The Gertrude Bell Jar

Ashura & Shiism

Ashura in New York. Great pictures, plus a very short history of the Shia/Sunni split from the Shia perspective:

It all started hours after Mohammad's death: while his son-in-law (and first cousin) Ali was attending to Mohammad's burial, others were holding a little election to see who should succeed Mohammad as the chief of what was by now an Islamic state. (Remember that by the end of his life, Mohammad was not only a religious leader, but the head-of-state of a significant polity.) The person soon elected to the position of caliph, or head-of-state, was an old companion of the prophet's named Abu Bakr. This was a controversial choice, as many felt that Mohammad had clearly indicated Ali as his successor, and after Abu Bakr took power, these people had no choice but to say that while he may have become the temporal leader of the young Islamic state, they did not recognize him as their divinely guided religious leader. Instead, Ali remained their spiritual leader, and these were the ones who would eventually come to be known as the Shia. The ones who elected Abu Bakr would come to be known as Sunni.

This is the Shia/Sunni split which endures to this day, based on this early disagreement.

This is interesting for how much of the conventional Sunni narrative it leaves out, I think (you can see my summary here, if you skip down to the paragraph beginning “Following the death of Muhammad”; I didn’t know that I was summarizing Sunni-only accounts at the time that I wrote it). In the Sunni version, the split doesn’t date from the time of Abu Bakr, but from after the rule of all four “rightly-guided” Caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, then finally Ali), and after the civil war over Ali’s succession. Then, finally, when the community accepts the rule of the Umayyads for sake of peace, this is when the Sunni accept the split between temporal and spiritual leadership the Umayyads represent, and the Shia do not. Presumably from the Sunni point of view, the problem doesn’t arise during the rule of the first four Caliphs because they believe those rulers were also legitimate spiritual leaders. A Sunni recounting of the tale will also never fail to mention that Abu Bakr was Mohammad’s father-in-law, and (possibly only according to Sunni sources?) the first convert to Islam after the Prophet’s wife, Khadija. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Sunni source mention that Ali was excluded from the shura council, or even note in passing that Shia Muslims complain that he was.

This kind of makes me wonder just how much the two groups differ in other areas of Muslim historiography. Shiism is pretty invisible in most mainstream scholarship on Islam, which rarely even bothers to note that Shia Muslims have radically different interpretations of some topics. Tmatt over at GetReligion frequently complains about the lack of attention journalists pay to explaining the differences between the two sects, but I have to say I’ve never come across a really good, comprehensive summary; I think I've probably only encountered a small slice of it in the course of reading other things.

Some Subtle Media Criticism

I watched a documentary about Daniel Pearl last night, called The Journalist and the Jihadi, produced by HBO, and narrated by Christiane Amanpour. It was interesting enough, but it did that irritating thing where the only question any terrorist is ever shown being asked and answering is “Do you feel any remorse?” And of course they always say “No.”

Maybe somebody could send around some kind of helpful memo about this? Saying:

Dear Journalists: Jihadis think they are in a war and that everyone who isn’t in their army is an enemy troop. Hence they are never sorry for killing anyone. Just deal with it already and move on with your life, okay? Which could include maybe asking them something your viewers might be curious about when you have the chance. Like you could ask them whether the leaders of their particular cell think Islamic law permits the use of nuclear or chemical weapons against civilians in jihad, or whether their mothers dropped them all on their heads when they were babies, or something like that. Any question we don’t already all know the answer to will do, really. Since this information is apparently very, very hard to remember, please refer to this helpful FAQ when preparing to interview an Islamist terrorist:

Is the jihadi sorry for what he’s done?  NO

Does the jihadi feel any remorse?  NO

Does the jihadi think he did the right thing?  YES

Does the jihadi feel that God approves of his act?  YES

Maybe all the journalists working these stories could write the answers down on a card and tape it to their foreheads, so that they’re always reminded of it whenever they see each other at the hotel.

I don’t know why this gets up my nose so much. I guess it’s because it’s always such a waste of an opportunity to hear absolutely anything else these people might have to say. It’s like if the world press were covering some big astrophysics conference and every single journalist just kept asking attendees if they expected the sun to rise in the West the next morning, and kept carefully noting down the answer every time it was given, over and over again, until press time was over.

I mean come on, it’s been years now, figure it out.

Added to The Blogroll

1. MahdiWatch, a blog by Timothy Furnish, author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Madhis, their Jihads and Osama bin Laden, keeping an eye on eschatological rhetoric in missives from Islamist imams so you don’t have to!

2. Mooselim.ca. According to an article in the Toronto Star, “Tired of the so-called "community leaders" who purport to speak on their behalf, a group of half a dozen twentysomethings are finding the voice of the average young Canadian Muslim – and sharing it at a unique blog cheekily named mooselim.ca.” It looks interesting.

