The Gertrude Bell Jar

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.

"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.

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.

"The Press Just Doesn't Get Religion"

I'm adding GetReligion to the blogroll today; it's a blog about press coverage of religious issues. The current entry is about a press report on U.S. Latina conversions to Islam, and links to other commentary by Muslim women on hijab and women's rights under Islam.

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.

The Pope Talks Islam

There are two competing accounts of whether Pope Benedict XVI thinks Islam is compatible with democracy, according to two attendees of a recent conference with him on the topic, plus an essay by Ratzinger from about 10 years ago on the same subject, here.

(I think the University of Chicago Islamic scholar Fr. Fessio mentions, transcribed as “Rashan” in the radio transcript, must be Fazlur Rahman).

Reality One Paging Reality Two, Please

I'm currently reading New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper, a political philosopher by trade who is looking at a variety of 20th Century violent religio-political cults through the lens of a framework developed primarily by Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt to describe the totalitarian impulse. I think it would be of great interest to anyone who found Lee Harris' essay on fantasy ideology persuasive, because it provides a more precise and consistent conceptual framework for what the true believer is actually doing emotionally and intellectually. It also avoids the main weakness of Harris' argument, the assumption that the political goals of such actors are necessarily fantastic.

Put very crudely, Cooper theorizes movements like Islamism as an effect of a spiritual disorder he calls pneumopathology, a term he borrows from Voegelin. The essence of the disorder is a conscious act of "honest dishonesty," an adoption of a "second reality" independent of commonsense reality (although the second reality is often adopted in response to real grievances). Once the second reality is adopted, the imaginator finds the conflict between commonsense reality and the second reality unbearable; instead of containing this conflict within himself, the imaginator will seek to externalize the second reality, making the conflict the world's problem instead of his own. This sounds kind of airy and Freudian or whatever, but will make immediate sense to anyone who's ever had an "Hello, earth to Joshua/Heather/whoever" moment when talking to a member of, say, the Spartacist Youth League. (My vivid memory of the almost irresistible urge to snap my fingers in front of their eyes to awaken them from what seemed like a hypnotized daze is part of why, I think, I feel that I already kind of know people like al-Zarqawi, and why it makes such sense to me that Islamist terrorist tend to hail from the educated upper crust of their own societies, rather than being the superstitious medieval peasants that the idea of religious fanaticism suggests in the modern West.)

I'm not sure I completely understand the more theoretical part of Cooper's justification for regarding this as an essentially spiritual disorder, but what I do get is the way he explains that fully adopting a second reality involves the destruction of the imaginator's moral self, which was bound by the precepts and limitations of commonsense reality. The act of replacement of commonsense with second reality grants permission to actualize that second reality; methods of attempting to do so are understood as predictions rather statements of intention. For example, Stalin says that the Kulaks are a dying class. In commonsense reality, this means that he is about to have them all killed. But to Stalin this is merely a prediction about the future, which was already true when he made the initial statement. In the same vein, the Aum Shinrikyo cult turned the Buddhist concept of pao, which refers to a course of spiritual reflection undertaken near death, on its head by making it an active verb: they were pao-ing "enemies" of the cult, not murdering them. To cult members, their prediction that the time for the entire world to be paoed had come was being partially fulfilled by their act of planting nerve gas on Tokyo subways, whereas in commonsense reality, they had merely decided they wanted to kill everyone outside the cult, and proceeded to attempt to do so. In this way the essential connection between intention and action is lost, and is instead ascribed to the workings of a fictional reality; commonsense morality is abandoned absolutely.

What Harris' articulation of this phenomenon lacks is Cooper's recognition that sometimes commonsense reality is actually altered by imaginative religious and political movements. Aum Shinrikyo failed to murder the world, but Stalin did do a pretty good job on the Kulaks. Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, about Nazi death squads populated by middle-aged non-ideological family men, presents a good account, I think, of how non-cult members will naturally adapt to a consensus reality created by cult members, if the cultists manage to accede to political power and impose it upon everyone. Among the examples of "second reality" movements cited by Cooper--Aum Shinrikyo, bolshevism, Nazism, the Witch Craze in Europe, Christian Identity, Heaven's Gate, Islamism, the revolutionary in general as a type, etc.--are of course many that succeeded in actually altering political reality for long periods of time; arguably in the cases of Nazism and bolshevism the alteration may have been permanent in the absence of powerful external enemies.

