Suddenly it seems like everybody’s talking about this issue
I raised (
here and in subsequent blog postings) first with Hamed Abdel-Samad’s
claim that Islam is a form of fascism and then with Graeme Wood’s
argument in
The Atlantic saying much the same thing – that we’re making a mistake to let Islam off
the hook as the source of the current problem with ISIS. Now Robert Wright of
The New Yorker has published a
piece taking Graeme Wood to the woodshed for helping the
radicals by taking the same position they do – that they are not only Islamic,
but
very Islamic.
Wright has published a complaint that Samuel Huntington’s
Clash of Civilizations theory, a
geopolitical view more at home on the political right than on the left, is
becoming mainstream.
He cites two
political journalists,
The New York Times
columnist Roger Cohen, and
The Atlantic
writer Graeme Wood, both presumed to be liberals, who seem to have taken a
putative clash of civilization position.
He quotes Roger Cohen as
saying “the West has been or is at war, or near-war,
with the Muslim world.”
To make sense of what he is saying, let me lay out my
understanding of Samuel Huntington’s Clash
of Civilizations thesis as I understand it. I’m not a political scientist or a historian,
but I’ve worked in the area of culture theory and have followed the Clash of
Civilizations theory debates from early on, so I’m also not coming to this
totally out of the blue.
The Cold War was a clash of values between capitalism and
communism, between those who stressed the benefits of the free market,
particularly its power to generate wealth, and those who wanted to make
fairness and equity primary (from each according to his abilities to each
according to his needs.) Francis
Fukuyama declared that history was over, meaning the communist/capitalist clash
was over, and capitalism had won.
Huntington, though, thought that clash had simply been replaced by
another one, this time between cultures.
(Culture and civilization have always been difficult to define and the
terms are often used interchangeably, as in this case.) Not economic, not ideological, but cultural
values will be fought over from now on.
Huntington writes as a theorist, not as a political advocate. He sees his work as merely descriptive and he
doesn’t take sides.
Without going into details (the Wikipedia
article on “Clash
of Civilizations” provides a good history and explanation),
I agree with critics who complain Huntington has overlooked diversity within
civilizations, that none of the world’s great civilizations is uniform, and all
affect one another in the age of broad communication, particularly since the
advent of the internet.
What I think Robert Wright is saying is that he understands Roger
Cohen and Graeme Wood to be advocates of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations theory, and a booster for Western values over
and against Islamic values. But Wright
then stops working in a philosophical, analytical mode, and switches to a
political mode. It’s not smart to
construct the world in terms of clashes and antagonize Muslims by describing
them negatively, he seems to be saying.
Better to seek to work cooperatively with the Muslims.
If I understand Wright’s point correctly, he may be right to criticize Roger Cohen, but with Graeme Wood, I think he’s barking up
the wrong tree. Roger Cohen uses what is
to me an unfortunate choice of words. He
says, “Across a wide swath of territory, in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in
Pakistan, in Yemen, the West has been or is at war, or near-war, with the
Muslim world.” If that isn’t a “clash of
civilizations” claim, I don’t know what is.
With Graeme Wood, though, I think Wright may have it wrong.
My starting point, remember, was the very active discourse on
Islam in Germany, which centered initially on the difficulty of integrating
Muslims from rural Anatolia into a largely post-Christian European setting, but
has been expanded now that Salafists in Germany are recruiting for ISIS and
right-wing groups are forming to resist the so-called islamicization of Germany.
One piece of that discourse is represented by Hamed
Abdel-Samad, who emigrated to Germany years ago
and has emerged as Islam’s harshest critic, along with a number of women committed to fighting destructive patriarchal values among immigrant (chiefly Turkish and Kurdish)
communities in Germany’s cities and towns.
Those critics all maintain that they remain “culturally Muslim” but at
the same time find something inherently wrong with Islam itself.
For this to make sense, you have to accept Abdel-Samad’s
definition of Islam as the ideology laid out in the Qur’an and in Hadiths
attributed directly to the prophet Mohammed.
Initially, Mohammed took a passive stance when he was surrounded by
enemies and preached peace. Later, when
he began to build his empire through war and conquest, he took a more
aggressive stance and began to speak of the importance of punishing
non-believers and eliminating opposition.
Those who read the Qur’an this way see his development into a more
aggressive absolute ruler as the argument against Islam as pacifist.
“Cultural Muslims” like Abdel-Samad and the feminists working with Germany's immigrant community to bring them safely out of a world of honor killings and forced marriages and raise women's consciousness about gender rights in Germany's modern democracy, have left the religion behind and come to define themselves in
terms of the spiritual values which have grown up in Islamic countries over the
years and which can be attributed to the early period recorded in the
Qur’an.
