For the moment, let's look at a Muslim who cut off his wife's head. Mark Steyn has a few moments of clarity to shed on this bloody event:
Look at the late Aasiya Hassan, beautifully coiffed, glossy-lipped. On countless occasions since 9/11, I've found myself at lunch or dinner in New York, London, Washington, Paris or some other western city, sitting next to a modern Muslim woman like Mrs Hassan telling me how horrified she is at how hijabs and burqas, honor killings and genital mutilation, forced cousin marriages and the disproportionate number of Muslim wives in European battered women's shelters, how all these have come to define Muslim womanhood in the 21st century. Yet Aasiya Hassan ended up no differently - all because her husband's TV network had a cashflow problem?
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/024863.php
Islam has been around for roughly 1,400 years as a system of rule. That, in some way, shows it has potency. In some way it obviously "works" for a massive number of people over many centuries. There's something significantly "right" about it or it wouldn't have survived, as Truepeers points out often. The same can be said of Hunter/Gatherer societies; and even moreso about dinosaurs. One man cutting off his wife's head isn't anything at all in the vastness of history. Beheading every woman over the age of 40 is no big thing in the larger scheme of things. Life would go on. The problem is one of morality. And who, really, is to decide such a cosmic question once for all?
If Islam works, who are we to say anything about it? Perchance, in the fullness of time, Muslims will gradually reform themselves into something more akin to "non-wife beheaders." Yes, like anything, we'll find back-sliders here and there, the occasional Muslim who cuts off his wife's head; but what the hey? If we don't give moderate men a chance to settle into life as easy-going guys without the pressure of having to conform to laws we make, they might feel the pressure too much, and they might behead their wives all the more often. Let's forget Islam and chat about money and other universals. That Islam itself is based on war, slavery, and rape, pillage and murder? Well, let's find some nice middle-class people and chat. Jihad? It's a bridge we can cross when we come to it. Yeah. We can talk about it, as Theo van Gogh said
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O ye Islam critics, praise be, give us a strategy, a narrative to follow.
"If we back... into a corner... claim is an evil ideology" is not much of a strategy or a narrative to follow and to grow.
As for sarcasm about the morality of killing women, well that is not really an open question for anyone with whom we would fight, is it?
The question for me is this: in overcoming the false dichotomy between talk and action, in formulating a truly useful narrative and strategy, do we need to argue endlessly over the correct understanding of Islam, in a desire to deny the existence of moderates, radicals or what have you, or are we best served by simply being pragmatic: e.g., making clear we will have no truck with men who abuse women, preach a political Jihad, deny freedom of speech, etc. etc., and fight accordingly the many little battles in our struggle for freedom, building a narrative according to a strategy as we go along.
There's something significantly "right" about it or it wouldn't have survived, as Truepeers points out often. The same can be said of Hunter/Gatherer societies
-what I believe is that history is in large part a story about the creation of order but that order can only be created - the erosion of order in the previous system can only be addressed - by expanding the degrees of freedom within the system. This is because order is not independent of human resentment and the need to mediate this, a mediation that has and will continue to have in future a tendency towards allowing - because there is no other way to mediate resentment - greater freedom in human societies. Compared to pagan tribal societies, Islam grows because it does allow for some greater degrees of freedom over its forebears. But much about it today is clearly incompatible with modernity. It must face this challenge and change or die.
As for us, we need to avoid the trap of thinking that our own resentment of Islam can somehow guarantee the rightness of our position. No, the only thing that can guarantee our rightness is having a strategy that, for all the pragmatic and higher reasons, works.
Talk is cheap, unless it's moving others in the right direction.
Talk is cheap, unless it's moving others in the right direction.
I would suggest that for Aasiya Hassan or Theo Van Gogh the right direction would be away from knife weilding "misunderstanders of islam." The most pragmatic advice being simply, DUCK!. for here it comes again. I really don't think the munafiq are as surprised by these events as are those westerners that still persist in believing in a moderate islam. Why should we feign ignorance, when our, however unwelcome, critique could lead lip-stick muslima to take precautions from loosing their heads? Perhaps she'd still be alive if only they had AFLAC?
