The Gertrude Bell Jar

"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!

Today In Islamophobia

City of Brass has an excellent essay answering science fiction writer Dan Simmons’ blog post about a “Century War with Islam” and the Eurabia argument in general. Meanwhile, reason columnist Cathy Young argues with Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch et al and Oriana Fallaci, and replies to Spencer’s replies here and here.

Cartoon Comment

Aziz Poonwalla has an excellent post up at City of Brass about the “Cartoon StupidStorm,” with links to a great deal of worthwhile commentary on the controversy. I would draw your particular attention to the Mona Eltahawy piece from which Poonwalla quotes extensively in his own earlier post at Dean’s Place:

Lost amid the ashes of torched embassies and the senseless deaths of Muslim protestors is the fact that the cartoon controversy is as much about freedom of expression in the Muslim world as it is about freedom of expression in Europe.

The violence and the bitter words exchanged over the past few days have little to do with Islam but everything to do with those who want to be its sole guardians and spokespeople. [...]

This is not a clash of civilizations but a battle between the extremists - Muslims and non-Muslims alike - and the rest of us who refuse to allow them to speak for us. This is about control. So of course it is about freedom of expression - in Denmark and in the Muslim world.

Also, another book to add to the reading list: Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained. Sounds like essential reading based on the GNXP comment Poonwalla highlights.

Apocalypse Then And Now

Well, the David Cook books, Understanding Jihad and Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, have come in the mail, and dipping into the latter, I find that its relevance to parsing the public statements of our Shia Persian of interest will be uncertain, since Cook notes that he is focussing exclusively on Arab Sunni sources. (In his introduction to another book I found at the library, Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden, author Timothy R. Furnish states that he will deal exclusively with Sunni Mahdist movements, and further that he began working on correcting the misperception that Madhism is primarily a Shia phenomenon in his own doctoral dissertation, so perhaps that will be the best place for me to look for references to works that deal with Shia variants of Mahdism).

Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature looks like it will be a profitable read nonetheless. See this, for example:

[One level] of the anti-Semitic conspiracy stems from the frustrations Muslims feel about their inability to deal with Israel and their inability to convince the larger world of the justice of their concerns.

He continues the thought in a footnote:

There is also the inability to understand the freedom of choice and the marketplace of ability created by a free society, which promotes the view that since the Jews are prominent in Western society (and are regarded as even more so by the exagerrations created by discovery of "hidden Jews"), there must be some conspiracy to explain this fact. Coming from a hierarchical society where ability is not necessarily rewarded and where it is more important to have a protective group supporting an individual than to get a good education and to work hard, the conspiracy accusation at this level is understandable.

Ah. The footnotes concludes, "See H. 'Abd-al Hamid (1996, 5-6)," but probably you don't want to, since the reference is to his work Yajuj and Majuj, or, Gog and Magog, so the book most likely presents an example of this phenomenon rather than a critique of it. On the other hand, it's an English translation, so go nuts if you want to, I guess.

Beyond this, it looks like Cook will be fleshing out one of the central claims in Bernard Lewis' Semites and Anti-Semites, that modern Arab anti-Semitism is almost entirely dependent on European and Christian sources and influences for its theory, and pretty much dates from the latter half of the 20th Century. As Lewis explains, though Jews and Christians were indeed thought inferior and assigned secondary dhimmi status and subject to many special restictions in Islamic civilizations, the notion that Jews are any kind of threat to Muslims is a modern one. After all, in Islamic history the Muslims triumphed over Jews on the battlefield, and though the Jews did plot to kill Jesus, they were too incompetent to succeed (Muslims believe that Jesus did not really die on the cross and was simply taken bodily into heaven by God rather than resurrected). Persecution of Jews in Islamic civilization did occasionally occur, but was exceptionally rare as compared to Europe, which is why Muslim lands were a haven for European Jews during the European Middle Ages.

