blogging the blog

I've been following Robert Spencer's Blogging the Qur'an which, up until recently, was shown at HotAir with a repeat at the JihadWatch site itself. I'd not been commenting since the main student-style questions arose at HotAir and I've not been able to register there. With the move, I decided to take up a student role and ask some questions relating to the entry on Suras 41, “Explained in Detail,” and 42, “Consultation”. I've received patient but, at times, somewhat defensive replies from Robert Spencer.

Basically, I've questioned Spencer's scholarship and impartiality in relation to his paraphrasing of verse 42:41 which arises out of the context of the previous verse. Ten translations of these two verses are given below, followed by Spencer's paraphrase:

Koran 42:40-41

Pickthall: The guerdon of an ill-deed is an ill the like thereof. But whosoever pardoneth and amendeth, his wage is the affair of Allah. Lo! He loveth not wrong-doers. And whoso defendeth himself after he hath suffered wrong - for such, there is no way (of blame) against them.

Yusuf Ali: The recompense for an injury is an injury equal thereto (in degree): but if a person forgives and makes reconciliation, his reward is due from God: for (God) loveth not those who do wrong. But indeed if any do help and defend themselves after a wrong (done) to them, against such there is no cause of blame.

Hilali-Khan: The recompense for an evil is an evil like thereof, but whoever forgives and makes reconciliation, his reward is due from Allah. Verily, He likes not the Zalimun (oppressors, polytheists, and wrong-doers, etc.). And indeed whosoever takes revenge after he has suffered wrong, for such there is no way (of blame) against them.

Shakir: And the recompense of evil is punishment like it, but whoever forgives and amends, he shall have his reward from Allah; surely He does not love the unjust. And whoever defends himself after his being oppressed, these it is against whom there is no way (to blame).

Sher Ali: Remember that the recompense of an injury is an injury the like thereof; but whoso forgives and thereby brings about an improvement, his reward is with ALLAH. Surely, HE loves not the wrongdoers. There is no blame on those who defend themselves after they have been wronged.

Khalifa: Although the just requital for an injustice is an equivalent retribution, those who pardon and maintain righteousness are rewarded by GOD. He does not love the unjust. Certainly, those who stand up for their rights, when injustice befalls them, are not committing any error.

Arberry: and the recompense of evil is evil the like of it; but whoso pardons and puts things right, his wage falls upon God; surely He loves not the evildoers. And whosoever helps himself after he has been wronged -- against them there is no way.

Palmer: For the recompence of evil is evil like unto it; but he who pardons and does well, then his reward is with God; verily, He loves not the unjust. And he who helps himself after he has been wronged, for these - there is no way against them.

Rodwell: - Yet let the recompense of evil be only a like evil but he who forgiveth and is reconciled, shall be rewarded by God himself; for He loveth not those who act unjustly. And there shall be no way open against those who, after being wronged, avenge themselves;

Sale: - And the retaliation of evil [ought to be] an evil proportionate thereto: - But he who forgiveth, and is reconciled [unto his enemy], shall receive his reward from God; for he loveth not the unjust doers. And whoso shall avenge himself, after he hath been injured; as to these, it is not lawful to punish them [for it]:

source

Robert Spencer: Then v. 40 says that an equal injury should be inflicted in retaliation for an injury – but Allah will reward those who forgive. However, taking revenge is not sinful (v. 41).

I've discussed this matter further with my son who has never read any of the Koran. Reading those above translations and Spencer's paraphrasing he immediately concluded that Spencer had indeed misrepresented the verses and even more so than I had questioned him over. In my son's view verse 40 suggests than an evil deed deserves a proportionate evil deed, not that such "equal injury should be inflicted in retaliation" as Spencer has it. The next part - "Lo! He loveth not wrong-doers" - is pretty clear in saying that Allah would prefer that the conflict end amicably and no further evil deeds be committed. Finally, if attempts at forgiveness and reconciliation fail, then and only then is a forthright self-defense advised and this is without blame since it has presumably followed the earlier efforts. So, rather than being a whitewash of mere revenge as Spencer's paraphrase suggests, the Koran is demanding an approach to conflict resolution which is, in fact, quite modern.

It's a pity that Spencer missed this opportunity to give a fairer reading of the Koran and reveal some of its inherent merits, at least in these purer or more directly revelatory Meccan verses.

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medical opinions

There are currently two men of medicine pushing their views of Islam: the one characterizing it as incorrigibly jihad prone and the other as a spiritual treasure hijacked by the jihadists. The first is Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad and an associate professor of medicine. The second is M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a specialist physician in private practice. Presumably both men have an instinct and a motivation for healing but their views are opposed in their essence and therefore the guidance offered is conflicting. It would be interesting to hear the two of them debate, whether directly or through representatives or surrogates.

