Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a thoughtful and for the most part well-reasoned expression of concern in this morning’s Independent entitled “Mobs in the Middle East, Salman Rushdie’s new book, and how progressive Islam fell to the barbarians.” At least that’s the way it looks, at first reading, though the histrionic title may give the game away. I hope she is wrong when she says:
It’s more or less over for progressive, liberal Islam. Many of us who’ve tried to keep alive the thoughtful, humane, cultured beliefs and practices of our parents and enlightened scholars can barely breathe or speak after the last wretched week when benighted mobs raved and killed across Muslim countries – some of them newly free and supposedly democratic.
But then she goes on immediately to say:
The Arab Spring turned to vicious winter and dashed naïve expectations and hopes. Casting out dictators does not necessarily bring wisdom, responsibility and self-control.
Surprise! Surprise! The key word here is “naïve”. It had never occurred to me, at least, that, just because despotism fell, we were in for a peaceful future. Huge convulsive changes are taking place in the Middle East, and we do not know the shape of the future, but certainly, no one should have expected that these despotisms would have turned at once into peaceful, freedom loving democracies. Religion had too large a hand in the so-called “Arab Spring” for the outcome to have been other than tumultuous. Religion is like that. Or did people just forget?
Revolutions, particularly violent ones, or religious ones, however apparently peaceful, do not, as a rule, bring about peace. Whoever first wrote the words of Jesus about bringing, not peace, but a sword, understood this. The rage and the hatreds can last for generations, even centuries. Egypt’s revolution was relatively peaceful, or so it seemed, and the transition to elected governance seemed peaceful as well, but the final shape even of Egypt’s future is by no means secure. The Tunisian regime, too, was also overthrown without serious upheaval of civil life, but democratic or not, its future, if anything, may be a bit worse than its past. Human Rights Watch has already urged Tunisia to fix serious flaws in its draft constitution to include
the status of international human rights conventions ratified by Tunisia, freedom of expression, freedom of thought and belief, equality between men and women, and non-discrimination.
But there is no sign that these things are even understood in Islam. The newly elected president of Egypt seems not to understand them at all, even though he was himself educated in the United States, where two of his children were born. He has asked President Obama to sanction the idiots who made the execrable and amateurish video, posted on YouTube, now convulsing the Muslim world. No – more than that, much more – for the Egyptian Prime Minister, Hisham Qandil,
told the BBC that Western nations should revise their domestic laws to “ensure that insulting 1.5 billion people, their belief in their Prophet, should not happen and if it happens, then people should pay for what they do”. [see here]
And can we doubt that Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s president, had the same thought in mind when he spoke with President Obama, and complained about the YouTube video that seems to be at the heart of the protests which led to the deaths of American diplomats, one of them one of the stauchest friends that Muslims had? The protests in Egypt before the American embassy became so intense that, without instruction from their own government, embassy officials apologised for a video for which they were in no way responsible. We are often told not to treat the Muslim world as a totality, that there are many peace-loving, reasonable Muslims, who should not be lumped in with baying masses crying for blood, and I have no doubt that this is true. Yet this seems not to be the way that many Muslims view themselves when their loyalty is at stake. When they are angry they suddenly become a bloc of 1.5 billion people whose ire it is ruinous, we are to understand, to arouse.
Ms. Alibhai-Brown, sadly, saw fit to align herself with the mob. No, she didn’t grab a placard that said “Behead those who insult the Prophet”, but she did say this:
Modernist Muslims, amalgams of the West and East, comfortable with the multiple identities, have no part to play. We are written out, quashed. By whom? By the barbarians who have taken over mosques, schools, homes, hearts and minds. And also by Western political and cultural warriors and agents-provocateurs who derive inordinate satisfaction from playing and inciting Muslims, zapping away as if playing an electronic game. [my italics]
It is unclear to whom she is referring. Though she speaks about the stupid YouTube video, she spends far more time complaining about Sir Salman Rushdie and his friends and other libertarians who are
up and about chanting hymns about freedom of expression in his name and having a go at religions and followers.
And this largely unidentified crowd of freedom loving people would be more convincing, she says,
if, in the interim years, they had spoken out against powerful Zionist censorship, or [instead of worrying about Kate Middleton] had commented when other women’s bodies are [sic] routinely exploited.