Cooper has avoided mentioning the American Revolution so far, but it is interesting to look at it through this framework. The central assertion of the Declaration of Independence amounted to standing the then-governing assumption about the relationship between divine and political authority on its head; the Divine Right of Kings was replaced by God's endowment instead of every man with inalienable political power. Note that we date the birth of the USA from this simple assertion of a new reality; the actual expulsion of the King's authority through the War of Independence and concretization of the new order in the Constitution followed much later. We have been living in this reality for so long that it is as if the previous one never existed; we are nearly incapable of conceptualizing the pre-Revolutionary mindset that accepted monarchy as the natural and divine order of things. The tendency of Westerners today to make movies about the history of Europe like King Arthur and Braveheart that project our current understanding of justice infinitely backwards is I think a consequence of that. In these types of movies, good men and true were always rebelling against authority in the name of "freedom," because that is what good people who have accessed the "real" nature of things always do (in a sense, they can't actually be good unless they are good within our reality). But of course this is revisionist nonsense.

The revolution that replaces existing reality with one that turns out to be actually better on a practical and moral level is a rare bird indeed, as 200 subsequent years of revolutions worldwide have clearly demonstrated. But how do you know your revolution isn't just such a good revolution that will be blessed by history? Apparently, you don't.

I'm skipping over Cooper's discussion of the tendency of religious "second-reality" movements in particular to assume an increasingly annihilatory character over time, because I'm just tucking into the part where he's going to talk about Islamism in particular (and, evidently, some specifics about the Abrahamic tradition in general, beginning with the implications of the Israelites' understanding of their covenant with God as history, which I imagine will connect up with the similar Islamic sense of history in some interesting ways.)

Update:
A reader objected that the idea of the divine right of kings was already pretty much dead by the time of the American Revolution.

C. replied: Predictably, it's even more complex than that. The Divine Right of Kings, formally speaking, is a rather late development of the theory of monarchy, going along with the appearance of absolutism and monarchies that were a great deal more powerful -- both in theory and in practice -- than the prior medieval types. Opposition to it crops up in odd places, like the Spanish political theorist (I'm blanking on the name) who published a justification of tyrannicide (and dedicated it to the newly crowned king, which I believe was Philip II's successor).

This should not denigrate the accomplishment of the Founders. The idea of consciously designing a system of government was intellectually "in the air" by this time, but I'm not sure that it was expected to be brought into the real world any more than the various utopias which had been proposed going back to the Renaissance. And it certainly does seem to be true that it's hard for Americans to grasp other political mentalities, now that ours is so firmly established.

One could also look for examples of a revolutionary "replacement of reality" in religious history: the rise of Christianity for sure; possibly the Protestant Reformation.

I replied: The idea of consciously designing a system of government was intellectually "in the air" by this time, but I'm not sure that it was expected to be brought into the real world any more than the various utopias which had been proposed going back to the Renaissance.

And indeed I did not mean to suggest that there was anything particularly sudden about the Declaration; obviously it was the outgrowth of a particular line of thought that had been developing for some time. I was noticing instead the fact that real-world actualization of it followed rather than preceded the assertion of its reality in the real world (We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, etc. etc.) in precisely the same fashion Cooper finds in the methodology of many other imaginitive political and religious movements.

C. added: ...though of course there are obvious differences between the American Revolution and the Rise of Christianity on the one hand, and Stalin and Aum Shinrikyo on the other, even apart from the level of success. For starters, that business about abandoning commonsense morality and confounding predictions of the future with statements of intent has no obvious parallels.

And: I'll have to look up Cooper: it's a promising line of analysis. I've never read anything by Voegelin, but the strand he pulls out of Arendt is certainly present in The Origins of Totalitarianism (the bit about Stalin and the "dying" kulaks is taken directly) and seems like it might well apply. Though she interpreted the totalitarian impulse as a response to specifically modern conditions, I'm not sure that's crucial to her argument.

(If the phrasing is too much in terms of "new realities" and "altering reality" I will have to wince a lot in the process of mental translation. Oh well.)

