what comes next?

Good main point about our current dilemma:

"You can sit here and talk about jihad from here to doomsday, what will it do? Suppose you prove beyond any shadow of doubt that Islam is constitutionally violent, where do you go from there?"

[...]

The fact is, the West does not have the political paradigms or language to justify an offensive against an ideological foe in religious garb.

from Raymond Ibrahim: Caliphate, Jihad, Sharia: Now What?
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sickening

I felt nauseous reading this bit from a clearly "approved" Muslim:

They do not realize that if a woman is condemned in Pakistan it will have an affect on Muslim women in America. And if a pastor in Florida threatens to burn the Qur'an, Muslims around the world are affected.

from Akbar Ahmed: Half of the world cannot go to war

He is equating a woman on death row with a mere threat to burn a book. And he is looking only at the consequences for Muslims! Basically, he is saying that we non-Muslims should cease to confront Islam in any way (whether by showing concern for its cruelty and religious bigotry or by showing contempt for its scriptures). In other words, we should submit quietly.

Ugh! This man is disgusting!
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the two religions are enemies

This is part of a rejected article that tells it like it is a little too clearly for some:

Teaching Islam among “The World’s Great Religions” in the University of Hawaii, I learned how profoundly ignorant of one another’s religion those Christians and Muslims were. And worse than ignorant: misinformed. Growing up to the realities of our shrinking globe is painful, and obscuring differences stunts this growth. I taught the similarities and differences, and rejoice in the increasing efforts toward interfaith understanding. But we can make no essential progress, religious or political, unless we honestly and courageously confront the reality that our two religions are essential enemies, antagonists each to the other’s essence, mutual blasphemers. Only with that realism can the mutual blasphemers begin to learn to get along with each other without violence.

from Willis E. Elliott: Thou Shalt Not! The WaPo’s ‘On Faith’ Blog Spikes A Regular Contributor When He Writes On Islam

Murray via Rubin

I followed the link and read this article by Murray based on this recommendation from Barry Rubin: "It is the best single article on Western internal responses to Islam and Islamism that I've ever seen." It isn't sufficiently pointed for me, but it does come close to putting a finger on the main problems, associated with truth and with feelings. Here is the best short passage I could find to quote:

As we come to the tenth anniversary of 9/11, we can begin to discern certain patterns in our recent behaviour. For the last decade, we have fought the war against Islamic extremism on exactly the wrong terms. And though Britain has led the charge in the wrong direction, the US is now following.

Defeating the Soviets during the Cold War required a large box of tools. They ranged from the doughtiest Washington-based Cold Warriors to Polish socialists who disagreed with tenets of Russian communism. In the same way, the war against Islamic extremism will only be won by a large toolbox approach. That will include Muslim reformers who will work for many years to try to wrench their religion away from its magnetic literalism. But it will also include those like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others, who believe that we must be allowed to say what we see when we look at this religion and retain the right to shine a light on it.

from Douglas Murray: Warning To The US: Don't Play By Islamic Rules
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a woman from Iran

Haideh Daragahi: Citizen journalism in Iran

bons mots from Hux @ FFI

Islam had its day and shot its wad. Had it any promise of rising again on its merits, it would find better ambassadors of Muslim values and leadership than Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

source

I don't like this guy - "Hux" or "THHuxley_redux" - but credit where credit's due. This is well said.

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models

The September 2008 issue of Commentary magazine has an excellent article by Bret Stephens: How to Manage Savagery. In it, Stephens examines developments in the world of Islamic terrorism and how that relates to the Muslim world at large. He considers the Huntington "clash of civilizations" paradigm against the realities of the past 15 years since it was first published and concludes:

Contrary to Huntington’s forecast, much of world conflict is now overwhelmingly characterized by fighting and competition not between or among civilizations but within them. And nowhere is this truer than in the Muslim world.