Scientism Is The New Spaghetti Monster

Harold Henderson had an interesting blog entry last month discussing some critical reactions to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, particularly Thomas Nagel’s (available in full, and well worth reading, here):

The key question is whence came design in nature. Dawkins says God's no explanation, because then you have to explain God. But on this field Nagel is a pro and Dawkins is an amateur: "All explanations come to an end somewhere," explains Nagel, since Dawkins evidently didn't do the reading. "On either view [Dawkins's secularism or the God hypothesis], the ultimate explanation is not itself explained.

The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics." Having laid out the rules of the match, Nagel finds that the God hypothesis loses round one, since "the theory of evolution through heritable variation and natural selection" explains how intricate designs such as the eye can come about naturally, and hence these designs no longer provide evidence for the God hypothesis.

But round two is still being fought out, because the evolutionary process is undergirded by DNA. And since DNA itself can't have evolved, where did it come from? "At this point the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a mystery -- an event that could not have occurred by chance and to which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry."

Of course that could change, and likely will if we can keep the theocrats at bay and dispassionate biological research going. (BTW, Nagel isn't buying Dawkins's idea that everything can be reduced to physics in any case. No matter what anyone says, your own experience of being aware isn't the same thing as neurons firing in the brain. Some things are just . . . different.)[Emphasis Henderson’s]

I don’t question evolution, but I do think claiming that it proves the non-existence of God is pure hubris, and a little obtuse besides. Whether or not one must read Genesis literally to validate the entire text and meaning of the Bible is a theological question, not a scientific one. (Of course, attempting to have the teaching of “Intelligent Design” replace the teaching of evolution in high school science classes is obtuse in the equal and opposite way.)

It’s been borne in on me lately, though, that Dawkins et al are talking about a lot more than defending the quality of science education in our nation’s public schools. This entry at GetReligion discusses a recent report of a conference of scientists on the subject of science and religion, and points to a number of scientists making rather exorbitant claims about what the replacement of religion itself with science can do for you and me. According to the New York Times:

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Apparently this is not an exaggeration of the kinds of claims made for the awesome power of science at the conference:

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

Although there was some pushback from more skeptical types too:

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

The interesting thing is, they really are pretty much mirror images, and not just because they are “extremists.” What strikes me the most about the scientists’ comments here (apart from the breathtaking historical ignorance, about Western intellectual history in general and the bloody 20th Century in particular), is how much they seem to attribute some kind of power or force to religion itself, independent of human agency. Whereas, as a long-time atheist*, I had thought we all understood that religion is merely a human project, invented by and for humans, to fulfill human ends. This means that it may not say anything very true about the world per se, but by definition it says a very great deal about us. It strikes me as fundamentally superstitious to think that religion is doing things to us (as opposed to us doing things with religion); and it’s remarkable that the anti-religious scientists quoted above not only seem to want to attribute agency to religion itself, but to identify it as the source of human evil as well.

Now that is superstition! Because if there IS no devil, then religion can’t BE the devil. We’re just stuck with ourselves all over again, and blaming religion is just more special pleading on behalf of a benighted if self-regarding species.

The application of science to the human (the part that's "just different" from physics) has what you might charitably call a checkered past. I'm thinking of Marxism, Freudianism, social Darwinism, etc. Whenever I read anything about Richard Dawkins lately I think about the work of Pascal Boyer, a psychologist who has been exploring the possible cognitive causes of religious modes of thought in humans, and this Wired article about a specific type of cognitive malfunction that seems to be common in math and science types. I think it might be that “scientifically” designed societies and social policies tend to be relentlessly anti-human in practice because actively suppressing the religious impulse, or whatever aspect of the human gives rise to and supports it, slips some crucial gears, gears we’re always supposed to be hitting. Our cognitive capacities evolved the way they did for some reason or other, no? So again I think a little humility is called for, perhaps especially by people who don’t understand or share the religious impulse that most people seem to have.

*Admittedly going a bit wobbly of late, but leave that aside for now.

Edited to add: Some friends of mine have gently pointed out that scientists actually do have a pretty workable theory of how DNA came to be, which makes me feel a bit silly for reposting the Nagel link that uncritically. However, I don't think it affects his underlying point. Nagel was positing DNA (implausibly, it turns out) as the point at which we are forced to acknowledge that God might have intervened, but it needn't be. There is still the flummoxing question of why the natural world exists at all in the first place.

Letter From Fallujah

My brother-in-law, a U.S. Marine who’s currently serving at Camp Fallujah, forwarded this around over the weekend. He says it’s pretty spot-on, and he thinks he knows the guy who wrote it (but no, the author is not my brother-in-law).

