MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


Careful and smart scholars, almost as a rule, avoid being condescending to people who outclass them intellectually. It's just dangerous. You can think that you're walking into a debate where the other scholar has missed a really obvious objection, but in fact what's happened is that the scholar has (a) already accounted for your objection and (b) has presented a subtle distinction or solution that you just didn't know about or understand. This is a mistake that undergraduate and young graduate students make all the time - there is not a philosophy class on the planet that doesn't have some kid who thinks that some very, very sophisticated thinker has missed something obvious that collapses their whole system. Post-adolescent male Objectivists are notorious for doing this crap in undergraduate philosophy classes. In graduate humanities seminars, you hear it from shrill feminists or insufferable deconstructionists. At economics conferences, it's pretty much anybody from Chicago.

Most people either leave the academy or learn to be very circumspect in approaching new arguments and nuanced scholars. We tell our students that if they think that some very powerful thinker has 'just missed something' or is 'just wrong', then what's actually happened is that the student has not understood some move or distinction. There is no doubt about this - it is an ironclad rule. While scholars do sometimes miss simple things, the debates and positions that we're talking about are hundreds and thousands of years old. The student who assumes that he's noticed what every other person has missed ends up being wrong (and, yes, it's almost always a he). The student who is arrogant or flippant his ostensible discovery ends up not just wrong but chagrined. And thus does University life tend to instill caution in good scholars.

Almost paradoxically, however, this entire process of developing caution requires that you're already dealing with scholars of a certain intelligence. You can't convince someone that they've missed a critical distinction unless they're able, once that distinction is pointed to them, to understand why missing it the first time around mattered. But sometimes students just can't wrap their minds around distinctions - and so instead of appropriate chagrin what you get are students who literally can't see why they're wrong - and therefore fail to experience the chagrin appropriate to someone who has been publicly exposed as not just self-important and not just wrong, but self-important because of precisely what they're wrong about. And so they go through academic life, supremely confident in their ability to contribute incisively to any conversation - only because they've never really developed the sensibility that allows them to kind of feel out the outlines of what they don't know, and why that's significant.

Enter Juan Cole. Not only is Prof. Cole seemingly convinced that his contributions range exclusively from the significant to the staggering (cf. people who think that everyone else has missed what they had as a brilliant first impression) - but he faces the additional handicap of being liberal and pretentious. Two parts: liberal (making him think that spouting off irrelevant details in the interest of terrorist apologizing makes him intellectually superior) and pretentious (making him think that his sophisticated insights are also of nontrivial moral worth). When the discussion turns to academic trivialities intertwined with ethical lecturing - as when he denied any imputation of fanaticism to the anti-Pope rioters and church-burners, arguing instead that postcolonialism made them do it - the smugness can become literally suffocating.

It's not perfect and you'll miss out on some nuances (the way that the liberal community reinforces the sense of specifically moral superiority underneath the bad arguments), but you can get almost the entire sense of what we're talking about if you imagine a 15 year old who's been both spoiled and doted on: not only does he reserve for himself the privilege of acting inappropriately because he thinks that whatever's going on in his mind is the most crucially important thing ever, but more often than not we're talking about parents and teachers who have made extensive efforts to convince the child of his intellectual acumen because objective reality wouldn't.

What does all this have to do with the Pope? Easy. From the Friday night New York Times editorial that suggested that the Pope needs to reexamine his priorities on 'Catholic identity' because it was hurting interfaith dialogue to the BBC idiot who insinuated that the Pope was naive because his life in the Vatican has been too sheltered to every pissant staff writer in the middle of rural Blue State America - everyone seems to think that they know more about Islam than Pope Benedict. Before we really start to insult Cole (that up there was just groundwork), let's examine the claim that he's naive in respect to Islam:


We've already commented extensively on the irony of imbecile journalists suggesting in one breath that Pope Benedict doesn't understand Islam and in the next breath suggesting something staggeringly stupid like "it's anger at poverty / the US / Israel / etc". Or stating aloud - as almost every story did - that it was uncertain whether the Pope's apology would stem the anger (yeah, real uncertain - you have to listen to what jihadist leaders are saying to figure it out - the mystery is almost overwhelming in its incomprehensibility). The spectacle of the apologist press suggesting that conservatives like Daniel Pipes or Robert Spencer don't understand Islam has reached "Muslims are killing people to object to being called violent" levels of irony.

We specifically want to kill this "the Pope doesn't know anything about Islam" meme that Juan Cole kicked off his 'analysis' with:

Note the conceit of simply assuming that one of the greatest theologians of the last 50 years got something "wrong, just as a matter of fact". Note the self-important tone of the short, punchy, journalistic style. And broken at the end with parenthesis - of course - because what's inside kind is something that anyone 'with training' should know, but just in case you don't he'll kind of offhandedly jot it down in a little Arabic-to-English show of erudition on Medina's pre-who-gives-a-flying-xxx name). And really, the quotes marks are priceless - even if they're not technically scare quotes, they still have just that little bit of condescension. And then the subtle insult-but-not of repeating the Pope's assertion but calling it a product of his imagination, plus the simplistic restatement at the end of the enthymeme that he assumes we were too stupid to catch. This is the kind of writing that you only get see if you're lucky enough - and we are - to work at a place where the dissident campus newspaper regularly frontpages 'news reports' written by unwashed socialists who, while high/awake, alternate between giggling nervously at their own courage and talking about how they just have to take a stand and attack Bush in every article, but they have to be subtle. Because of censorship. No other way to explain this - if you know, you know. And anyway, we're getting beyond the scope of this post. Relevant running summary: Juan Cole is a total douchebag.