Stephens draws a dramatic parallel between al Qaeda's fate and that of the larger Islamic civilization:

Still, al Qaeda’s decline offers a kind of portrait-in-miniature of a civilization that seems perpetually to be collapsing in on itself. Here is a movement in which suicide—that is, self-destruction—is treated as the ultimate act of self-assertion. A movement that sees itself as an Islamic vanguard, leading the way toward a genuine Muslim umma, but is permanently at war with the Muslim communities it inhabits. A movement whose attacks beyond the Islamic world have mainly had the effect of accelerating the very forces by which it is sealing its own fate. To use an inexact astronomical analogy, this is a movement with the quality of a supernova: even as an envelope of superheated gas rapidly expands outward, its core is compressing and ultimately implodes.

He then considers the policy implications of this reality and identifies three broad approaches that have been considered. Below is my attempt to illustrate these three as models of relationship between the Muslim world and the Christian West:



The first model I've called "separation" and is described by Stephens as follows [my emphasis]:

As for how the United States and its allies should attempt to deal with this new reality, one temptation is simply to stay away, on the theory that no good can come from putting our hands in such a mess. This is roughly the view of the libertarian and paleoconservative Right, and perhaps a majority of the Left. But the view hardly bears discussion: all mention of Israel aside, access to Middle Eastern energy resources is a vital American interest and will almost certainly remain so for decades. The Muslim world is also inextricably a part of the Western one, particularly in Europe. Nor is the global terrorist threat likely to go away even if al Qaeda does. The possibility that a regime that sponsors or supports terrorists might be in a position to supply them with weapons of mass destruction is a direct threat to us.

The second model I've called "diplomacy" and Stephens elaborates thus:

A second option, associated with the so-called realist school, contends that with rare exceptions, the U.S. should deal with the Muslim world more or less as it is, without seeking to change it. This is a view that has much to recommend it—at least in the hands of a master diplomatic practitioner. But Metternichs are hard to come by, and in the hands of lesser statesmen, realism easily slides into passive acquiescence in an intolerable status quo—or into intolerable changes to it. Witness the readiness of Colin Powell, as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff during the first Bush administration, to accept Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 as a fait accompli.

Finally, I have called the third model "one-way influence" and Stephens explains:

A third view, shared to varying degrees by neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, is that the U.S. and the West have no choice but actively to seek domestic reforms in Muslim countries. Needless to say, such a course is fraught with risks and often prone to mishandling, overreaching, and failure. But some version of it is the only approach that can, if not heal the pathologies of the Muslim world, then at least ameliorate and contain them so that they do not end up arriving unbidden on our doorstep, as they did one morning in September 2001.

a shameful conquest of itself

[...] "This England that was wont to conquer others," wrote Shakespeare, "hath made a shameful conquest of itself." [...] The country's lack of self-confidence is in stark contrast to the implacability of its Islamist terrorist enemy, within and without. [...] Thus, we are in a confused and vulnerable condition. Some believe that we are already at war; but all may agree that generally a peace-time mentality prevails. In all three ways — our social fragmentation, the sense of premonition, and the divisions about what our stance should be — there are uneasy similarities with the years just before the First World War.

We are fortunate in not having the specific external state enemies who once posed threats to the British state and against whom we could therefore define ourselves. There has been no straight substitution of the Cold War threat with another threat of different source but similar type. But the range and nature of the threats to the security of British citizens in 2008 are not confined solely to what the Islamists call their "jihad" against the West.

A shifting complex of risks faces us. An adequate approach to Britain's security in the next few years must address questions that are intricate, delicate, and strange to our conventional way of thinking. The familiar categories of "home" and "abroad," which have long reassured the British in a deep part of their national identity, are breaking down. We know much less about what threatens us and how it does so than our official policies assert.

from Gwyn Prins and Robert Salisbury, "Risk, Threat and Security," quoted at Middle East Quarterly

Supna Zaidi

The Middle East Forum announces the appointment of Supna Zaidi as assistant director of Islamist Watch, a project to resist the Islamist agenda to spread Shari‘a through lawful means and to gain special rights for Muslims in the West.

from MEF

Islam and the Unitarians

It suddenly occurred to me that there might be a connection between the Unitarian Church and Islam, given the origins of the Church in Transylvania which was, at the time, on the border of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires. A 2004 paper by a Unitarian Universalist minister details the cross-cultural influences.