In fact, I've been reminded of Bostom through just such a representative or surrogate in the form of Philip Carl Salzman, author of a Middle East Quarterly essay titled The Middle East's Tribal DNA. It is a useful essay in bringing together relevant data and ideas from cultural and political studies. However, Salzman relies a good deal on the work of Bostom as well as other writers of similar vein such as Bat Ye'or and Robert Spencer. He belongs to a school of thought that is gaining strength due, especially, to the absence of clearly formulated counterarguments. What I find original in Salzman's essay is the idea that a bedouin tribal culture over which Islam was to dominate has, instead, succeeded in dominating Islam itself. Here are his concluding sentences [my emphasis added]:

Middle Eastern societies are not "modern," however, in the sense that European and American societies are. The tribal spirit holds sway. Its influence upon Islam permeates even the most cosmopolitan Arab states even if the tribal influences enshrined in the religion espoused or revealed by Muhammad are, almost fourteen centuries later, forgotten. Indeed, had Islam, whatever its many dimensions and complexities, not incorporated the balanced opposition structure of the tribal society that it sought to overlay, it is doubtful whether it could have been as accepted and successful as it was.

Salzman is suggesting here not only that Islam failed to transcend the tribal culture out of which it arose but that its own success lay in its elevation and sacralization of that very tribal culture. Indeed, it doesn't take a great leap to conclude further that that is essentially what Islam consists of, viz, a sacralization of tribal political culture.

Something along these lines is mentioned by Salim Mansur, also for the Middle East Quarterly, in a review of Mohamed Charfi's Islam and Liberty. Mansur acknowledges a similar view among some modern Muslims though it is unclear whether and how his own view differs from this:

Charfi is unabashedly a modernist Muslim who contends that the traditional insistence of Muslims on religion and politics in Islam being inseparable is the source of much difficulty. Historically Islam was shaped by men in politics to legitimize their power, to make the state an instrument of faith, and to invest the successors of the Prophet, the caliphs, with an aura of sacred authority, an argument that others beside Charfi have also illustrated (most notably Ali Abderrazak in Islam and the Foundation of Power).

President George W. Bush has spoken eloquently about freedom being God's gift to mankind; Muslims have not been denied this gift of heaven but have squandered and abused it. Charfi's study will be of interest for both specialists in Arab-Muslim politics and general readers keenly concerned in contemporary affairs. The author is to be commended for striving to kindle an understanding of Islam that would take Muslims back to the religion's original impulse and help non-Muslims to appreciate how difficult is the process of reform.

Mansur does refer to "the religion's original impulse" suggesting that this might have formed the basis for a spiritual liberation. From this and other writings, it is clear that Mansur accepts Mohammad's primary message as represented in the Koran as just such a "gift of heaven" as the idea of freedom is for Bush, a gift that has been "squandered and abused". This is very close to the notion of a pure or spiritual Islam that has been hijacked by the jihadists.

Here is how Jasser expresses that notion [my emphasis]:

I will finally add a caveat that my only fear is that many exposed to the term [Islamofascism] will have little prior knowledge of Islam or contact with Muslims and will carry away a belief that Islam as a spiritual faith is fascistic in its ideology. That cannot be further from the truth of the Islam which I teach my children and so many of the vast majority of Muslims teach their families. But that should stimulate Muslims to even more actively defeat the Islamists who have hijacked our faith for their own political agenda. In fact we can also cannot forget that the Islamofascists are a subset of a much larger ideological threat to the west of the Islamists. The Islamists include all those who believe in political Islam from the fascists of Al Qaeda to the rank and file political Islamists who believe in democracy, elections, and parliaments but still hold tight to a theocratically exclusivist Islamic state.

source: A Muslim American

We have here, then, a spiritually pure inner circle of Muslims who reject the political character of Islam, surrounded by Islamists, jihadists, and Islamofascists. Jasser would like to believe that the inner circle represents "the vast majority of Muslims" but various polls and surveys make that very hard to believe, especially outside of the United States. Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch has almost daily opportunities to scoff at "The Tiny Minority of [Extremist] Muslims" as one news story after another pours in, indicating just how mainstream is the Islamist view of Islam.

