Another example of Muslim intolerance. In an essay on Frank’s site I discussed the cartoon controversy. Okay, let’s get the caveat over and done with (although I’ve said this time and time again). This is NOT about all Muslims. In fact I’m dismayed I even have to make such a disclaimer. Everyone should know that Islam contains a wide variety of opinion and that it is impossible to speak for all Muslims. In fact that’s the absurdity of Western complaints about essentializing. It is they who essentialize because they assume there is such a thing as an average Muslim, a unified ‘moderate’ majority. I’m actually very careful about what I say. And everything I say has been said by Muslims themselves.
In fact there is a great deal of crossover between the West and Islam. There are even pro neo-con Muslims and pro-Israeli Muslims, just as there are gay, feminist and progressive Muslims. Anything anyone says is bound to offend a Muslim somewhere at some time, not because they are Muslim but because they disagree.
Some more demonstrations – and the demonstrations are by the same people who protested the publication of the cartoons. This is not about what the Pope said. At its base it is simply an anti-Christian campaign. The objection is not to what the Pope actually said but that he dared say anything about Islam at all. Amongst certain schools of Islamic thought it is an offence to criticize Mohammed and the Koran at all, ever. The Koran is God’s word and it is perfect. Mohammed is faultless. In the most puritan of these schools it is especially an offence for non-Muslims to criticize Islam. They are simply scum who must stay silent.
It’s interesting to note that churches have been attacked in both Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian Christians have been getting increasingly nervous. Islamists have been painting slogans “first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” This is just an excuse to attack Christians – and they need very little excuse.
Islam has long felt the need to prove itself superior to the Abrahamic traditions that preceeded it. It is a competition that is largely driven by internal dynamics. If you come after Judaism and Christianity and claim that you are necessarily superior to them because you have the ‘final’ word of God then you are naturally in competition. In fact the very failure of these previous versions to submit and convert is an insult to God. Their existance is evidence of the failure to convince them about what should be perfectly obvious.
It’s not that Muslims as inividuals are any different to any one else. This is not about people. It’s about ideology and doctrine. It’s about the internal logic of a belief that says it has the final and absolute word of the only God. Such a belief leads to fanaticism. And it leads to fanaticism in any religion.
I don’t make much distinction between Christianity and Islam, they are two peas in the same pod to me. There are differences but they also share a lot in common. It’s an absurd argument about which end a boiled egg should be cracked open. In my view, they’re both deluded and wrong.
What the Pope said was trivial amongst all the things said about Islam. Why pick on this one statement out of thousands? Because it suits the fundamentalists anti-Christian agenda.
It’s also simply about bullying and intimidation. The fundamentalists know that their base is being steadily eroded by free speech. They know that the only way they can protect their absurd beliefs is by suppressing criticism. Islam has maintained its power by oppression. The very reason the gates of ijtihad were closed was to prevent Islam disintegrating into a thousand sects.
Imagine this – every Muslim is given the freedom to question the Koran. The laws against blasphemy and apostasy are all removed. There are no consequences if you declare your disbelief or convert to another religion. What happens next?
We forget that in evey Christian (and Jewish) country we are free to disbelieve, that we are even free to criticize. In many Muslims countries you simply do not have such freedom. You have to be careful about what you say. Why? Because purist imams and mullahs will inspire their followers to kill you (and they do kill you).
When was the last time anyone in a Christian or Jewish country was persecuted for heresy, blasphemy or apostasy? Yet it is a regular occurance in the Muslim world.
But sadly, I’m guessing there are some in the West who think the Pope should apologize and fully retract his statements. Great. The leader of the Catholic church having his speeches vetted by Muslim fundamentalists. Next all religions…
Now, for balance, consider some of the vicious anti-Christian and anti-Papist polemic that comes out of the ME.
Yep, let’s not upset fundamentalists.
The core beliefs of Islam are false. Islam needs to be roundly criticized. Mohammed made it all up. It was a fantasy. We do not have to kow-tow to myths. We do not have to be sensitive to the demands of bullies.
Ray, I’m no expert on Islam, but your points about the religion seem sensible enough. If a religion claims to be based on God’s exact words as revealed by His final and greatest prophet, then it stands to reason that its true believers will consider other religions inferior, and, to the extent that they claim divine sanction for ideas contrary to the one, true religion, heretical. It’s also no wonder that these true believers will use intimidation and terror tactics issuing from the very law laid down by their one, true God to quash the kind of questioning and dissent within and criticism without the faith that could subvert their God’s grand plan of a world united under his glorious rule.