I saw him briefly in the Spring; we were all in town for a family member’s funeral (he’d gotten permission for leave well in advance, as the death was not unexpected). In the few minutes I had to chat with him about Iraq when his kids were not in the room, he told me that the Iraqi army recruits they are training are definitely getting better (they manage to actually hit targets with artillery, for example, something the Iraqi Army did not seem able to do at all during the invasion), but that it will take “a long time” before the new Iraqi Army is really good to go.

"Kiss the Koran, big guy."

I found that Michael Cook link in a series of interesting posts on the Pope kerfuffle from a Christian perspective at GetReligion: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I found the discussion of universalism (see links 3 & 5) particularly interesting because I am currently working on an article about the treatment of Islamist terrorism in Bollywood movies (which I may try to flog to a print outlet somewhere--I'll let you, my faithful 3 readers, know if anything comes of it). Indian patriotism rests on the proposition that all sectarian differences can be overcome by loyalty to the Indian nation and Indian identity, but sometimes this belief seems to be an expression of Hindu universalism. In one scene in Zakhm, for example, a woman whose very existence is posited by the movie as the proof of the nationalist claim is shown first to pray in the Muslim fashion, then kiss a crucifix, then honor a portrait of a Hindu god. This might be seen by Hindus as a legitimate faith practice, but neither Christians nor Muslims would see it as a practice of Christianity or Islam. Hindus undoubtedly believe that all faith traditions can be safe in a Hindu-dominated nation, and this is most likely true. But is this claim likely to be persuasive to fundamentalist monotheists? Probably not.

In other Pope news, Austin Bay has an interesting article up about the propaganda value of "Muslim rage" media events for Islamists.

Cook Lecture

I’m adding a new item to the sidebar, a transcript of a talk by Michael Cook, a scholar of medieval Islam and Islamic history, with follow-up questions from assorted journalists. He addresses questions of jihad, the status of Muhammad, the political nature of Islam, etc. etc. It covers a lot of a ground, it’s all worth a read. A new name for my infinitely lengthening "to read" list!

Book Meme

Well, I've been tagged for a book-meme thingy by modernityblog, originally via Marcus at Harry's Place, so here ya go:

1. Name one book that changed your life: Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning

2. One book you've read more than once: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

3. One book you'd want on a desert island: The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson

4. One book that made you laugh: Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson

5. One book that made you cry: Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore

6. One book you wish you'd written: Anything by Elmore Leonard.

7. One book you wish had never been written: Since Marcus has already mentioned the obvious (Mein Kampf), I'm going with A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I liked it well enough myself, but anecdotally it seems to be the one standard book on the American high school syllabus most responsible for turning our nations' young people off reading forever.

8. One book you're currently reading: Since modernityblog mentioned everything currently in progress, I can too! The Blush by Elizabeth Taylor, Bollywood Uncensored by Derek Bose, Fundamentalism and American Culture by George Marsden, Guests of the Ayatollah by Mark Bowden, The Bible, Understanding Jihad by David Cook, and Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin.

9. One book you've been meaning to read: Arabic Thought In the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 by Albert Hourani.

10. Tag 5 people: Oh, anyone who wants to do it. Leave it in comments or post a link to your own blog if you'd like to let me know that you did it, if you did.

11. (additional question), make up the titles of two imaginary books: Martha Stewart's Killing by Martha Stewart, and Charted Knitting Codes & Rituals by Barbara Walker.

Watch This Space!

Mr. Bell Jar, who incidentally is currently reading a series of novels set during the Napoleonic Wars, except there are dragons, described yesterday's review of Imperial Hubris as "ripped from the headlines of the blogosphere, from 18 months ago!" Well I prefer to think of it as blogging at my own pace. Which means that you may begin looking for my incisive analysis of the current Israel/Lebanon crisis in February of 2008.

I am trying to get caught up on book reviews, though admittedly the books are mostly on the well-ripened side by now.

Imperial Hubris by "Anonymous"

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror by "Anonymous."

I've mentioned this book (which is now known to have been written by former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer) before, in a brief comment about one of its many flaws, but got hung up on writing the review, I think because I wanted to write the mother of all scathing indictments, but was honestly too infuriated and exasperated by this whole book to be able to sustain any coherent writing on it.

But time heals! I find, looking it over again, that a response I posted in another forum to a query about Scheuer a long while ago will do as a review. The questioner had seen Scheuer among the talking heads on tv commenting on the 7/7 London bombings, and was flummoxed by his "provocative yet ultimately mystifying talking points," and asked if anyone knew what was up with that.