Cook states that the so-called "rocks and trees" hadith,

The time [of Resurrection] will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, and until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees whence the call is raised: ‘Oh Muslim, here is a Jew hiding! Come and kill him.’

which is cited repeatedly by Islamists and apocalypticists alike (and even appears verbatim in the Hamas Charter) is actually the only hadith or reference of any kind in classic Muslim apocalyptic literature which assigns the Jews a particular role in the end times, and that in some versions of the hadith, the Jews are not mentioned at all. This is too slender a reed for contemporary apocalyptic writers who want to connect theories about the end times to the International Jewish Conspiracy, so they tend to lean heavily instead on sources from outside the Islamic tradition, chiefly Biblical passages, European anti-Semitic writing (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a core text), and all manner of Western crackpot books on topics like the Masons and UFOs.

Notes on Aisha

I encountered the claim that Muhammad was a pedophile (or "pedophile rapist" to be precise) again the other day in comments to a blog, and while it never seems quite worthwhile to answer this in blog comments, since the issue of Aisha’s age at marriage is complicated enough to take a bit of doing to discuss in full, and the person raising the issue rarely seems interested in hearing contradictory evidence anyway, I thought I would just do an entry here that I could link back to the next time the temptation to respond arises.

The Wikipedia article on Aisha has a good summary of the conflicting traditions and histories about Aisha’s age at marriage to Muhammad, and also of the difficulties resolution of this controversy pose to Islamic theological method. Another critic of the story that Aisha was married at the age of nine goes further and attacks the credibility of the narrator of the main hadith in question (the most important ones are attributed to Aisha, but hadith were preserved only as an oral tradition for about 170 years; M. Amir Ali is challenging the credibility of the transmitter of traditions attributed to Aisha and others, which were in turn collected and authenticated by al-Bukhari et al), finding also a few more hadith in addition to the historical sources cited in the Wikipedia article that seem to conflict with the marriage at nine story.

So that’s about as clear as mud. Whatever the truth of the matter may have been, the story clearly has been garbled in the transmission one way or the other. Why has 9 prevailed over the more customary marriage age of 13 or post-puberty for Arabs, which some sources also support as the marriage age for Aisha, in Muslim historiography? I think a partial answer may be found in D.A. Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A’isha bint Abi Bakr.

Spellberg relates two lists of attributes supposedly recited by Aisha herself in the works of medieval Muslim historian Ibn Sa’d. They are both related in the first person; the first is introduced with the words: I was preferred above the [other] wives of the Prophet by ten [attributes]:

1. He [Muhammad] married no other wife as a virgin except me.
2. He didn’t marry anyone else whose mother and father were both emigrants.
3. Allah sent down my innocence from heaven.
4. Gabriel brought him [Muhammad] my likeness in silk from heaven saying, "Marry her for she is your wife."
5. He and I used to wash from a single vessel and he didn’t do that with any of his wives except me.
6. He used to pray when I was in his presence. He did that with none of his wives except me.
7. He received revelation while he was with me. This didn’t happen when he was with any of his other wives.
8. He [Muhammad] died in my arms.
9. He died on a night which had been turned over to me.
10. He was buried under my house.

And introducing a second list, Aisha says "I received attributes which were not granted [any other] wife."

1. The Prophet of Allah took me as his wife when I was a girl of seven.
2. The angel brought Muhammad my likeness in the palm of his hand.
3. He [Muhammad] consummated the marriage when I was nine.
4. I saw Gabriel and no other wife saw him except me.
5. I was the most beloved of his wives.
6. My father was the most beloved of his companions.
7. The Prophet of Allah fell ill in my house.
8. I nursed him.
9. Muhammad died and no one witnessed it except myself and the angels.

Spellberg observes:

Four factors found in the two lists of Ibn Sa'd make specific mention of A'isha's marriage. In the first list, A'isha states that she was the only woman the Prophet married "as a virgin." (Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat, 8:58, 63; ibn Hisham, Kitab sirat rasul Allah, v.1 pt.2: 1001). This obviously prized though fleeting physical asset allowed A'isha to remind her husband that all his other wives, as widows, had been physically intimate with other men. Reference to her unique virginity, narrated on A'isha's authority, caused the Prophet to smile (Ibn Sa'd, 8:80). A'isha's virginity, defined as a special attribute, emphasizes her sexuality as the Prophet's marital prize, a mark of distinction which supports male definition and control of female honor and chastity. Unlike the Prophet's daughter Fatima, whose designation in later medieval sources as al-Batul, "the virgin," will allow her transcend aspects of more mundane female biology, not in the conception of her children but in matters of menstruation and parturition, A'isha's virginity merits no honorary epithet, but remains part of her sensual legacy as the Prophet's spouse.

