Modern Islam Archives

Enter the Strawman

February 8, 2007 05:40 AM

Ian Buruma is starting to flail at his critics. Enter the strawman:

Professor Cliteur holds so dogmatically to his idea of secularism and the Enlightenment that any accommodation towards religious faith, specifically towards Islam, is tantamount to appeasement of religious extremism, or a form of self-hating nihilism. My objection is not to the Enlightenment as such, but to the ideological zeal of some of those who believe they are acting in its defence. If we wish to isolate and defeat religious extremism, we must must have mainstream European Muslims as our allies. The rather crude polemics spouted by Professor Cliteur will not be of much help in this endeavor.

Oh come on. There was nothing in Cliteur's essay to suggest that the defense of Enlightenment values demands the rejection of religious faith or practice. His point was only that critics such as Buruma are naive in their belief that "dogmatism" is the problem, rather than what people are dogmatic about. I'll go further. I'd wager that Cliteur would have little trouble with fundamentalism of the Christian kind, provided it made no purchase on his liberties - particularly the freedom to keep his head attached to his neck. He's keen to cite Spinoza as the "godfather of the Enlightenment," and Spinoza was no atheist. (If anything, he had too many gods - at least according to the Jewish elders who expelled him.)

Buruma, too, insists that he understands this difference. Really? As you can see above, he is quickly back to moaning about the "ideological zeal" of the world's Cliteurs. Then there's this:

I admire the achievements of the Enlightenment as much as Professor Cliteur appears to do, but I also believe that one of its greatest achievements is the rejection of dogmatism, of any kind.

So he's not a postmodernist, as Cliteur alleges; he's just fantastically enlightened - enlightened enough to see that one can be over-enlightened. This is a rejection of the "postmodernist" charge?

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The Battle is Joined

February 5, 2007 12:07 PM

NOTE: Updated with criticism from Paul Cliteur below.

If you've been missing it, there's a fascinating debate continuing to unfold at signandsight.com over the recent Pascal Bruckner essay, excerpted below. Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash have each responded separately to Bruckner's allegations (i.e. that they withhold Enlightenment liberalism from those who try to escape oppressive cultural archaisms). Both are a tad puzzled - not to say alarmed - by Bruckner's suggestion that their views are shared by Bush and Blair, and somewhat amused by Bruckner's evidently indestructible reverence for the "French model." Now comes feminist Turkish-German author Necla Kelek with a rebuke for the respondents. Buruma and Ash overlook the sinister measure of conformity in the Muslim Ummah as they laud the "diversity" among Muslims, she charges. So here's the current state of play:

Buruma - Islamic practice is not monolithic; where it is extreme, it won't likely be reformed by a shrill apostate (and avowed atheist) like Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Bruckner is a French wanker who probably hasn't left the inner confines of Paris in awhile.

Garton Ash - "Pascal Bruckner is the intellectual equivalent of a drunk meandering down the road, arguing loudly with some imaginary enemies." No further description can improve on that.

Kelek - Buruma (mostly) and Garton Ash ignore the startling degree to which extremist Muslim dogmas, if not universally accepted, are nonetheless the status quo in the societies where most Muslims live.

I recommend you give all the essays a read-through. This is going to continue for awhile.

UPDATE: Dutch law professor Paul Cliteur joins the fray, with a very thoughtful piece. He argues that "postmodern" tendencies among Western intellectuals have created categories of equivalence that are in fact illusory and, at the furthest end, fundamentally dangerous, because they deny even the right of self-defense to the heirs of the Enlightenment. Buruma's book "Murder in Amsterdam," about the death of Theo Van Gogh, continues to lie at the center of the debate:

What remains a mystery is why many intelligent people stick to the postmodern frame of mind, even though so many intelligent writers - Terry Eagleton and John Searle, to name just two - have thoroughly deconstructed its tenets. I think this has to do with the postmodernist conviction that an attitude that they see as relativistic and pragmatic would help in the struggle against religious terrorism. They hope that, if we abstain from radical criticism of the terrorist mindset, we can pacify the most radical elements. This is a great delusion, as Buruma himself would have understood had he thought more deeply about the material in his own book. For Buruma profiles not only protagonists of radical Enlightenment but also Amsterdam alderman Ahmed Aboutaleb and the city's mayor, Job Cohen. Buruma writes that he met Aboutaleb - a Moroccan-born Muslim who advocates pluralism - "surrounded by bodyguards. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he needed full-time protection." That should have stimulated Buruma to further reflection on the nature of religious terrorism. As for Cohen, he has a reputation of being much too soft. He never employs strong language against ethnic and religious minorities. He is a man of "dialogue" and "respect," refraining from almost any kind of critique that might disturb the sensitivities of religious minorities. Yet Cohen was criticized by name in the letter that was left on the body of Theo van Gogh.