To be honest, we weren't going to include this forced conversion issue in the Benedict series because it's basically just a different flavor of the way that he drops irrelevant details to build his ethos - a habit of his that not a little bit of MR's bandwidth has been spent describing.

But then Chris Hitchens - in his soon-to-be-exposed-as-a-hoax-(or-forgery) Slate article - looks like he may have cribbed the argument from Cole. As if that's not enough evidence that Hitch didn't write that article himself:

Obviously, this has to stop. Juan Cole can lie to his liberal DKos groupies all he wants, but people listen to Christopher Hitchens. He matters. He actually matters quite a bit. And so when Hitch suggests that the Pope was just being stupid - because his Holiness choose to say something wrong about Islamic forced conversions (that the ban on them was a result of Mohammed being powerless) instead of just quoting later violent passages - there's a real risk that people might begin to get the impression that Benedict XVI is out of his depth. And that would be unfortunate because, of course, Cole is a pretentious mediocrity and Hitchens is very confused right now. At issue here is Koran 2:256, and here's how it enters the Pope's speech:

At issue here is what caused Mohammad to go from "no compulsion in religion" early in his campaign (specifically sura 2:256) to 'pagans must convert or be executed' and/or "struggle against the unbelievers and hypocrites and be harsh with them" (suras 9:5, 9:73; 9:5 is also one of the sources for the "People of the Book"/infidels distinction that Benedict alludes to). The Pope suggests that Mohammed consistently and increasingly lost his live and let live attitude as soon as his military power increased.
Cole is of course condescending on this issue, observing (now watch the language closely) that Mohammed already "was in power" as the "leader" of Medina. That's quite true, as far as it goes. But the distinction here is between being militarily powerful (powerful in the 'can pull off forced conversions' kind of powerful) and being 'in power' (as in leading a city). Here's where Cole cheats a little bit - yes, Mohammed was in power in Medina. But he was not powerful. He was in Medina because he had to flee from Mecca or be assassinated, so he joined Muslims in Medina. Eventually he rose politically and became leader of the city - but in the meantime, most of his efforts to get Medina's Jews to recognize him as a prophet were failing. So he's running this city, and he's got these Jews - but he's not strong enough to totally dominate them. So what does he do? He compromises and says that the Jews of 7th century Medina get to follow their own religion - no compulsion in religion etc etc. But that's the Pope's whole point: that this was a tactical, not a theological, concession. So in a surprise to absolutely no one, Cole has made something that sounds like an answer by referencing something that is technically true (that Mohammed "was in power") but totally irrelevent to the Pope's point - which is that when he actually got power as in became powerful, things changed. And you can feel quite confident that that's true, since Rudi Paret, one of the greatest Koran scholars of the 20th century, says it's true:

Maybe - at worst - the Pope should not have described the Mohammed of 2:256 as "powerless." But the fundamental point is still obvious and being avoided: Mohammed's ban on forced conversions seems to have experienced into a precarious decline more or less in inverse proportion to the strength of his Muslim hordes. And listen, we certainly make no pretensions to being able to debate out the intricacies of Koranic interpretation. Anyone who's genuine and knows even a little could wipe the table with us - let alone someone like Cole who would make factually true statements that seem relevant but collapse when you actually check if they're relevant in the way that he pretends they're relevant. So if you're one of the people that we know - we know - is about to pen us an email saying that we're ignorant kafirs who don't know that there was already the beginnings of a military formed and that later there was a military defeat but Mohammed didn't take back forced conversions or some such nonsense, save it - it's not that specifics don't matter or that we're not open to disproof. It's that you're answering a claim isn't at issue. What's at issue is the general tone of religious movements, especially religious movements that believe in the absolute authority of Scripture - and whether those movements seem to find ways not so much to "interpret" (because we know that there's no interpretation going on - it's just the manifest word of Allah)... not so much to interpret as to discover new passages justifying exploitation of the power that a deity from beyond has seen fit to grant them. This, incidentally, is another reason why Cole's darling pretensions toward 'debunking the Pope' are evidence of either a dishonest or weak mind - the net amount of power that Mohammed had when the suras banning or mandated coerced conversions isn't at issue. The relative amount of power across those periods is obviously the issue.

Hitch has obvious overreached by describing Mohammed's time in Medina as one of "relatively high confidence" - again, there's no way we'll stake personal credibility or be at all defensive about these issues, but certainly we can imagine arguments as to why Mohammed's confidence was relatively low when he was holed up in Medina compared to when he had successfully conquered Arabia. But that's beside the point. Come home Hitch... please?

As for Cole - this is argumentative dishonesty masquerading as argumentative arrogance (or is it the other way around). We don't know if he's right or wrong - but we do know that there's no way that he's as right as he either thinks he is or that sounds like. For him to be mocking the leader of world Catholicism - not just mocking, but belittling - there had better be absolutely, positively, demonstrably no debate about what Cole is claiming. And we know that there's debate about his views of Islam, because he's committed to the claim that 'jihad' is peaceful and Islam forbids forced conversions - and we know of not a few prominent Muslims scholars who disagree with him on both those counts.

Previous: They Called Europe 'Christendom' For a Reason --- The Imbecility of Interfaith Dialogue --- Juan Cole As a Study In Pro-Jihadist Faux Liberal Sophistication --- Confused? We'll Translate: He Believes in God --- So Catholic That He Actually Thinks Catholicism Is True --- On How to Really Believe (Without Blowing Things Up)