The second list confirms the particulars of the marriage by explaining that A'isha was seven when she married the Prophet and nine when the union was consummated. A'isha's age is a major preoccupation in Ibn Sa'd where her marriage age varies between six and seven; nine seems constant as her age at the marriage's consummation. (Ibn Sa'd, 8: 58-62, where hadith concerning her age are repeated more than ten times. (Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4: 71.; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 6: 118. Both al-Bukhari and Ibn Hanbal maintain the ages as six and nine.) Only Ibn Hisham's biography of the Prophet mentions that A'isha may have been ten years old when the Prophet consummated the marriage (Ibn Hisham, v.1 pt.2: 1001). All of these specific references to the bride's age reinforce A'isha's pre-menarcheal status and, implicitly, her virginity. They also suggest the variability of A'isha's age in the historical record. (For disputed date of birth, see al-Tabari, Ta'rikh, 4: 2135 and its contradiction within the same chronicle, 4: 1262. For her death date at sixty-seven, not sixty-six, see Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-a'yan, 3: 16).

So firstly it seems that a pre-menarchal age was always attributed to Aisha in early sources; it is only where this indirectly trips up other methods of historical dating linked to Aisha that we see any real disagreement. Secondly, her young age and therefore indisputable virginity were seen by her biographers (and perhaps Aisha herself if we can trust the sources) as evidence of her specialness to the Prophet.

And why is the specialness of Aisha important in Muslim history? Spellberg notes that Ibn Sa’d and the other medieval historians she quotes were writing just around the time when the ongoing dispute among Muslims about the status of Ali had finally been formalized into a sectarian split between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. Muhammad had died leaving no male children who survived into adulthood. Community leaders chose Abu Bakr, Aisha’s father, as the first successor to Muhammad. Some members of the community thought that Ali, the husband of Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, should have been chosen instead. However, Ali was passed over two more times, in favor of Umar and Uthmann. When Ali was finally chosen as the fourth caliph to succeed Muhammad, Aisha led part of the community into a battle to prevent his succession. The battle was a bloodbath, but more so for Aisha’s side, and Ali assumed the Caliphate (but was soon thereafter assassinated, and the Umayyad dynasty began its rule of the Ummah).

Aisha’s presumed special status is understood by Sunni Muslims as evidence for the legitimacy of Abu Bakr as Caliph, and therefore implicitly the whole chain of succession after him, since the subsequent decisions of the leaders of the community are implicitly validated by the legitimacy of the first one. And Aisha herself was deeply involved in these controversies, and may have exaggerated some aspects of her history in order to legitimate herself (according to a standard that "supports male definition and control of female honor and chastity" to be sure) following her instigation of a battle that nearly destroyed the Ummah.

Or maybe Aisha really was nine when she married Muhammad. In a discussion on the islamicfeminist community (which unfortunately has since been deleted, and was also where I found the links above) at LiveJournal, one commenter noted that it was probably time for Muslims to begin taking a more anthropological view of Muhammad and the original Muslim community, viewing them as products of a very different society from ours in the far past, instead of treating every single thing they did as exemplary, and falling into the "trap" of trying to justify every aspect of their history, good or bad. This is probably easier said than done, since so much Islamic theology and jurisprudence uses the details of the lives of the Prophet and the Companions as guides to law and ethics. But it would simplify more than a few things, too.

Those Pesky Hand-Holding Saudis

Well, here’s a previously unsuspected (by me at least) conflict among Republicans about relations with the Muslim community in the U.S. It seems to be related to a problem Steven Schwartz discussed at some length in his Two Faces of Islam, the White House’s obvious need to do some kind of networking with this community (and not just to secure votes, but as a matter of policy, I would think) vs. the fact that most Muslim institutions in the U.S.--mosques, charitable and community groups etc.--were coopted by Wahhabism via Saudi money and influence in the 80s and 90s. According to Schwartz, about half of the U.S. Muslim leaders Dubya held a photo op with shortly after 9/11, for the laudable purpose of discouraging harassment and persecution of Muslims in the U.S., were in fact Wahhabists. At the time Schwartz thought it was simply an error, Westerners being tone-deaf to deep conflicts among Muslims as usual, but it can hardly be a mistake by now.

