The partial is never the whole

On the Kelley file last night, the host [hostess/hostette?] devoted her opening segment to the Donald Trump “ban all Muslims” comment. She had two guests, Andrew McCarthy, an attorney with experience in immigration and terrorism and some past government service, and Sebastian Gorka, Chair of Military Theory, Marine Corps University and an anti-terrorism blogger.

I have not been able to find a transcript of their discussion, but at one point the distinction was made by McCarthy between what is intended to be meant between being a Muslim being “radicalized” and being a “terrorist.”

As he made his point, Kelley interjected [presumably for us, the great public who otherwise would not know, in her view] in terms like the following: “Radicalized, yes, you mean accept Shariah law.”

I want to make some observations on her statement. [Please keep in mind while I watched it as it happened I do not have a transcript before me.]

First, the phrase “Shariah law” is redundant.

Shariah is law. Supplemented by the method of ijtihad [demonstration by means of analogy,] using the Quran and the Sunnah [the traditions conveying Muhammad’s example in word and action] a body of legal literature has evolved. Collectively this is termed “Shariah,” a word which means path or the way. Not unlike the rabbinic notion of halakah it is, for the Muslim, the “way to go” through life.

Second, Shariah embraces what in the West are often regarded as two, separable aspects of life, namely the sacred and the secular.

The rules in Shariah cover any and all circumstances a Muslim may confront while going about daily life. Once again, this is not functionally unlike the orthodox Jewish notion of halakah.

Third, would Megyn Kelley or Andrew McCarthy term an Orthodox Jew a “radical Jew?”

I make these three observations to illustrate what I regard as muddled thinking in the West about Islam. In part [there are other factors in play] this muddle is a consequence of the sacred/secular [or, “profane” in the old-fashioned term] distinction which has been a foundation of western Enlightenment culture since the eighteenth century, if not since the Renaissance.

Thus I would comment:

The Islam challenge to the west is far more complex than is often made apparent, of which the Kelley File example is a mere illustration. For a thorough and informed introductory exposure to a sound western analysis of Islam let me commend Hans Küng’s monumental book, Islam: Past, Present & Future, in which is offered a review of Islam’s almost 1500 year history and a paradigmatic tool for its assessment and impact on our own culture.

Apocalyspe

It was Samantha Nix, leader of The Lost Tribe, in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, who said it as she recited “The Tell of Captain Walker.” The reference was “in time past, history back” and the great defining event which had ruined life, reducing the planet to near total wasteland : “the Pox Eclipse.”

The Pox Eclipse!

What a tremendous phrase for one understanding of the Apocalypse. It suggests, I think, a disease, a sickness, a distorting illness and departure from the normality of health and wholeness; a pox. More, it suggests that this pox eclipsed or darkened hope, normality, and life as it should be.

Such an understanding lies behind so many movies and books of the apocalyptic-based genre that currently dominate so much of our artistic culture. That spirit or Geist now seeps out of the realm of fiction and lands bang, front and center, of our daily and nightly news media.

The Pox Eclipse. Here it is. In your living room.

Indeed  a CNN piece by Frida Ghitis uses this very notion to answer the question so many are asking: what on earth is ISIS doing? What do they want? They are making enemies of everyone, Europe, the USA, Russia, and now China. What sense is in this? Ghitis summarizes:

(This is) the group’s long-term objective. While ISIS is, in fact, trying to build an Islamic State and is working to capture and govern territory, its ultimate vision is an apocalyptic one. A strategy that looks self-destructive is, in fact, destructive, but perhaps less baffling than it seems as first glance. As many scholars have noted, ISIS’s long-range vision is of an end-of-days battle with the West — what it calls “Rome.” It is the ultimate suicide mission, one that sees the entire world involved in a grand final conflagration.

This pox eclipse is a suicide/homicide combo.

Imagine a man jumping off a high bridge. He will not jump alone. He has grabbed and ensnared any and all others and should he jump all will go with him.

This is what he wants!

What would you expect and want a police officer to do in this circumstance?

