Has Islam become the
issue? By Spengler
Nothing shows
up the shallowness of the American neo-conservatives
better than the choice of a French Catholic, Professor
Alain Besancon, to fire a first salvo against Islam in
the May issue of their flagship journal, Commentary. His
essay, "What Kind of Religion is Islam", re-states the
millennium-old Christian case against Muslim theology,
while barely hinting at why theology has
any bearing on the civilizational conflict
now under way. Nonetheless, a Rubicon has been crossed,
for Islam itself has become the issue, rather than
terrorism, dictatorship, slavery in the Sudan or
mistreatment of women.
Until now the
conservative establishment carefully toed the White
House line, namely that "this is a war against
terrorism, not against Islam". As Washington's visions
for Iraq's future vanish like a desert mirage, the basic
premises of its policy may be re-thought. In that
respect, the fact that Besancon has surfaced among the
neo-conservatives is news indeed, although both the
regular media and the weblogs have failed to take note
of it.
Something like this was inevitable after
years in which American conservatives sought to shoehorn
the problems of the Islamic world into the box of the
Western enlightenment ("freedom" vs "tyranny"). Muslims
who abhorred the entente cordiale of evangelical
Protestants and Jewish conservatives, though, should be
entitled to a bit of Schadenfreude. Where are the great
intellectual lights among the Jews and Protestants?
Apart from complaints about the Prophet Mohammed's
marriage to a nine-year-old and suchlike, the
Evangelicals have trouble explaining why they dislike
Islam.
The secular literati who became the
Jewish neo-conservatives have a tin ear for religion.
Commentary's long-time editor, Norman Podhoretz, reduced
the mission of the Jewish prophets to a "war against
idolatry" in his recent book, observing that Islam has
even stricter rules against worshipping images than does
Judaism. In short, by Podhoretz's simple-minded
standard, Islam is a better version of his own religion
(Oil On The Flames Of
Civilizational War, Dec 1, 2003).
In
a nutshell, Islam, according to Besancon, is not one of
the three Abrahamic religions, but a pagan throwback,
not a "revealed religion" in the sense of Judaism and
Christianity, but a reversion to the "natural religion"
of the pagan world. He writes: "In Islam, God gave a law
to man by means of a unilateral pact, in an act of
sublime condescension. This law has nothing in common
with the law of Sinai, by which Israel joined in
partnership with God, or with the law of the Spirit
about which Paul speaks in the New Testament. Rather,
the law of Islam is wholly external to man, and it
precludes any notion of imitating God as is urged in the
Bible ('be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy').
There is some similarity here with pagan conceptions and
specifically with pagan ethics. Predestination, in the
Muslim understanding, is not so different from the
ancient notion of fatum."
Rosenzweig had
characterized Allah as a capricious Oriental tyrant who
can reorder the universe at his whim. Besancon takes
note of "the characteristic Islamic denial of the
stability and consistency of nature - the world is not
governed by an unchanging natural law. Atoms, physical
properties, matter itself: these endure only for an
instant, being created anew at every moment by God - it
is no wonder that to many Westerners the Muslim cosmos
has seemed a borderland between dream and reality."
This, argues Besancon, makes Muslim faith an entirely
different entity than that of Jews or Christians: "In
Islam - the will of God extends, as it were, to the
secondary causes as well as to the primary ones,
suffusing all of life. Religious and moral obligation
can thus take on an intensity and an all-encompassing
sweep that, at least in Christian terms, would be
regarded as trespassing any reasonable limit - outsiders
may well be struck by the religious zeal of the Muslim
world towards a God whom they recognize as being also
their God. But this God is in fact separate and
distinct, and so is the relation between Him and the
believing Muslim. Christians are accustomed to
distinguish the worship of false gods - that is,
idolatry - from the worship of the true God. To treat
Islam suitably, it becomes necessary to forge a new
concept altogether, and one that is difficult to grasp -
namely, an idolatry of the God of Israel."
Muslims, Besancon concludes, misappropriate the
identity of the God of Israel, put an entirely different
God in His place, and worship it as if it were an idol.
That is worlds apart from Norman Podhoretz's naive
conclusion that Islam, in consequence of its prohibition
against images, opposes idolatry even more fiercely than
Judaism. Now that the neo-conservatives have taken
instruction in matters of theology, what policy
consequences might ensue? Will they continue to counsel
President George W Bush that democracy can be whipped up
Iraqi-style like a round of instant falafel? If the
remote, arbitrary, crypto-pagan god of Islam bears no
imitation, as Besancon puts it, what political
conclusions should one draw? The Straussians would
answer with Immanuel Kant that a constitution could be
devised for a race of devils if only they were sensible.
If we believe Besancon, Islam is neither devilish nor
sensible, and the old moral calculus of the Western
Enlightenment simply is irrelevant to the Muslim world.
Perhaps the last spark of Catholic combativeness against
Islam will fall on dry tinder among American Protestants
and Jews. No man is a prophet in his own country.
Besancon drew the ire of the Church in October 1999,
when he told a synod of bishops in Rome that Catholics
should stop using "faulty expressions such as 'the three
revealed religions', 'the three religions of Abraham'
and 'the three religions of the Book' to refer to Islam,
Christianity and Judaism. The National Catholic Reporter
commented October 22, 1999, 'This last point was viewed
by some as an especially remarkable statement, given
that the pope himself has used the language of
Christians and Muslims as brothers in Abraham at least
five times - in a homily in Ankara, Turkey, in 1979; in
a radio address to the peoples of Asia in 1981; in an
address to Muslim workers in Mainz, Germany in 1980; in
an address to a Rome colloquium in 1985; and in a homily
in Gambia in 1992'."
Tragedies are tragedies
precisely because the protagonist has no choice but to
walk into a trap that he cannot possibly anticipate. We
now are in the second act of the great tragedy of the
21st century, in which the terrible secrets hidden from
the actors gradually are revealed to them. Buy another
packet of crisps and stay in your seat: this is where it
gets interesting.
Numerous Asia Times Online
readers have raised pertinent issues regarding my
contrast of Islam on one hand and on the other Judaism
and Christianity in Why Islam Baffles
America (Apr 15, 2004) and Horror and Humiliation in
Fallujah (Apr 26, 2004). Rabbi Moshe Reiss
observes that while Judaism and Christianity are closer
theologically, Islam and Judaism are more similar in
ritual. He is quite right, but the experience of the
Islamic and Jewish beliefs still may be quite different.
Few Muslim prayer books exist, because the
five-times-daily prayer consists of relatively few
repeated lines which easily may be committed to memory.
Much of the prayer service consists of stylized physical
movements, which during my attendance at Muslim services
reminded me of a close-order drill. The few Muslim
prayer books available at booksellers on the Internet
run to 30 or 40 pages. Hundreds of Jewish prayer books
are sold on the Internet, and they typically run to
between 500 and 1,000 pages. I reiterate the mainstream
Jewish and mainstream Muslim prayer (leaving out fringe
elements such as the Sufis) are an entirely different
thing, and will address readers' questions in more
detail in the near future.
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