Remora

For Christmas in 1914, the Kaiser sent every German soldier on the Western front a box with 10 cigars. Facing them, the Tommies were being flooded with Christmas parcels containing plum cake -- apparently parents and wives at home were properly alarmed at what their boys would be eating over there in France -- all those sauces, you know. The soldiers on both sides declared an informal ceasefire, and traded cigars for plum cake, and sampled each others beers. On January 1, the Germans initiated a barrage, but the Tommies soon noticed they were firing in the air. The British replied, shooting high in the air. A good enough time was had by all. The high commands on both sides were furious, and sent strict orders down to the lower level officers that any fraternizing with the enemy in the future would be severely punished.

Four months later, in April, the Germans tried to break through the front at Ypres using a new weapon. Cannisters were exploded in a salient in front of an Indian-Pakistani battalian. A yellow cloud appeared, and was moved forward gently by the wind. It killed trees, birds, rats, and people. The gas was chlorine. The troops arrayed before it had no knowledge of gas, and no protection from it. Chlorine, breathed in, will either choke you to death immediately or have these effects: you spit up masses of bloody mucuous, your lungs expand to almost twice their normal size, they fill with water, you die. If in 1914, it seemed natural that the troops would fraternize at Christmas, the appearance of the gas -- which was used, by the end of the year, by the British - signalled that this was, indeed, another kind of war altogether. The old 19th century codes were gone.

I'm thinking about this because of an article in the WP Style section Sunday by
Joel Garreau.

Here's the intro grafs:

"Hinges in history -- 1914, 1929, 1945, 1963, 1981, and maybe the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

These are pivots on which our lives move from one world to another.

After we swing past them, it's hard to remember what the previous world felt like, or what sense it made. (Why did '50s fraternity boys compete to see how many people they could stuff into a telephone booth? What was a telephone booth?)"

I am not sure 9/11 is in that company, but as it becomes obvious that the US is still vulnerable to a terrorist strike - that indeed, we can expect it, if the letter writing anthrax campaign isn't part of it - perhaps something has turned.

There's a lot of criticism of the way the Left has protested this war. Marc Cooper has an article in the LA Times which lays out the problem -- although I don't know what to make of Cooper's mild flag fixation. It isn't the alienation from American symbols that characterizes the Left's wierdness right now -- it is the alienation from reality. Reality is that we might have to look seriously at how we do the future - we might have to leap out of the practico-inert, to use Sartre's wonderful term -- and the left should have some idea of what that means.

Here is what I would like to see as a kind of left-sympathetic guy.

I would like to see some more serious response to the various policy disasters in the Middle East than the "why do they hate us" mantra. Which means making difficult decisions. If it is true that the US sanctions against Iraq and the bombing are immoral, it is also true that the regime of Saddam Hussein is a horror, perpetrated against a people who have never had a chance to decide their fate for themselves. They are locked in a prisonhouse created at the end of WWI and called Iraq. By quitting the bombing, we would accomplish one thing. We would stop pursuing an immoral and also an irrational policy. But what then? Simply leave SH free to continue killing and torturing on the usual scale?

The 'solution' to this, I feel instinctively, is democracy. US foreign policy, famously, is split between a realistic and a Wilsonian, or idealistic, school. The problem isn't really that the idealists are wrong -- it is that they continually underestimate the difficulty of pursuading the American public to follow through on the type of committments that would underwrite idealism, beginning with the failure to join the League of Nations and going all the way up to the ridiculous control Jesse Helms exerted over foreign policy in the Clinton years.

An idealist would have to say -- it is impossible to pursue foreign policy in a properly democratic way without building support for it domestically. Unfortunately, even when the US has promoted democracy, it has done so inconsistently, with wide leaway left for America's material interests. Jimmy Carter would lecture Argentine generals about human rights, but not Saudi sheiks. And when it got down to promoting democracy, the end result has been mere voting. Voting is the last part of democracy -- without separation of powers, without guarantees of rights, there is no democracy, period, whether the state's leadership has been elected or appointed itself over the barrel of a gun.
But given that stronger notion of democracy, can the left really credibly promote democracy? Only if it is willing to say that democracy might not be good, in the short run, for the West -- I imagine real democracy in Saudi Arabia and Egypt would be plenty bad for the Western oil interests, and let's face it, that is our interest. Our standard of living depends materially on the availability and cheapness of oil.

