Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?
Phyllis Chesler
[This article, which I downloaded sometime in March 2007, and just came across moments ago, is worth reading, I think, in the light of attempts that are being made to diminish our freedom to criticise Islam -- or any other religion. Since it is now behind the Times paywall, I think it deserves to be more widely read. Why have we devolved, since then, to the frightened, overly sensitive victims that we seem to have become? I acknowledge that Ms. Chseler, at the time of publication of this article, met this kind of small-minded opposition to her arguments about Islamic barbarity, but would her article appear in a major Western newspaper today, I wonder? Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1480090.ece]
Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.
When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.
In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.
In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and free thinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.
I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes — one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).
Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.
Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.
Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.
However, my views have found favour with the bravest and most enlightened people alive. Leading secular Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents — from Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and exiles from Europe and North America — assembled for the landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida and invited me to chair the opening panel on Monday.
According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.
Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.
Ibn Warraq has written a devastating work that will be out by the summer. It is entitled Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Will Western intellectuals also dare to defend the West?
Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York
Here, for those who have persevered, is an article by Chesler published yesterday at israelnationalnews.com
h/t Malgorzata Koraszweska
Yeah… I think she’s a bit of an extremist herself.
“The typical left point of view is that the West has caused jihad due to its allegedly imperialist, colonialist, racist, and capitalist policies. Anyone who does not blame the West, especially America and Israel, is politically suspect.”
Bullshit. Dishonest right-wing bullshit, usually spouted by bigots. Acknowledging that Islamic states are tyrannical and oppressive doesn’t magically let the West and Israel off the hook for their crimes, and pointing that out isn’t the same as the quoted nonsense above.
You seem very sure of yourself Improbable Joe, and yet this is a woman who married a Muslim, remember, and spent some time in Afghanistan. In what way is this dishonest right-wing bullshit, please. I’m dying to know. The bit you quote is her introduction to her review of Scroggins’ book on two women: Wanted Women. Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui; consider her point that of the two Scroggins chooses the terrorist rather than the reflective intellectual. Is it still bullshit? What is bullshit about it, and why shouldn’t the emphasis she describes be of concern to us?
I should add (Improbable Joe) that in his book Why the West is Best Ibn Warraq says some very similar things. Is he a right-wing bigot too? Is it bullshit when he expresses the view that we are selling our birthright by enabling Muslims to undermine values which have been won in the West over a number of highly fraught centuries? I agree that Chesler can be unapologetically blunt to the point of offense sometimes, but what is it about the article from which you took those words that moves you so quickly to respond as you do? For instance, take this, from Chesler’s article:
Really? A racist and an Islamophobe, not to mention neo-conservative? On the other hand:
In what way should this kind of partiality be considered bullshit?
Is there room in your worldview for just one scary, wet-the-pants villain… and everyone else is blameless? Because that’s what I’m objecting to. The West has been a villain in the Middle East for at least decades, Israel oppresses the Palestinian people… and I have plenty of room in MY worldview for the fact that Islamic regimes enslave women and oppress non-Muslims.
The bullshit is claiming that the “typical left point of view” is to forgive Islamic regimes for their crimes, as though admitting flaws in your own nation is tantamount to blinding yourself to the flaws in others, or vice-versa. And, yes, I DO see bigotry as being a natural and almost inevitable consequence of that sort of “with us or against us” attitude.
Oh, and that condemnation of “the left” fails to take into account what we were discussing the other day, which is the fact that “the left” doesn’t tend to take stands. It prefers to play accommodationist, and not really criticize anyone for anything ever… except for rudeness.
I am sooo nicking this and spreading it far and wide and I think we all shoud. What is it with the left that they can’t get their PC blinkers off and SEE Islam for what it is? Does not compute.
I’m neither left nor right, but strictly a radical liberal, which I don’t see as a extremist position at all. What is so funny and disturbing is that politics has become so absurd that radical liberals, including the likes of Hitchens (who was a lefty until he turned his back on the left) are seen as some kind of fundamentalists who want to (gosh) allow everyone the right to liberty, to speak and express themselves freely, so long as they don’t abuse the rights of others. Fundamentalists who want democracy and a free society, where individual rights are respected.
Excuse me for my extremist and diabolical political fundamentalism!
The Left-Right dichotomy is false & over-simplistic.
I agree that the fawning accommodations made by Western Liberal sentimentalists are dangerous & paradoxically foster the oppression of women by Islamic dogmatists. Just because the Islamist fundamentalists are prepared to kill those who criticize them is not reason to refrain from calling an evil practice just that. OTOH, Israel for example, with the support of the USA has a long list of crimes against its neighbours and the Palestinian people. Israel and the USA should be called out for this too. (See: The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk if you disagree with this statement.) Oppression exists under many doctrines & flags and should be exposed for what it is. Our loyalty should be to justice & liberty; not some political position.
There needs to be free & unhindered public dialogue to discuss these issues without the threat of violence or censorship. This right needs to be protected for all regardless of their politics. How exactly would you pigeonhole such a position? I would suggest that it does not fit any sort of uni-dimensional Left-Right abstraction.
This personal account outlines how the values of Muslim family life are incompatible with the fundamental rights of the women trapped in its grip. It may not be politically correct to say so, but it needs to be said.
-evan
Oops:
Edit: … ‘the fawning accommodations made by Western Liberal sentimentalists *are* dangerous & paradoxically *foster* the oppression of women…
Done….
I think it’s about time liberals reclaim their liberalism, which has long been abused by the most illiberal of absurdities.
I think the problem that I see is that “the left” is a bunch of weak-ass accommodationists. The right-wing religious bigots and racists are certainly willing to make strong stands and call for taking revenge against perceived enemies, and anyone who happens to look or sound like them. The danger is when good, well-meaning people who want to fight against oppression and tyranny look around for allies, the strongest one they see are often the worst sort of people. The strongest stance against the worst of Islamic law and culture taking root in the West is unfortunately taken by the Christian fundamentalists who want to enact “Bible sharia” and create a Jesus-based theocracy. I see the linked article as being too close to the language of the sort of people who would love to turn the tactics and goals of Islamists against them in the name of Christianity, that that’s a really bad thing.
