Last Monday we got to participate in the OneJerusalem.org blogger conference interview with Robert Spencer, of
knowing everything about everything fame. Spencer has a new book out titled
The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion, and you're obviously not going to wait for paperback to purchase it. Also on the call: Allen Roth (
One Jerusalem), Pamela (
Atlas Shrugs), Lynn (
In Context), Richard Baehr (
American Thinker), Jerry Gordon
(Israpundit), Avi Green (
Tel-Chai Nation), Kim Priestap (
Wizbang, Jim Hoft (
Gateway Pundit), and Oceanguy (
Somewhere on the A1A). OneJerusalem's
audio recording is on the top of their frontpage.
If there is a relatively unique strain running through Spencer's work, it is his insistence that one of the dimensions of the war against political Islam must be argumentative - or, at the very least, that the argumentative coherence of militant Islam accounts for part of its attraction to so many Muslims. It's not just that advocates and adherents of a global caliphate are driven by a very real political agenda - it's that this is a political agenda that arises from the most rigorous readings of the Koran. And so to throw our weight behind advocates of moderate Islam, it's not enough to point out that more militant definitions are undesirable. Obviously, a different vision of Islam will have to be fashioned - and Spencer's point is this will have to be a vision of Islam that, in the most basic senses, makes sense. It has to be a vision of Islam that seems Islamic, otherwise it will by definition not appeal to Muslims.
This ought to be a trivial point - to convince someone to believe something, that something has to make sense. But that obviousness has been suffocated by multiculturalist postmodern irony. Instead, we have beliefs (even religious beliefs) being treated as fashions that can be donned or not as convenient. And so on one side of the coin we have vast tracts of the media landscape, including
the Paper of Record, asking why the Pope can't tone down his calls for "Catholic identity" because it hurts interfaith dialogue. One the other side, we have a startling inability to recognize that political Islamists actually have reasons for believing what they believe - and that those reasons, not coincidentally, have to do with Islamic holy books. They don't believe what they believe because they think it's good - they think it because they think it's true.
Is there anything more absurd than hearing sophisticates who literally have never picked up the Koran commenting that militant Islam is a "perversion" of the "Religion of Peace"? It's not that we can demonstrate why they're necessarily wrong (although Robert Spencer can, and
regularly does). It's just that - how would they know? How can they be so conceited to assume that their hope for what the Koran says must be what it says? The answer involves how community-reinforced arrogance in faux sophistication supports a myopia driven in no small part by near-hysterical decadence, and takes us far beyond the scope of this post.
The real problem with declarations that Islam "is a Religion of Peace" is not that it declares as a fact something that tens of thousands of Muslim scholars, thousands of suicide bombers, and 19 male Arab pilots vehemently disagree with. The real problem is that it fundamentally misunderstands what a religious is and how it works. Religions are on one hand clusters of beliefs just like any other clusters. But they are beliefs of a particular kind: beliefs in revealed dogma. What they "are" is what believers think their holy books say they "are".
This, then, clarifies the genuine question that has to be asked before any solution can be reasonably proposed: what is the potential for Islamic Holy Books to serve as resources for moderation? It's important to frame this question as one of degree, rather than as one of absolutes. The question must not be "is Islam a Religion of Peace": religions don't work that way. The question needs to be: "how much is there in the Koran and the hadith for people who want to craft moderate visions of Islam, and how much is there for their opponents". And then there's an even further modification that has to be made to account for different ways of interpreting, not just different interpretations: how much is there in the Koran and the hadith for people who want to justify ways of reading the Koran and the hadith that suggest moderate visions of Islam? That's why the Pope's speech is so important - it seems historically uncontroversial and analytically inescapable that literalist readings of pre-modern texts will tend to be more anti-modern than evolving readings.
The point remains the same: as a matter of politics, the important questions are not the simplistic ones ("if we sat down for an infinite amount of time, what would our conclusions be", "if we could create an ideal interpretation that would be peaceful, how would we do it and what would we leave out") but "what can you persuade people is reasonable for a given amount of time". So the question is not "can Muslim dogma be understood peacefully" but rather "how good are the arguments for understanding Muslim dogma peacefully as opposed to other alternatives". It's an argumentative question as much as an ethical one. If you're stacking up all the passages that call on Muslims to be peaceful and all the passages that call on Muslims to forcibly spread Islam, which side wins? And even more importantly, are their tie-breakers that suggest one side over another (i.e. Spencer's extensive citations on his blog of passages that suggest that the later, violent Medina revelations abrogate the earlier, peaceful Mecca revelations).
Now there are two mistakes that apologists make - mistakes that can only be made if they get away with framing the question as "what is Islam" instead of "what is an interpretation of Islam that is compelling". Unsurprisingly, both are made by Juan Cole in various places on his blog (you know, we wouldn't pick on him so much if he wasn't such an ideal case of faux sophistication and shallow erudition in the cause of terrorist apologism). The first mistake is to insist that you've described what Islam "is" just because you have
your own interpretation of Islam that almost nobody else agrees with. If it's just your own interpretation that you can justify to yourself but to few other people, then you don't get credit for "describing" or "teaching about" or "explaining" Islam.
