will be political and violent, whether a Caliphate does exist or not.
Do not Christian principles exist outside of any church styling itself orthodox or catholic? Can you submit an earthly supervising authority that would make the schisms seen by insiders look like unity to outsiders? Could a simular authority, if identified, explain why both the Shi'a episcopy and Sunni tradition are in chilling unity in regards to infidels? Whether muslims call their texts, "most normative tradition," or "sola scriptura" it will say the same thing, to the largely the same effect.
Mo's model is political whether, to whom, [or] if he intended that political power devovle.
Whether muslims call their texts, "most normative tradition," or "sola scriptura" [said text] will say the same thing, [and have] largely the same effect.
Perhaps, that is more clear.
Maccus,
I could quibble with your implying here that Islam is mostly all about politics and the infidel; i could point out that there must be many Muslims, living in Muslim societies, for whom there is nothing holy about their political (or religious) leaders and whose religion is thus more focussed on God, no matter how much the powers that be will always like scapegoating the infidel for all the people's woes and demanding everyone share in the hate, because it says so in the Koran.
But it would only be a little quibble. I accept as a fact of life that we non-Muslims will always be susceptible to scapegoating from Muslims, just as they (to a lesser extent) have reason to fear that we will unite against them. We should accept this and then ask what are the kinds of national and inter-national politics that we need to encourage or fight for, in order to best mediate this hard reality, to avoid nuclear war and the like. Is there any hope for the world if we don't continually pressure tyrannical societies to become more free and transparent?
Ultimately I can't go very far in trying to sum up the importance of various competing loyalties in the Islamic world. I have my (hopefully intelligent) impressions; but as i say i don't see how it does our side any good to be focussed largely on trying passively to define the final world on Islam, without doing anything to change it. I think we need to learn more about it (learning should never be closed, on any subject, because closure is to deny the fundamental human reality that any human order must continually be working to re-present itself, or it will die) according to tests we help set for it, tests for the loyalties of individual Muslims, that will bring to light the hard choices all must make between traditional and modern forms of human society. And let us not doubt that many Muslims live uncomfortably with one foot in both, and will hide from the choice until they can't.
Once we know there is a potential for great danger in Islam's resistance to modernity, that's the key thing we need to know. And I think we in the West are now widely starting to know this, thanks to the arguments that people like you are advancing.
After this, what we need to be doing is devising tests, real world political and cultural pressures, that will provide us with real time information on what we can achieve in terms of advancing the cause of freedom. We need to find out what Muslims really believe when the choice is, say, medicine for your baby, or Islam as the likes of a bin laden wants it.
Ultimately, I am not primarily interested in what the Koran says, I am ultimately interested in what people really believe, when push comes to shove: do they choose freedom or slavery, traditional society or modernity, cousin marriage or out marriage, Madrassah or molecular biology, Israel or Hamas, Saddam or Bush, Taleban or American allies.
Now I know these choices cannot be made once and for all. I know each little test will have to hedge on the answer. But that's ok if I have faith in an ongoing learning experience, if I believe in a reality that transcends any ideology, i.e. if i believe in the inescapable need for all societies to become more free or die.
Want to come to America? Well, show that you will help us fight our enemies in the Islamic world first... show us what kind of committment you have to separating mosque and state.
Look, I am willing to listen to arguments that the only rational thing we can do is build a wall around the Islamic world, if one can make a plausible argument that it is possible to sustain such separation without it being a disaster, without having to massively re-engineer a modern world where global inter-dependence is now a fact of life, without having to fear the consequences that the resentment a wall will engender will not be worse than the resentment and danger we face today.
I'm even willing to listen to arguments that we now have to go on the defensive and fortress New Zealand, because we are destined to lose in Europe and America.
But among those "quarantine" proposals I've read, I've not yet seen any good arguments for the viability of walling and just trying to leave the Muslims alone. I think we're stuck with them; collectively (as a global political and existential fact) they're a potential danger to us, whether we try to welcome them to integrate with us, or declare them our eternal enemies.
