Saturday, June 16, 2007

Islam: the questions which must be answered

The readiness to take offence is a sign of the deep-down insecurity of the Muslim psyche in the modern world, writes Roger Scruton

The term "Islamofascism" was introduced by the French writer Maxine Rodinson (1915-2004) to describe the Iranian Revolution of 1978. Rodinson was a Marxist, who described as "fascist" any movement of which he disapproved. But we should be grateful to him for coining a word that enables people on the left to denounce our common enemy. After all, other French leftists - Michel Foucault, for example - had welcomed the revolution as an amusing threat to Western interests. It is only now that people on the left can acknowledge that they are just as much a target as the rest of us, in a war that has global chaos as its goal. The word has therefore caught on, not least because it provides a convenient way of announcing that you are not against Islam but only against its perversion by the terrorists. But this prompts the question whether terrorism is really as alien to Islam as we should all like to believe.

Despite his communist sympathies, Rodinson was a peaceful soul, who spent seven years teaching in a Muslim school in Lebanon and wrote a biography of Muhammad in which the prophet is portrayed as a mild-mannered campaigner for social justice. But this biography was denounced by the Egyptian authorities as an offence to Islam, was withdrawn from the curriculum of the American University in Cairo, and has ever since been banned in Muslim countries. This readiness to take offence is not yet terrorism - but it is a sign of the deep-down insecurity of the Muslim psyche in the modern world.

In the presence of Islam, we all feel, you have to tread carefully, as though humouring a dangerous animal. The Koran must never be questioned; Islam must be described as a religion of peace - isn't that the meaning of the word? - and jokes about the prophet are an absolute no-no. If religion comes up in conversation, best to slip quietly away, accompanying your departure with abject apologies for the Crusades. In Europe this pussyfooting is now being transcribed into law, with "Islamophobia" already a crime in Belgium and movements across the continent to censor everything at which a Muslim might take offence, including articles like this one.

The majority of European Muslims do not approve of terrorism. But there are majorities and majorities. According to a recent poll, a full quarter of British Muslims believe that the bombs of July 7, 2005, in London were a legitimate response to the "war on terror".

Public pronouncements from Muslim leaders treat Islamist terrorism as a lamentable but understandable response to the West's misguided policies. And the blood-curdling utterances of the Wahhabite clergy, when occasionally reported in the press, sit uneasily with the idea of a "religion of peace". All this leads to a certain scepticism among ordinary people, whose "racist" or "xenophobic" prejudices are denounced by the media as the real cause of Muslim disaffection.

Now of course it is wrong to give gratuitous offence to people of other faiths; it is right to respect people's beliefs, when these beliefs pose no threat to civil order; and we should extend toward resident Muslims all the toleration and neighbourly goodwill that we hope to receive from them. But recent events have caused people to wonder exactly where Muslims stand in such matters. Although Islam is derived from the same root as salaam, it does not mean peace but submission.

Although the Koran tells us that there shall be no compulsion in matters of religion, it does not overflow with kindness toward those who refuse to submit to God's will. The best they can hope for is to be protected by a treaty (dhimmah), and the privileges of the dhimmi are purchased by onerous taxation and humiliating rites of subservience.

As for apostates, it remains as dangerous today as it was in the time of the prophet publicly to renounce the Muslim faith. Even if you cannot be compelled to adopt the faith, you can certainly be compelled to retain it. The anger with which public Muslims greet any attempt to challenge, to ridicule or to marginalise their faith is every bit as ferocious as that which animated the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.

Ordinary Christians, who suffer a daily diet of ridicule and scepticism, cannot help feeling that Muslims protest too much, and that the wounds, which they ostentatiously display to the world, are largely self-inflicted. To recognise such facts is not to give up hope for a tolerant Islam. But there is a matter that needs to be clarified. Christians and Jews are heirs to a long tradition of secular government, which began under the Roman Empire and was renewed at the Enlightenment: human societies should be governed by human laws, and these laws must take precedence over religious edicts.