TL;DR version: The enemy of my enemy? Not always my friend, sometimes just the same sort of enemy from a slightly different angle.
I don’t read that in the article. It seems to be calling for a strong human rights stance and an enlightenment process within Islam which keys in more with a rationalist approach: not something the Christian right will go along with anytime soon. Absolutely right though, the enemy of your enemy can be just a different sort of enemy.
Improbable Joe:
I don’t read that in the article either. Indeed, Chesler, though given to hyperbole, includes people who find that she is not a racist and a bigot, people like Ibn Warraq, for instance. (Is it not significant as well as troubling that the only refuge in the US that Hirsi Ali could go to was a right-wing think tank?) The big problem is that, by reacting to Chesler in this very reflexive way, you fail to see that there are a number of Muslim liberals who find the opportunities and freedoms of the West of enormous importance, and condemn Islam for the tyranny, oppression of women, lack of critical freedom, etc., which are condemning the Middle East (whatever involvement the West has played there — and remember much of British involvement there (save for the canal zone) originated in the Ottoman Empire siding with Germany in WWI) to stagnation and marginalisation. Her article about the contrast in the way that Scroggins treats Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui is telling. The Enlightenment woman is condemned, the Muslim terrorist is romanticised. (Shades of Che.) Berman notes the same thing in his book The Flight of the Intellectuals. Ian Buruma, for instance, treats Hirsi Ali as a charlatan, and idealises her Muslim opponents.
Regarding Israel I’m very circumspect on the whole. It’s the only democracy in a sea of tyrannies, so it must be doing something right. The fact that much of the population of Israel is composed of Sephardic Jews who fled oppression in Muslim countries is something that many people simply ignore. And the fact that the “Arabs” continue to threaten Israel with annihilation raises questions in my mind as to what Israel can possibly do. It has, unfortunately, reacted with disproportionate violence to threats, but then, perhaps we would too, if placed in a similarly fractured situation. The facts are not clear enough to ascribe blame in this situation, but the romanticising of Palestinian resistance is scarcely helpful; and while settlement on the West Bank makes the problem almost insoluble, the fact that giving up the West Bank would almost certainly make Israel militarily vulnerable (and even untentable), as it was in earlier Arab-Israeli wars, means that it will hold onto it unless there is a change of heart about its continued existence.
I agree with Clod. There is no sign that Chesler is a racist or a bigot, and her support for Enlightenment values and feminism would not be particularly welcome to the Christian right. My main point in publishing Chesler’s article and linking to her recent one was simply to point out that there is an apparent unwillingness amongst Western liberals to stand up for liberal values, and that, whatever you may say about the Middle East or Afghanistan or the Muslim world, the failure to criticise Islam and its consequences for so many people — especially, but not exclusively women — has led to an inability, amongst Western liberals, to defend the values that give them the right to say what they want to say, when millions of people in Muslim lands live under tyranny, and will go on doing so if they cannot separate their religion from governance. But we must stand up for the values of free expression and equality, even if this make us look like bigots, because we are in danger of losing it if we do no.
Eric, are you saying that someone CANNOT be an anti-Muslim bigot? Is every claim of anti-Muslim bigotry automatically rejected as a defense of Islam? Or should people actually apply thinking when they hear or read things?
Because I feel like you’re completely missing my point in a very specific way that I see all the time. There’s the long list of things I agree with, that I think you are listing to counter a point I’m not making. There’s the exaggeration of the potential threat from Islam, which I find both intellectually lacking and personally distasteful. There’s a “flattening” of the world into simplistic “good and evil, with us or against us” terms. And I think at the bottom there’s an unexamined xenophobia that I feel makes “Othering” way too easy.
My interest is more politics than religion these days, specifically American politics. I wind up reading more than I’d like to about Christian extremists and very obvious anti-Muslim bigotry in America’s far-right. I’ve read about firebombed mosques and Muslims targeted by violence and unconstitutional attacks on their religious liberty. And then I read critics of Islam who are supposed to be “liberal defenders of freedom” who don’t sound much different from the Christian fundamentalist bigots. Like I said, and hopefully you’ll actually address, good people can adopt bad thinking if they choose their allies poorly.
“My main point in publishing Chesler’s article and linking to her
recent one was simply to point out that there is an apparent
unwillingness amongst Western liberals to stand up for liberal values”
Exactly right. And when any rational liberal starts to voice their
criticisms, they’re silenced by personal attacks, being called racist,
etc. This is designed to equate rational liberals with the far right.
Ironically, it is exactly the same strategy that islamofascists are
using to silence criticism.
Improbable Joe:
I can attest to this as a liberal who grew up in a very conservative family – I’m also in the process of shedding some of my “accomodationist” positions. Opinions like the one reprinted in the original post are extremely valuable, and I welcome full-throated critiques of Islam and Muslim theocracy. However, I think it’s just as important not to allow such a critique to support, for instance, Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in the US whose problem with Muslim theocracy is only that it is Muslim, and who would be very happy in a Christian theocracy here in the West.
The Israel problem is too fraught for me to have formed a good enough opinion on it yet (and it’s likely I’m too young to have a good handle on it), but let’s be clear that here in the US the pro-Israel stance taken by those Evangelicals is anything but rational and just, whatever the myriad problems with Islamic states in the region. There are religious beliefs that require certain crazy interpretations of biblical prophecy to come true in order to bring about the end of the world, and many of those Christians who do not share those specific beliefs still believe it is inherently dangerous to oppose Israel because they believe Israel is literally “God’s people” — it’s based on a conflation of political Israel with biblical Israel. This amounts to a belief in the state of Israel as a kind of political papacy, with Netanyahu the “infallible” political leader. Even several of the current GOP candidates have said outright that “there can be no daylight between US policy and Israel’s.” These ideas, while dangerous on their own, happen also to support the imperialist visions of various neoconservative segments of our political class that want everlasting hegemony, and who are clamoring for yet another war.