Which gets us to the second serious contribution the left can bring to the table (while tucking in its napkin and asking for a little more wine, garcon): power is a political issue. The refusal to recognize or go with the Kyoto accords isn't just a disaster for the environment, but it is a lost political opportunity. The Federal government underwrote our oil economy - from a foreign policy that was calibrated to keeping the price of a barrel of oil as low as it could go in the fifties and sixties to the socialization of the road system. The left has to make the case for the Federal government underwriting a new power economy -- that means everything from fuel cells which use natural gas to solar and wind power to conservation. This is the most powerful part of a lefty program, and it has been oddly muted since 9/11.
It shouldn't be.

The connection is pretty clear between the alienation of bin Laden's supporters, both active and passive, and the failing government in Saudi Arabia, which is authoritarian, corrupt, and unintelligent. America is so fixated on the Palestine-Israel drama that it doesn't even see what is evident in the Middle East -- that America's other great ally, Saudi Arabia, has squandered its wealth and inscribed itself in the global economic system to the extent that its oil simply doesn't count anymore. It can't afford gestures like the 1973 oil boycott. It can't afford the infrastructure it so stupidly built. It shouldn't have built it anyway. And who profited from it but American weapons manufacturers, American construction companies, and etc. When you think about the importance of SA to the Arabic world, this is the elephant in the room.

So - there are things the left, or at least a lefty leaning guy like me, can suggest about the future.

Remora
Renata Adler and Joan Didion - can I name four things I like about them? I like the way in which these two women stay resolutely out of the loop. I like the unblinking gaze they cast upon the loop. I like the way dates are important to them, documents are important to them, rhetorical impasses are important to them. The way they proceed by looking, rather than feeling. A hard thing to do, because it can addict you to the disconnect, to an automatic blankness of response, as if blankness were somehow more objective. However, in a political culture that has debased outrage and routinized indignation (indignation is the default mode on MSNBC, the cheap standard, news talk shows look more and more like bad marriages, we watch a man bellow and wonder how high his voice can get, how much face he can put in another person's face, and we know, hey, this is an act), we go to the slow take for the sake of, well, beauty. A balance, a classicicm. So it is nice that Renata Adler is interviewed extensively here -- even if, to appreciate the interview, you have to have an sense of the stakes, which are admittedly pretty rarified stakes (I'll have mine well done, please). Briefly, the New York Times has made it its business, over the past year, to cut Adler down. The beef if that Adler won't get with the program about Watergate. She insists that John Sirica, far from being a Watergate hero, was a rather stupid man with a shady past. Now, sometimes I disagree with Adler violently. I think her defense of Westmoreland, who sued 60 minutes, was wrongheaded. But she is a fascinating writer. There are writers who dig carefully, have an archeologist's concern for levels, damage, evidence. You don't get sloppy with your artifacts, you are intensely concerned with where and when they appear, you are intensely concerned with context.

Joan Didion is a greater writer, which makes it all the more unfortunate that she was interviewed by one Tom Christie for the LA Weekly. This indigestible melange is how he segues into the interview.


"THERE'S SOMETHING UNSETTLING ABOUT JOAN DIDION. Perhaps it's the body of work, and the fact that she's one of few living writers whose name can be shaped unapologetically into an adjective: Didionesque. Or perhaps it's the clean, calm, almost soporific style with which she eviscerates the likes of Bob Woodward and Michael Isikoff and Cokie Roberts in her new book, Political Fictions (Knopf), a collection of eight lengthy essays on the American political process."

A calm, almost soporfic style, that also slices and dices? She writes like a sleepy surgeon, or is it a drugged Ronco announcer? Or perhaps a fishmonger with insomnia? This is writing that throws out the words and lets the sense come creeping after it. The encounter between this cerebrally dormant style and Didion is like the encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an ironing board, as Lautreamont once said. Or maybe it isn't -- what the heck, just ink it in. The motto, I guess, of the LA Weekly.

In other news -- Alan has gotten a fan letter for his rebuttal of my Friday post -- but hey, I got a fan letter too. So score is one to one.