So fixated are they on tyrannical Muslims [she continues] that they cannot or will not see all those other ways that speech is controlled and punished.
But, again, she does not identify any of these alleged offences against freedom, and instead is content to wave ambiguously, as if to suggest that this almost justifies the raging mobs which she identifies with the barbarians who have quashed the humane, liberal Islam, the loss of which she so much regrets — though she does not explain how they were able to take over “mosques, schools, homes, hearts and minds.” (I assume she is speaking of Britain when she says this.)
She complains that there doesn’t seem to be a reasonable Islam with which to identify, and deprecates the violence convulsing so much of the Middle East. But beneath the surface of her writing she seems to be seething with barely concealed rage and finds it hard not to express her contempt for the West and its purported freedoms, where speech is in fact, she suggests, selectively repressed. She complains that, instead of engaging with Tom Holland and his “outlandish” theories about the origins of Islam, his critics “are told to get angry and they do so.”
Most of the protesters will know nothing about the film or book [she writes]. But their emotions are as easily inflamed as tinder.
But her own, barely suppressed emotions, are dry and crackling too. She speaks of Tom Holland’s outlandish theories about Islam, as though she knows that they are outlandish. Has she taken a critical look at them herself, I wonder? And why is it so easy to inflame the emotions of the crowds, to lead them to commit or threaten murder in the name of their offended prophet, even if they are outlandish? Holland would not be the first historian to have got things wrong.
I have now watched Holland’s documentary, though I have not read his book. It is mild and questioning, to a large extent sympathetic to the hurt that some will feel because he asks questions about traditions that are widely regarded as holy. He seems largely sympathetic to Islam, and obviously has great respect for its holy places. But he is a modern historian, and he wants to understand. He is trying to produce an explanation for the rise of Islam which, he thinks, is not sufficiently explained by Islam’s own self-understanding. He brings his critical mind to bear on the problem. Has he got it right? Certainly, he has raised enough questions to raise doubts about the traditional understanding. Is it one-sided? I don’t know, since I don’t know what the consensus is amongst scholars working in the field. Should he have broached this contentious subject in a popular medium? Of course he should have, even though the Georgetown University scholar whom he consults – Seyyed Hossein Nasr – says that Holland has nothing to teach Islam — which raises questions about Nasr’s objectivity.
But we are used to that. Christian scholars play the same game all the time. They know that their beliefs are challenged by the historians, yet they go on believing just the same. What many believers have not learned is how to perform the balancing act between what they believe and what is known.The vain attempt to square Christianity with science is evidence of that. And just like Nasr, Christians still insist that their beliefs are firmly grounded in history, regardless of what historians may say. This kind of balancing act has been going on for more than two centuries now. Alibhai-Brown speaks of “[m]odernist Muslims, amalgams of the West and East, comfortable with their multiple identities,” but they can never be really comfortable with their multiple identities, anymore than Christians can be. That is why she speaks of the raging crowds as “severely goaded and provoked,” even though all that rage seems to have been prompted by nothing more than the actions of a small and contemptible group of people who made an amateurish video with no histoical or aesthetic merit (and who may themselves have felt goaded and provoked)? There must always be a nagging doubt that perhaps the old stories are simply wrong, that the history is not secure, and that religious belief will remain forever an uncomfortable intrusion in a world in which knowledge is prized above belief. In such a world the True Believer, in Eric Hoffer’s sense, knows that only barbarism is really the answer. What is creationism, after all, but a milder version of barbarism? The only way out of this morass is knowledge. The more we know, the less we will defend with our lives beliefs that do not rise to the level of knowledge.
A little off topic for today, but still in the general theme of this site.
Reviewing the Wisdom literature in the Hebrew bible — something which cannot be read in a dash, if we want to appreciate its depth, if not its “beauty” (always hard to judge in a doubly-translated text, first from Hebrew into Greek, then into English), I came across those verses in Sirach, the eminent Hebrew sage (ca. 180 BC):
Sirach 30 (NRSV – oremus)
14 Better off poor, healthy, and fit
than rich and afflicted in body.
15 Health and fitness are better than any gold,
and a robust body than countless riches.
16 There is no wealth better than health of body,
and no gladness above joy of heart.