It may be that that the best path forward in the Middle East doesn’t exist – it may have to be the least bad path. But in criticizing Islamic theocracy, I think it’s important that the simple act of criticism does not send an automatic signal that we support endless war, crazy apocalyptic belief, Christian theocracy, violence against Western Muslims, or any of the rest, but in our polarized political culture it’s impossible to avoid these well-worn cultural associations unless one is explicit. If you are familiar with Christian-right writing on these issues in the US, it’s easy to read articles like Chesler’s as rife with dog-whistle and shibboleth — whether she intended it or not.
I’m afraid I side with Improbable Joe on this. One can certainly dislike and criticise in a rational way Islam as an institution without feeling constrained to deny that a terrible injustice has been done, and is being done, to the people of Palestine or to complain about Turkey being an ally of Germany in the First World War, as if that meant anything very much now (Turkey was an ally of the US and the UK in the Korean War). As for Palestine, Robert Trivers, in his latest book, praised by Richard Dawkins, has a telling commentary on the establishment and continuing expansion of the state of Israel, which has, alas, come more and more under the control of nationalist zealots who do not wish to reach any kind of settlement. And for the human cost of this dreadful situation, there is a wonderful book by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti called ‘I Saw Ramallah’. Not all Muslims are the kind of people who invaded that book-launching in Holland the other day, just as not all Jews are the kind of young men (American Jews, it seems) who may be seen on YouTube taunting a Palestinian woman who is being thown out of her home, and just as not all Christians are fundamentalist believers in the ‘end days’ anxious to foment as much violence in the Middle East as possible so that prophecies may be accomplished. I append two reviews of Barghouti’s book:
From Publishers Weekly
You can never go home again. That’s the message in this impressionistic memoir by a Palestinian poet returning to the West Bank after 30 years of exile. Barghouti was in Cairo at the university when Israel won the Six-Day War and didn’t return home until 1996, when the now-defunct Oslo Accords allowed him to go back. As one might expect, his return to see his birthplace and his family is fraught with problems, as he attempts to reconnect with relatives and friends. The people living in Ramallah and its physical geography have changed in ways that make Barghouti feel as displaced at home as he does abroad. The changes he blames partly on the weakness of his own people, but mostly on the Israelis. The truth of Palestinian faults “does not absolve the enemy of his original crime….” Indeed, the anger he feels at Israelis on both the left and the right helps explain why the Oslo peace process failed and why peace seems as elusive as ever. But this is as much a personal journey as a political one. Using a poet’s eye for detail and language (the book is beautifully translated), Barghouti, who now lives in Cairo, intersperses the story of his homecoming with his history of journeys across the Arab world. “The displaced person becomes a stranger to his memories and so he tries to cling to them.” His deft mind and words show how, for many Palestinians, politics have swallowed up the personal.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Poet Barghouti puts a personal face on the plight of displaced Palestinians in this account that is as much politically tinged lament as memoir. Thirty years–and nine volumes of verse–after being deported from his home in Cairo, he was permitted to return to the home of his youth on the West Bank in 1997. “Displacement is like death,” he states. “One thinks it happens only to other people.” Yet he describes himself as just one of four million displaced Palestinians who have no airline, police, TV, or government. Several months after the Six Days War, when his son was just five months old, Barghouti was taken for “preventative deportation” and separated from his family for most of the next 17 years before being allowed back in Egypt. He targets Anwar Sadat, responsible for the deportation that deprived him of having other children, and various Israeli leaders, who headed the occupation he calls a crime. Interspersed vignettes portraying the author’s life are often charming but sometimes confusing in terms of chronology and emphasis–only at midbook is his deportation detailed, and even then it’s not fully explained–and repetition dulls the message. Still, this relentless account, first published in 1997 in the Arab world, reflects the acuity and sensitivity of a poet (with an occasional verse included) and provides an underrepresented point of view. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
Perhaps it might be added that the Baath parties of Iraq and Syria, or Khadafy’s regime, were (or are in the case of Syria) very far from being theocracies in which religion was inseparable from governance.
Badly worded – I wrote in haste – but I think the point’s clear.
Tim, I’m just a bit puzzled. You say, for instance:
That’s true, and I never suggested otherwise — nor, I think, does Chesler. She is not talking about Muslims, but about Islam. And I do think, as do people like Warraq also believes, that there is something barbaric about Islam. That doesn’t mean that ordinary morality is out of reach for Muslims, just as it is not for Jews and Christians, but it does mean that there is something (as I believe) indelibly barbaric about Islam itself. The fact that all Muslims were not represented by those who broke into the Amsterdam launch party goes without saying, but that there are Muslims like this around the world who are having a dangerous effect on several of our freedoms, not only says something important about Islam, but is a matter of great concern.
None of this is to deny Israel’s part in the standoff between Israel and its neighbours. However, given the endemic anti-Jewish aspect of Islam, how was this to be settled? What several generations of negotiations have not been able to do, we won’t achieve here either, but the role of religion in this dispute is probably what makes it so resistant to solution.
Just out of curiosity… do you see something in Catholicism that leads directly to molesting children?
Improbable Joe. No, I don’t, although I think there is something intrinsic to celibacy and propinquity to children that may lead to it. But, in reference to the underlying purpose of your question, I think Islam is barbaric for the simple reason that the Qu’ran is and other sacred texts of Islam are. All you have to do is read the Qu’ran to be apprised of its barbarity, and in concert with the hadith and the biography of Muhammad, the barbarity of Islam is pervasive. That doesn’t mean that Christianity is not in some respects barbarous, especially in its attitudes toward the Jews, and this is, unfortunately, written into the sacred text, but it does not include admonitions to kill unbelievers, it does not encourage slavery, though it does not condemn it, and it does not specify barbaric punishments for wrongdoing, though it often applied them. In Islam the ownership of human beings is commended, completely barbaric punishments are required, and the killing of unbelievers is enjoined. Worst of all, the Qu’ran revels in the punishments of the hell reserved for infidels and apostates, and describes its the terror of hell in lurid and terrorising detail. In my opinion these have had a deadly effect on the character of Islam.
I don’t see any difference between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. I’m not sure why you do, except for the fact that you’re culturally more comfortable with two of the three. I think the only real difference between the three is that Western culture has more outlets for the violence inherent in Christianity and Judaism, not that the religions themselves are fundamentally different. Secular values have also smoothed over the rough patches, which combines with general ignorance of what the texts actually say to allow believers to pretend that their “holy” books are somehow fundamentally more peaceful than the Koran. I know that YOU know what the Bible says, of course.