So, the only real discussion is how to mitigate this danger, how to create an agenda for freedom and ask all people, including Muslims, to see more clearly what is at stake, to see more clearly the potential (deadly for both sides) consequences for encouraging resentment of modernity and the global economy. We need to find ways to divide societies whose leaders want to make our existence the focus of their resentful cries to group loyalty, and ask people in tyrannical societies to take sides against tyrants (most people being usually cowed and unwilling to make hard choices until a competing pressure comes unavoidably on scene).
We need to get going in embodying and defending what we need to become if we are to advance human civilization as a shared global reality in which we can't all be the same, in which national and regional differences have to be respected, but in which large demographic realities cannot safely be committed to wildly different visions of the human good.
There's a human agenda for defenders of freedom to advance, and it is ultimately for Muslims, not for us, to decide what they and "islam" will become in relation to it. But in the process of learning, in real time, that will unfold if we get serious about playing our part in incorporating and defending modernity, all kinds of new understandings are possible for those with whom we interact. People are human before they belong to any ideology. There is something we share that transcends any religion or politics. Most people, even most Muslims, will admit this I believe when push comes to shove. Why? Because our shared human reality is greater than any fantasy ideology however well knit and holy textually founded.
Could you even say whatever it is you want to say without implying that you didn't say it? I suppose, with the wind blowing in the right direction, in certian phases of the moon, that I could "quibble" about how "focused" you actually assume those "submitters" who do not submit. Are they "submitted" to the same allah as mo'?
I could further "quibble" with your insistence that islam is political, not by the model of mo', the koran, and near 1400 years of tradition, but only by my implication.
I accept that many that say they submit have never done so thoughtfully and willingly. They are, in their confused state, largely as peaceful as you suggest, and I'll not spoil their comfortable hypocracy by suggesting that they devote themselves to a morally bankrupt tradition. Despite policies, the best mediation of the looming conflict is apostacy. If one has never submitted, then their is no need to submit, to myself nor that murderous pedophile. If nominal muslims want our freedoms and access to our wisdoms, then they should read our books, not theirs.
Where have I ever argued that, the only rational thing we can do is build a wall around the Islamic world? Look.
Only, I think that if we don't want a wall then we should steer labourers away from the brick and mortor of koran and tradition.
Neither do I think we need go on defensive. Actions have ideological underpinnings. Someone, possibly long ago, thought an action a good idea, before he and subsequent seeing monkeys did it. We have the best ideas. We can't be afraid to say so. Even the hypocracy that you prototype for the hip munafiq is preferable to most of what they've come up with on their own.
And in our dissenting opinions, I think we do embody Western values of debate. What I think most dangerous about your division of... societies whose leaders want to make our existence the focus of their resentful cries to group loyalty is the possible conflation of resentful cries with those of honest conviction. Shall anyone that knows what islam is, be shunned, regardless if they adhere or not? Shall Ibn Warraq and Osama Bin Laden get the same rough treatment from an alliance of hypocrits?
I know you haven't advocated for a wall; I just threw that in as a rhetorical tack: if not "reform", then what?
I agree with you that apostasy should be held up as an option and that apostates and converts must be defended. It's just that i don't believe in a one key fits all doors approach. History has to be messier than that. And I can't imagine entire Muslim societies throwing off Islam in some final fit. History keeps teaching me that revolutions never work, that societies can only really change by evolving. If you just declare the ancien regime dead, you leave the people devoid of any cultural resources to mediate their differences and conflicts. And they just devolve into new kinds of tyranny, the kind of conditions that would be ripe for the return of fundamentalism.
I certainly don't want to shun Ibn Warraq. The individual's freedom is what I will always defend. But if in making a defense of individual freedom our highest value, we run into apostates making fun of those who cling to "Islam" as their private religion, and trying to shout these religionists down as hypocrites, then i might intervene and say that this is not productive but rather simply encouraging a dangerous polarization that might lead us back to darker times.