Schwartz of course advocated naming names and ending any association between Wahhabist leaders and U.S. officialdom in any capacity, but I imagine it’s a bit difficult to declare Wahhabism per se an enemy of the U.S., since it is after all the official state religion of Saudi Arabia, which in turn is still officially an ally with whom we apparently continue to enjoy warm relations. And indeed Wahhabism itself is not Islamism or terrorism, but instead is more like a feeder religion to the political movement, and the dissolution of the House of Saud along with all other regimes (of Muslim nations) deemed illegitimate by Islamists and the reinstatement of the Caliphate is the fundamental goal of Islamism. It may be that the White House believes that Wahhabist groups and individuals still under the influence of the Saudis will have ceased their support of Islamist terrorist organizations just as the Saudis have ostensibly done since 9/11 (vs. their previous strategy of cooptation through funding), so that these contacts are consonant with rather than diammetrically opposed to our interests. It may also be that this belief is monumentally naive. Either way, I’m not sure I have a strong opinion on what the official attitude towards CAIR or similar organizations should be. It’s not as if there is much of an alternate institutional structure for maintaining basic contact with the American Muslim community anyway, so what are you gonna do?

This all came up, btw, because Daniel Pipes has lately accused Grover Norquist of being, himself, an Islamist, or at least a crypto-Muslim. I came across this tidbit via a posting by Jonah Goldberg at the Corner, along with the background link above, and this email to Goldberg from a reader calling the accusation against Norquist ridiculous, on the basis that Norquist’s wife does not veil, and the couple still serve alcohol at social functions. Pipes is correct that in Islamic orthodoxy Muslim women are not supposed to marry non-Muslim men, but this is an interpretation based on a verse in the Qur’an about a husband being one degree above his wife--since it is considered inappropriate for a non-Muslim to be in a position of superiority over a Muslim in any context, if a husband rules over his wife, a non-Muslim man may not rule over a Muslim woman in marriage. But plenty of Western Muslimahs reject the "rulership" reading of the verse and consider it an expression of male responsiblity for women instead. I haven’t happened to hear anyone so far say they also therefore reject the marriage rule, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if many do. Besides, just because something is orthodox doesn’t mean all Muslims observe it all the time, and it doesn’t sound like Norquist’s wife is particularly near the fundamentalist or even orthodox end of Muslim faith anyway. Pipes' assertion that the mere fact of Norquist’s marriage to a Muslim woman proves that he himself must have converted to Islam, let alone Islamism, is indeed absurd. (I should probably get around to reading Pipes’ book on Arab paranoid consipiracy theories about Jews and Israel sometime soon, it sounds like he has a flair for that sort of thing).

Book Recommendations

Most of the Koran has multiple potential meanings like the sura I quoted in the previous post, which makes recommending a single source about any aspect of Islam kind of a touchy issue. A while back, a friend asked me to recommend a book that would give a good introduction to Islamism. I wanted to say Jansen’s The Neglected Duty, which contains an English translation of Muhammad 'Abdus Salam Faraj's Al-Faridah al-Gha’ibah along with a lot of background and discussion from other Muslims. (There are some quotes from it and a link to a bookstore where you can buy just the Faridah at the Islamist Watch website--the title is translated as The Absent Obligation there.) But Jansen’s book is out of print and scarce, so it seemed a bit beside the point to recommend it. I’d say, just poke through some of the documents on the Islamist Watch site, but the problem is, no context is provided, and especially no information that lets you understand both how perverse this particular interpretation of Islam is, yet also how compelling. I think maybe I want to recommend The Veil and the Male Elite by Fatima Mernissi for starters. It’s a feminist reinterpration of the Koran and Hadith and a vivid recounting of early Islamic history. She is always clear about what the tradition has been, and which parts are her own interpretation, so although it is a heterodox text, it’s nonetheless a good, memorable introduction to the subject matter. Maybe read that, and read some of the stuff on the site linked above, and you’ll probably be able to see how everything resonates. Also, see Emmanuel Sivan’s Radical Islam, for important context about Ibn Taymiyya (a medieval Islamic jurist, and an important legitimating source for Wahhabism and Islamist thought in general) and the history of the Islamist movement.