Anti-Socinian [anti-Unitarian] writers [...] were generally writing out of the alarmed conviction that Unitarianism might represent a stage towards conversion to Islam, a belief partially inherited from the early days of the magisterial reformation, when the spread of Islam was seen as both an extension of anti-Trinitarian heresies and as a consequence of divine wrath over such apostasy. After all, none other than Martin Luther himself had famously blamed the spread of Islam on the Unitarians in exactly this fashion, writing that “Arius’s punishment in hell becomes greater each day as long as this error lasts. For Mohammed came from this sect” (5:206). The ultimate concern about Unitarians was more than a concern with heresy: the ultimate worry was also political, with many Europeans fearing that Islamic-happy Unitarians might possibly sympathize with Ottoman ambitions, a concern that had more than an element of truth.

from Susan Ritchie: The Islamic Ottoman Influence on the Development of Religious Toleration in Reformation Transylvania

This is another example of the political sentiment: "My enemy's enemy is my friend." The Ottoman leaders would have exploited the Reformation divisions in order to gain religious and political influence among the Reformation Protestants. Likewise, Luther is exploiting anti-Muslim sentiment in order to argue against Unitarian theology.

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new world confusion

Frankfurter Rundschau 25.06.2008

Arno Widmann witnessed a memorable meeting at Schloss Elmau, between Tariq Ramadan, the controversial voice of European Muslims, and Jürgen Habermas, the "leading theorist of the new world confusion." Extremely impressed by Ramadan, Widmann was inspired to consider whether German Jews were not the first Germans. "Most Germans saw themselves as Hesseners, Frankfurters, Bavarians, Pfalzians rather than Germans. The Jews were not given the opportunity to see themselves as Bavarians. They wanted to be Germans. Perhaps Europe is in a similar situation today. The Irish are first and foremost Irish, the Danish are Danish, the Germans Germans and the Belgians are primarily Flemish or Walloon. Immigrants who are prevented from becoming Irish, Danes and Germans but who are called upon to be more European that Europeans ever were, have no option other than to become Europeans. They will be the first true Europeans. No Europe without Muslims."

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left-wing Muslims

Frankfurter Rundschau 23.06.2008

In an interview with Michael Hesse, French Islam expert Olivier Roy locates the origins for the radicalisation of young Muslims not in Islam but in Western politics: "The West thinks that Islam is the root of radicalisation, so we automatically see Bin Laden as the trailblazer of the Muslim world. We should really be fighting him as a terrorist, not as a Muslim. Young Muslims do not become terrorists because they read the Koran or frequent a mosque. They do it for effect. They are the true heirs to the ultra left-wing groups of the 1970s: obsessed with America and Wall Street, they are more anti-imperialist than any proponent of Sharia. You only need to look at the videos of the hostage decapitations in Iraq to see that they are replicating the murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades – this has nothing to do with the traditional Muslim imagination."

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remaking our gods

to Janusz S. Kowalik
Reader comment on article: The Enemy Has a Name
in response to reader comment: To Anne Julienne

Submitted by Anne Julienne (Australia), Jun 21, 2008 at 18:48

Your desire for "the total or nearly total secularization of the planet" is not realistic. Some parts of Europe are highly secularized (only 10-20% religious in France, Germany, etc) but most of the world is not like that and Europe is, in any case, succumbing to Islam in a slow and steady process of appeasement, demographic decline, and post-modern uncertainty. The current situation requires nothing less than that we remake our gods and especially our attitudes to our gods so that both the secular and the religious, both the Christians and the Muslims, can live in peace. Eliminating the one or the other from the equation is not gonna work, bloodshed or no bloodshed.

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if the truth be told

Two different world views
Reader comment on article: The Enemy Has a Name

Submitted by Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai (India), Jun 20, 2008 at 00:44

Dr. Pipes could be trying to pinpoint the enemy, Islamism, but would be missing the wood for the trees.