Remora
A little late to announce this -- but Jacques Derrida, to whom we at Limited Inc are constantly alluding (unless we take our regular meds packet), won the Theodor Adorno prize, worth around 100,000 bucks. Yes, I'd never heard of it either. Seems that Godard and Boulez are past winners. Der Spiegel has a nice photo of Jacques looking tough to go with the story.

Oh, and Jurgen Habermas won a peace prize in Germany. He took the occasion to call for (what else? ) dialogue with Islam.

Dope.
Yesterday Alan wrote an extensive reply to my Friday post. You'll remember, that Post was a harsh appraisal of an article in Salon. Here's my reply to Alan, who I must thank for livening up my site this weekend.

Alan,
I'll concede your point about Buddhism, because you know what you are talking about, and I don't. I will admit that, childishly, I wrote those jibes against Buddhism partly to rouse you to write something. Sorry -- but it worked.

There's three more serious points you make, and that I'd like to take up.

Fundamentalism.

Connerney's point about fundamentalism is, I think, folded into a larger argument which claims that fundamentalist Islam, although only one part of Islam, correctly gives weight to an Islamic principle - jihad. And given that principle, Connerney can compare Islam in general with Judaism and Christianity in general. The argument is a little assymetrical, because Connerney doesn't make the same point about fundamentalist Christianity -- that is, he doesn't make the point that fundamentalist Christianity gets some part of Christianity right. He gets sidetracked into a sociological comparison between fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. As I said in my previous post, I think he's simply wrong, here. But there is something depressing and dumb about simply tallying up the atrocities on both sides -- fundamentalist Islam generates apartheid against women, fundamentalist Christianity generates apartheid against blacks in South Africa, and so on. Your point is well taken that fundamentalism can "only be formulated after fully historical approaches to religious scripture have been developed -- source criticism and form criticism and that sort of thing." But in terms of the larger argument Connerney is mounting, I'm not sure if this isn't a red herring. I'll concede that the Croatian priesthood that blessed the execution of the Serbs might very well have been well versed in source criticism, but what I am after, and what I think Connerney's article is after, is how the religion institutionalizes behaviors. In other words, is there any common thread that runs through fundamentalist Christianity, Catholicism, and other forms of Protestantism so that I can say that my little list of atrocities is consistently motivated?

Texts
But first, let's consider what you say about the Qu'ran and the Bible. Your suggestion that " when an utterance is made in the second person [as it is in the Qu'ran] directed to a nonspecific You, when the content of that utterance makes it possible to take the utterance to be of universal applicability, (applicable to all people in all places and at all times, or at all times subsequent to the time of the utterance), that is a natural way to interpret the utterance. And so those utterances have been interpreted in the Islamic tradition." That sounds right to me. But the upshot, surely, should be that that the Qu'ran limits the variety of Islams, not that it eliminates them. Sufis and Dervishes make out of those imperatives a mystical sense -- orthodox Sunni Muslims make something else.
And you are right about the Bible -- it is a madman's attic.
However, I think you are wrong to diss my quotes from the bloodier chapters of the Old Testament. If one Christian reads the Bible and resolves to love his neighbor as himself, and another resolves not to suffer a witch to live, I wouldn't say the latter doesn't understand the Bible -- I would say he doesn't understand what parts of the Bible we don't take seriously in 2001. And that shift isn't in the Bible, but outside of it, in the world. In other words, I think you overestimate the power of texts in these religions, and underestimate the power of the organized body of interpreters. Perhaps I think this because I don't have a stake in thinking that the Bible (or the Qu'ran) is true in any spiritual sense. Still, what's important to me is your larger point, about the centrality of war or struggle in Islam. This gets us to our most important point.

The Fatal Comparison
When Berlusconi announced that Western Civilization was superior to Eastern, he was opening the floodgates. The superiority of the West used to be relatively undisputed in the West, but since the end of the colonial era, the creed has been rather battered. Only Samuel Huntington and a few sour Straussians bothered to man the ramparts any more. The triumphalist conviction has come galumphing back in the wake of September 11th. Connerney's article is definitely in that vein. Now I think you, Alan, think that I was sort of harsh to Connerney - vitriolic, unfair, and wrongheaded. But I still contend the guy is either ignorant of sophistical when he compares Christianity and Islam. This isn't because I am particularly prejudiced against Christianity. I make no bones about being an atheist, but I can see the attraction of religion, and I understand people who take Jesus as their savior. I come from those people. Nor do I think Islam should be understood on some sliding scale - the usual relativist, multi-culty mumbo-jumbo. No, my problem is that Connerney can't mount a fair comparison when the comparison is obvious. It is between the centrality of jihad and the centrality of conversion.