I replied: I didn't hear what Scheuer was saying last week, but I have read his book. His basic argument is: nearly all Muslims in the Middle East are secretly Islamists, no matter what they try to tell you. Our policy options therefore are: 1. To withdraw entirely to fortress America (no more oil-buying or any other kind of trading relationship with any regime in the Middle East, and no support whatsoever for Israel or any other nation in the region and indeed no diplomatic relationship with anyone of any kind there, no more pc environmentalism preventing full exploitation of our own oil resources, no more pc civil-rights concerns preventing full defense of the homeland) or 2. Go on a total war footing, in which we understand that our purpose is to kill as many Middle Eastern Muslims as possible, or at least sufficiently to fully subjugate and terrify any survivors (hence, the book has chapter titles like "Get Good At And Used to Killing.") Pull completely out or kill 'em all, basically.

To Scheuer, in other words, the uber-fallacy is to believe that there are any Muslims in the Middle East who do not secretly want to overthrow their governments and install Osama bin Laden as their caliph in a Talibanesque Islamic state. The neocon agenda is therefore delusional, since the establishment of such a caliphate would be the inevitable outcome of allowing Muslims to vote. A right-wing militaristic response is delusional to the extent that it continues to attempt to minimize civilian casualties and be somewhat selective in regards to targets. A left-wing negotiation response is delusional because there is no negotiating with this basic antipathy to our very existence; there can be only stupid good faith on our part and lying for temporary advantage on theirs.

It's difficult to overstate the magnitude of his error here. (Although the bibliography to his book offers a partial explanation of it; Scheuer does not read Arabic nor has he made any effort to read about any of these issues from a Muslim or Arab perspective in English or English translation. His whole reading diet from the Middle Eastern perspective has apparently been propaganda missives from al Qaeda and a handful of fellow-travellers as provided by CIA translators, and from the Western perspective various iterations of conservative national defense punditry, plus the literature that has grown up around the "clash of civilizations" theory as applied in the Middle East.) But his argument for it is: Condemnation of Israel and U.S. support for Israel is nearly universal in the Middle East; al Qaeda condemns Israel and the U.S. on the same basis; therefore support for al Qaeda must be universal in the Middle East. This is a little like saying: Nearly all Americans condemn terrorism on their own soil; Bush condemns terrorism also; therefore nearly all Americans must be Bush supporters. Whereas of course we know that all significant political actors in the U.S. condemn terrorism; the competition among them is not about whether to be against terrorism, but about what to do about it. And in fact the same is true of the Middle East (though for equivalency in at least numbers read "Pat Buchanan" supporters for "Osama bin Laden" supporters); all political actors in the Middle East have condemned Israel and U.S. support for it to varying degrees since 1948; the question of which group is best able to mobilize and maintain support for itself based on its approach to the issue is the highly variable and contigent one. And all of this is trivially obvious from even a cursory glance at Middle Eastern history or at the very small amount of public polling data available.

I found myself worrying a lot more about the quality of foreign policy analysis at the CIA than about the Iraq War after reading this book. Some of his criticism of U.S. policy is quite correct, and his knowledge of al Qaeda itself at the operational (but not ideological) level is very useful. But the underlying perspective is just warped and flat-out wrong.

Another commenter asked if I thought any of this theory could be based on ancient views of warfare, when people believed that the only way to successfully assimilate another culture was to kill all the men and take all the women for the conquerors, and also, " … what does he think the remaining portion of these civilizations would do while the other 75%+ is being wholesale slaughtered?"

I replied: I haven't read any of theory of warfare type books that were listed in his bibliography, but it wouldn't surprise me if a fair number of them went into the kind of discussion you're talking about and might have influenced his own take on things. IIRC the specific historical example he used to critique the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was WWII, or specifically the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan, to make the point that the post-WWII occupations were much easier to handle than either of the current ones because such a large portion of the civilian population as well as the military had been killed already in the war; the Germans and Japanese were totally beaten down and hence docile at war's end in this view.

I mean, what does he think the remaining portion of these civilizations would do while the other 75%+ is being wholesale slaughtered?

Cowering and awaiting instructions, presumably. So would the occupations of Germany and Japan lead one to believe. Of course there was little else they could have done at the time, the idea of international terrorism by nonstate actors not having been thought of yet, and not as easily done anyway with the available technology. But this is where his notion of fortress America comes in, I suppose.

The original questioner commented that Scheuer had indeed given off a bit of a "crackpot" vibe, and that perhaps he was intentionally a little cagey about what he was actually saying, since being too clear might well put him on the "do not call back" list.

I replied: I think he manages to sound reasonable enough even in most of his book. It's common enough, after all, to point out the differences between the German and Iraqi occupations as I mentioned below. But to most people this is just a difference in the outcome of two very different approaches to warfare in which the latter version is vastly preferable on its own hook; the point of bringing it up is just to recognize the difficulties that seem to follow comparatively low casuality warfare and propose ways to address them, or to critique Dubya for failing to plan for them in advance, etc. I think Scheuer is probably the only commentater I've encountered who thinks the correct answer would have been to have gone all Dresden on Iraq in the first place. I'm guessing he just doesn't include the crazy part when he's talking on tv.