Online Snippets

Some fascinating commentary going on at Belmont Club on religion, politics, and values:

When the Founding Fathers created the framework for procedural democracy it was unnecessary to spell out its ends because those were largely provided by the moral, ethical and religious consensus of the underlying society. When that underlying civilizational consensus has been destroyed or diluted, as is the case in Western Europe and to a lesser extent the United States, what intrinsic ends does a value-neutral democratic mechanism serve? The answer possibly, is whatever it can be put to, like a Turing Machine which adopts whichever persona the loaded instruction set demands. Then Dutch democracy becomes the Muslim right to chuck a hand grenade out the door at policemen come to arrest them for plotting to blow up a public landmark. Democracy becomes a vehicle waiting to be hijacked; a metaphor for the old saw that someone who believes in nothing will believe in anything.

But of course the process of secularization -- or 'value emptying' as Pell might put it -- has not been entirely uniform. In actuality, while whole chunks of the West have thrown out their traditional value systems, other chunks have been busy proseletyzing theirs. As Episcopalian churches have emptied the fundamentalist Islamic mosques have filled. That uneven development, if left unchecked, may eventually mean that the magnificent mechanism of secular democracy, which serves no value of itself, will be arbitrarily assigned a goal by the majority most willing to hijack it.

Some snippets from the comments section are provocative:

Monty [said,] "For a believer of Islam, there is only the Ummah and the tribe - nothing else"

Then how did Scotland and the Norse countries become free? They were very tribal. Why were so many East Coast US Indian Tribes politically organized into democracies? Why was Islam so tolerant for so long?
# posted by PureData : 5:30 PM

PureData:
Your first point is void: the Irish, Welsh, and Scot tribes were not Muslims. They also had a more nationalist identity than the various Arab tribes did; a Scottish clansman was still a Scot.

Second, your notion that Islam had some magical period of tolerance is simply not true. Islam has always been intolerant of other religions. It's just that during the European Middle Ages, it was somewhat less intolerant than the various nominally Christian regimes in Europe. Jews were tolerated, but were forced to pay the dhimmi tax like all other non-Muslims during those times, and there were periodic pogroms against non-Muslims all over the Islamic world right up until the present day.

Islam has never in its entire history been particularly tolerant of other religious creeds; it was just somewhat less repressive at times than other polities.
# posted by Monty : 5:45 PM

Exactly, Monty. And the fundamental reason for such tolerance at all was that it was forced upon the conquerors by demographics: apparently even a country so associated with Islam and the Caliphate as Iraq wasn't predominantly Muslim until something like the 12th century, prior to which it was Nestorian Christian and Zoroastrian. The Muslims had no incubation period: they formulated Islam, to some brief extent, and then conquered the exhausted peripheral states of the Byzantine and Persian Empires. They ruled like Mongols: a tiny minority of indominatable warriors with an inch-deep culture suddenly holding in thrall a vast population of ancient, enduring, sophisticated civilization.

What choice did they have but to accept their existence (which in fact they often didn't do)? What choice did they have but to adopt the political, economic, military, scientific and cultural institutions of the conquered? We've all seen pictures of Hagia Sophia: a Romanesque church surrounded by minarets. We've all read the Aristotelian treatises of the famed Islamic Golden Age--was Aristotle an Arab, or a Muslim? Was Pythagoras? Was Euclid? Was Hippocrates? Of course not. Was the reason that Islam resembles Christianity and especially Judaism in certain oblique but fundamental ways because the angel Gabriel actually descended from heaven and dictated the sura of the Koran? Obviously not.

Islam appeals for the same reason Marxism appeals: the romance of the shallow. Islam is doomed because it has no native intellectual resources with which to do so. It is the romance of Bedouin, gilded over with God-talk inspired by the more successful, attractive merchant communities of Jews and Christians along the China-Persia-Rome maritime trading routes
# posted by Dan : 5:59 PM

Speaking of the Communism of the 21st Century, Gilles Kepel gives an interview at opendemocracy.net, deserving to be read in full.
[snip]
Visiting sites such as iraqresistance.net (and perusing its list of supporters) one sees that the Iraqi resistance, though fought under the banner of jihad, is understood and supported by the extreme, fastidiously secular Left of Europe and South America as an armed opposition against its eternal nemeses, capitalism and classical liberalism. An alliance of authoritarianisms, radical Islam and world Socialism. The Marxists and the Mujahideen. We see its more faint but unmistakable manifestations in the States - for instance with Michael Moore singing the praises of the Iraqi "Minute Men," Moore being a sloppy pseudo-populist rather than a doctrinaire collectivist.
# posted by trish : 6:00 PM

What strikes the outsider about Islam and the Muslim faith is the lack of introversion among Muslims about their faith. Most books on Islam are written by scholarly unbelievers, and there is very little doctrinal debate even among senior Islamic clergy. Once the sunna were agreed upon fairly early on in Islamic history and shari'a based on those interpretations of the Koran, all further inquiry simply...stopped. There is no Muslim equivalent of St. Agustine, Luther, or C.S. Lewis to interpret the creed and adapt it for modern minds.

It is notable that the main schism in Islam is not doctrinal as in the Christian faiths, but is based on the idea of succession (a very tribal concern): Shi'ites believe that Mohammed's cousin Ali was the rightful Caliph, while Sunnis believed that the successor was to be chosen by council (who eventually settled on Abu Bakr).

A doctrinal split often prompts the faithful to think carefully about their understanding of the creed, and to either follow or diverge from the path. This leads to conflict, obviously, but it also keeps the faith vibrant and in tune with the changing times. Islam has never really faced up to the changing world - it has always been an insular religion. You can see it in the terminology that Muslims use: Dar al Islam is the House of Peace (Muslims), and everyone else is in the Dar al Harb, or House of War. This worldview beggars even the strictest Calvinist interpretation of the faithful versus the unbelievers.

Finally, it's important to remember that salvation in Islam means following the rules. It has little to do with one's qualities as a person or moral stature; all one must do to achieve Heaven is follow the rules (Sunna, Hadith, and Shari'a). This worldview doesn't exactly promote intellectual discourse or introspection.
# posted by Monty : 6:25 PM

This is a wonderful thread, top to bottom. A saver, to read more closely as time permits. Let me just add to Trish, that the alliance of which she speaks is certain and well-rooted; radical Islam recruits actively in the prison system in the USA--and I'm sure all elsewhere in the West--and rose into sharp relief in the 60s, on the back of Cassius Clay, who is one of my favorite people, and who backfired on Islam at least somewhat by illuminating the brutal internecine tactics of Islam via providing the stage upon which Malcolm X was publicly shotgunned to death by a rival faction. The Black Separatist Movement arose incongruously after the hard civil rights legislation had been won, and did much to linger out the already certain death of Jim Crow. The impetus was from the international left, piggybacking the opportunity-rich racial aspect of the Vietnam War.

The West has been greatly hindered in the global war against totalitarianism on all battlegrounds where racism can be imputed. "P.C.", usually seen as a rather harmless 'can't we all just get along?' invention of idealist college kids, is in reality a cold, hard totalitarian tumor on the heart of western culture. Evidence is everywhere, like falling leaves. One big one, the silence of feminism on taliban women. No, it was not just to avoid helping GWB. The true message of that silence--as with a thousand other examples we've all seen--is "Screw the liberation rhetoric, what this is about is, burning all of civilization's property titles and starting anew, and WE pick the leaders, this time."
# posted by Buddy Larsen : 6:49 PM

Sartre is an idiot.
# posted by erp : 6:55 PM

Good stuff.