A tale of two videos

I caught last night’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s interview with Sea Hannity on the web this morning. She was promoting her new book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs A Reformation Now, which I have not read. I have read other books by her, however, and understand why she is a darling voice for certain ears, described by someone somewhere recently as “a political superstar.” The ears for which she offers re-enforcing insights were represented by Hannity’s comment in the interview that Hirsi is claiming, in Heretic, that Islam is “not a religion of peace” and yet when he says the same thing he is branded an “Islamophobe.” 

The interview was all very predictable to someone familiar with Hirsi’s train of thought which has been consistent and constant, although somewhat more discordant since her embracing of atheism.

Be all that as it may, what caught my attention was her comments regarding American policy in the Middle East, and indeed more globally, over many decades. You can hear them in the interview, as linked above, at 01:30 – 01:48. Hirsi references, as explanation in great part for the explosion of current  Islamic  terrorism, traditional, even standard, American support of “despots” and which enabled, legitimized, and thus sustained their despotic leadership.

Immediately another video popped into my head, this time a portion of a sermon. In this clip you can hear what echoed in my mind at 02:19-02:50.

Jeremiah Wright was excoriated for his “America’s chickens coming home to roost” statement.  His sermon was especially publicized and commented on in the tumultuous and bitterly sore aftermath of the 9/11 calamity, not its original context. Some at the time were hinting if not explicitly stating that the victims in the Twin Towers conflagration were somehow “getting what they deserved.”  Wright, I think, was not saying anything to support that, which is outrageous and insane  He was with drama, flair, and dynamism saying that America’s support for despots over the years was behind foreign detestation of the USA as well as America’s reliance on violence itself to advance its interests.

Hirsi states it calmly and is lionized. Wright preaches it with passion and is both despised and rejected, as President Obama, his parishioner,  was driven to do.

My interest lies in the medium and manner, not the message.   As for the message, that a nation’s foreign policy can be morally culpable and provide cause for violence against that nation, it is nothing more than a basic lesson of history down the ages. It can shock only those who know nothing of history, their own or others’.  As for the implication that this insight applies to the USA in the case of 9/11 and all that has followed, that, it seems to me, is in need of far more examination, particularly by placing US foreign policy in the Middle East in the broader context of what America does and seeks to accomplish globally. This context, let it be said, is such that recognition is demanded of an enormous amount of good being done. So, moving on from that:

An interview delivered in calm tones in a polite context is received with equanimity, if not total acquiescence, while a sermon uttering the same sentiments with theatrics, passion, and memorable phraseology is greeted with amazed disdain, if not stunned horror.

This tells us something, it seems to me, about the Western public square’s unease with religious faith per se.  Hirsi is welcomed and attention given to her and Wright not; quite the opposite in fact; Wright was slashed by comments hinting, not at bad theology, but treason. Hirsi was far tamer than Wright.

More controlled and controllable perhaps?

Less threatening?

What could be more cool than an atheist telling religion how to reform itself?  Religion without God? Cool!

Cool, perhaps, in a NYC  television studio and along the corridors of western academia, but I have no doubt that she, even though saying what Western ears think they want to hear, will be the one ridiculed and despised in Riyadh, on the streets of Sana’a and Tehran, and the crowded rooms of every madrassah.

Je suis Charlie

Do you remember these tee shirts?

I

 

NY

Or this hashtag?

#Bring Back Our Girls

The former, worn widely across the USA and in many other parts of the world right after 9/11, embodied a stiffened resolve and determination to defeat Al Qaeda. The latter, which never quite caught on despite Michelle Obama’s espousal, captured a sentiment and never brokered a policy. The girls never came back, although some managed to escape the clutches of their Boku Haram captors.

Despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda clearly was not defeated and Boku Haram is rampant in Nigeria, as witnessed to by events reported today.

Which brings me to the recent horrific events in Paris and these:

Je Suis Charlie Hebdo (remembering the magazine slaughter victims)

Je Suis Ahmed (remembering the policeman shot on the ground.)