Sadly, I believe that counterarguments to the "Jihadism is the real Islam" idea are lacking because they cannot be expressed in any clear, coherent or logical manner. Inevitably, inconsistencies and contradictions emerge, a feature not present in the jihadists' case. I have noted elsewhere (in the Koran according to Jasser and the hidden hand) that Jasser must suffer a perpetual cognitive dissonance if he is to uphold the Koran as the Word of God since it involves such blatant contradictions. Jasser's capacity for persevering within such a discordant mental framework is further evidenced in the above interview where he says:

My love for my faith should drive me to wage a counter-jihad, and not blame the messenger (users of this term) and demand that the term be stricken so that I can live in denial. These thugs spread an evil in the name of a warped version of the faith they believe is Islam. However, I become like “al Qaeda” if I refuse to call them “Muslim” and commit takfir (determining who is and who is not a Muslim) by saying they are not “Muslim.” Their Muslim or Islamic identity is between them and God as it is for every Muslim. Once we open the door to debate who is and who is not a Muslim it empowers a theological hierarchy which will purport to speak for the faith community. I will never subscribe to that. As a moral human being and as an American, it is obvious that their actions are evil and barbaric and we should do everything we can to destroy them and defeat them wherever we find them.

The last phrase is an echo from that famous (or infamous) passage from the Koran as follows:

And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. And fight not with them at the Inviolable Place of Worship until they first attack you there, but if they attack you (there) then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers.

Koran 2:191, trans Pickthall

Is it just me or does Jasser start the above paragraph by refusing to deny Islamofascists as fellow Muslims while ending the paragraph by characterizing them as trouble-making disbelievers who must be sought out and slain just as the jihadists themselves are seeking out and slaying all the rest of us? For at least this poor addled brain, this "argument" is far far too self-contradictory to swallow.

I'm afraid that in the current debate, such as it is, I must assign one point to Dr. Bostom (et al) and deny one point to Dr. Jasser (et al). I'm also disinclined at this stage to hold my breath in expectation of any change in the situation. Islam, for me, is an attempt to sacralize the "might is right" outlook which is directly opposed to every aspect of humanism and natural justice that I know of. There is only one way for Islam to go and that is down. Down into the dust where it belongs.

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cutting the crap

I said, "Show me the ladder, that I may mount up to heaven."
He said, "Your head is the ladder; bring your head down under your feet."

from Rumi: Ghazal 19, trans A.J. Arberry, via Sunlight

In his notes to this translation, Arberry explains the second line above as meaning "prostration in prayer, the subjection of reason to spirit". Me, I read Rumi in my own way. I prefer to take his meaning more directly: to see - in this instance - a head under a foot and not, as Arberry would have it, a head submitting to Allah or spirit. A foot is a foot and a spirit is something almost diametrically opposite to that. To me, Rumi (through the divine guide or Friend) is simply advising that the best way to reach heaven or attain things we yearn for is to begin with reality, to begin simply with "what is".

Our feet, after all, are what connect us to the earth. As we walk about, the pressure on our feet is a constant reminder of our heaviness, of this gravitational pull of body to earth, and of our inevitable rootedness in reality. Of course, it is also human to aspire to something other than the reality we are in. We express that in our longing for the Beloved, in our ambition to climb higher and higher, thus achieving more and greater things. However, we go nowhere so long as our heads remain in the clouds of imagination and aspiration. The journey must always begin with the here and now, with things as they are.

Here in Australia, I believe largely as a result of our British heritage, we like to link "spirit" with dung of one sort or another, especially when mocking vaporous idealism. We exclaim: "what a load of bullshit!"; or more sharply command: "cut the crap!"

In the Islamic world, there is no one better at trying to get Muslims to bring their heads down under their feet than Wafa Sultan, the forthright realist of brief but potent Arab television fame. (Those powerful five minutes remain at YouTube.)

As brave as she is, however, Sultan is stronger on rhetoric than on fact. For example, she does say in her speech that:

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people.

transcript from her appearance on Al Jazeera TV, February 2006

Unfortunately, this is not strictly true, especially not the last and more general sentence. It is justly claimed that it was Jews who carried out the first act of modern terrorism in the King David Hotel bombing. Many innocent civilians died, Jews included. Since I am an Israeli sympathizer, I understand what drove the Jews to do this. I don't see it as a petty act of revenge but a necessary and desperate act of survival for the Jewish people. Others less sympathetic might see it as a case in which Jews did indeed "protest by killing people".

Salim Mansur is another solid realist in the Muslim world, less flashy but equally determined, working in the quieter but more precise ways of the academic. For me, his strongest "cut the crap" message to the Muslim world is contained in a little known essay titled Muslim on Muslim Violence: What Drives It? (available from the Center for Security Policy). In it, he documents the genocidal atrocities perpetrated by Muslims on their so-called brothers-in-faith, starting in the first century of Islam and more recently expressed during the violent breakup of Pakistan in 1971. He attributes this self-destruction to a political corruption of the original message of Islam at the time of the Karbala massacre and he asks that Muslims take a hard look at this turning point in their history when this "official" Islamist ideology was adopted.