And, American Muslims seem to by and large be doing just fine adapting to Western culture. So is it something inherent in Islam, or something more complex?
I actually think there is something within Catholicism that is responsible for a fixation on children. The sum total of its values leads to placing children too much into the care and authority of the catholic church, and consequently to their corruption.
I also think there is something within Islam that breeds barbaric cruelty, violence and hatred. It is not an enlightened or esoteric religion, it does not preach love thy neighbour or God is love, unless we count Sufism, which makes up only 1%.
The link for me is simply that religion values authority too highly, which in turn leads to all manner of evils. Since it is so widespread, it has an unusual level and unjustified amount of respect.
I really don’t understand the arguments by both Joe and Tim. The reason why liberal Muslims or liberal Christians are less ignorant or less barbaric is because they’re liberal, have been brought up with liberal values. Take away those values and they would be no different if brought up in places without such values.
Yes, the general new atheist message is that religion is bad, even evil, and that is very black and white, it just happens to be true. To say that religion does good, is a bit like saying that someone is generally a good person with the exception of the odd murder or rape. That misses the point–the person has to face justice for the negatives that they do, all the good they do doesn’t excuse their acts of evil.
Well, I shan’t argue with you further, Improbable Joe, on this particular point. I think anyone who has read both the holy books of the three religions and considered their history would probably conclude that Islam is the more violent and inhuman of the three, but that is only my own judgement, but so far I have seen no reason to change it. Islam was imperialist and colonialist from its beginnings; it was racist at heart, and intolerant of other religions. In a minority its barbaric elements may be quiescent, but there is no reason to believe that it can change in its very heart, until it has undergone a reformation and an enlightenment, and there is very little sign that Islam is doing that, even, I suspect, in the US. However, I’m not sure what you mean by this:
How can you possibly say such a thing? Islam, from the very start, was a violent religion, and had an enormous scope for its inherent violence, which took it from Arabia, through Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and on into Spain, and then eastward through what is now Iraq, into Persia, Afghanistan and India, and on into Southeast Asia, and then through Turkey into the Balkans, and driving from both east and west into France and Austria, where it reached the limits of its power. It moved northward through Armenia and into the Caucusus, killing and plundering as it went. And even in settled regions there were episodes of intolerant violence in which Christians, Jews and other minorities were massacred and oppressed.
Muhammad was a leader of cutthroats who lived on booty and protection money. Islam was born in violence and it expanded by violence, and it is the only religion that gets away without being criticised for its imperialism and its colonialism which imposes upon its conquests a completely alien culture and suppresses the local culture. Christianity gets blamed for the crusades, rightly, to some extent, though the crusades were, in origin, a response to the expansionist and marauding tendencies within Islam. It’s amazing how Islam seems to live such a charmed life, without blame for its imperialism, its slave trading, its oppression of minorities, and its claim to have been a great civilisation, even though it denounced most of its leading critical thinkers as apostates. It really is amazing. European colonialism is widely condemned, and although there was much violence involved in it, it did in fact leave behind something of value for many of the lands (not all, the Congo being an example of one of the worst examples of European colonialism on record, aside from the very different imperial rule of the Japanese in China Southeast Asia) that were colonised, and, in the end, it withdrew from empire (to a large extent) willingly. The British in India took a patchwork of princely states and transformed it into a nation, except for the partition which was caused by religious differences between Muslims and Hindus. They studied Indian history and thought and preserved much of it. They preserved the architectural treasures of the subcontinent, and respected its religious traditions. And yet Islamic imperialism, that wreaked havoc and destruction wherever it went, victimising infidels, and destroying their shrines and temples, gets off scot free. How come?
Egbert, I think the thing that raised hackles was the opening sentence of Chesler’s piece for israelnationalnews.com: “The typical left point of view is that the West has caused jihad due to its allegedly imperialist, colonialist, racist, and capitalist policies. Anyone who does not blame the West, especially America and Israel, is politically suspect.” And rightly. That sentence is undiscriminating and contemptible. (This does not mean that I do not agree with much of what Chesler says about Islam, and particularly its treatment of women.) The simple point we are making is that one kind of injustice doesn’t excuse, and should not allow us to ignore, other kinds of injustice. It is a matter of moral consistency. Yes, we can rightly get exercised about the way Muslims went about subjugating India, but that should not allow us to overlook the fact, documented in Stephen Pinker’s latest book, that the mostly preventable famines in India under British rule in the nineteenth century are among the top 21 of man-made events causing huge amounts of death in the last 20 centuries (the ranking is twelfth). There was also, as I recall, another terrible famine in Bengal in the 2oth century while India was still under British rule.
And, Eric, who is letting the Muslims off scot-free? Really!
Ummm… you HAVE read the Old Testament, right? Entire tribes wiped out, including their cattle?
“Islam is especially evil” leads directly to both bigotry and the pathetic cowardice of “Islam is an existential threat.” I guess preserving the fear and having a known enemy even if they present a near-zero threat is important to some people, but I think it is bordering on pathological.
Tim Harris:
Of course not. However, the point that I am making, and that I think Chesler is making, has to do with religion and injustice. There are things about British rule in India which are very troubling, and famine is one of them. But famine in India was produced by a laissez-faire doctrine in economics (based on Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the utilitarianism of James and John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham), more than on religion, the same kind of economic theory which has widened the gap between rich and poor and reduced so large a proportion of the American population to indigence. But what is so signally important to recognise is that these consequences of British rule in India were widely criticised in Britain, by the British themselves. Florence Nightingale analysed the problem of Indian famines, and blamed the British administration of India for its failure to provide adequate local government structures to deal with famine, as well as to improve transportation for the distribution of food.