I said that I wanted to find a thread connecting the various forms of Christianity. Christianity never presented itself as a philosophy, of which one can be persuaded. It presented itself as a means of salvation, to which one can be converted. To ignore conversion, as Connerney does, is to bowdlerize Christianity - to make it historically inexplicable.

You present a hypothetical: Imagine a Christian being handed a Bible asked, "OK, where's the meat? If I've only got time to read a small part of this thing to get the most important ideas, what should I read?" Now, your own reply to your hypothetical shows that you and I went to different churches when we were kids. Because I went to a Southern Baptist church, and I can answer that question even now, from memory: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only beloved son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life." To say that as we used to in Sunday school, put hyphens between the words, and say it like you are running downstairs. Your own response to your hypothetical is nice, it emphasizes the ethical and aesthetic sides of Christianity, but historically, all of that was secondary. If belief in Jesus is so important that non-belief can be punished by eternal flames, than recommendations that you be nice to your local Samaritan sort of go by the by. In fact, this is where a conversion based religion with a salvationist creed is truly insidious -- it posits a judgment of people outside of ethics, based on what their 'heart' -- that organ so favored by our current Prez - contains. It is this that explains the ability of an organized religion that is based on belief in a God who tells us to love one another to calmly organize auto de fes, harbor a rancid, and intermittently deadly, prejudice against Jews, and to commit numberless atrocities (of which I could make a Homeric catalogue, but won't) against its own set of unbelievers. Connerney might feel there are ameliorating circumstances, but the terminuses of his comparison are obvious. Not filling in the Christian end -- ignoring conversion - is cheating. He confesses, after all, to teaching religious studies, so he should have some familiarity with the subject. That he skews the article the way he does makes me pity with tears in my eyes - well, okay, not that much -- the poor kids of Iona.

And one last note about Judaism. There isn't a conversion function that I know of in Judaism, which distinguishes it in a major way from the two other religions. Furthermore, Judaism, for about 1900 years, had to survive in a hostile environment, in which it was always on the verge of persecution. Therefore, as an organized body, it has built in limits to the damage it can do. Spinoza might be expelled from the synagogue, but they weren't going to go after Descartes with torches.

There it is.
Roger

Today we have some comments on my post Friday by Alan. There's a NYT article by Robert Worth
The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror which I'd also like to juxtapose to Alan's reply.

Comments

Alan replies to yesterday's post! At last, dialogue! I'll make a comment on this comment later. I've also included some further links at the end.

Roger,

I think you missed the boat on this one.

"It also seems to be true . . . the putting down of Pure Land
Buddhism."

--Yes, but these aren't religions of the Book. They do have
their sacred texts -- scads of them -- but those texts aren't
nearly as central to those religious traditions as their
respective scriptures are to the Big Three monotheisms.
-- The religious traditions of East Asia that you mention do have
blood on their hands, but much less of it than do the religions
of Europe/North Africa/Central Asia.
-- You haven't shown that such violence as they have committed is
in any way tied to the content of their sacred texts, which is
RDC's charge against Islam; to my knowledge their is no such
relationship (and very little violence in those texts).

"Fundamentalism, as a literal and nonhistoric approach to
religious scripture . . . Wow. The man seems to have misplaced
1400-1800 some years of Western history. I guess he feels like
the fundamentalism thing gets him off the hook[.]"

RDC's case here would be stronger if he elaborated on the
extension of the term fundamentalism as he defines it here.
Nonetheless, he's basically on the mark: fundamentalism, as
scholars use the term, is a phenomenon that began in the late
19th century. A "nonhistoric approach to religious scripture"
can only be formulated after fully historical approaches to
religious scripture have been developed -- source criticism and
form criticism and that sort of thing. Fundamentalism was and
is, among other things, a reaction to these trends. You may
consider this too narrow a definition of fundamentalism, and
certainly there were fundamentalist-like tendencies earlier in
church history. However, it was not and could not have been
there from the beginning. It requires, for example, fairly
widespread lay literacy. When you extend the notion of
fundamentalism to Islam, the picture is complicated further; but
the point is that fundamentalism is not simply a synonym for
primitive or dogmatic religion, or for religious bigotry.