On Muslim "Lies"

A friend sent me this link to an article about Muslim "lies," dragomans, and Orientalism.

Did anybody else see that Saturday Night Live sketch when Joe Montana was the guest host, consisting of some people standing around in a living room talking, and each person would say something out loud and then there would be a voiceover saying what the person was actually thinking to themselves, and the thoughts would be radically different from the speech each time? And then they got to Joe Montana, and he said something nice to the other people, and his thought voiceover said the exact same thing, word for word? [Laugh] And then he said, out loud, "Well, it's been nice talking to you people. I'm going to go up to my room and masturbate now." [Big laugh] And his voiceover repeated it as he walked up the stairs [Another big laugh]. It worked especially well, I think, because football players are generally believed to be bone-stupid.

In everyday life, every time another person opens his or her mouth to speak, we know they are editing their thoughts and tailoring their words to us in one way or another, and we know that we constantly do the same when we speak to others. We think of this as an indispensable social skill rather than "lying." And in the arena of politics, we know that every time a conservative or liberal pundit opens his or her mouth to speak about the same issue, they will be highlighting entirely different data points about it. This is not "lying" either; this is analysis and interpretation (the selection and integration of the most salient data to illuminate a given way of thinking about an issue), and rhetoric (the presentation of that data to persuade others to share that way of thinking about an issue by associating it with what the speaker presumes the audience already believes), and no political discussion can take place without it. A precise and even-handed presentation of every relevant detail about a given issue, if such a thing is even possible, can never move beyond itself. What are we to make of this great mass of facts? What do they mean? We are always of necessity intellectually imposing one sort of order or another on a chaotic world. (I did try to start writing about rhetoric but found it impossible again--I never did turn in a paper for the rhetoric course I took in college--because as my husband said to me, trying to talk about rhetoric itself is a lot like expecting a fish to describe the water in which it swims, but my point would have been: people who understand how rhetoric works know that they are doing basically the same thing as their political opponents are but from a different set of premises, whereas people who don't understand how rhetoric works think that they are telling the unvarnished truth and others are lying).

I might never get around to writing the "right vs. left stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims" thing that I mentioned before, but if I ever do, the theme will be "savage vs. noble savage." The right theorizes the Arab and Muslim Other as a superstitious medieval peasant with access to high-tech weaponry; the left theorizes this Other as post-colonial victim, period. Both are cartoons serving different political agendas, and both end up, in their most idealized form, looking a lot like Joe Montana (if Joe Montana were a ventriloquist's dummy that is, but pass over that for now). In both theories, this Other is supposed to be incapable of higher-order intellectual functions like analysis, interpretation, and rhetoric. Every word out of their mouths is supposed to be, simply, "true." If it isn't "true", then they're lying (right) or suffering from false consciousness, known in this context as "Westernization" (left). Not interpreting, not arguing, not "spinning," just lying, or succumbing to someone else's lie. Both conceptions assume that we (the non-Muslim "West") know what is "true," what Arabs and Muslims ought to have in their heads, which of course is whatever "truth" reinforces our own politics. Underlying both assumptions is the unstated belief that for the simple, dusky foreigner, the mouth is the telegraph of the brain (or more precisely the "authentic" self, in the left conception), and corruption is the only possible explanation for any discontinuity between thought and speech.

If you asked a dozen Christian theologians whether or not the Bible says that the Jews killed Jesus, how many would simply say "yes?" The words on the page do in fact describe Jews involved in the death of Jesus. So if the theologians said "no," would they be "lying?" If you are a believing Christian, you believe the Bible is "true." But you also believe that there are different ways to interpret it, and that some types of interpretation have authorized acts (like the Holocaust) that contradict other Christian principles that seem more central according to other interpretations. And you further believe that it is your duty to present the correct interpretation of Christianity whenever you speak of it. Asking what the Bible "says" is really asking what it means. So a Christian being asked whether the Jews killed Jesus will be considering not just the words on the page, but what it has meant to answer that question in a certain way in the past, and what it means to answer it a certain way now, and how those meanings might qualify the concept of Christianity itself. The Christian knows what the text contains, but wants to exert some control over what it is understood to say, with several goals in mind: to avoid authorizing anti-Semitism, to present his or her own belief about the real central meaning of the Passion, whatever that might be, to avoid presenting Christianity as inherently anti-Semitic, intolerant, and murderous. The answer will be heavily qualified, therefore, not only by interpretation itself, but also in reaction to an array of presumed biases, both against Christians and against Jews, and indeed the very presumption that this is a vitally important question to ask about the Christ story in the first place.