As for Chesler’s opening sentence, I do not find it contemptible, but to be largely the truth. The faults of the West tend to be magnified and the virtues of Islam tend to be glorified. This is something which Ibn Warraq repeats again and again in his book The West is Best. As he says:
Or, again:
Is this pathological, Improbable Joe? I think the readiness with which we have self-censored over the years since the Rushdie fatwa is a real danger. When people refuse to do things which will prompt Islamist violence, we are literally caving in to that violence. Do you not think this is a problem of serious proportions. I simply will not accept that to fear for our freedoms is pathological in situations where death threats are uttered and people refuse to speak out because they are afraid. It has got nothing to do with armies or massive power, but it does have to do with the failure of good men to do something (to cite Burke).
Hear what Warraq says about Wilders (and his film Fitna, I think):
While you do not think there are any serious threats, Warraq obviously disagrees. Unless there is a good reason to think otherwise, I think I’ll stick with him. And Hirsi Ali is saying very similar things. Islam is a danger. It is insidious. It works by undermining local cultures, and by insinuating its own resolutions to social problems (as it sees them). It does this by repeatedly claiming the right to be considered separate from the larger community, to be governed by its own laws, and by imposing those laws, to the extent possible, on others, by threats, by repeated claims to outrage, and so on.
About universities and their relationship with rich Muslim donors, Warraq has this to say:
Is this contemptible too, I wonder? If so, why?
Regarding the Old Testament. It is widely agreed now by critical biblical scholarship that there is no truth to the stories of Canaanite genocide, Improb Joe. These are founding narratives, but there is no historical or archaeological evidence for their historical reliability. If Tom Thompson is right, the stories are a fabricaton to distinguish the incoming colonists from the Persian Empire from local inhabitants. It’s imperial propaganda, in other words. If Tom Thompson is not right, then we have to try to understand why a people should have told stories like that about its past, knowing them to be untrue. (To the extent that Jewish fundamentalists think of them as applicable now and to Palestinians, we have a problem, but it is more localised than the Islamist one.) The trouble with the Qu’ran is that its principles are still being quite literally applied to real people with real heads that get chopped off, or real bodies that get stoned, or real flesh and blood that are blown up by jihadi bombs. There is a difference, and a very important one. However, this really is, for now, my last word on the subject.
Tim, I’m sure there are a diversity of views and opinions among the political left, but when you’re not part of the left, you can’t help but generalize and point out that in general, the left seem to be morally blind when it comes to Islam, being either apologetic for Islam or attacking personally those who wish to criticize it. This goes right up to the likes of Obama.
I think I know why there is a misunderstanding between left and centrist atheists is because we have different value systems. New atheism expresses centrist sentiments, while accommodationism expresses socialist or leftist sentiments. The clash is a clash of values, and not a clash of reasoned arguments. But new atheists, in my opinion, seem to have reason a lot more on their side.
OK, Eric… I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
Yes, Improbable Joe, I think we will! Thanks for the exchange though. It forced me to think about it a bit more closely. However, I do take Ibn Warraq very seriously on this matter. I think he has a more intuitive understanding of the danger of Islam than many people in the West do, and that, I believe, is a serious problem. But clearly I will not convince you of that.
There are a lot of things going on here. Public anti-Islam rhetoric tends automatically to be pro-Christian (at least in the US), and sometimes quite reactionary. It’s impossible to count how many times I’ve heard something like “Should we allow them to build Mosques in our country?” which sounds so very similar to “Should we allow the gays to marry?” or “Should we allow doctors to kill patients who want to die?” If the political left is currently plagued by a naive ecumenism, certainly it’s fair to say that the right is too quick to lump anything that isn’t Christian (atheism, secularism, Islam) into one big anti-Christian threat. Apologetics coming from the left also tend to be centered more around Muslims than Islam itself, and much of it is in reaction to crazy policies proposed by the political right. Our worry is that if it’s possible for a religious majority to single out Muslims for discrimination in law and policy, it will be just as easy to single out any other community with non-majority beliefs. The problem for an atheist is to craft arguments criticizing Islam in such a way that it does not instantly suggest all kinds of illiberal and anti-democratic policies against Muslims that are part of the Christian right’s playbook – and as I said before I think this association (i.e. equating “anti-Islam” with “pro-Christian”) is currently automatic, if only for the volume of anti-Muslim sentiment coming from conservative Christians.
I’m not sure I want to continue with this, but here goes: surely the fact that famines in India were caused by ideas that were regarded as intellectually respectable at the time (though Adam Smith, let it be noted, spoke out against the immiseration of the working class), or that certain people in Britain spoke out against the policies that brought about these famines, does not make what was perpetrated against the people of India somehow better. There seems to be the thought lurking somewhere in the background that so long as one’s intentions are good or supposedly reasonable, then the effects that they have are necessarily less harmful when compared with a full-blooded brutality backed up by brutal precepts, even when those effects involve far wider suffering. Karl Polyanyi, in The Great Transformation, remarked on the way that we steel ourselves with science, or what is taken to be science (said to avoid the No True Scotsman ploy), in order to justify inhumanity.
Yes, I agree with what Ibn Warraq says (and his account of what has been happening at the Middle East Centre in Oxford is alarming), but that does not mean that, for example, Israel’s policies and the activities of the Israeli lobby in the States are beyond criticism (Israel is not, by the way, a democracy if you are Arab), nor does it excuse American brutality in Fallujah or, for example, the letting off virtually scot-free of American soldiers and contractors who are guilty of murdering Iraqi civilians.
The problem, surely, is not simply that of religion: the questions we should be asking are why fundamentalism is growing stronger or at least more obvious amongst the adherents of all the Abrahamic religions and how we can reverse this trend. And I think it is important to recognise the non-fundamentalist adherents of these religions and to support them in the struggle (which is also theirs) against fundamentalism. Otherwise, I think, we tend to act like those doctrinaire Communists who regarded democratic socialists as de facto Fascists and enablers of Fascism. And this means standing firmly on secular principle, which not only protects non-believers but protects believers both from members of their own religion and from members of other religions, and which also denies the claims of canon or sharia law to stand above the law of the land.
Finally, I think Another Matt’s closing words are excellent: ‘The problem for an atheist is to craft arguments criticizing Islam in such a way that it does not instantly suggest all kinds of illiberal and anti-democratic policies against Muslims that are part of the Christian right’s playbook…’ though I would, being British, modify that last phrase thus: ‘all kinds of illiberal and anti-democratic policies against Muslims that are part of the playbook of the Christian Right in the States and of extreme nationalists in European countries.’