Are we witnessing more of the same in response to atrocity? Sympathy, sentiment, and even serious insight, as testified to by the flowering of brilliant cartoon responses in support of the Charlie Hebdo victims, but once again the mere blossom of a desert flower, so fragile under the withering brilliant sunlight of harsh reality? Or, is this time different? Do the demonstrations across Europe signal the beginning of a change, of the transformation of the victim? And if so what might this transformation lead to?

Right-wing, nationalistic political structures are in place across Europe to seize the day. But, this hardly is a wholly agreeable prospect, given the sad, brutal, and murderous recent history of such ideology’s triumphalism. I liken the appeal of this reaction to that of eating a donut when you are hungry. It looks good, is so easy to eat, and satisfies immediately, but the hunger pangs are merely masked for  a moment. A donut is not a steak, nor even an apple or a tub of yogurt.  (Yes, I love donuts!)  But if not the donut of reactionary nationalism, what? Where is, if you will, the truly nutritious response?

The soft apologetics, articulated most clearly by President Obama, that “Islam is a religion of peace” and the fanatics wreaking such havoc are simply aberrant criminals will not do. The violence is so widespread, threatens to become even more common, and is so utterly indiscriminate that such verbal sops have lost their power to steal resolve and merely permit populations to put up with more slaughter. Besides, an influential, but so-called radical, spokesman such as Imam Anjem Choudary has reminded everyone that, in his view, “Islam is not a religion of peace, but of submission to Allah.” Apart from the Quran, Choudary makes clear that for him and his supporters this entails the imposition of Sharia law throughout the world, as an eventual goal. It is Sharia that, amongst other things, mandates death for certain behaviors,  such as conversion to Christianity by a Muslim and insulting the prophet Muhammad.

The point is that the soft apologetics approach totally ignores and indeed fosters willful ignoring of this attitude within Islam. It is illustrative to note that even when death is not advocated, the free speech ideal nurtured in the western concept of a democratic society is to be attacked as made clear by the comments made the other day in Wisconsin by a Muslim leader seeking to take to court journalists who had reproduced some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

On the other hand, anti-Islamism voices speaking in far clearer and harder tones are being heard more and more. They rise from the heart of Islam itself. For example, Dr. Qanta Ahmed said on US television this morning, in an interview that everyone should see, that western democracies have to wake up and understand that Islamism is a “hijacking of Islam and turning it into a totalitarian political ideology.” (She makes clear, by the way, that the most numerous of Islamism’s victims are Muslims.)

There you have it. The question is not how to deal with Muslims or with Islam or some nut-job murderous criminals. The question is how to deal with aggressive, hardline, political totalitarianism. It is an old question.

Are the terrorists right? They are counting on our culture being too corrupt and our civilization too weary to hear and implement the old answer.

Much ado

Someone mentioned nihilism to me yesterday evening. Wish it hadn’t happened! I went to bed shortly after and spent ages tossing and turning trying to recall  what I knew about it. The last time I had given it much thought was when President Obama asserted that ISIS had “no ideology.” That certainly is one way of understanding nihilism; the terrorist using terror for no real or substantive objective other than the destruction of the existing social order, a la the word’s origins in nineteenth century Russia., made popular by Turgenev especially. But, as philosophy classes taught me nihilism is a much broader notion than terror.

In popular usage, apart from the reference to terrorism, I suppose it is most widely applied to the person who simply doesn’t care very much about anything at all. I am uneasy about this, of course, for very much the same reasons I am skeptical about the claim to be a fundamentalist.

In my experience fundamentalists think, for example, that they “take the Bible literally,” but when you get truly engaged you discover that what they mean by this claim is that they take some of the Bible literally. Not only that, to the vast reaches not taken literally there is the interpretation bail-out, which is what they accuse the non-fundamentalist of doing all the time; “Oh no, this is what it really means.” The problem, thus, is exegetical inconsistency, driven by some other agenda entirely than a belief in literalism, and the fundamentalist ends up in the morass of inarticulate criteria and intellectual dishonesty. But, it provides certainty! The last refuge of the fearful. But, I digress ….