Islamic religious leaders and Western "dragomans" like Karen Armstrong are of course constantly being asked equally fraught questions about Islam with respect to Islamist terrorism. They answer these questions knowing that they have no control over not only how much of their answer will see print, but how much else the reader or the journalist might be able to add to contextualize whatever portion of their remarks are quoted. The imam says what he believes about Islam, which is that of course it does not authorize the kidnapping and beheading of random civilians for Muslims living today. He says this in a context in which interrogating Christians are not the only audience for his answer. Islamism represents a grafting of Islamic concepts onto mostly Marxist-Leninist tropes for the purpose of fomenting a political revolution across the Muslim world. It is a particular reading for a particular purpose, and one that loses much in the translation from more traditional readings. Muslims disagree amongst themselves about what Islam "really" means, in much the same way Christians do about Christianity. For a Muslim to assert that a given terrorist practice does not "come from" the Koran is not so much an attempt to deceive Christians about what Islam "really" means, but an assertion of his own beliefs about his own faith. What would it mean to "admit" that beheading "comes from" the Koran? Wouldn't this amount to validating the Islamist interpretation, implying that the Koran is in fact a terrorist playbook? It turns out that a lot of people on the right would say yes to that.

And, oddly enough, so do a lot of people on the left seem to think, though they would never say so out loud, exactly. When Islamist violence finally caught our collective attention about 3 years ago, the presumption that such an act must be the result of something we had done was natural enough. I think Paul Berman captured the reasoning process fairly well in his Terrorism and Liberalism, in the context of his discussion of the initial French Communist reaction to the excesses of Nazi Germany:

For it is very odd to think that millions or tens of millions of people, relying on their own best judgments, might end up joining a pathological political movement. Individual madmen might step forward--yes, that is unquestionable. The Reverend Jim Jones might lead the demented residents of his pathetic Jonestown in Guyana to their collective suicide. But, surely, millions of people are not going to choose death, and the Jonestowns of this world are not going to take over entire societies. The very idea of a pathological mass movement seems too far-fetched to be believable …

Let us suppose that … a social or political movement does appear to be showing, in fact, signs of a pathological attachment to murder and suicide. In that case, there has got to be a rational explanation. Perhaps some unspeakable social condition has provoked the murderous impulse. Perhaps small groups of exploiters or imperialists, through their terrible deeds, have driven thousands or even millions of people out of their minds. Perhaps a population has been humiliated beyond human endurance. Unbearable social conditions might well breed irrational reactions--though, in such a case, the irrational reactions ought not to be seen as irrational. For the human race does not act in irrational ways.

Yet this theory of a purely reactive sort of violence, though it proceeds from a desire to provide a rationale for apparently irrational behavior, ends up infantilizing the actor. French liberals were saying things like this about Nazis on the assumption that if other members of their society "knew" why the Other was behaving like that, then they would not behave in a likewise reactive fashion themselves, and become caught up in a cycle of violence. But there was no question that Weimar era Germans "knew" why they were humiliated; you could tell they'd picked a culprit through their aggressive words and actions. Indeed, the deprivations of Weimar Germany were a result of the quite intentional punishment of Germany for its role in WWI contained in the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Why would such knowledge of the Other's complaints about past wrongs make one group peaceful, but the other group violent? Why is one "punishment" just and another unjust? In this conception, one group is simply morally or perhaps intellectually superior to the other. One group is supposed to have some sort of perspective on the situation, and the other group is not. One group is expected to act responsibly, towards another group that is understood merely to react blindly.