Tim, everything you said is perfectly reasonable to me.
And to add–new atheism is not beyond criticism either. But many of the criticisms shown by acccommodationists have so far been either incoherent, rhetorical or even silly. If we hold ourselves to be so rational, then we must also be self-critical and encourage self-criticism.
Tim, I’ve already said I wouldn’t comment further, but you’ve smoked me out of my burrow at least one more time. You say:
Well, no, not in the sense that it made things better for those who suffered. But it is important to know that the government of the day didn’t do it as a matter of policy. It was the runon effect of an inadequate economic theory. But this is much better than being the object of a deliberate decision to starve people to death, as was done, e.g., in Stalin’s USSR. And that’s not a small matter. That people in Britain criticised British administration of India is significant and important, when you set it alongside, say, Islam, which purports already to be the perfect society. But no one was justifying the inhumanity of the Indian famines, at least not here.
And, further to your comment, nothing justifies injustice, Israeli or any other form. As to supporting non-fundamentalist opponents of fundamentalism in the churches: Yes, maybe we should support them, and I would be willing to do so except for one thing. Supporting religion, even of the moderate variety, is support for religion, and religion, overall, is, I think, an evil. Religions of the book always have a tendency to return to type, because the sacred text remains even during periods of moderation, and the pendulum of history will bring it back sooner or latter. The long liberal experiement in Christianity, which lasted from the late fifties until the nineties on the last century, and which is now rapidly losing ground to more literal believers, merely kept the church alive during a period when religion was fading away, and preserved the structures of religion so that they were there when the conservatives began to grow strong again. Religious enthusiasm, so deprecated in the 18th century, is what keeps religion as a live option, and religion will always return to the sources of this energy when it is losing ground. I’m not particularly disposed to assist even liberal religion, because of this.
Another Matt’s words may sound excellent:
I don’t want to play out of the Christian right’s playbook, of course, but if Islam is a danger to democracy, as I believe it is, then, whether out of that playbook or not, some of their recommendations may make sense. I think the prohibition of veiling is a good start, because unless Muslim women are free, Islam will continue to play a subversive part in democratic polities. Should Muslims not build mosques? Not if they are going to be centres of subversion and hatred of their neighbours, as too many of them are.
One of the problems here is that the extreme right Christians or nationalists are the ones who have taken up the defence against a force (radical Islam) that is in fact a danger. Liberals, in response, try to make excuses for Islam, and defend it agaisnt the extreme right, thus increasing the danger, and the xenophobia of the extreme right. Everyone who opposes militant Islam (and Islam is militant at its very heart, I believe) immediately apologises for soundling like an extremist. The result is that few who oppose militant Islam are listened to, because they sound like conservative nut cases. This is a dangerous situation. It makes nuanced criticism very hard to achieve, and, in fact, it seems that radical Islam, suitably disguised (as in a Tariq Ramadan), represents the public face of Islam in the West. This, I think, is dangerous, as people like Ibn Warraq and Maryam Namazie point out. The only way out is by a firm, judicious critique of Islam, and a refusal to permit Islam to propose seventh century solutions to contemporary social problems. The same, of course, goes for Roman Catholicism, which is still peddling medieval solutions to contemporary issues. Neither should find a friendly reception. This would help us recapture the intitiative that we are losing to conservatism, at the same time that we protect the freedoms without which the hegemony of religion is an assured thing.
Well, at least they sound excellent! =o)
I hate to go another round on this, and I apologize if this makes everyone grumpy, but I really can’t let this go:
This is an awful lot of prior restraint. I think any proposal like this need to be accompanied by the necessary “OK, so how do we get there from here?” argument. Otherwise it’s just so much wishful thinking. Would you be comfortable using the power of the state to enforce these things? How do we word the legislation so that religious veiling is distinguishable from this:
http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4026/4702975510_da20c83da7_z.jpg
By what democratic basis would we ban mosques but not Baptist churches and cathedrals, which also continue to be centers of subversion and hatred? Islam is not the only set of beliefs that threaten democracy — though it may be the most concentrated — but our democracy is only functional if subversive thoughts and beliefs are allowed to flourish as long as they do not cause demonstrable harm to others, and even then it is only the harm itself that is up for societal correction. I don’t see how to accomplish state enforcement of anti-Muslim policies without resorting to a McCarthyite policing of the citizenry, and I worry that this cure is worse than the disease. The way forward isn’t clear to me, obviously, but I think there are positive ways to move toward what we all wish for. For instance, a more thorough system of support for abused women and prosecution of abusers would increase everyone’s freedom without specifically calling for special laws against male-Muslim abuse of Muslim women. The stupid Oklahoma anti-Sharia amendment was unconstitutional not because of the content of Sharia law, but because it singled out Islam; roughly the same thing could have been accomplished in regular law by making general, piecemeal, democratic legislation that happened to be incompatible with Sharia.
Please don’t mistake what I’m saying – I’m trying to distinguish between what is feasible, democratic, and liberal when it comes to legislation, and on the other hand what case we should be making against Islam and other religions as part of our public speech. I’m all for robust critique of Islam and of the damage it does in the world, which obviously can’t be denied. I also think the recent accomodationist attempts to silence something as innocuous as posting Jesus and Mo on Facebook were asinine, and deserved all the criticism they received.
Do you think it’s impossible to make an argument that says “this is dangerous, hateful belief, and its effects are awful” without implying that an active, targeted campaign of state force is the appropriate solution? It’s not an apology for Islam to say that Muslims should be treated with dignity and freedom under the law. I also don’t think calling certain actions of Muslims atrocities is anti-Muslim, in the sense I’m trying to convey — they are atrocious whether or not they came from Islam, and as long as we can police violence and support women on a general level those nasty parts of Islam will not withstand the democratic sieve.
I’m glad people are still posting, because this is an excellent discussion.
Matt actually gets to the root of the problem in a liberal state or society. How exactly can you restrain illiberal forces without that restraint itself becoming illiberal?
I shall only say that laissez-faire is a policy, and not a lack of policy, and I think that needs to be recognised.