More to come.

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Forgetting the Girl

January 26, 2007 10:41 AM

From the online Euromag signandsight.com, a very important essay from the great French philosopher and social analyst Pascal Bruckner, responding to Europe's shameful ostracism of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He loses me a bit in suggesting a parallelism between the outlook of Bush and Blair, on the one hand, and the perspectives of Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash - two writers taken to task in the piece for enforcing intellectual segregation in the name of "multiculturalism." (The better criticism of Bush, at least, is precisely the opposite - i.e. that he believes some Western values are self-evidently universal, or ought to be.) But Bruckner knows his Europe, and is spot-on here:

Anyone with a mind to contend timidly that liberty is indivisible, that the life of a human being has the same value everywhere, that amputating a thief's hand or stoning an adulteress is intolerable everywhere, is duly arraigned in the name of the necessary equality of cultures. As a result, we can turn a blind eye to how others live and suffer once they've been parked in the ghetto of their particularity. Enthusing about their inviolable differentness alleviates us from having to worry about their condition. However it is one thing to recognise the convictions and rites of fellow citizens of different origins, and another to give one's blessing to hostile insular communities that throw up ramparts between themselves and the rest of society. How can we bless this difference if it excludes humanity instead of welcoming it? This is the paradox of multiculturalism: it accords the same treatment to all communities, but not to the people who form them, denying them the freedom to liberate themselves from their own traditions. Instead: recognition of the group, oppression of the individual. The past is valued over the wills of those who wish to leave custom and the family behind and - for example - love in the manner they see fit. ...

Out of consideration for all the abuses they may have suffered, ethnic, sexual, religious and regional minorities are often set up as small nations, in which the most outrageous chauvinism is passed off as nothing more than the expression of legitimate self-esteem. Instead of celebrating freedom as the power to escape determinism, the repetition of the past is being encouraged, reinforcing the power of collective coercion over private individuals. Marginal groups now form a sort of ethos-police, a flag-waving micro-nationalism which certain countries of Europe unfortunately see fit to publicly support. Under the guise of celebrating diversity, veritable ethnic or confessional prisons are established, where one group of citizens is denied the advantages accorded to others. ...

The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go. Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism is perhaps nothing other than a legal apartheid, accompanied - as is so often the case - by the saccarine cajolery of the rich who explain to the poor that money doesn't guarantee happiness. We bear the burdens of liberty, of self-invention, of sexual equality; you have the joys of archaism, of abuse as ancestral custom, of sacred prescriptions, forced marriage, the headscarf and polygamy. The members of these minorities are put under a preservation order, protected from the fanaticism of the Enlightenment and the "calamities" of progress. Those termed "Muslims" (North Africans, Pakistanis, Africans) are prohibited from not believing, or from believing periodically, from not giving a damn about God, from creating a life for themselves far away from the Koran and the rites of the tribe.

Multiculturalism is a racism of the anti-racists: it chains people to their roots. Thus Job Cohen, mayor of Amsterdam and one of the mainstays of the Dutch state, demands that one accept "the conscious discrimination of women by certain groups of orthodox Muslims" on the basis that we need a "new glue" to "hold society together." In the name of social cohesion, we are invited to give our roaring applause for the intolerance that these groups show for our laws. The coexistence of hermetic little societies is cherished, each of which follows a different norm. If we abandon a collective criterion for discriminating between just and unjust, we sabotage the very idea of national community. A French, British or Dutch citizen will be prosecuted for beating his wife, for example. But should the crime go unpunished if it turns out that the perpetrator is a Sunni or Shiite? Should his faith give him the right to transgress the law of the land? This is the glorification in others of what we have always beaten ourselves up about: outrageous protectionism, cultural narcissism and inveterate ethnocentrism!

Read the whole thing, as they say.

[ht: aldaily.com]

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Amen

October 3, 2006 06:03 AM

Victor Davis Hanson despairs of modern Europe. Who doesn't? But his piece today is still worth quoting at some length for the clarity it brings to the present circumstances.

But now all that hard-won effort of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation....

Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship: fear of radical Islam and its gruesome appendages of beheadings, suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth, petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and fist-chanting mobs.

In contrast, almost daily in Europe, “brave” artists caricature Christians and Americans with impunity. Why?

For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque....

So the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of traitors of a sort, since they themselves, not just their consensual governments or some invader across the Mediterranean, have nearly destroyed their won freedoms of expression — out of worries over oil, or appearing as illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or another London or Madrid bombing.

Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount, but it simply won’t stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in everything turns out to believe in nothing....

Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.

We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future, but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past. [author's italics]

Can't add much to that.

