Tuesday, February 20, 2007
On the divisions within Islam
Christopher Hitchens drills into the divisions within Islam, and the manner by which the West should, and should not, respect those divisions.
I have met a few very hard-line right-wingers who say: So what? If one lot of Islamists wants to slaughter another, who cares? It's very important to repudiate this kind of "thinking." Religious warfare is the worst thing that can happen to any society, and it now has the potential to spread to societies that are not directly involved. For the most part, official U.S. policy in Iraq has been sound in this respect, always working for a compromise and recently losing American lives to rescue the moderate Shiite leadership from a murder plot hatched by a messianic Shiite militia. Even where this policy fell short—as in the appalling execution of Saddam Hussein—the American Embassy urged the Maliki government not to conduct the hanging on the day of the Eid ul-Adha holiday that would most humiliate the Sunnis. We cannot flirt, either morally or politically, with divide and rule.
However, the self-generated Islamic civil war does have significance in the wider cultural struggle. All over the non-Muslim world, we hear incessant demands that those who believe in the literal truth of the Quran be granted "respect." We are supposed to watch what we say about Islam, lest by any chance we be considered "offensive." A fair number of authors and academics in the West now have to live under police protection or endure prosecution in the courts for not observing this taboo with sufficient care. A stupid term—Islamophobia—has been put into circulation to try and suggest that a foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam's infallible "message."
Well, this idiotic masochism has to be dropped. There may have been a handful of ugly incidents, provoked by lumpen elements, after certain episodes of Muslim terrorism. But no true secularist or even Christian has been involved in anything like the torching of a mosque. (The last time that such a thing did happen on any scale—in Bosnia—the United States and Britain intervened militarily to put a stop to it. We also overthrew the Taliban, which was slaughtering the Hazara Shiite minority in Afghanistan.) But where are the denunciations from centers of Sunni and Shiite authority of the daily murder and torture of Islamic co-religionists? Of the regular desecration of holy sites and holy books? Of the paranoid insults thrown so carelessly and callously by one Muslim group at another? This mounting ghastliness is a bit more worthy of condemnation, surely, than a few Danish cartoons or a false rumor about a profaned copy of the Quran in Guantanamo. The civilized world—yes I do mean to say that—should find its own voice and state firmly to Muslim leaders and citizens that respect is something to be earned and not demanded with menace. A short way of phrasing this would be to say, "See how the Muslims respect each other!"
Indeed.
4 Comments:
By 
Jason Pappas, at
Tue Feb 20, 02:53:00 PM:
I sincerely question the wisdom of trying to end internecine strife in Islamic and Arab societies. The problem is very deep and will change only over several generations. (But then again, I was always skeptical about nations-building in Iraq. The intension was honorable but far too generous and a costly choice in pursuit of our defense.) While I differ with Hitchens here, I couldn’t agree more about the “idiotic masochism” with which we self-flagellate while we show utmost respect for the enemy’s culture. Who ever fought a war while praising the enemy’s ideology?
By Pudentilla, at
Tue Feb 20, 03:02:00 PM:
But where are the denunciations from centers of Sunni and Shiite authority of the daily murder and torture of Islamic co-religionists?
here and here.
new pundit rule: never ask a rhetorical question for which a minute's googling can provide the answer.
By Escort81, at
Tue Feb 20, 10:36:00 PM:
Pudentilla -
I appreciate the attempt to make it appear as though there is a large volume of common sense condemnation originating from responsible Islamic leaders, but you need to do a better job Googling and citing.
Reading a few graphs down in your first citation/link, one comes across this gem:
Qaradawi, who heads the international federation of Muslim scholars, announced on Monday that his organisation has decided to send a delegation to Tehran to hold talks with Iranian officials.
"It is Iran that holds the keys" to a settlement in Iraq, he said, adding that he would head the delegation and be assisted by Iranian scholar Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Taskhiri.
However, Qaradawi defended Iran's "right" to pursue a nuclear programme for peaceful ends, the issue at the center of Tehran's crisis with the United States, which accuses it of seeking nuclear weapons.
"Why does Israel have the right to possess military nuclear power whereas Iran is not entitled to possess peaceful nuclear power?" he asked.
Great. You've cited an Islamic scholar who denounces the violence in Iraq in one breath and shills for the Iranian nuclear program in another breath. See TigerHawk's 7:22 AM 02/20/07 post to read why Iran's nuclear energy program is a thin cover for a weapons program, and how Iran could have chosen purely an energy path, but instead chose a dual use path.
New commenter rule: if you are going to cite a source, make sure it's a responsible one.
Perhaps a better rebuttal to the Hitchens piece is that Islam is by its very nature decentralized, with no "official" clergy, and has rarely spoken with one voice, but rather is in a constant struggle (jihad?) among various factions to determine what true Islam means.
I suppose there are such things today as Christian fundamentalist terrorists (people who kill abortion doctors or bomb clinics), but it seems they are many orders of magnitude fewer in number than their Islamic cousins. Hitchens is making the point that something is wrong in the heart of Islam (though it may be cultural rather than theological), and it is hard to disagree.
By Dawnfire82, at
Thu Feb 22, 03:38:00 PM:
"Hitchens is making the point that something is wrong in the heart of Islam (though it may be cultural rather than theological), and it is hard to disagree."
Little of both. As off the cuff evidence, consider the ethnic proportions of Islamic terrorists. (a vast category, I know) A much greater portion of such people are Arab in origin, even though there are more non-Arab Muslims than Arab. That there are vastly more Islamic terrorists than those of other religions is a sign of theological roots (and if you study the religion in detail, you'll see why) but there are vastly more Arab Islamic terrorists than non-Arab Islamic terrorists despite their smaller overall population, and that indicates a cultural root as well.