So yes, "jihad" might be understood be exclusively an inner struggle of overcoming, just as interchangeable faces on CNN insist on continually preaching to us. But how good is that argument when held against the rest of the Koran? How well does it stand up to other interpretations of jihad as a political and military struggle, interpretations that are being proclaimed explicitly and with seemingly abundant Koranic backing in weekly sermons? It would seem - just a very quick and crude litmus test - that if we want to evaluate from the outside what the Koran probably lends itself to justifying, we should default to the people who are recognized experts on the Koran. That would be Islamic clerics rather than, say, academic or journalistic apologists. And the results of that crude litmus test - that the Koran and the hadith, in the final analysis, support violent struggle - are confirmed by extensive studies such as Spencer's.
The second mistake is to insist that you've described what Islam "is" just because you've pointed to
historically marginalized interpretations of Islam that were never accepted by the majority of Muslims. If they weren't persuasive interpretations, then you don't get credit for "describing" or "teaching about" or "explaining" Islam.
Cole claimed that there have historically been interpretations of Islam that argued for a non-transcendent conception of God. Well OK, fair enough - but how tenable were those interpretations? Did they stick? If not, why not? If an argument fails to capture any large group of people for any significant amount of time - despite being given a thousand and a half years - it's probably not a very good argument. Compare this situation to Catholicism, which has gone through periods where each of the three fundamental categories of philosophy - idealism (Augustine), realism (Aquinas), and nominalism (the Scholastics) - held sway. That's not because Catholicism is any of those things in any inherent way. It's because Catholicism's foundational texts are diverse enough to have allowed advocates of each, for a time, to rule the roost.
So it's not about what any particular person can imagine Islam might be. It's also not about what small groups of people for small periods of history imagined Islam to be. It's about what seems like a reasonable interpretation of Islam for large groups of people across large amounts of time - which is, after all, the ultimate test of the persuasiveness of an argument. That's why, in Spencer's words, Muhammad matters. Religious Muslims believe that the Koran is a literal transcription of Muhammad's life and that Muhammad's life is the supreme example to be followed. So if you want to win them to moderation, you have to be able to paint a compelling picture of Muhammad himself an advocate of peace. It's not enough to cherry-pick passages that could lead to a desirable conclusion if you squint real hard and tilt your head just the right angle. There has to be a way to line up the arguments for moderate Islam next to arguments for radical Islam - and the debate has to end up being at least close.
This framework also helps to explain why moral equivalizing anti-Christian or anti-Jewish scholars are so misguided. Critics point out that Muhammad advocated violence, and apologists respond that there are passages in the Gospel when Jesus also advocated violence. Well OK, fair enough - but how tenable is that as an interpretation of the ultimate message of Jesus? When lined up against the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus's parables, how well does that interpretation hold up? And of course, we know the answer to that question - a violent interpretation of Catholicism turns out, under examination, to be a rather untenable one. Which is exactly and precisely and naturally why the religion that sponsored for the Crusades ended up, a thousand years later, endorsing Vatican II. Inversely, how does the debate on Muhammed's advocacies of violence play out when the preponderance of evidence is weighed? How plentiful, binding, and definitive are passages that inveigh against violent retribution?
Critics point out that Muhammad advocated military expansion, and apologists respond that there are passages in the Hebrew Scriptures when Israelites committed massacres with the sanction of God. Well OK, fair enough - but how tenable is that as an interpretation of the ultimate message of Judaism? When lined up against the messages of the prophets, how well does that interpretation hold up? And of course, we know the answer to that question - the Talmud is a static witness to how debates about Jewish scripture play out, and the result is a view of religion where even the death penalty should be eschewed. Inversely, how does the debate on Muhammed's exhortations to spread Islam by the sword play out when the preponderance of evidence is weighted? How plentiful, binding, and definitive are passages that inveigh against violent expansion?
This is an easy question that someone immersed in the Islam is a Religion of Peace catechism ought to be able to answer: has there been any time in history when a robust theological justification for moderate Islam has ever taken hold? Spencer claimed that there hasn't been - that when people talk about the moderate Islamic states of the 1970s and 1980s, what they're actually talking about is a pluralistic, unspoken agreement to ignore the theological consequences of the Koran. His explanation has the benefit of being able to explain why those societies were overrun so quickly by clerics who showed up and said "actually, if you open the book, it says the opposite". Islam has been around for a millennium and a half, so presumably most of the interpretations of the Koran have been trotted out and tested at one time or another. Has a sizable majority of Muslims have ever been persuaded that their is a robust social vision in the Koran that's peaceful? If not, that doesn't necessarily end the debate about what resources for moderation are in the Koran and the hadith, specifically relating to Muhammad - but it is overwhelmingly suggestive that those resources are scant.