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'Our Home Turf'

February 24, 2006 08:43 PM

One more reason it's fun being Jewish:

Israeli starts ‘anti-Semitic cartoon contest’

JERUSALEM: An Israeli cartoonist has launched an “anti-Semitic cartoon contest” to poke fun at fellow Jews in response to furore among Muslims over the publication of caricatures depicting the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH).

Cartoonist Amitai Sandy said he was inspired by violent Muslim protests and the launching of a Holocaust cartoon competition by an Iranian daily that said it wanted to test the boundaries of free speech espoused by Western countries....[snip]

“We will show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published,” Sandy wrote on his website.

“No Iranian will beat us on our home turf,” he added in reference to the cartoon competition being held by Iran’s best selling newspaper to lampoon the annihilation of six million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust during World War Two.

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Dog Dane Afternoon

February 10, 2006 07:25 AM

Who knew there were Iranians in Kiev? I didn't, until I ran into my Danish friend Lars on the street this morning. Half tongue-in-cheek, I asked Lars, who handles security issues between Ukraine and the Scandinavian countries, whether the Danish embassy was still intact. Yes, he told me, but as a matter of fact the embassy saw its first cartoon protests just this morning. (They've had police protection out front since Monday.) He said the 30-odd protestors included representatives from a local Islamic Association and some Iranians who are students at some of the local universities. No major disruptions, but the Danes decided to close for the day, just in case.

I was curious to see what practicing Muslims looked like in Ukraine -- I had never seen one here, and let's just say that Ukraine is not the safest place on earth for non-whites, if there were to be any (non-whites) in this crowd. Since the embassy is only a couple of blocks from my flat, I quickly headed home, grabbed my notebook and camera, and headed for the site. Unfortunately, by the time I reached the embassy the crowd had already left, though I did spot one woman in hijab buying a coke at a nearby kiosk. But what struck me anyhow was one minor detail that remainded: the Danes had taken down their flag, as well as the EU flag that customarily flies beside it. I could not imagine that the United States -- or even France -- would respond similarly. What an awful capitulation in the face of such cretinous incitement. Even if you close for the day in the interests of staff safety (fair enough), you don't let them take down your flag. I headed back to my apartment, wondering what I might see at the Swedish embassy, which is across the street. Sure enough....

It's easy for me to judge, though. The Danes and the Swedes don't imagine themselves as provocatuers; they can't make sense of the strange hatred and violence directed at them; they aren't accustomed to the rent-a-mobs that are routinely sent to pester U.S. consulates for the pleasure of satellite viewers. Part of the privilege of being American is in feeling a perverse exhilaration, not fear, when I see the mob burning my flag in the streets of Tehran or Damascus. It is the exhilaration of knowing that my flag represents everything the busily benighted are fighting against: liberty, tolerance, robust dignity. Until they can get their grimy little hands on me, they're just going to have to settle for the flag. And they couldn't possibly face a tougher adversary. The flag will hate them back; it will never stand for cynical neutrality between opposites, like the Swiss flag. But what happens when you replace pride with modesty, and still they burn your flag? When do you stop surrendering if you can't possibly comprehend the source of the grievance? At some point, Denmark, you just have to let the flag fly.

UPDATE: Do not miss Michael Kinsley's ruminations on the cartoon riots in today's Washington Post.

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The battle is joined

February 6, 2006 07:39 AM

I'm so outraged by this, I might just go draw a picture of Mohammed. Don't push me!

P.S. In the Arab World, the blood libel against Jews is endlessly repeated in the mainstream press; translations of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are bestsellers, and the latter even "inspired" (is that the right word?) a TV miniseries broadcast in Egypt and Syria; Imams compare Jews to monkeys and pigs and call for God to destroy them (the Jews, not the monkeys and pigs). And I'm supposed to be offended by a cartoon depicting a Jew with actual human emotions? Puhleez.

P.P.S. From a sociological perspective, it is interesting to see what comes out of the Islamic world when the mask slips. A Danish newspaper runs a bunch of cartoon depictions of Mohammed... must be time to attack the Jews! Someone more clever than myself is going to have to connect these dots.... Message to Europe: Stop drawing Mohammed or the Jew gets it! (...Did you hear me, Europe? Europe? Hello? Europe, are you still there?... )

P.P.P.S. This reminds me of an incident that occurred at Harvard a while back. A young woman from Virginia had hung the Confederate flag in her dormroom window. Responding to this offense, an African-American woman displayed a Nazi flag in her window. Which raised some interesting questions: 1) Where on earth did she find the Nazi flag? 2) Hitler was an especially effective... cracker? 3) How much does a Harvard eductation cost? 4) Isn't a protest supposed to suggest that its target is the idiot?

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