The primary duty of citizens is to obey the state; what they do with their souls is a matter between themselves and God, and all religions must bow down to the sovereign authority if they are to exist within its jurisdiction. The Ottoman Empire evolved systems of law which to some extent replicated that wise provision. But after the Ottoman collapse, the Muslim sects rebelled against the idea, since it contradicts the claims of the Shariah to be the final legal authority.

The Egyptian writer and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, went so far as to denounce all secular law as blasphemy. Mortals who make laws for their own government, he argued, usurp a power which is God's alone. Although few Muslim leaders will publicly endorse Qutb's argument, few will publicly condemn it either. What to us is a proof of Qutb's fanaticism and egomania is, for many Muslims, a proof of his piety.

Whenever I consider this matter I am struck by a singular fact about the Christian religion, a fact noticed by Kierkegaard and Hegel but rarely commented upon today, which is that it is informed by a spirit of irony. Irony means accepting "the other", as someone other than you. It was irony that led Christ to declare that his "kingdom is not of this world", not to be achieved through politics. Such irony is a long way from the humourless incantations of the Koran. Yet it is from a posture of irony that every real negotiation, every offer of peace, every acceptance of the other, begins.

The way forward, it seems to me, is to encourage the re-emergence of an ironical Islam, of the kind you find in the philosophy of Averro%s, in Persian poetry and in The Thousand and One Nights. We should also encourage those ethnic and religious jokes which did so much to defuse tension in the days before political correctness. And maybe, one day, the rigid face of some puritanical mullah will crack open in a hesitant smile, and negotiations can at last begin.

Source



Adolescent Intellectuals

To a small child, the reason he cannot do many things that he would like to do is that his parents won't let him. Many years later, maturity brings an understanding that there are underlying reasons for doing or not doing many things, and that his parents were essentially conduits for those reasons. The truly dangerous period in life is the time when the child has learned the limits of his parents' control, and how to circumvent their control, but has not yet understood or accepted the underlying reasons for doing and not doing things. This adolescent period is one that some people -- intellectuals especially -- never outgrow.

The widespread and fervent use of the word "liberation" in a wide variety of contexts is one of the signs of the adolescent belief that only arbitrary rules and conventions stand in the way of doing whatever we want to do. According to this vision of the world, the problems of all sorts of individuals and groups -- women, minorities, homosexuals, children -- are to be solved by liberating them from the restraints of laws, rules, conventions and standards. They are to be liberated even from the threat of adverse judgments by other individuals. We are all to be "non-judgmental."

Two centuries ago, the great British legal scholar William Blackstone pointed out that there are some laws so old that no one remembers why they existed or what purpose they served then or now. But the bad consequences of repealing some of these laws have often made painfully clear what purpose they served.

Some of the painful consequences of various "liberations" that began in the 1960s have included the disintegration of families, skyrocketing crime rates, falling test scores in school, and record-breaking rates of teenage suicide. A long downward trend in teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases sharply reversed during the 1960s, starting a new trend of escalating teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases, climaxed later by the AIDS epidemic.

Sometimes bad things happen because of adverse circumstances -- poverty or war, for example. But our post-1960s social disasters occurred during a long period of peace and unprecedented prosperity. Murder rates, for example, were much lower during the Great Depression of the 1930s and during World War II than they became after various "liberating" changes in the 1960s.

One of the signs of maturity is the ability to learn from experience. Some of us have learned and we have halted or reversed some of the adverse trends. For example, the quest for those elusive "root causes" of crime, so dear to the political left, has been put aside in favor of locking up more criminals -- and the crime rate has declined. The left is upset that we have so many people behind bars and lament how much it is costing to keep them there. They do not even bother to estimate how much it would cost to turn them loose.

The left has never understood why property rights are a big deal, except to fat cats who own a lot of property. Through legislation and judicial rulings, property rights have been eroded with rent control laws, expansive concepts of eminent domain, and all sorts of environmental restrictions. Some of the biggest losers have been people of very modest incomes and some of the biggest winners have been fat cats who are able to use political muscle and activist judges to violate other people's property rights.