But there are also differences
even between “religious Muslims,” some of whom cherry-pick the Qur’an for the
peaceful parts and others of whom, the radical Islamists, cherry-pick it for
its fascist parts, its focus on the imposition of an absolutist Caliphate,
violence and martyrdom as a strategy for ultimate world domination,
infallibility, and inviolability of the person and even the name of the Prophet
Mohammed. What should not be missed, though, in all of this, is the extent of the diversity even within the Muslim world. This diversity matches to a significant degree the same kind of diversity in other civilizations, down to the contrast between literalists on the one hand and those who read religion as poetry and history as metaphor. This diversity should serve as a counter-argument to Huntington’s tendency to see civilizations
are essentially monolithic and opposed to one another. The lines, in other words, should be drawn horizontally, between subgroups of civilizations, not vertically, between civilizations themselves.
And that’s how I read the Graeme Wood article in The Atlantic, as well – through an Abdel-Samad
filter. I assumed both are saying that
though there is a problem with Islam, there is no problem with Muslim
individuals, who are as capable as anybody of assuming the values of humanism
and democracy. The fact that they have
not done so in great numbers means nothing.
The fact that Muslims, or African Americans, or Australian indigenous
peoples have not won a whole lot of Nobel Prizes doesn’t mean that they are not
capable of it; it means they have not had the benefit of the grounding in the
kind of education and critical thinking that develops Nobel Prize winners.
Robert Wright’s reading of Wood fails to see his nuanced
thinking, in other words. What Wood (and
Abdel-Samad) are after is recognizing the power of Islam as an idea –
specifically aggressive absolutist Islam as inspiration for the kind of people
drawn to fascist power and claims to certain truth. Wood begins by complaining that Obama
repeatedly refers to ISIS as “not Islamic,” and suggests that this analytical
error has “contributed to significant strategic errors,” namely that Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS, by declaring he had reinstated the caliphate, was
drawing in thousands of dreamers. (I am
reminded of the “next year in Jerusalem” line spoken at Passover over centuries
of Jewish exile, and remember the joy after the Six-Day War when Jerusalem was
back in Jewish hands. Some ideas are
overwhelmingly powerful.)
Wood never speaks of the radicals of ISIS as representative
of Islamic Civilization. On the
contrary, he compares them more to the “dystopian alternate reality” of people
like David Koresh and Jim Jones. He
knows they represent a very small portion of the Muslim world; it’s just that
they have a colossal power base. But
this means it is anything but what Huntington would like to call a battle
between Western and Islamic civilizations.
It is a battle between radical fundamentalists using what is there in
the Qur’an to support their views on the one hand, and non-radical Muslims and
others inside and outside of the Muslim world, who would rather live in
peace. And that includes a great many
Muslims who would join across “civilizational” lines with people of Asian,
Christian, Jewish, non-religious European “civilizational” lines to build on
humanist democratic values. I realize I
am overlooking the arguments over whether critical thinking, gender equity, and
other humanist democratic values can come directly to Asia and the Middle East
without Western baggage, but the point still remains – in fighting ISIS, one is
not fighting Muslims. One is not even
fighting Islam as it may come to be; one is fighting it as it is currently
understood by radical fundamentalists.
These are inordinately complex issues. Some question whether Islam is even
amenable to change, as Christianity was when faced by the Enlightenment, for
one thing. Then there is the fact that
those fighting ISIS include both Saudi Arabia and Israel on the same side. And the fact that Al Qaeda and ISIS are now
on opposite sides. And that ISIS is
actually at the center of a Sunni/Shiite Civil War, that Saudi Arabia, the
chief Sunni state and the chief sponsor of the Sunni madrasa which fostered the
kind of radicalism that built up Al Qaeda, is a strong, some would say the chief,
sponsor of the fight against ISIS.
Jordan, with its penchant for neutrality, experienced tremendous
nationalism and a desire to fight when one of their pilots was burned alive by
ISIS. Egypt, the home of the Muslim
Brotherhood, another Sunni group with tyrannical fundamentalist instincts, is
also fighting ISIS. There is no
justification to call this a “war of civilizations.” Not even close. More than anything, it is actually an
intra-Muslim world conflict.
And of all these complex issues, the most complex of all is
the question of whether there is an “essential” Islam, as Abdel-Samad claims
there is and Wood seems to be arguing if there isn’t, there might as well be. There are two counter-arguments to the claim
that Islam is essentially bad. One is
that you have cherry-picked wrong, that it is “essentially good” (and then it
becomes a power issue -who gets to cherry-pick what). The other is that one should not judge Islam
by what it says it is but by what it demonstrates itself to be, that it is the
“lived Islam” that we should focus on, not the theoretical (Qur’an-based)
Islam. And that leads us to more complex questions, like how and why there are more books translated into modern Greek than into modern Arabic, despite the huge disparity in population. And the fact that women's rights are perfectly shoddy in virtually all the so-called Islamic countries. And to what degree are those countries that way because of Western imperialism and to what degree (remember the refusal to accept the printing press for 300 years after it was invented) are they retrograde for Islamic and self-inflicted reasons.