The difference between the two realities, that submitted by Sultan and that by Mansur, is that the first locates the error right in the heart of Islam, right in the very opening page of the Quran (the Fatiha). She has, as a consequence of this and of other experiences, turned her back on Islam as a spiritual path. Mansur, on the other hand, is loyal to the forces opposing this "official" political Islam, forces largely contained within or expressed through the Sufi traditions. In this way, he can still identify as a Muslim although most Muslims (being so largely politicized and under the sway of "official" Islam) would deny him that identity and thereby feel free to attack him in a violent physical way. Despite a loyalty to what he would see as the pure essence of Islam, he remains an apostate in the eyes of "official" Islam.

In terms of realism, of who has put their head more firmly under their foot, I have to favour the lady here. She may be making some slight errors in her enthusiasm to communicate forcefully, but the overall tenor of her message is, to my mind, correct. I believe that Mansur sees an ideal - or more correctly, an idealized - Islam, an Islam that might have been. There are enough elements in the Islamic faith tradition to keep that ideal alive for him.

And it is indeed a beautiful ideal, an ideal of brotherhood in faith, a transcending of all boundaries of race or tribe. It is an ideal very purely communicated by the likes of Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a modern Sufi of British origin, who promotes a world consciousness of Oneness. His message can be accessed through The Golden Sufi Center.

However, some ironic questions arise: Is this not precisely the message that Islam is meant to convey? Is the world now not divided precisely along the lines of who - or what - can best deliver this message of Oneness?

Wafa Sultan certainly doesn't see Islam as fit for the task. Salim Mansur might see Sufi Islam as fit. Vaughan-Lee is careful to downplay his Islamic allegiance in favour of a New Age purity, wearing his stark white outfits, sitting next to flower displays, and speaking in a tone of studied gentleness. There seems to be no fighter in him, not even of the spiritual sort. But still, he is a Sufi and a Muslim.

By contrast, Robert Spencer likes to quote Rumi on his allegiance to Muhammad thus:

Root and branch of the roses is
the lovely sweat of Mustafa [that is, Muhammad],
And by his power the rose’s crescent
grows now into a full moon.

quoted in Spencer: The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion,
and also at his blog:
Blogging the Qur’an: Sura 6, “Cattle,” verses 1-83
original source is Annemarie Schimmel: And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety

It is clear what Spencer's intent is here, especially in the context of the Quranic verses on which he is commenting and which actually have no connection whatever to Rumi's lines. Spencer has merely found an excuse, any excuse, to point the finger at Rumi and tar him (and his fellow mystics such as al-Hallaj) with the same brush as he tars Muhammad himself. The message is: Don't trust the Sufis for they are as much "Muslims" and just as "bad" as any other Muslims.

And Spencer does have a point. For those, especially, who are appalled at Islamic violence, a sweet pure mystic like Vaughan-Lee is very attractive and his ideal of Oneness also. However, should one be tempted thereby to affirm the shahada (the affirmation of Muslim faith) then there is no going back for the gentle Sufi has brothers in Islam who forbid apostasy and will see to it that you stay put.

As outsiders - poor benighted kufrs that we are - we must take Islam for the reality that she is, both her good points and her bad. We cannot but respect Islam as a long-standing institution within humanity's history but the political ideology is, as Spencer keeps reminding us, a solid and real part of what Islam is. It is there at its very roots, in the Quran and in the life of Muhammad.

I love some of the good things, especially many of the lovely lines of wisdom of Rumi. However, I love the humanist in Rumi, not the Muslim. If, to his sensitivities and in his time, Mustafa did smell sweetly it is no longer true today. Too much of the dung at the heart of Islam has been uncovered. There is simply too much crap there to allow for a sweeter smell. Yes, perhaps there is a pearl inside that dung heap, but I have yet to discover it myself or have it shown to me.

For me, Rumi and his opus stand apart and independent of Islam. The wisdom, the pearls, therein can survive many a refiner's fire, whether that of the Islamists or the more recent one of those commercializing him. A few days ago the 800th anniversary of Rumi's birth was celebrated thus in Konya, Turkey:

Whirling dervishes perform a sema ritual during a ceremony to mark the 800th birthday of the Sufi mystic poet Mevlana Jelaleddin Rumi in Konya, Turkey.
Photo: AP @ smh.com.au

When I saw this photo, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry and, indeed, I wondered whether Rumi himself would know which was appropriate. After some thought, I've decided that from his grave there would issue loud and hearty laughter: he would go with the guffaw.

Similarly, when it comes to Islam: I must also go with the guffaw.

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