17 Death is better than a life of misery,
and eternal sleep* than chronic sickness.
It is the confused ideology of Christianity which has erected the sacrosanct principle of maintaining living whatever the circumstances. The civilizations of the ANE were more realistic and less barbarian than the absolute principle of preserving living which is no longer a human life at all cost.
From Juan Cole’s web-site ‘Informed Comment’: “Meanwhile, the Libyan government apologized for and vehemently condemned the attack on the consulate and the killing of its personnel. And, on Wednesday Libyans staged pro-American demonstrations in several cities.” He also shows a photograph of one of these demonstrations in which a Libyan woman holds up a placard saying, “Thugs and Murderers Do Not Represent Benghazi or Islam.”
I think it is important that, in addition to fulminating about the nastiness of Islam, this kind of thing should also be talked about and brought to people’s attention instead of being ignored, as, for example, Jerry Coyne, alas, ignores it. Otherwise, it seems to me, we are behaving in a way not wholly unlike those Muslim fundamentalists who seize on any excuse to take offence.
I must say, I agree with your comments on Alibhai-Brown’s piece.
Poor Jerry Coyne is going to be a pretty busy guy if he has to blog on every item that some one out in the Internet thinks is important.
I’m thinking that one of the primary purposes of a blog is to scratch your own itches, so to speak, and if something bothers you enough personally that you think that someone else ought to report on it then by all means feel free to report on it yourself.
Which you have just done by the way.
And I do agree with you that it is important to present this sort of information.
Although I do disagree with the placard holder, as Thugs and Murderers do indeed represent Islam, and I think not inaccurately, violent and lethal reaction to criticism is part and parcel of the Koran.
Well, Mr Oberski if you want to scratch your own itches, do so. But I think in addition to scratching your own itches, it is important to have a sense of fairness and to present such information as Juan Cole presented and not pretend, explicitly, that there is no-one in the Muslim world standing against those thugs and murderers who are, after all, scratching their own itches. That is all.
,
It should be worthwhile reading the book by Tom Holland
http://www.amazon.com/In-Shadow-Sword-Global-Empire/dp/0385531354/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347978883&sr=8-1&keywords=Tom+Holland,+In+the+Shadow+of+the+Sword,
which has mixed reviews on Amazon.
This is the book underlying the Channel 4 (UK) program Islam – The Untold Story, by Tom Holland that was cancelled because of Muslim objections to Holland’s historical approach.
The power of video over print is spectacular. Since more buzz developed about the cancellation of the video viewing, as just another case of bowing again to Islamic intimidation and the usual death threats, than about the book’s publication.
It has been already pretty hard in the West to initiate a historical approach to the study of the Origins of Christianity — it took in fact nearly 250 years after 1,800 years of existence of the Christian churches — and it’s going to prove even much harder to attempt a historical study of the origins of Islam, nowhere in sight at the present.
Tom Holland’s thesis is that, as in the case of Christianity, the records of the origins of Islam and the Koran are very vague for about 100 years of its origination, and the religion, instead of appearing full-blown, was gradually structured and defined, in the context of Arab imperialism.
Not unlike Christianity, which developed within the geography of the Roman Empire and owed its miraculous promotion from superstitio to religio to the endorsement by the Emperor Constantine in 313, and the annexation, by Emperor Theodosius in 380, of the Catholic sect as the exclusive Christian church accepted as legal in the Empire.
Instead of religions creating empires, it is military empires that have legitimized religions and gave them geographical scope and judicial authority.
Same thing may have happened with the Hebrew religion when Moses and Joshua brought their armies to the borders of Canaan and expropriated the Canaanites of their territory by the power of military conquest. At least in the traditional description of the ancient Tanakh, although many modern OT historians tend to believe that this story of origins is a later glamoralizing fiction.