When you attack my hypocrisy, I don't think you are attacking my fundamental truth claims - fact is, I don't recommend Islam to anyone - but rather that pragmatic part of me that grows from the recognition that I can't grasp the whole of reality in my little mind and that people have to find their own ways forward, however irrational and perverse they seem to logic. In my politics, what they must bow to is the need for order and individual freedom. And if in doing so they are well served by whatever silly religious ideas they hold, like Mormons or Masons going to temple rituals, then so be it. The primitive can have a useful role in modern society, if it is made the affair of private religion, if it disciplines the individual and helps him avoid the perils of all-consuming consumer society and helps him survive the great competitions to succeed in productive arenas. Muslims still have children. The "great" minds in our universities have few. We have something to learn from that.
It's just that i don't believe in a one key fits all doors approach.
Who said anything about a key, or a door? I am in favor of bringing the house of islam down. Apostacy is an individual revolution. Do you deny that such individual revolutions do work? Or that societies are made of something other than individuals, that choose to submit ot not?
And how could one ever conflate islam with culture? If revolutions do in fact never work, then why shouldn't mohamhead's revolution finally die? Arab and other cultures did exist before islam. Why wouldn't they exist after? Why assume that mass apostacy would "leave the people devoid of any cultural resources to mediate their differences and conflicts?" Most of what good infidel lovin' munafiq would now call islam, simply isn't. Why shouldn't they keep what isn't islam?
When you attack my hypocrisy, I don't think you are attacking my fundamental truth claims
...yeah, that's kind of my point. Neither, when calling those submitters, who don't submit, munafiq am I attacking their fundamental humanity. I do attempt to polarize, them and their false identity.
Mormons and Masons both haven't the same history of islam. Though I would put Smith, Sinclair, Hubbard, and Mohamhead all behind Cagliostro in creativity of religious scams, mo' is clearly the most violent of all listed. There are "silly ideas" and then those "silly ideas" that shall get us all killed.
Do you deny that such individual revolutions do work? Or that societies are made of something other than individuals, that choose to submit ot not?
- I tend to agree with you; i just think, in the long term of history, that one route to apostasy for many will be through "reformed" Islam. That's why I like to speak of many keys for many doors. i just don't think attempts to polarize are always pragmatically useful.
On the larger question, what are societies made of? well they are made more or less simultaneously - in the unfolding of a single event - from acts of individual differentiation and collective affirmation of what the individual has discovered. Inherent in society is a process of institutionalization that tends to forget its moment of origin in individualistic differentiations (because how do we know an individual has made a real difference until and if others recognize and "copy" it?).
To champion the individual today is to encourage a return of our thought to the origins of the creative process, one that we will always tend to forget in our copying, at the risk to our necessary if never well understood freedom. And yet the individual who doesn't keep in mind that he is only an individual within a larger market for shared and exchanged understandings of what we should hold sacred will not be too successful.
The more primitive human societies don't look individualistic at all. They must have relied on individual acts of subtle differentiation in the evolution of their sign systems, but the greater reality as it is known to consciousness is that all must obey the shared myth and ritual; the most primitive societies are very equalitarian (i.e. no banking or ownshership of wealth) and one tends to play a well-tread and ritualized life role. Part of our struggle with Muslims is to get them beyond that world view to a larger consciousness of our fundamental humanity and the necessity of individuals within it. And part of that may entail some serious inquiry into the nature of the individual and revelation of Mohammed. Returning to that origin need not bring everyone back to fundamentalism, as we usually conceive fundamentalism.
If revolutions do in fact never work, then why shouldn't mohamhead's revolution finally die?
-well, I'm not going to try to draw the line, once and for all, between an evolutionary process with eventful ruptures, and full blown modern "revolutions" of the French and Russian variety that were really a return to inferior forms of tyranny, it seems to me (though one cannot deny elements of real progress accompanied more systematic failures). It seems to me that Mohammed did a lot to bring a tribal culture into the domain of monotheism, not to reject that tribal past. And given that I think his monotheism isn't very good, in some ways a poor copy, a heresy of what already existed among Jews and Christians, I am again inclined less to call it "revolutionary" as another failed revolution (the word really means a circling back). In a sense, our enemy is still as much a fierce tribalism as it is the "Islam" in which that tribalism represents part of itself as a universalizing project. No doubt his "revolution" or its carriers will die off sooner or later. Nothing lasts forever.
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