I know Robert Wright by reputation, chiefly from his bloggingheads.tv days, and I know he is a good thinker and has an impressive list of books to his name, two with God in the title. I would have thought he'd perhaps want to engage in this debate over what is Islam, and I'm disappointed he chose instead to make the political argument that we should be pragmatic and politically correct. That we should not say or do anything to encourage
the radicals. Tiptoe carefully
so as not to step on any Muslim toes.
Wright, like many others, worries that by calling ISIS
Islamic, one is only playing into their hands and making them stronger. To label them Islamic, the argument goes, is
to make other Muslims who love Islam want to be in their number. Instead of driving home the point that one
can be opposed to Islam but solidly in support of the right of Muslim people to
full participation in modern democracy, fairness and equality, Wright worries
that we may be providing right wingers with ammunition. By saying bad things about Islam, he
suggests, we give them an opportunity to say, “Look at that. Even the liberals at the New York Times and The
Atlantic agree with us that we are at war with Islam,” and the clear and
terribly wrong implication to that is that we are at war with Muslims. No.
That’s wrong. One needs to keep
making the distinction clear. Muslims
can be culturally Muslim. They can even
be religiously Muslim but advocate a peaceful Islam. What we are fighting, Muslims, as well as
anybody else with decent values, is Islam as Abdel-Hamad and Wood define it, as
an insidious force. Just because this is
a nuanced argument does not mean it is too difficult for the world to come to
terms with.
Wing nut Christians, those who think there is no need to
work for peace on earth because the Rapture is right around the corner, are
usually too uninformed about the world to do much damage, although they do buy
a lot of television time and reach into the homes of millions of vulnerable
people. But wing nut Muslims pose a much
greater danger at present. And here, I think Roger Cohen makes the point very well. I dismissed him earlier for failing to distinguish between Islam and Muslims, but to give him his due, he makes the point that it's a whole lot of Muslims we are talking about - even tens of millions. And his latest article makes the point that we're by no means talking only about ISIS when we speak of Islam-inspired mischief.
Still, even tens of millions are not the majority, or even a critical mass. When people
like Abdel-Samad speak of wing-nut Islam as the “essential” Islam, wing nut
Christians say, “See! Muslims are the
enemy!” à la Huntington, and we are usually too cowardly (or bored) to say, “No,
wing-nut-ism is the enemy – and that means we're talking about you guys and your essentialist
Christian nonsense as well as ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, Boko Haram and all
the radical Muslims. You’re all from the
same deck of cards. Now let’s get to
work on diffusing the power of angry religion to ruin our lives, Christians,
Muslims, whoever wants to join in. Whether you are a
Muslim who wants to stress the peaceful nature of the Qur’an and admit you
don’t read the it literally, a Christian who speaks of the “salvific power of
the Eucharist” and rejects both literalism and church hierarchy, or a
non-believer in religion, doesn’t matter, we can all agree any religion with
exclusivist truth claims is not the way to go. Keep your eye on the donut. The problem is not civilization. The problem is the closed mind, of which fundamentalist religion is one manifestation.
What Wright is suggesting is actually a terrible insult to
Muslims. To suggest that they can’t see the difference between their brand of peaceful
Islam and the radical brand of violent Islam, and for that reason we need to be
careful when criticizing Islam is to sell them short. Those
who argue Islam is essentially violent can usually accept that this Islam can
be modified as Christianity was modified and modernized when the Enlightenment
came along. And they can find common
ground with those who argue Islam is essentially peaceful and merely
misunderstood by the radicals and opponents of Islam who happen to find
themselves on the same side for now.
Wright seems to have no intellectual argument, in other
words. Merely a political one. And his appeal is to those who are afraid
that the truth will wreak havoc with our lives.
Better, he is suggesting, to lie a little and make those we disagree
with think we are on their side. Or, to put less harsh words in his mouth, to use diplomacy and tact, instead of honest opinion.
The problem with that is that truth comes out
eventually. Lying or dissembling is always a short-term
solution to problems at best. When insincerity is exposed, when it becomes obvious to Muslims that we were supporting Islam only for political expediency, those who follow Wright’s
proposed strategy will be come to be seen as hypocrites and liars.
Human rights is what we're after, not play-nice and "who am I to tell you you can't beat your wife?"
"As long as you don't hit her in the face?" you say?
Why not stick to the message. Take a look at what motivates you. If it doesn't lead in that direction, call a spade a spade - and let it go.