Politicians in cities around the country violate property rights regularly by seizing homes in working-class neighborhoods and demolishing whole sectors of the city, in order to turn the land over to people who will build shopping malls, gambling casinos, and other things that will pay more taxes than the homeowners are paying. That's why property rights were put in the Constitution in the first place, to keep politicians from doing things like that. But the adolescent intellectuals of our time have promoted the notion that property rights are just arbitrary rules to protect the rich. Many academics and federal judges are sufficiently insulated from reality by tenure that they never have to grow up.

Source



The New Mufti of Muslim Australia

A more charming fanatic



Report by Andrew Bolt

I WAS chatting to the charming Sheik Fehmi Naji el-Imam, now Australia's new Mufti, when we were interrupted by the Queen. Her Majesty settled herself at her table, while we and the other few hundred guests at the Royal Exhibition Building lunch waited politely. Two archbishops - one Catholic and the other Anglican - then said Grace and I whispered to the sheik, "Why aren't you up there, too?" "One day I will be," he replied. I was joking, but I'm sure Fehmi was not.

And why shouldn't he hope to be up there, making the Christians shuffle up a bit to make room for his very different and demanding faith? I mention this not to damn his cheek, but to point out Fehmi - however moderate he is painted - is not there to police our Muslims and assimilate them for you. His job isn't to get Muslims used to secular Australia, but Australia used to Muslims.

That point may be lost by commentators who, with me, have long wanted him to replace the disastrous Sheik Taj el-Din al-Hilaly as Mufti, our senior Muslim cleric. I wanted Hilaly sacked for preaching hatred, and thought it disturbing that Muslims chose to be led by a man who'd praised suicide bombers as heroes, called the September 11 terror attacks "God's work against oppressors", and insisted raped women be "jailed for life". And what a symbol of determined apartness he was, with so little English after 30 years here. But how much better off are we with Fehmi chosen on Sunday by the new Australian National Imam's Council to take over as Mufti?

Not so much. But let me first count Fehmi's blessings. He is a most courteous man, who has often preached against violent jihad at his Preston mosque, and publicly and often called for the Sydney-based Hilaly to go. Lebanese-born, he speaks fine English after 55 years here, and has impressed leaders of other faiths, with the admired Rabbi John Levi praising him in a 2001 ABC profile as "extremely wise and compassionate".

Yet, last year, Levi said Fehmi had "shocked" him: "He is under great pressure from a radicalised community, but nothing can excuse his destruction of decades-long work on Jewish-Muslim understanding." And here's the problem. In the end, Fehmi leads believers who demand he be far more radical than you'd expect from a "moderate". What alarmed Levi, and the Howard Government, is that Fehmi backed the Hezbollah terrorists in their war with Israel, hailing them at a rally as "freedom fighters". Worse, when asked at his first press conference as Mufti if he accepted Osama bin Laden was behind the September 11 attacks, he stalled: "What evidence?" Advisers then stopped him from speaking on Iraq.

Excuses will be made that Fehmi dares not be as moderate as he'd like, and he's often hinted that's so. He urged that the Danish cartoons of Mohammed not be published here because they'd "disturb people who can do things that we don't want them to do." He criticised police raids on suspected extremists in Perth because "we worry about some amongst our people who become so angry about this sort of thing, and might do some act, which we won't be happy about".

When Channel 9 asked him about Sheik Mohammed Omran, who has been linked to terrorists, Fehmi said only: "I know him and he has his own way of thinking, which I don't want to talk about." And note this. At Monday's press conference, he refused to repeat his past criticisms of Hilaly, defending him instead. What's more, the imams' council went out of its way to save Hilaly's face, saying it first voted to keep this notorious bigot as Mufti, only to have him turn it down. This was no repudiation of him. And back at his Lakemba mosque, Australia's biggest, Hilaly reminded us: "Control will always be in Lakemba." Which is why I fear Fehmi is just a soothing distraction.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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