Actually, while it’s no wonder that this would happen, it doesn’t seem entirely consistent with free will. For if we are free to choose to submit or not to submit to Allah, what’s wrong with letting people be exposed to questioning and criticism of the “one true faith” whose proof of its legitimacy to the title can surely overcome all challenges? After all, we can freely choose to accept or reject this questioning and criticism, and it is surely nobler to believe even when we’ve encountered, considered, and dismissed the best reasons for not believing than it is to believe only because we don’t know any other way to do. But try this logic out on the truest of the true believers and you might well be cursed or even beheaded to gleeful chants of “Allahu Akbar.” Yet, I wonder how long it would take for Islam to erode or evolve the way you rightfully point out that Christianity has if the “purist imams and mullahs” and those in their sway were to follow my logic rather than their illogic and permit the freedom to question, challenge, and even reject the faith.
I also agree with you that the core beliefs of Islam, as I understand them, are false and that we should not kow-tow to the “bullies” who would suppress, by any means necessary or unnecessary, dissent. However, as I suggested yesterday, I still believe that the Pope showed poor judgment in saying what he did when and where he did. For it’s one thing to kow-tow to bullies and quite another to say things you know or should know the bullies will react to with crazed violence that victimizes innocent Christians and their churches when there is no really good reason for saying such things. Surely the Pope could have made whatever point he was trying to make without quoting an obscure 14th century figure who called Mohammed the purveyor only of “evil and inhuman” things.
He could have but he didn’t, and I can’t help but wonder why.
Hi Steve,
I think the Pope’s comments need to be taken in their proper context. I know of at least one Muslim spokesperson who appreciates the context. Waleed Aly, a director of the Victorian Islamic Council and a regular spokesperson wrote an opinion piece in the Melbourne Age (18/9). He says that:
“Pope Benedict’s speech was an academic address at a German university on an esoteric theological theme that had nothing to do with affronting Muslims. The apparently offending remarks were almost a footnote to the discussion.”
He goes on to say:
“But it seems some elements in the Muslim world are looking avidly for something to offend them. Meanwhile, governments looking to boost their Islamic credentials are only too happy to seize on this, to nurture it, for their own political advantage. At some point the Muslim world has to gain control of itself. Presently its most vocal elements are so disastrously reactionary, and therefore so easily manipulable. Here, the vociferous protests come from people who, quite clearly, have not bothered to read Benedict’s speech.”
Waleed goes on to be scathing of Muslim over-reaction, openly ridiculing some prominent Australian mullahs, including the grand mufti of Australia.
Now if the bloody Pope can’t make “esoteric” theological points at a university then who can?
But, alas, he has decided to offer a personal apology, not that it will really satisfy the fundamentalists. I liked the comment from a mullah in Pakistan, “all we want is for the Pope to be removed.” Oh, is that ‘all’ you want? Some obscure fundamentalist mullah in Pakistan ‘only’ wants the Pope to be sacked. Sounds a reasonable request to me, totally proportionate.
The bizarre thing about this is that the Pope’s speech was actually about religious violence. So how do some Muslims protest the suggestion that Islam is violent? Why, by threatening to assassinate the Pope and burning churches. As Waleed sarcastically says:
“There. That’ll show them for calling us violent.”
Ray, thank you for your reply. It makes a good deal of sense, and it’s reassuring to know that some Muslims, even some fairly influential ones, are speaking out against the violence more than or in place of their speaking out against the Pope’s remarks.
However, I must confess that I’m still inclined to question the Pope’s judgment. Did he really need to speak out against religious violence by quoting words to the effect that Mohammed taught evil? If the Pope didn’t realize that Muslims would hear about this and that many would react with violent outrage, he seems shockingly naive. On the other hand, if he did anticipate the reaction he got, what were his motives for going ahead and saying what he did? Either way, I think he’s cast himself in a dubious light, although not nearly as dubious as have the Muslims who’ve responded with violence and even with just harsh indignation but have said nothing against the violence.
On the other hand, you raise an excellent point when you ask, “Now if the bloody Pope can’t make “esoteric†theological points at a university then who can?” I believe that he should certainly be able to. Anyone should be able to. But ’should be able to’ and ‘can’ seem far removed, and I don’t know what we should do about it in the world as it is.
What do you think?
Hi Steve,
Another article in The Age today has a couple of Catholic scholars suggesting that this particular speech was not put through the normal vetting process. Bishop Michael Putney said,
“The Pope was giving an academic lecture on the deficiencies of Western culture, not on Islam. I think he thought it was in his old territory, but clearly as Pope he’s in everybody’s front room, no matter where he speaks or what style.”
The article goes on to suggest that there was actually a delay between when the Pope spoke and when the protests began. Suggesting a degree of cynical manipulation.
For me this issue raises an important question. How much of a right do you have to be offended? Doesn’t tolerance mean learning not to react too easily?
Another Australian Muslim, a prominent lawyer, has also come out against the demonstrations. He said he had actually read the Pope’s speech and could find nothing in it to object to.