Radicals are acting like an army committed the protect the civilians, the moderates.

Both have their roles cut out. And still both are part of one society.

When the chips are down, Muslim world unites at different levels with remarkable speed and unity of mind and purpose. The more Muslim world is subjected to stress and trauma, the more it reacts out of a sense of self-preservation.

Bush's war on terror was more of an imperialist campaign to conquer the world that remained to be conquered. So there was no reason to restrict its focus to one face. For Bush, the enemy has many faces. Under the circumstance, Dr. Pipes' analysis is reduced to a narrow selfserving proposition.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

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Thank you, Ghulam
Reader comment on article: The Enemy Has a Name
in response to reader comment: Two different world views

Submitted by Anne Julienne (Australia), Jun 20, 2008 at 18:12

You've expressed the truth as seen by a Muslim in a few well chosen words.

To me, as a non-Muslim, your view fails to explain sep 11 and fails to acknowledge that Bush's wars were a response to that unprovoked attack. Through incidents like the Rushdie novel and the Danish cartoons, we now know that Muslims feel threatened or "subjected to stress and trauma" at the very slightest of slights.

We in the West will not continue to tread carefully as if on egg shells. We in the West might be more capable of uniting against Islam than you give us credit for. Good clear statements disclosing the Muslim mentality are useful to us.

So, thank you for your comment.

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litmus test

Acceptance of Israel is an excellent litmus test but ... what to do with all of those non-Muslim mostly Leftist anti-Semites who don't pass the test either?

It's bad that most of the Muslim world is anti-Israel but it's even worse that so many in our midst are allied with them on this point. Perhaps "Islamism" is not a full enough description of the enemy after all.

For me, as a non-Jewish (and lapsed Christian) Zionist, Israel is the thing that should define us all. It is the great moral issue of our time and the great test that God (however understood) has set us. We stand or fall as a decent humanity on how we view Israel and on how much or how little we are prepared to tolerate the existential threats to her, whether they come from a mad Iranian president or a mad Jew-hater closer at hand.

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a prayer for victory

These are terrible times for world Jewry. Islamic Jew-hatred is genocidal. The international Left has betrayed us. Our leaders are weak. Our friends are few and far between.

If we wish to persevere in this environment we must embrace those who support us while eschewing those - even in our own ranks - who tell us that support for Israel is conditional. Now is not the time to quibble over Christian theology. Now is the time to stand united with our friends against our common enemies.

from Caroline Glick: Jews united for Israel's friends

As one of the "few and far between", I pray that the Jews of the world will listen to this lady. May she gain victory over those ideologues, especially those Jewish ideologues, who would sacrifice Israel to anything short of the Very Ultimate.

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no agnosticism on racism

Below are some key excerpts from a 1953 interview with Bertrand Russell. He speaks with great clarity and conciseness, yet in a very accessible conversational style. I've chosen these excerpts because they touch on the issue of how to evaluate Islam today.

When, in a recent book, I said that what the world needs is "love, Christian love, or compassion," many people thought this showed some changes in my views, although in fact, I might have said the same thing at any time. If you mean by a "Christian" a man who loves his neighbor, who has wide sympathy with suffering, and who ardently desires a world freed from the cruelties and abominations which at present disfigure it, then, certainly, you will be justified in calling me a Christian. And, in this sense, I think you will find more "Christians" among agnostics than among the orthodox. But, for my part, I cannot accept such a definition. Apart from other objections to it, it seems rude to Jews, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and other non-Christians, who, so far as history shows, have been at least as apt as Christians to practice the virtues which some modern Christians arrogantly claim as distinctive of their own religion.

[...]

Of the great religions of history, I prefer Buddhism, especially in its earliest forms, because it has had the smallest element of persecution.

source: Bertrand Russell: What is an Agnostic? (1953)

What Russell says of Muslims or "Mohammedans" is that they can behave as well or as badly as people of any other religion and this is hard to argue with. Christianity, especially, has a very very bad history in matters of persecution and in its failure to reign in emperial brutality as inherited from Rome.