Not caring about very much at all is a far cry from not caring for anything. Nihilism is a ruthlessly deep and wide criterion; nihil, nothing, means exactly that. Who cares not at all, not the teeniest smidgen, for nothing?

In philosophical circles nihilism gets more precisely defined (naturally, for that is what philosophers do, define things.)

The first move is to qualify the common understanding of not caring.

This is done by asserting that while not caring at all may be the literal requirement for nihilism, practically speaking not caring at all seriously may be enough. Ah, an adverb; they are ever the give-aways, the verbal dark corners into which writers and speakers duck so as to keep their real intentions hidden. The politician who says “I intend to vote normally with my party on all issues,” is a perfect example. Always be alert to the adverbs!  Thus, the notion of caring seriously becomes a formula for relativism of such a chaotic kind that anyone and anything could be said to qualify. It defines nihilism in such a way as to make it a universal club, because, after all, who amongst us cares just as seriously about everything we care about. Good grief: I hope Scotland beats England in their futbol match later today, but I do not care about it as seriously as I care for the health and safety of my loved ones. If everyone is a nihilist, as this move permits, then nobody is.

The second move is to qualify the common understanding of nothing.

There are various philosophical theories (many formed) that suggest that we are unable to state, to philosophical satisfaction (that is, in some agreed definitive manner,) the natures of truth, of reality, of knowledge, or of morality, and thus should not enter into discourse about them, that nothing should be stated. An advocate of one or of more than one of these theories is sometimes said to be a nihilist. Needless to say, this view is so highly defined as to be immediately less than everything and thus more than nothing. Furthermore, these theories are exactly that … theories. In practical living nobody lives according to them and actually cannot. Say, for example, you have just finished teaching a class in which you have eloquently argued for and, to your own satisfaction at any rate, confirmed the theory that we cannot meaningfully speak of the truth or of this or that utterance being true; that all truth talk is non-sense. You pack up your notes, grab your car keys to drive home, when a colleague comes up to announce that you’d better hunker down in your office for a while because the roads are closed due to a sudden heavy snowstorm. The colleague is making an assertion with a truth claim and in fact the claim is weighty enough to impact and change  your actions, how you live in other words. There is no truth except the roads are impassable. So much for truth-nihilism. Pragmatism reigns.

When you think about it, nihilism is much ado about nothing.

Blair’s warning

The BBC today is reporting an important speech by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The headline captures the essence of it: “West should focus on radical Islam.”  He argues that issues such as the Ukraine crisis are temporary shadows flitting across the global landscape which is more deeply marked by the confrontation between two cultures, which he labels “the West” and “radical Islam.”

For the sake of this post let us concede that Blair is correct in his assessment of sideshow crises and in his diagnosis of the real symptomatic issue of our time. (I hasten to add that history would urge a more concerned analysis of sideshows and their impact on global affairs, but be that as it may.) My focus just now is on the notion of “radical” as applied to a religious faith.

Blair sets up an implicit contrast. On the one hand, he speaks, as reported, of “the threat posed by a radical view which ‘distorts and warps Islam’s true message,’” which he further labels as both “a threat” and “closed-minded.”  On the other hand, he posits “the culture” of “the West” which is, he asserts, “open-minded.”  On the one hand, “radical” Islam and on the other “open-minded culture.”

Tony Blair is, in his personal life, a Roman Catholic. Perhaps a fear of being thought biased has prompted his utterly bland description of the conflict. Would branding the West as “Christian” be portrayed as something other than “open-minded” or would it simply be ridiculed as being inaccurate? Probably both. Let me elaborate.