Oh, hey, Another Matt. I’m not making a recommendation. Like you I am exploring alternatives, but sometimes I wonder if, in fact, there are not situations in which liberalism and democracy become self-defeating — in which case, of course, there should be some remedy. For instance, I watch “democracy” developing in Egypt, and some people saying that democracy is rule by a majority, but this is simply incorrect. Democracy is rule by a majority under a constitution which limits the powers. Rule by a majority could be simply — and is very often simply — a tyranny of the many over the few.
The same, by extension, goes for toleration. Toleration is fine, so long as there is some understanding of the limits of toleration. Some kinds of thing would subvert a state in which toleration was practiced without attention to the strains and stresses within that state.The concept of toleration developed out of a situation in Europe where it was clear that no sect of Christianity was going to be able to dominate the continent, or any country within it. There was, then, a general consensus that, in order to avoid a general implosion, there had to be rules about the role that religion would play in public life, and how religions would function vis-a-vis the state. There was never a clear settlement of how this would be done, but a general “standing back” to see how things would fall out, but a growing sense that Christianity — which was really the only religion in consideration — was divided beyond repair, so that the different factions would have to learn to get along together. Hence, toleration.
Notice that the Jews were never included in this general “amnesty”, and the position of Jews was still ambiguous. This came out very clearly over the next few centuries, and came to a point of crisis in the Second World War. But nothing was really settled about the relationship of different religions. So, the toleration of liberalism didn’t really extend to Islam, in any clear sense. And now Islam is not so much asking for toleration as for a kind of unique status within a culture in which toleration had already developed to a point where the question was no longer raised about the status of different Christian factions.
But this is different. Christians were accustomed to having lost control of the culture. Islam seems to be claiming, not just to be tolerated, but to be protected from the culture that Christianity no longer controls, but in which it was understood that there should be a “liberal” willingness to live and let live. And this is a very dangerous situation. It threatens to subvert the liberal experiment — for, so far, it is only an experiment, and not a wholly successful one. Can this experiment stand the kind of stress that growing numbers of Muslims are placing upon it? That is not yet decided.
To suppose that liberalism is some kind of remote ideal is silly. It is something that is being played out in historical time. From the response of many Christians, it is not clear that the liberal ideal will be able to restrain the religious forces that are involved. People speak about right wing and left wing and Christian fundamentalism. This is all irrelevant. The right-left distinction no longer makes much sense. The question is whether liberalism can stand the strain of a new intolerance in a consensus that has been formed within largely Christian culture.
And if you say that there are also atheists and other nonbelievers in Christianity, that is still, so far, largely Christianity and its products. This is clear from the kinds of support so-called “right wing” parties are receiving. Not in Britain, perhaps, but in Holland, Denmark, France and elsewhere. As Oriana Fallaci said, she was a Catholic atheist! And she found Islam a threat to her culture, to her sense of place and importance.
But we are talking about liberalism as though it were a done deal. It’s not. It’s only the temporary settlement of the strains and stresses within European societies (and their offshoots). Whether that settlement can stand the influx of another and much more primitive form of believing is another question altogether. I don’t think it can, and I think, despite the fact that I think Pinker is right about the decline of violence, that that advance could be reversed very quickly — as it was, for instance in the 1930s. And the liberal ideal of toleration, born in an historical situation very different to the one which obtains today, may be its undoing. I’m not sure that Mill’s On Liberty is relevant to this situation, as it was in 19th century Britain.
Tim, yes, of course, laissez-faire is a policy and not a lack of a policy, But it was believed to be the best policy. Interestingly, Thomas Malthus, a vicar, was largely responsible, for he believed that population growth and decline were natural phenomena, and so in effect not something for which anyone could take responsibility. (Recall the role that Malthus played in Darwin’s theory of natural selection.) That horrified me when I first read it on a survey of 19th century thought (many many moons ago), but its outworking in places like India were truly horrifying. It was not, I think, because people were heartless, but because they believed that these were natural processes over which we had little control. A lesson here about free will, I think.
Eric,
Thanks much for the thoughtful replies. You’ve given me much to think about, and you’re right – in many ways liberal democracy only works well if everyone who is a part of it believes in it; this is of course true of all political systems, but I’m given to believe liberal democracy is less fragile than libertarianism or communism (or what have you). Maybe there’s little evidence for that belief and it’s something I’d be willing to reconsider.
The “tolerance” question is especially difficult, because of the fatuous attitude that says “well, if you’re so tolerant why aren’t you tolerant of my intolerance?” Incidentally it reminds me of this classic Onion article: http://www.theonion.com/articles/if-god-had-wanted-me-to-be-accepting-of-gays-he-wo,11500/
Yes, Eric, thank you for your thoughtful replies. But I have to disagree about what seems to me to be to be an exculpation of aspects of British administration in India (and in Ireland: the potato famine). I really don’t think that saying that people thought it was ‘best policy’ to allow millions to starve to death and do nothing (did they honestly believe this, or was it that they didn’t care? – I recall Winston Churchill’s response to the Bengal famine of the 1940s when Wavell and others begged for help: ‘Why hasn’t it killed Gandhi?’) because it was really nature that was responsible somehow lets those people off the hook and makes what the British did (by not doing) somehow more benign than what other nations have done. The British also destroyed the Indian cotton industry, consigning tens of thousands to poverty and worse, in order to protect the Lancashire cotton mills, again using the excuse of laissez faire. Somebody said something along the lines that it takes religion to make good people do bad things. But, as Karl Polanyi’s remark which I quote in a previous comment suggests, it is a problem that is far broader than religion. I see little difference between those callous British officials and the young Communists who, in thrall to the idea of creating a Communist future, searched the houses of Ukrainian peasants for stocks of food which, if found, they confiscated, even though some of them felt sorry for their victims, who they knew were destined to die of starvation. The ideal – laissez-faire or that of a Communist society – was more important than reality. It was Hannah Arendt who spoke of the banality of evil in connexion with Eichmann and I see little difference between those British officials who stood aside and ‘did their jobs’, just as Eichmann did his job, and used his doing of his job as a defence of his crimes.