However, Russell doesn't compare the core teachings in their fixed written forms. These are the ongoing legacy of the various religions, pretty much untouched by time and circumstance. It's true that interpretations and evaluations change over time - people "read" or understand the texts differently - but the words themselves have remained fairly stable despite being transmitted for much of their history through manual and not automatic means.

In my own estimation, the Bible remains as a valuable literary work and Jesus remains as a valuable moral leader. I have not found the Buddhist texts accessible, entertaining, or enlightening. I do find the Islamic texts - the Koran itself in conjunction with the traditions and life of Mohammad - to be problematic. I see no moral leadership there, no spiritual instruction, just practical guidance on how to manage political situations and conduct wars. Muslim dogma is not exploited so much in the interests of persecution as in the interests of supremacism through the sword, world domination on all levels: cultural, spiritual, geographical, genetic. On the last point, there is a very apparent Arab racial dominance element to Islam. It is chiefly expressed through the "right" of the conqueror to rape and enslave the women of the conquered. The cultural dominance is chiefly expressed through an insistence that the Koran - the word of God - is untranslatable so that it can only be properly accessed through the Arab language.

The racial element of Islamic supremacism is rarely talked about but its presence is felt most strongly when Muslims project their own racism onto all those who view Islam critically. The "racist" card is pulled out from their own sleeves and no one seems to be noticing this, let alone pointing it out.

So here goes, even if it is a lone voice in the wilderness:

Islam is a racist ideology and the Koran is a racist manifesto.

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style and clarity

I like the writing style and analytical clarity of this op-ed piece in the NY Times.

Extremist movements have been growing bigger and wilder for more than three decades now, during that period, America has tried pretty much everything from a policy point of view. Our presidents have been satanic (Richard Nixon), angelic (Jimmy Carter), a sleepy idiot savant (Ronald Reagan), a cagey realist (George H. W. Bush), wonderfully charming (Bill Clinton) and famously otherwise (George W. Bush). And each president’s Middle Eastern policy has conformed to his character.

[...]

Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.

A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the extremist ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises.

source: Paul Berman: Why Radical Islam Just Won’t Die

fighting fire with fire

Here is Zak
on the attack
condemning Mo
from go to whoa

Here is Zak
better than Mac
setting the scene
to make things clean

Though he is little known in the West, Coptic priest Zakaria Botros — named Islam’s “Public Enemy #1” by the Arabic newspaper, al-Insan al-Jadid — has been making waves in the Islamic world. Along with fellow missionaries — mostly Muslim converts — he appears frequently on the Arabic channel al-Hayat (i.e., “Life TV”). There, he addresses controversial topics of theological significance — free from the censorship imposed by Islamic authorities or self-imposed through fear of the zealous mobs who fulminated against the infamous cartoons of Mohammed. Botros’s excurses on little-known but embarrassing aspects of Islamic law and tradition have become a thorn in the side of Islamic leaders throughout the Middle East.

[...]

Botros’s motive is not to incite the West against Islam, promote “Israeli interests,” or “demonize” Muslims, but to draw Muslims away from the dead legalism of sharia to the spirituality of Christianity. Many Western critics fail to appreciate that, to disempower radical Islam, something theocentric and spiritually satisfying — not secularism, democracy, capitalism, materialism, feminism, etc. — must be offered in its place. The truths of one religion can only be challenged and supplanted by the truths of another. And so Father Zakaria Botros has been fighting fire with fire.

source: Raymond Ibrahim: Islam’s ‘Public Enemy #1’: Coptic priest Zakaria Botros fights fire with fire

pathetic plea to respect Islam

The West will be pleased to learn that nine out of ten Muslims are moderates – good news for those optimistic about co-existence. Muslims say the most important thing Westerners can do to improve relations with their societies is to change their negative views toward Muslims, respect Islam and re-evaluate foreign policies.

from John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed: Who speaks for Islam?

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