The Goad and the Halter

Recently, via TIA Daily, I learned of two articles at MEMRI on Moslem reformist intellectuals. One of them, Malek Chebel, has proposed 27 propositions for reforming Islam based on the values of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment. Another, Lafif Lakhdar, proposes "religion within the limits of reason", and this Tunisian even goes so far as to say, of the Danish drawings of Mohammed, that:

Culture should be free, and every artist and every researcher should be free to write about all religions without any restriction. ... [This] includes humor and satire.... That is a secular principle: separation between religion and politics, and between religion and artistic and literary creation, and between religion and scientific research. This is the greatest achievement of modernity. The clerics must not be allowed to intervene in these matters.

While it is encouraging to see that such intellectuals exist in the Islamic world, my enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that they are a very small minority, and that we are not backing them up enough in the West because we are not doing enough in the current war to see to it that Moslems learn what kind of life their faith alone will cause them to have. (Although Hamastan's steady progress (HT: TIA Daily) towards civil war may do this despite our best efforts to prevent them from learning this lesson.)

From what I can tell, the Islamic world is in a sort of intellectual paralysis-cum-awareness of life around it, which reminds me of the Parkinsonian paralysis (caused by the 1918 sleeping sickness epidemic) described by Oliver Sacks in his collection of case histories called Awakenings.

At the end of my first meeting with Leonard, I said to him: What's it like being the way you are? What would you compare it to? He spelt out the following answer: "Caged, deprived, like Rilke's tiger"... .Again and again, with his penetrating descriptions, his imaginative metaphors, or his great stock of poetic images. Leonard would try to evoke the nature of his own being and experience. "There's an awful presence", he once tapped out, "And an awful absence. The presence is a mixture of nagging and pushing and pressure, with being held back and constrained and stopped -- I often call it the goad and the halter. The absence is a terrible isolation and coldness and shrinking -- a bottomless darkness and unreality." (205)

If the efforts of the above two intellectuals, aided weakly by exposure of the Islamic world to the West, are the "goad", then the enormous burden of intellectual inertia represented by three vignettes I presented in a recent roundup, and by this article represent the "halter".

The article is very long and rambling and is notable not just for mentioning the Ayn Rand Institute and Objectivist commentator Robert Tracinski by name, but also for (1) its demonstration of just how serious an obstacle to intellectual development Islam is and (2) some observations that show that the Moslems have a an understanding of the West that, while flawed, is still rather cunning. The article is "Mission reforming Islam" by Abid Ullah Jan. I am not sure whether the title alludes to the television series title Mission: Impossible, but such an allusion would be quite apt.

The article is quite plainly an anti-reformation manifesto of sorts, as this early paragraph indicates.

A specter haunts the world, and that specter is Islam. This is not the Islam discoverable in the pages of the Qur'an and life of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), but a mythical Islam that is the product of the new form of anti-Islamism that Yossi Klein Halevi, writing in the Los Angeles Times (December 4, 2002), says is "outdated domination theology" and that forms the subject of a Ayan [sic] Rand Institute's study by Robert Tracinski significantly entitled "A War Against Islam" (2001). [1] It is an Islam that the New York Times assured us, way back on January 21, 1996, is nothing less than a "menace" to the world and itself. [2]

...

Islam-bashing is anti-Islamism at its most radical and totalizing. Its goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to dilute and destroy. It repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no difference between Osama bin Laden and a person sitting in Washington calling himself [sic] "moderate Muslims." To it both are radicals; it views every Muslim action, both present and past, either opportunistic -- in waiting to strike at the right time -- or an act of deliberate aggression. It is not that Muslims went wrong here or there; it is that Islam is wrong root and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is really quite simple: that Islam is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity. [link added, my emphasis]

The fact that Jan chooses to call the desire to reform Islam "Islam-bashing" should pretty much tell you what to expect from him. But I find it intriguing that he sees something that many followers of reformed religions in the West do not: that such efforts are in fact a call for Moslems to ignore parts of their faith, meaning: a call to choose to ignore the dictates of faith when they interfere with daily life.

While many religious people of reformed faiths only incompletely reject faith as a means of knowledge, Jan has a firm grasp on what reformation really means: the subordination of faith to evidence and logic when the demands of modern life make it clear that faith is "getting in the way". While most will accept this on some level in order to live their lives on earth, Jan does not.

Jan, like the Palestinians marching under the banner, "Yes to starvation, no to capitulation", chooses the former, as indeed one who surrenders his independent judgement to what is written in a book must. He says this explicitly, in fact.

Actually the basic premise and condition set for reformation of Islam negates the core of Islam. Contrary to what Abdou Filali-Ansary from Morocco may look forward to in the Muslim world -- a state of "disenchantment" with pure religious dogma in favor of the ethical principles that underlie it, such that "faith becomes a matter of individual choice and commitment, not an obligation imposed on the community"[4] -- there is no dogma in Islam.

The choice is open to individuals as long as they have not come to the fold of Islam. The choice ends when one surrenders himself to Allah with heart and soul. Islam is not imposed on individuals. Once one submits his will to the Will of Allah, he has no choice but to obey the divine laws to the utmost and live fully by the prescribed way of life.