Sub
Tim Harris (#5). By all means, coverage must be fair. Do you really think that one placard is enough to counter all the violence and rage, though? Or one Muslim claiming that prophets will always be abused, so Muslims should just accept that Muhammad will be abused. There are too many blasphemy laws in the Muslim world for these counter-examples to carry much weight. And I think Alibhai-Brown was perhaps not exaggerating when she said it is now finished with moderate liberal Islam. I do not think that there is a moderate Islam, although I think there are moderate Muslims. The Qu’ran, the hadith, the sunna, do not give us any encouragement to think that a moderate Islam is a possibility. It is an ancient religion which, no doubt, provided the foundation for an ancient empire, but it is no more capable of updating itself than is Roman Catholicism, and we saw what its attempt at aggiornamento has produced. I listen to Tariq Ramadan, and behind the velvet glove you can feel the steel, although he is reputed to be a moderate. There are a few Muslims in Europe who are trying to modernise Islam, but all of them need bodyguards. These are not encouraging signs.
Let me bring to your attention a piece done by Ayan Hirsi Ali for Newsweek, which is available in pdf format here. Let’s not forget also that Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey wants Islamophobia made into a crime against humanity. And Turkey, they say, is more secular than religious.
Besides this, Juan Cole is known to paint rosier pictures than are warranted by the facts, and to my mind takes religion much too seriously. Yes, of course, when opposition to a government is needed in the name of religion, religion will play a part, as the Catholic Church apparently did in Brazil, and as it certainly did in Poland, but afterwards it is there to hold onto the strings of power. When the generals in Argentina were disappearing young radical women, raping them, and selling their children, the Catholic Church was well informed about it.
Cole apparently thinks that the Muslim Brotherhood is something like the religiousness of the original thirteen colonies of the US:
But then they set up a government in which religion was separated from government. Cole should not pretend that these are even parallel situations. When the US was formed no one thought it was possible to form a republic not based on religious belief. Now we know it can be done, and that, if freedom is to be preserved, it must be done. Juan Cole pretends not to know this, and that is, to my mind, contemptible. I am always cautious in referring to Juan Cole.
It’s important to remember that Muslims’ grievances against the US is not confined to this video. We have propped up ruthless dictators, overthrown legitimate governments, and invaded their countries. How can we compare four deaths at the Libyan embassy with the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis and the displacement of a million or more due to our “war against terror”. Now the neo-con warmongers are again screaming for an attack of Iran. Is it any wonder many Muslims are agitated by any disrespect coming from the US. They know what is likely to follow.
Paxton,
Just to clarify. Are you suggesting America possibly going to war with Iran and our foreign policy blunders are the reason for their disgruntlement? Btw, no one is comparing deaths but you, my friend.
Killing people to stop people from killing people is not a sustainable strategy.
No, Eric, I do not think that one Muslim and one placard, etc…. I was pointing out that according to Juan Cole demonstrations against the killings of the American embassy staff were held in a number of Libyan cities, something that would invove more than one demonstrator and more than one placard.
I am sorry, Eric, but I have read the post of Juan Cole’s you draw attention to, and find nothing contemptible about it.
Well, Tim, of course we will not always agree. However, it does seem to me that Cole too easily elides the fact that, while each of the 13 colonies may have had religious foundations, the federation was such that it would need to hold religion and the mechanisms of governance apart. If you listen to Mohammed Morsi, for example, repeating that the Qu’ran is the constitution of Egypt, and that the constitution of Egypt is the Qu’ran, you will recognise that you are dealing with something entirely different, and not pointing this out is, at least so it seems to me, egregiously misleading. I did not say the post was contemptible, but that his failure to point out these important differences was contemptible, because, as it seems to me, at any rate, it simply ignores the fact (for example) that he seems simply to overlook the fact of religious divisions in the Muslim world which, for justice to prevail, must be recognised by separating governance from a particular Islamic tradition. There are not only Copts, and other Christians, and Jews (most of whom have been forced to take refuge in Israel), but there are divisions within Islam itself that need to be taken into consideration, and some forms of Islam which are, for example, the Ahmadiyya Muslims, and the Sufis, who are widely treated as heretics or apostates. If Cole wants to refer to the religious foundations of the various American colonies, he should also point out that the problem of religious disagreement was resolved in the American republic (at least to a significant degree), by a separation of church and state, instead of suggesting, as he does, that Americans should therefore sympathise with the close identity between governance and religion in the Muslim world. That was my view, at any rate, when I remarked on this. I have yet to find Cole’s reports of multiple protests against the consulate killings.
Eric, there is an article in The Atlantic, with photos, by Elizabeth Reeve about pro-American demonstrations in Benghazi & Tripoli.