So yes, I think the fundamentalism thing does get 1400-1800 years
of Western history off on a techicality, only it's a more
important technicality than you realize.

"And surely the extermination of almost all native peoples, as a
program of the European-Native encounter, justified throughout
its history with multitudinous reference to scripture, was a mere
flyspeck on the vision of the Weltgeist, surely."

The conquistadores were not reading their marching orders
straight out of the Old Testament. As you know, the theological
justification for the Roman Catholic part in the
conquista/conversion/genocide came from a complex mix of
scholastic theology, canon law, and whatnot; and at times there
were interventions on the side of the indigenous peoples (cf.
Bartolome de Las Casas.) Fundamentalism that wasn't. The term
is, arguably, more applicable to, e.g., our genocidal antepasados
here in Texas; but I'll deal with that point after I've discussed
the nature of the Qur'an as divine revelation.

". . . perhaps we should look at the gentle texts from the
"quasihistorical Age of the Patriarchs". Our reading today will
be from selected old Testament books. "

A pedantic quibble here: The Age of the Patriarchs extends only
to the time of the Covenant with Moses at Sinai, recounted in the
Book of Exodus, and hence none of the texts you cite are,
strictly speaking, from the Age of the Patriarchs.

But more important: One thing that immediately strikes the
Western reader (i.e., me) about the Qur'an is that, unlike the
Christian Bible, it's all of a piece. What happened is that
Mohammed would go out into the desert to meditate. One day he
started hearing voices. He came back into Mecca and told people
what he was hearing. They said, "It's the voice of God." He
kept on listening, and telling people what he heard. They
remembered it, and wrote it down. God was pretty direct and to
the point. This is the way things are. Do this, and you'll be
happy. Don't do this, or you'll be sorry.

And that's the Qur'an. It's not a miscellany of every
conceivable kind of document produced over a thousand-year
period. No archaic histories emerging out of oral tradition. No
long passages of "Jehosaphat begat Jedadiah". No Songs of
Solomon that snuck in past the censors to embarrass future
generations of prudes. No
we-can't-decide-which-version-of-the-story-to-use-so-let's-include-all-four.
None of the ravings of a John of Patmos.

RDC is correct when he says (in the complete article), "The Quran
is a notoriously difficult text to understand in some ways. For
one thing, it lacks almost any sense of context: Verses are
addressed to mysterious Yous and Theys from an equally mysterious
We." This remark highlights one of its differences from the Old
Testament, where the context within a historical narrative is
generally very clear. Now, I suggest that when an utterance is
made in the second person directed to a nonspecific You, when the
content of that utterance makes it possible to take the utterance
to be of universal applicability, (applicable to all people in
all places and at all times, or at all times subsequent to the
time of the utterance), that is a natural way to interpret the
utterance. And so those utterances have been interpreted in the
Islamic tradition. On the other hand, when an utterance is
reported in the third person, in the course of a narrative of
events quite remote in time and space, it takes a good bit of
contortion to interpret that utterance as of universal
applicability.

The relevance of all this to our discussion? Two things. First,
when you ask,

"I mean, who takes Judges literally?"

Let's consider again the hypothetical Anglo in Texas in the
1800's opening his Bible and reading "Now go and smite Amalek,
and spare them not; but slay both men and women," and deciding
that Jehovah's instructions to the Israelites a few millenia ago
were directly applicable his own relations with his Kiowa
neighbors. How someone can read it that way, as I suppose has
been done all too frequently, is beyond my imagination; but you
can't call it a "literal" reading. Even if you ignore the
context in a historical narrative, there's that pesky word
"Amalek," which is a proper noun, denoting a particular group of
persons who ain't around any more. It takes quite a bit of
sophisticated hermeneutics to conclude that anything that God may
have said about them should be applied to the Kiowas. (Unless,
of course, you already know what conclusion you want to come
to.)