The Qur'an enlightens. One does not come to the fold of Islam to enlighten and reform it. Instead, it is the individuals [sic] who enlightens and reforms himself by embracing Islam in real sense. [bold added]

"In the real sense" means completely rejecting anything not prescribed by his faith. Obviously, one who defaults on ever thinking critically of Islam ever again cannot reform it. Jan is correct. And as one whose entire basis for judging something as "good" is based on faith, any attempt to reform Islam is wicked and threatening.

And Jan, the cave-dweller, sees something many in the West do not, and he reiterates this when he says that "Western civilization has become a kind of ism that has to be defended and imposed on the Muslim world at any cost." I do not necessarily agree that we need to reform the Moslem world. A ruthless policy of bombing and isolation would remove it as a threat to my life far more effectively. But the fact remains that whether we take it upon ourselves to civilize the Moslems or threaten them with annihilation unless they do the work themselves, the Islamic faith demands its practicioners kill or enslave anyone who does not convert after being "invited" to join. It is the willingness not to do just this that is the "ism" of which Jan speaks. This "ism" is the notion that man has rights by his nature, and its clear implication is that religion is not a valid excuse to murder or enslave someone else.

And Jan's cunning shows when he turns the tables on the "forward strategy" advocates. The West lacks a sufficient degree of confidence in itself to present his coreligionists -- the barbarians of the modern age -- with the same alternative it presented to savages in the past: become civilized (or at least stop harming us) or die. A major flaw with the "forward strategy" is that it too easily lends itself to the altruistic interpretation that we should reshape the Moslems for their sake rather than for our own protection. And when we allow the focus to shift to how we may best serve others, it becomes far less clear why it is, exactly, we should make the Moslems change. In fact, they need not reform or renounce their faith at all. But this is easy to forget in the context of the "forward strategy", and especially in Bush's altruistic interpretation of it.

Jan even cashes in on this confusion by the way he frames the Moslem adoption of governments inimical by their very nature -- as founded on Islamic precepts -- to civilized countries. He couches the adoption of sharia in terms of self-determination, a concept rightly applicable only to a people that respects individual rights.

[T]he question of whether it is Islam that is to define the state or the state that is to define Islam ... is irrelevant. It is up to Muslims to decide. But the first thing is to let them free from the never ending colonial bondage and interference in their internal affairs. [bold added]

And Moslems have a very "Red Chinese" interpretation of the meaning of "internal affairs" as the events of September 11, 2001 showed. Nations like Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia do not have an inviolable right to establish totalitarian regimes. In fact, no totalitarian regime -- as a systematic violator of individual rights -- has rights at all.

Jan also, more like a dog sniffing weakness than a philosopher recognizing intellectual rot, takes advantage of the prevalence of moral equivalence in the West to condemn its defensive war.

To make the matter simple, we can say that no non-Muslim country is occupied by Muslim these days. Nowhere Muslims are imposing their faith and way of life on non-Muslims through the language of daisey [sic] cutters. [Based on Iran's actions, it's a safe bet that this is only because they don't have them. --ed] The idea of Jihad, even in the most convoluted form, is better than the US "war on terrorism," which has infected not only Muslim understanding but also some strains of Western thought. Muslim web sites with titles such as "Azf al Rusas ("The Music of the Bullet") are not as evocative as the US title such as "Shock and Awe" and "Infinite Justice" for practical mass murder of Muslims in the name of freedom and democracy.

So our use of violent means in answer to being attacked makes us no better than the Moslems. In fact, we are worse because we wreak more havoc! Noam Chomsky himself ghost-wrote this for all I know. The prevalence of moral relativism in the West both primes Moslems educated here to buy this garbage, and Westerners who hear them repeating it to be less likely to support their side in the war. And Jan knows this. Otherwise, his "prophet", the caravan raider, is an unspeakably evil man by the very same standard. That leaves only tactical considerations as a motivation for this utterance.

Amit Ghate, in discussing the situation with Iran, has already answered this charge very well.

[T]he key to morally evaluating a war is not by how devastating one side may be, but to decide whether it is fought as a war of aggression or a war of self-defense. The former is to be criticized as irrational and evil, the latter exhorted for its rational recognition of reality. Clearly any US attack on Iran would be one of self-defense, as Iran has been fighting and threatening us since (at least) 1979, and such an attack by the US would therefore be rational and moral, not a reversion to some savage latent tendency.

Jan's article thus ultimately exposes his faith as the very caricature he claims the "Islam-bashers" make of it.

[E]very Muslim action, both present and past, either opportunistic -- in waiting to strike at the right time -- or an act of deliberate aggression.

Your book demands that you attack infidels. Your only case for not seeing that such attacks are acts of aggression is that you turn your mind off when it tells you to attack. And you present disingenuous arguments to disarm your enemy intellectually. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, .... Oh. Forget it. That's not in the Koran.

Will the reformists or the fundamentalists win in the Islamic world? It's an uphill battle all the way, but the reformists deserve our support.

-- CAV