Thus, there is a presumption of some sort of diminished capacity in the Other if we attribute the other's violence to our own fault--because in this theory we should avoid rather than embrace a symmetrical reaction. And worse, if we attribute the violence of a given movement to the wrong that we have done to an entire collectivity, then the entire collectivity must react in that same violent way, or our theory collapses. And how can an entire collectivity exhibit such an inferior moral and intellectual capacity? Why through some sort of defect or disorder in their culture, of course. (Some might even say, through some defect in their race, but we are too smart to go there, not directly anyway).

------------

I wrote the forgoing about a month ago, and stopped there, but I think it’s probably obvious where I was going with it, i.e., how the Western leftist academy’s embrace or at least defence of Islamism as an expression of Muslim "authenticity" is at bottom just another iteration of Orientalism. A number of Muslim Middle Eastern ex-pat intellectuals I’ve read have alluded to this point, but now I’m reading what promises to be a sustained, focused critique of this tendency, Haideh Moghissi’s Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: the Limits of Postmodern Analysis, so I’d rather return to this topic after I’ve chewed that one over a bit.

Btw, the article I linked to contains a paragraph that I think is extremely misleading.

And then there's the case of Montasser al-Zayat, a source who has been tapped by virtually every Western journalist who has gone through Cairo in the last decade. He is a lawyer who specializes in defending Islamists, mostly members of al-Gama'a al-Islameya, and he serves as unofficial spokesman for the group. He's a genial fellow, or, as one Egyptian reporter described him, everyone's favorite Islamist. When I met him, he told me, as he has told many others, that the Egyptian government made the Islamist groups violent. Of course, that's not true. At the very beginning, the groups formed military wings to carry out assassinations and other terrorist operations, but Zayat has told his story to so many Western journalists, who have reported it in books, magazines, and newspapers, that it is perhaps fair to credit him as the man responsible for spreading the idea that the Egyptian government made the Islamists violent.

I’d just like to note in passing that the radicalization of the Muslim Brotherhood by Nasserite repression has been discussed in every history of the movement I’ve read so far; that story may be wrong (and I’d be interested to know if anyone’s seen a good alternate interpretation that would contradict it), but it is hardly the product of one Islamist successfully spinning ignorant Western journalists.

Islam & the Challenge of Democracy/Khaled Abou el Fadl et al.

Islam and the Challenge of Democracy by Khaled Abou el Fadl et al. This is a reprint of a special issue of the Boston Review, consisting of an opening essay by Abou el Fadl (an Islamic legal scholar whom I've mentioned before), a collection of responses to the essay from other scholars, and a closing essay responding to the responses. The central argument is:

Although Muslim jurists debated political systems, the Qur'an itself does not specify a particular form of government. But it does identify a set of social and political values that are central to a Muslim polity. Three values are of particular importance: pursuing justice through social cooperation and mutual assistance (49:13, 11:119); establishing a nonautocratic, consultative method of governance; and institutionalizing mercy and compassion in social interactions (6:12, 6:54, 21:107, 27:77, 29:51, 45:20). So, all else being equal, Muslims today ought to endorse the form of government that is most effective in helping them to promote those values.

Several considerations suggest that democracy--and especially a constitutional democracy that protects basic individual rights--is that form. My central argument (others will emerge later) is that democracy--by assigning equal rights of speech, association, and suffrage to all--offers the greatest potential for promoting justice and protecting human dignity, without making God responsible for injustice or the degradation of human beings. A fundamental Qur'anic idea is that God vested all of humanity with a kind of divinity by making every person the viceroy of God on this earth … [H]uman beings, as God's viceregents, are responsible for making the world more just. By assigning equal political rights to all adults, democracy expresses that special status of human beings in God's creation and enables them to discharge that responsibility.

Abou el Fadl then provides an historical account of how these concepts have been treated in Islamic jurisprudence up to this point, and how they can be integrated with the notion of both Shariah and popular sovereignty in a modern nation-state. The responses from other scholars range from interesting to irritating to soporific. (Why is John Esposito the biggest name in this field in the U.S.? Because he never upsets anyone by ever saying anything. This dubious talent is on full display here, nearly 10 pages of it.) The response to the responses is interesting, taking up some of the challenges about Western hegemony and Muslim authenticity posed by some interlocutors. In all a valuable and thought-provoking read.

Update: The complete contents of this book in its original form as a Boston Review issue are now available here.