But the Qur'an isn't like that. Not only does the context-free,
second-person form of its injunctions give them every appearance
of being intended as universal commandments, but there are no
bothersome questions about whether the Kiowas ought to be treated
like the Amalekites were treated. The word is "infidels", which
clearly includes you and me, and all those who reject God's
revelation to his Prophet Mohammed.

Second, and more important: I suggest that your attempt to refute
RDC's claim about the centrality of war in the Qur'an with these
citations from the Old Testament fails, because, given the nature
of the Qur'anic revelation, the entire Qur'an is central to Islam
in a way that (no one in her right mind thinks that) everything
in the Bible is central to Christianity. Imagine a Christian
being handed a Bible asked, "OK, where's the meat? If I've only
got time to read a small part of this thing to get the most
important ideas, what should I read?" The Christian might
recommend the Sermon on the Mount, the Passion of Christ, perhaps
some of the letters of Paul; but no one, I venture to say, would
point to Judges 21 or 1st Samuel. Whereas it's quite plausible
for the Muslim to say, "All of the Qur'an is equally important;
it's all the Word of God." So matching quotation for quotation
misses the point.

"This development of the religious community outside of the halls
of political power gives both Judaism and Christianity the
flexibility to adapt to the secular concept of the separation of
church and state[.]"

I agree that RDC is on very shaky ground here. In the Christian
case, I'd attribute the alleged flexibility (although there's
probably a better word) more to the fact that neither of the men
you might call the founders of the religion, Jesus and St. Paul,
founded political states, whereas Mohammed did.

Re Judaism, about which neither of us have said very much (in my
case because I don't know very much): I think RDC is right about
the nonpolitical nature of Diaspora (rabbinical) Judaism. Temple
Judaism is another matter, and to the extend that certain
Orthodox sects may be attempting to reinstate it in Jerusalem,
they're clearly a destructive force in contemporary Palestine.
But I don't know what I'm talking about here.

BTW, apparently James Carroll makes the counterargument to RDC's
in Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: " Carroll
proceeds according to a straightforward thesis: In the aftermath
of Constantine's conversion (AD 312), the church became an organ
of the Roman state, and as a consequence, its integrity was
irreversibly compromised." (Erik Tarloff, writing in Slate last
January.)

" Briefly, the question of how tolerance . . . Christianity as a
political force."

The question will depend to a degree on how you define
"tolerance": I would argue that there are important differences
between, say, the view currently hegemonic in the West that
religious beliefs are entirely a matter of private conviction,
and the quite different view, found at many times in European
history, that belief cannot be compelled. The former is, as you
indicate, the aftermath of Europe's exhaustion from its
fratricidal religious wars. But the point is that, after
Protestants and Catholics had killed each other in sufficient
numbers for enough centuries that they got good and sick of it,
there was enough doctrinal room in Christianity for them to work
out a modus vivendi, a new understanding of the relationship
between secular and religious authority, between the public and
the private, so that they no longer felt a need to kill each
other, and yet they still considered themselves believers. By
extension, this new-found tolerance caused them to lose the urge
to kill, or ( in many, but still too few, cases) even to convert
nonChristians. It's not the place of a nonMuslim to say whether
or not similar room exists in the Islamic tradition, but I take
RDC's point to be (and I say this in the light of my own
preliminary and uninformed reading) it's hard to see where it
could be found.

"There is an . . . ignorance armed with a diploma."

First, I agree that "Why do they hate us?" is a stupid question.
There are a whole lot of "they"s who hate us for a whole lot of
different reasons (not to mention the problems with the referent
of the "us"). But to the point: RDC teaches history of
religion. I suggest that your gripe is not with him or with the
way he teaches his subject, as with the discipline itself; you
think that he would present a more accurate picture of history if
he taught not History of Religion but History of Everything Ever
Justified in the Name of Religion. The conquistadores, Cromwell,
and the Croatian bishops were all mass murderers, but if you
think that their crimes deserve a central place in the history of
the particular human phenomenon known as "religion" -- well,
let's just say I think the burden of the argument is on you.

Love & peace,

Alan


For a modern justification of those Judge's quotes, see the Rationalchristianity site.


A good link to a Net argument about the posting of John Chrysostom Homilies Against the Jews (or Judaizers), in which the conversation twists around the context of apparently anti-semitic language. There's a website devoted to the golden tongued John - .