I see very little evidence that many people like freedom and individualism. Instead, I see much evidence that they hate and fear freedom, not just their own but freedom generally. When the Germans were freed of Nazism, half of them became Communists and the other half became group-think nihilists, with the obvious exceptions. When the Communists were cast down, the Germans returned to tribalism and local hatreds. Few people like freedom. It's unnatural and new and alien to Humanness. The usual state of Man is slavery and fear of others. It's only we in the Western Modernity who have freedom, a small minority among us, who fight by force against the primitives, and even many of our own hate that freedom and wish to destroy it.
Islam is successful because it speaks to the primitive in Man, the most vile and usual of Man. It's ordinary. We surpass it only by violence and destruction of the institutions of Islam, of the people who resist, of the customs it perpetuates; but we won't wipe out the hatred of freedom even if we destroy every last Muslim on Earth. We are stuck with the love of slavery eternally. People generally like order, and the more restricted and absolute, the better they like it. People generally hate freedom.
Freedom comes at the point of the sword, and that is how its maintained and spread. Otherwise, there would be no Muslims. They'd all be free. They love slavery. That's the nature of things. We fight with it. If we don't, they'll still fight among themselves to dominate and enslave others, for a while till they are enslaved by others eternally onward. There is democracy at gunpoint or there is slavery at gunpoint. Those are our choices.
The most pragmatic advice being simply, DUCK!. for here it comes again. I really don't think the munafiq are as surprised by these events as are those westerners that still persist in believing in a moderate islam. Why should we feign ignorance, when our, however unwelcome, critique could lead lip-stick muslima to take precautions from loosing their heads? Perhaps she'd still be alive if only they had AFLAC?
-I'm not offering an either/or proposition. Of course our/your critique might save someone's life. But how do we build on this and go further... how many more lives can we save?
If "duck" is your most pragmatic advice, it is not likely to help in many circumstances and so is not always pragmatic. There are all kinds of people who today have to interact with Muslims, whether on the frontlines of the GWOT, at work, in the neighborhood, at school. What is pragmatic for these people, people who may lose something important if they don't interact with Muslims and yet who fear they are taking a risk in putting a certain degree of faith or trust in representatives of Islam, is to find out more of what the people with whom they are interacting really believe. And if our only knowledge of that comes from the Koran or Hadith, we are not nearly as well positioned as we could be to know the reality that is in front of us. Is al Qaeda really prepared to nuke New York? And how many ordinary Muslims will help them do that, or actively work to stop them? You can only find out by going to war, to engage people in all kinds of ways, with various consequences at stake, and thus begin gathering intelligence. There is a similar need for finding new ways to measure our present reality in countless areas. For example, how many Muslims will turn on and reveal the wife beaters or the polygamists if there are positive and negative consequences put in play by Western nations willing to engage? As of yet, we simply don't know. We don't know what many ordinary "Muslims" really believe.
As bloggers, I think it would be useful if we started raising such questions and exploring reality in ways that will allow for new narratives focussed on such practical and pragmatic questions to emerge. Clearly, there are not yet many other people out there with courage or imagination in taking the lead. And people don't seem to be greatly moved by arguments of the type, "it's in the Koran, therefore..." Mo' next door is illiterate, for starters... and people want to know what he really believes, not only what's in the Koran which may be a very rough approximation of what he believes
I see very little evidence that many people like freedom and individualism. Instead, I see much evidence that they hate and fear freedom, not just their own but freedom generally. When the Germans were freed of Nazism, half of them became Communists and the other half became group-think nihilists, with the obvious exceptions. When the Communists were cast down, the Germans returned to tribalism and local hatreds. Few people like freedom. It's unnatural and new and alien to Humanness. The usual state of Man is slavery and fear of others. It's only we in the Western Modernity who have freedom, a small minority among us, who fight by force against the primitives, and even many of our own hate that freedom and wish to destroy it.