And, yes, in a state of nature population growth and decline are natural phenomena, but this is something that the industrialisation has obscured (Malthus lived, as I recall, before the Industrial Revolution got into full swing) – though these phenomena will surely become more salient in consequence of over-population and the destruction of resources; but to say that that is naturally so and to make of it a principle of governance (let the weak go to the wall) is quite another matter.
There is, incidentally, a remarkable little thing on Youtube in which Mayor Booker criticises trenchantly the New Jersey Governor’s plan to hold a popular referendum on the issue of gay marriage; Booker is splendid, and what he says has a great relevance to the discussion we have been having on the dangers faced by liberal democracy.
Tim, you say:
I think that equivalence is a bit of a stretch, though I see the point of it. But you even acknowledge that Wavel, the Viceroy at the time, I believe, and a Field Marshal, did what he could and pleaded for more help to relieve the suffering of the starving during the Bengal famine, which occurred, remember, when Britain was still fighting the war, and when India was still under threat from Japan. But to compare someone like Wavel to Eichmann is really stretching things. Eichmann’s job was to ship people to the killing centres. Wavel’s job, which he took seriously, made more difficult by crop failures in India for a couple years, was to save people. It seems a bit harsh to compare him to Eichmann, not to mention fairness. That doesn’t let the British off the hook, since there were cases where Bristish landowners in India raised land rents, and did other things to skew the production of foodstuffs. Of course, there were failures of compassion, since for many of the British, Churchill not least, Indians tended to be thought of (in Kipling’s words) as lesser breeds without the law.
My only reason for mentioning laissez-faire was to point out that this was secular thinking, and not the imposition of a religious point of view — which is what the post was really all about in the first place — not to justify what happened, or to defend those who were implicated in it. It was an early attempt to govern in terms of secular principles — something that was necessary in India at the time, riven as it was, and still is to a great extent, by religious divisions and rivalries.
However, I haven’t read Indian history for years, so my remembrance of these things is now a bit sketchy.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t trying to suggest that Wavell, whom I admire and who did his best in a difficult situation, was like Eichmann, It was those 19th-century officials who stood by and did nothing I was talking about. (And Churchill’s callousness in the – 20th-century – circumstances did him little credit.) Yes, I know you are talking about religious points of view: my point is that governance by secular principle – if you can call laissez-faire a genuine principle (there are after all secular principles and secular principles) – can result in disasters quite as great as those brought about by religious ones, and that when they do it does not seem right to me to regard them as more benign than religious principles merely because they are secular, or those who practice such principles as somehow being nicer or morally better than those who follow religious principles.
Tim, the point of this discussion, if you recall, began with Chesler’s pieces about the barbarity of Islam, that is, the inherent barbarity of the religion itself. I happen to agree with that assessment, and, while it is true that there are some inherent barbarities in Christianity, there is no “warrior spirit” in Christianity, as there is in Islam. Though sometimes people were converted at the end of a sword to Christianity, this is not part of the foundational texts of the religion, as it is of those of Islam. Indeed, early Christianity disallowed the profession of arms. Mithraism was the favoured religion of the Roman legions, and it was only with Constantine, when Christianity became the imperial religion, that those strictures on the use of arms relaxed. And it is that barbarity of Islam which makes it, in my view, probably inconsistent with democracy and liberal ideals of toleration.
This was the point of the discussion, and in the course of it we have been diverted into consideration of the British in India. It should be noted, as it was by many of the British, that the role of the British in India was inconsistent with political practice at home, an inconsistency which would lead, eventually, to the British leaving India. The forces which brought that about were active long before 1947, and may have been sown at the time of the Muntiny in 1857. The vicious British response to the rebellion of the sepoys was really a sign that Britain no longer had the moral capital to retain sovereignty in India.
Now we come to the famine. Tim, you raised the famine as a counterpoint to the cruelty of Muslim rule in India, and the latter truly was cruel. Those they could not convert they oppressed, destroying much of India’s cultural heritage in the process. Let’s just stick with the famine of 1943. Is this a sign that the British were as cruel and culturally rapacious as the Muslims? No, I don’t think so. The famine occurred in the midst of a world war. It occurred largely because of a number of factors beyond the control of the government — poor food production in the preceding two or three years, the inability of the Indian government to deliver food supplies through he Bay of Bengal, then controlled largely by the Japanese, the loss of rice imports from Burma, the corruption of local Indian governments — which were, by this time, largely run by the Indians themselves after a period of devolution — and the food hoarding of the more well to do, the difficulty of imposing rationing schemes, and several other problems, including the resistance of the War Cabinet and the interference of Lord Cherwell, one of Churchill’s advisors, who, as Wavel said, was “a fraud and a menace,” as well as a racist. The only point that I have been trying to make is that, overall, the famine was not the result of a deliberate attempt by the government of India, to starve people to death, whereas, in the case of Muslim rule in India, cruelty and oppression were indeed the purposes of Mughal rule, and that cruelty and oppression were the immediate product of Islam, and were characteristic of Islamic rule in most places where its rule extended. The British were not, on the whole, barbaric in the same way (although their response to the Mutiny certainly was, but this, in itself, made British rule in India untenable in the long run). Muslim imperialism was religiously motivated, and its oppressions and depredations were based on the belief system of Islam. The same cannot be said of the British in India.
Tim, I think this is the video you were talking about here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Z7tl7Vy8U
Especially from 1:10 onwards. Those strong feelings and passions are his liberal values, and I share them.
Here’s an example via Ophelia:
http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2773/turkish-women-permitted-rape
Inside, we find:
If this is true, it’s an outrage, and instance of liberalism defeating itself, to echo Eric’s theme. But again, I suggest that the solution is to simply enforce rape and abuse laws equally among everyone without regard to anyone’s religious beliefs. There don’t need to be any special laws prohibiting sharia or treating “rape by a muslim due to belief in Islam” with any more or less sympathy under the law than any other rape. If democracy is able to eradicate extreme, damaging religious behavior like this, I’d rather it act more as a sieve than as a sniper to do so.
Thank you again, Eric. I’m sorry to have diverted the discussion. But I just want to say that I thought I made it pretty clear in my last comment that I was not talking about the 1943 famine, where the goverrnment in India did try to mitigate things, but the famines of the 19th century.
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