A good link to a Southern Baptist dissenter from the Southern Baptist Convention's most recent pronouncement on the cosmic place of women.


Here's a nice link to the relationship of the Ottomans and the Jews, from the 14th century up to the 1881, when the Sultan officially pronounced against the blood libel story -- that Jews killed little Christian boys and used their blood in some satanic ceremony. A story, by the way, that the Russian Czar believed and the Pope, at that time, was unwilling to condemn.
.

Finally, here's a link to a book by Bat Ye'or on Islam and non-Islamic people. . There is also a preface to the book, online, from Jacques Ellul. I haven't read the book, but the intro makes it pretty evident that this book is going to deal harshly with Islam. Bat Ye'or interprets dhimmi, or the Islamic pact with non-Islamic people, in the light of the obligation to fight -- jihad. Also, the Serbian-Bosnian conflict is obviously in the background of Ellul's essay.

Dope

A friend sent me this article from Salon. Since I don't pay for the premium articles, I was unaware of it. But reading it has made me feel, for a moment, positively Voltarian:


Islam: Religion of the sword?
Unlike Christianity or Judaism, Islam's religious history is inseparable from its conquests -- which is why the concept of holy war lives on today.


A certain Richard D. Connerney wrote it. He is credited with teaching religion at Iona College. What can one say? His students are obviously being fed a mixture of bigotry and error, poor guys. Connerney has an at best vague acquaintance with the history of religion. But he is eager to show it off, nonetheless.


The point of his article seems to be that Islam, being a religion of the book, is tied to the violent message within that book. That seems fair enough. It also seems to be true of almost all religions that have achieved political status. I don't know enough about the internicene disputes between the Daoists and the Buddhists in Imperial China, but I have no doubt I would find monks and advisors to one emperor or the other legitimating persecution, torture, expropriation of property, and murder. You can find this, also, in Japanese history, especially in the putting down of Pure Land Buddhism.
But this doesn't worry Mister Connerney. In fact, after pointing out how often the Qu'ran uses the word war, he gives us this astonishing piece of information:


"Fundamentalism, as a literal and nonhistoric approach to religious scripture, exists in every tradition, but only in Islam does it go hand in hand with widespread violence. Yes, Southern preachers occassionally get carried away, and yes, Hindu fundamentalists cause intermittent communal violence in the Deccan subcontinent. Neither of these two fundamentalisms, however, has produced the same types of problems as Islam. It is not Hindu fundamentalists or Southern Baptists that generally become international terrorists. What is the difference then between Islam and other wo! rld faiths? Is there something inherent in the history and texts of the religion that lead to this behavior? I think that there is."


Wow. The man seems to have misplaced 1400-1800 some years of Western history. I guess he feels like the fundamentalism thing gets him off the hook -- after all, if the Croatian bishopry, in World War II, felt it could bless the extermination of some 500,000 Serbians because they were Eastern Orthodox, that isn't exactly Southern Baptist fundamentalism. That Southern Baptists are "Southern" because of a certain unpleasant racial thing (you know, slavery and all) seems also to have escaped his attention. And surely the extermination of almost all native peoples, as a program of the European-Native encounter, justified throughout its history with multitudinous ireference to scripture, was a mere flyspeck on the vision of the Weltgeist, surely. I mean, who takes Judges literally?


People who have inherited the gains of past generations have an understandable temptation to blur the process by which those gains were made. But one thinks that a professor of religion would have poked around, perhaps, in the history of the religion. Connerney's potted history is really quite amusing to read:

"This [Islamic bellicosity] is in distinction from Judaism and Christianity, in which the religious community both predates and postdates the existence of a Jewish or Christian political state. Judaism already exists as a faith in the quasihistorical Age of the Patriarchs (circa 2000-1300 B.C.) before the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel, and Judaism continues to exist and develop as a religious community after the Babylonian Captivity, the Roman occupation, the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and throughout the Diaspora up to the year 1948. In a similar way Christianity, self-consciously apolitical in its origin, exists for centuries in a Roman/pagan context until the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D. This development of the religious community outside of the halls of political power gives both Judaism and Christianity the flexibility to adapt to the secular concept of the separation of church and state that come out of the Enlightenment, and to embrace ideas of modernity and sec! ular civil society. Put simply, neither faith requires the existence of a theocratic state to function fully as a religion because both their origins and endpoints exist above and beyond concerns of statehood. Not so with Islam."