I replied: Though she interpreted the totalitarian impulse as a response to specifically modern conditions,

As it happens, it seems likely to me that Islamism is a response to modern conditions, most specifically the particularly totalitarian and repressive character of movements that managed to acquire and hold on to power in the Middle East. There are antecedents to the basic theology of Islamism going back to the very beginning of Islam--indeed it understands itself as reproducing the original project of Muhammad in the modern era. But as Cooper points out, the most logical and literalist methodology suggested by the Koran for reenacting the early years of Islamic history would be a new hijra, and in fact early versions of Islamist movements did center on withdrawing from society to perfect a "pure" Islam in a committed community, often literally in the desert. But it is impossible to have a wholly separate self-governing society within a totalitarian state, or in any version of a modern nation-state, really, and these communities were uniformly attacked and repressed wherever they arose. Time to cut straight from hijra to jihad!

Of course, there are many other ways of looking at this; objectively the hijra movement was short-lived and pretty spotty, and would have been viewed suspiciously by any type of formal government; the original hijra occurred within the context of warring tribes each controlling their own patch, so all Muhammad had to do was find a host tribe. But it does seem that the justification for jihad, now, rests heavily on the sense of constant and pervasive attack on Islamists by the state, which objectively is very much the case.

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.

Always the Last to Know

Everybody loves the Jack Chick tracts, everybody talks about the Jack Chick tracts, but does anybody tell me there’s a Jack Chick tract about Islam? Tragically, that pamphlet is not available in Arabic, but this one is. Note the cultural sensitivity in the artwork there.

It occurred to me that I should probably post a link to a scholarly discussion of the etymology of the word “Allah,” but it turned out that “Allah the Moon God” is a very hot topic on the internet. My favorite is the “No, Allah is the Solar God!!” (http://www.balaams-ass.com/alhaj/page14.htm) guy, but I invite you to entertain yourself for hours with your own Google search on these terms.

Islam in the News

A friend rather reluctantly emailed this to me this morning thinking I’d be interested in the topic if not the actual opinions of the author. But Mr. Bell Jar had already pointed out to me a Trib story on the same subject, which, while lacking the Telegraph article’s virtue of containing its own refutation of the implied superiority of all Westerners in such news items, does highlight the interesting news that they apparently don’t have free speech in Italy. (Nor freedom of religion in France, where Muslim headscarfs have been banned in schools). This has all been news to me, and I’m beginning to think there’s a lot I don’t know about what Europeans think democracy is.

FWIW, I think Mustafa’s reading of the wife-beating sura is pretty orthodox as far as it goes, apart from the weapon specs. I think Amina Wadud mentioned a hadith that has Muhammad advising husbands to beat their wives very lightly with slender reeds (or possibly feathers? I’ll have to look this up later, as it apparently is not in the online hadith collection, but I did find this one: “How does anyone of you beat his wife as he beats the stallion camel and then he may embrace (sleep with) her?”), but the point is supposed to be that they cannot inflict much pain or damage, rather than that they are good for hiding abuse from the police. Or so she would like to argue, the plain meaning of the sura itself being uncrackable, apparently. Unless you accept the notion of a trajectory towards social justice, in which Muhammad’s invention of prior steps before beating are meant to eventually move Muslims towards non-violence in domestic matters entirely. Or this argument that the sura has been mistranslated and doesn’t refer to beating at all.

In sum: the meaning of this sura is a matter of dispute among Muslims; Mustafa is presenting one fairly well-established interpretation so far as I know. The article didn’t quote the other parts of the book relating to women that the court found "intolerable and criminally reproachable," but I do have a notion of what the court might have been looking at, since I’ve been reading “fundamentalist” Mustlim tracts on the status of women lately, as the stomach permits. They’re pretty darned sexist all right.

Is it really possible to declare an entire form of religious belief illegal? If so, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just declare Jerry Fallwell and the whole Christian Coalition out of order, and put them in jail, or at least confiscate their publications and shut down their websites? Why oh why haven't we thought of this sooner?

Just what the hell is going on over there anyway? I thought we were supposed to be the ones overreacting and oppressing Muslims and suspending civil liberties all over the place. Europeans are supposed to be the smart ones.