So it seems that these people have gone out of their way to misinterpret the Pope’s speech for their own political gain. Frankly, we shouldn’t be appeasing people who deliberately misread things to push their own agenda.
Ray, I’m inclined to agree with what you say. But then I take a look at the world as it is, and I’m not sure what to think or to do. I’m fighting feelings of utter disgust and contempt for Islam. A part of me wants to thumb my nose at Islam, Allah, and Mohammed and invite as many people as possible to join me, and to tell any Muslim who doesn’t like it to go straight to hell and let the “civilized” world send them there if they try to bully and terrorize us.
Another part of me is trying to feel and demonstrate respect for every human being no matter what his beliefs and behaviors, and to find the right thing to do about Islamic intolerance to make things better, which thumbing one’s nose at the faith will certainly not accomplish.
But in the end, I don’t know what to do.
A good tonic is to seek out progressive Muslim voices. They certainly exist and they need our support. This is really a war of ideas within Islam, between the ‘purists’ who want to return to an imagined perfect past where Islam was unchallenged and the ‘progressives’ who understand that the world changes and Islam must adapt. The purists attack the West in an attempt to turn fellow Muslims away from ‘its’ temptations.
The thing that irks me the most is well meaning Westerners who naively end up supporting the purists out of a misguided anti-Westernism. You’ll find that the progressives want reform and want democracy.
The problem really has been the utter fuckwittery of US foreign policy. The ME can be democratized, but it does not want US ‘corporates first’ democracy imposed on them. The problem with Americans is that they think they own and invented democracy.
I found a reasonably progressive and moderate Islamic voice at Dawn which is one of the leading online newspapers in Pakistan. Check out Mahir Ali’s opinion piece on Pope Benedict at http://dawn.com/2006/09/20/ed.htm#4
Anand
Trouble is that in the US, with our Presidential policy of warrantless wiretapping and internet surveillance, we might just get on some terrorist watch list by going to a Pakistani web site, then be abducted and put in detention indefinitely with daily torture and no habeas corpus. No, this is not hyperbole. Just for considering that there might be a moderate Islamic voice can get one arrested in the US. Ok, that is a bit of sarcastic hyperbole. But not by much.
Ray, I think your suggestion of seeking out progressive Muslim voices is an excellent one. Thanks for all of your comments.
I realize that this is an old thread, but I’d like to applaud the idea of not only seeking out progressives, as Steve said, but also finding ways to support a healthy Muslim blue meme to fight the radical Islamic red-blue stream. As a feminist, this is not an easy position for me to take since, from my point of view, even the healthiest of blue memes are horribly oppressive of women. I am going to use Don Beck’s, and KW’s, color catagorization of modes of thinking here, partly because I’m a bit lazy, but mostly because I find the spiral dynamics concepts to be quite helpful.
Christians, well-meaning though they may be, cannot help because the distrust of other religions/ethnicities is so strong throughout the blue meme. This is one of several reasons why the Bush-led mission to plant democracy into Iraq was doomed to failure. In truth, the Iraqis, for the most part, do NOT want to be like Americans (although many would jump at the chance to live in America), as infathomable as that might seem to many Americans of all stripes. What was it that Gandhi said about how people prefer their own bad governance to the good governance of outsiders? Substitute the word “culture” for “governance” for an equally true statement.
As for the over-reaction by some Muslims to the Pope’s words, comedian Jon Stewart dryly observed that those protesting apparently don’t understand the concept of irony.
How much of that violence is really red with an excuse to act out instead of blue protecting their absolutist view of the world?
Hi Kelly,
I don’t think it’s necessarily true that blue has to be patriarchal, there is a form of blue matriarchy. But this is where SD falls down. I’ve talked about this in some of my articles at Integral World. There is a stage we can associate loosely with blue where there is a choice between both the good/terrible father and mother. There is a type of authoritarian matriarchy which controls by turning the subject into a ‘victim’ that needs the constant protection of the terrible mother. This ‘matronizing’ attitude is sadly common in the helping professions, including psychology.
A healthy blue in my view would include both the good father and good mother archetypes. In fact I would argue that the transition to healthy orange could not occur without the positive feminine.
That development can and does occur with pathology seems obvious. We all have kinks, twists and scars from such pathology, including our cultures. Ken noted that orange pathology is flatland, which dissociates the other value spheres by a dominant scientism. Green patholgoy develops that flatland with either a unidimensional intersubjectivity or interobjectivity. Yellow pathology continues this with a flatland altitudinal fixation. And what is the earlier patholgy on which all this is founded? Blue’s pre-differentiation of the values spheres within a dominant religious-mythical structure that levels everything in the One True Whatever. We’re still stuck with that one going forward, all the way to Cook-Greuter’s unitive ego stage.