Since Connerney devotes some part of his article to explicating the centrality of war in the Qu'ran, perhaps we should look at the gentle texts from the "quasihistorical Age of the Patriarchs". Our reading today will be from selected old Testament books.

The tone is set in Joshua, but I'm not going to be tedious. Here's a typical bit of the Lord's advice in Judges 21.

"For the people were numbered, and, behold, there were none of the inhabitants of Ja'besh�gil'e-ad there.

10 And the congregation sent thither twelve thousand men of the valiantest, and commanded them, saying, Go and smite the inhabitants of Ja'besh�gil'e-ad with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children.

11 And this is the thing that ye shall do, Ye shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man.

And here the Lord is, again, in 1 Samuel:
2. "Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Am'alek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Ex. 17.8-14 � Deut. 25.17-19

3 Now go and smite Am'alek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
Now the Lord's advice here - which is reminiscent, is it not, of Eichmann? Or your average Einsatzkommando unit commander - folds into an interesting story. For the Lord here is talking to Saul. Saul, unfortunately, fails the Lord. He fails, that is, to commit genocide.


9. But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.

10 � Then came the word of the LORD unto Samuel, saying,

11 It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments. And it grieved Samuel; and he cried unto the LORD all night.


The Lord's complaint has echoed down the centuries. How many soldiers have been commanded to utterly destroy a people and a place and have been miserably bought off with the best of the sheep, so to speak? This is known as not looking at the mission as a whole. This is known as not having focus. Because the mission is to extinguish a people. This was pretty clear to the quasi-historical Samuel, the Lord's prophet. And guess what? As this book shed its benificent influence through the Christian world, the message was taken up by many a Christian captain. Need I mention the Lord's work Cromwell did in Ireland? Or the Lord's broom, sweeping away the Tasmanian natives -- there's a very interesting chapter on this in David Quammen's Song of the Dodo. There good Christians, inspired by this most beautiful of religions, in contradistinction from nasty, nasty Islam, actually formed a small army and proposed, rather like beaters in a hunt, to spread from one end of the island to the other and advance, killing "every man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." They nearly succeeded -- a nice, jolly English slaughter, that. Their descendents, of course, prosperous New Agers and so on, can then make up simulacrum of native 'spirituality' and enjoy the healthiness of these past creatures, er, people, without the muss and fuss of actually having to confront them in the flesh.

But I'm forgetting! The WTC attack! It changed everything! -- apparently even history. Ah, the retrospective glow one feels over the West's benignant behavior, inspired by that coexistence "for centuries in a Roman/pagan context until the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D. This development of the religious community outside of the halls of political power gives both Judaism and Christianity the flexibility to adapt to the secular concept of the separation of church and state that come out of the Enlightenment." What though the Enlightenment comes 1400 years afterwards? And notice that we sort of skip, oh, skip lightly, over the effect of Christianity's adoption as the religion of the empire. Notice that the Roman/pagan context sort of, well, vanished? Think this was due to the sweet fluting of Bishop Athanasius? Or perhaps the dreams of Augustine, laid out in the City of God, that manual for ghettoizing the non-Christian?
This is an issue that deserves more than one post. Briefly, the question of how tolerance happens is one that is ill understood, and is, perhaps, connected to different causes in different societies. I'd argue, though, that Western tolerance did not arise from some proto-type in Christian organizations, but rather arose out of the exhaustion experienced by Europeans in the 17th and 18th century for Christianity as a political force. Or, to be fully dialectical about it - TOLERANCE AROSE OUT OF CHRISTIAN INTOLERANCE. I'll make that argument in another post.

Anyway, let's sum up this exercise in Ecrasez l'infame. There is an explanation for the commonly posed question, Why do they hate us? (although, as I have explained in an earlier post, I think this question is fundamentally stupid). It is because we are not only not taught history, we have such as Connerney teaching history. A man who can lightly skip over most of history in his pursuit of it, and who conveys an abbreviated and nonsensical melange of half fact to his students, can only be thought of as that worst of menaces, ignorance armed with a diploma.