-Man, you talk about freedom as if it's an either/or, you either want it or you don't. But to put it in those abstract metaphysical terms is to evacuate all possibility of grappling seriously with reality. And to say freedom is unnatural and alien to humanness is nonsense. If that were true, how come you have come to love freedom: were you lucky enough to breath in some special space dust when most people or nations missed out? Freedom is something uniquely human; animals don't have it. And clearly all humans have it *To Some Degree*.
Now obviously people can have varying appetites for freedom, or more precisely for risk and uncertainty. There are actually few people who will say they don't want more freedom; though there are many who don't want to take the risk or live with the doubts. The reason why things like Communism appeal to people is not because they believe it to be slavery but because they go into it believing they are escaping "wage slavery" or feudalism, or what have you. Communism collapsed because the people who lived under it discovered they didn't like it, or when they found out it didn't really exist.
And to say Germans today have simply descended into tribalism is just another way of escaping the hard work of trying to find out what Germans actually believe. Germany is the world's leading exporter. Clearly they know something about individual freedom or they could not have that kind of economic success.
There is a basic paradox in free market societies: they maximize freedom, when they do, by closing certain doors. To take an extreme example: the Hells Angels gain freedoms (via wealth) for themselves by organizing their economic lives according to a gangster code of conduct that is very rigid. Mormons gain freedom for themselves and their families - thanks to economic success - by regulating themselves according to a strict ritual code. Conversely, there are people who think themselves freedom lovers but who, in never closing off certain doors that would provide them with a necessary discipline to succeed in a free market world, actually end up with limited freedom. If Germans argue that the welfare state is not a drag on freedom but a necessary safety net that actually maximizes individual freedom, the only serious argument is not in the abstract but on the question of whether they have the right amount of state intervention: too much will destroy freedoms, but too little may well do so also.
People generally like order, and the more restricted and absolute, the better they like it. People generally hate freedom.
Seriously? If you go interview a 100 people and offer them drugs and a life as your slave, 99 of them, in any country, will act very negatively towards you. Freedom is hard work, but that is not to say people want to be slaves.
In any case, I await how you can possibly explain historical evolution as anything other than a movement, in the long if not the short term, from lesser to greater freedom, from simple to complex forms of social organization.
There is democracy at gunpoint or there is slavery at gunpoint. Those are our choices.
-This is the kind of thing that gives one a metaphysical buzz. It's fun to write. But it is not the kind of thing that is going to move anyone to do anything. It is an abstraction that is not interested in a serious essaying of reality. As such it can offer little to the vast majority of people whose activities are pragmatic and as such the real motor of history. Freedom used to be won by the sword, but only after people knew what they were fighting for (thanks to a prior exchange of opinions, which is the real foundation of freedom). Though today freedom is increasingly an outgrowth of an ethical and economic interaction/war that does all it can to minimize actual physical war. One can hope to win that kinetic war not by waiting impatiently for the battle to erupt but by getting involved in measuring and discussing daily ethical and economic interactions with an eye to measuring reality and focusing or channeling the conflicts out there in ways that will serve your side the rare day the armies actually get to take the field. In a nuclear-tipped world that's just not going to be a regular occurrence, or if it is that will be the end of us.
What is pragmatic for these people, people who may lose something important if they don't interact with Muslims and yet who fear they are taking a risk in putting a certain degree of faith or trust in representatives of Islam, is to find out more of what the people with whom they are interacting really believe.
A nominal muslim that is in variance with koran, hadiths, life of the murderous pedohille, and various schools of jurisprudence can hardly be described as representative of islam. The pragmatics of dealing with people that insist on calling themselves muslim, is to realize that they, like many people, haven't a clue as to what they are calling themselves. We must be clear about what best "represents" islam, while being open to the recognition of an heretics divergence. As, alcoholics that no longer drink, are not representative of the dangers of alcoholism, "submitters" that don't submit do not represent "submission."
So practically speaking, one can intereact well with alcoholics and nominal muslims as long as one is careful not to offer them beers, sharp instruments or excuses.
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