Only very recently could a Western international statesmen, for such is Tony Blair if anyone is, get away with such a blandly vanilla description of the heartbeat of Western culture. After all, as Simon Schama makes clear in his recent The Story of the Jews, the Jewish experience of Western culture ever since their expulsion from the Holy Land under Roman decree was one of anti-Semitic prejudice followed by programs and pogroms and indeed Schama uses this Christian pressure on Jews as justifying intellectual foundation for his own embracing of Zionism. One exception he enthusiastically notes and lauds, namely the seven century experience in Spain during which Jews were ruled by, wait for it, Muslims. Schama does not use the label but in essence he founds Zionism on a reaction to “radical Christianity.” Closed-minded Christianity, of course. The Nazi horror was, Schama would have us understand, the apotheosis of this Geist.

I mention this not to disagree with Schama’s analysis of the history of anti-Semitism, but rather to throw into high relief the nature of today’s western culture. In short, Christianity is so weakened in the West by secularism and the insidiously suicidal identification of its own values with those of liberal democracy that its institutional vigor has withered to the point of public irrelevance, the hullabaloo over the current pope’s “leadership style” notwithstanding.

From this perspective, therefore, any enthusiasm (!) for religion and its public practice and/or role in political life is bound to seem “extreme, radical” even primitive. “Radical Islam” is a phrase that trips off the tongue too felicitously in the West. What strikes a secular resident of the West as radical may be no more than faithful observance. Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn are viewed as almost quaint, in the same realm as the Pennsylvania Amish. Tourist attractions, not terrorists.

I hear the objection: But they do not blow up buildings and kill innocent people. Clearly. Criminal activity is criminal no matter the motive and criminal activity is a challenge to justice. The slaughter by gunshot currently taking place on the streets of Chicago (as widely reported) and fast approaching crisis proportions (a death rate exceeding that in Afghanistan) is not branded “radical western secular culture.” It is simply “drug gang related madness,” a criminal trend that must be stopped; not a good advertisement for an “open-minded” heaven. Nor are the riots in Rio on the eve (almost) of the World Cup.

My point can be put this way: in the West today any faith commitment seems radical if expressed in public and asserted to be relevant to policy. Only a hermit could be unaware of the “war on Christianity” currently being waged across the USA in ways both subtle and explicit. Former president, Jimmy Carter, once asked, “If Christianity were a crime would there be enough evidence to convict you?” Alas, the answer in our secular culture, open-minded though it may be, is too obvious for too many. Western Christians are not “radical” or “extreme” enough. But, should they stick their noses into the public square just the teeniest, tiniest bit, they will be labeled as such.

World Betterment

It was fascinating to read this morning on various news outlets that the Muslim Brotherhood has been branded a “terrorist organization” by the government of Saudi Arabia. (I seem to recall that several other organizations were named also.) This announcement prompts a couple of observations.

First, during the “Arab spring” in Egypt (an explosion more than a flowering) did not President Obama refer to the Brotherhood as, if not champions, then at least exemplars of the democratic intellect? The Brotherhood regime under President Morsi was immediately to be embraced as the legitimate “voice of the people’s will.” This was the US government’s stance.

Second, setting aside, but certainly not forgetting, that Morsi himself is currently under trial and the Brotherhood banned in Egypt, is it not necessary to observe the paradoxical nature of a feudal dynasty (the house of Saud) in Arabia delegitimizing a people’s movement in the twenty-first century?

Third, it is wearying to witness, under the light of both observations above, yet again that opportunistic power preservation is the principal motivation of political posturing.

The world deserves better.

But, of course, the world does not deserve terrorism either. (I say this without suggesting anything about the status of the Muslim Brotherhood with which I am not nearly familiar enough to know.)  A movement’s use of violence against the innocent to create enough fear to cause acceptance and respect is, at the very least, an admission that the movement’s ideas are shallow, unconvincing, or indefensible in the court of public opinion. If you cannot convince me of the wisdom of your world view slaughtering my wife and children will hardly sway me that you are right. This, however, raises the horrible notion that terrorism is not motivated by the desire for ideas to succeed, to convince, but simply to wreak havoc upon and to exterminate “the other,” that it is a mere manifestation of the distorting vision of “final solutions.”  

I repeat: the world deserves better.