Author: Michael Skube
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: October 21, 2001
URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24908-2001Oct20.html
ATLANTA
>From President Bush to imams at
American mosques, everyone wants to make earnest bows toward Islam's civilizing
past and its deep spirituality, taking issue only with terrorists who claim
to act in its name. "Our quarrel is not with Islam," the president has
repeated in so many words.
The problem is that Islam has a
quarrel with us, and the antagonists are not simply a few extremists trained
in the use of a box cutter. By now, the elephant -- or camel, if you will
-- in the room can no longer be ignored: Islam not only exhibits a frightful
intolerant streak at times, but its very nature seems to be one of intolerance.
Either you are a believer or you are an infidel.
To Americans and most Europeans,
this is a menacing choice. We once kept close watch on infidels ourselves,
and put more than a few of them to death. But it's been a while. The Protestant
Reformation broke the papacy's authority in civil matters, but did not
produce freedom of thought. A more thoroughgoing change was needed, and
it came in the late 18th century with the Enlightenment, a broad movement
that displaced Christianity as the final arbiter in political life, and
elevated reason and law in its place. It is a movement that has no parallel
in the centuries-old theocracy of Islam.
Since the Enlightenment, the West
has rejected religious absolutism, while guaranteeing a freedom of worship
unknown anywhere else in the world, along with the freedom of non-worship
and even rank heresy. The Enlightenment is one of the reasons the United
States is privately a nation of many faiths and publicly a nation of hands-off
secularism. For two decades and more, "secular" has been a term of opprobrium
among Christian fundamentalists who lobby state legislators and appeal
from pulpits to restore prayer in the schools and morality wherever they
find it missing. They know the Bible better than they know Voltaire or
Rousseau, Gibbon or Hume, or any of the other writers and thinkers who
constituted the disputatious family that Peter Gay, the most eminent historian
of the period, calls the philosophes.
The writers and thinkers of the
Enlightenment haven't always had good press. They were, depending on the
direction from which criticism came, idle dilettantes, superficial if not
also supercilious, or they were enemies of morality in general and Christianity
in particular. But they laid the foundation, even in spirited disagreement
with one another, for separation of church and state, for freedom of speech
and worship, for tolerance and for the simple injunction to live and let
live.
It is a decidedly mixed blessing
-- as anyone nauseated by the tawdriness of popular culture must acknowledge
-- but it is what separates us from those who confront us with militant
religiosity. It is at the heart of who we are as a civilization and a people,
more so even than capitalism. And it is entirely alien, even malignant,
to the greater part of the Islamic world.
Here and abroad, Muslim clerics
have condemned the attacks of Sept. 11, and no one should doubt their sincerity.
Scholars of the Koran assure us that nothing in the text commands the faithful
to take up the sword against the innocent. But, as the text makes clear,
the sword is to be taken up -- against those who deny Allah and his Messenger,
against those who once believed but fell away, against foes of the faith,
real or imagined.
Blood feuds and assassinations punctuate
Islam's history from the very beginning. This is a religion that seems
to place more stock in retribution than mercy. "Wherever one looks along
the perimeter of Islam," Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington writes in "The
Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order," "Muslims have trouble
living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally arises as
to whether this pattern of late-20th-century conflict between Muslim and
non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other
civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the
world's population, but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in
intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence
is overwhelming."
Damning words, but that evidence
-- in the Middle East, in Africa, in Indonesia, in the Philippines and
now in the United States -- is not easily refuted. In only one of many
studies that Huntington cites, Muslims were participants in 26 of 50 ethnic
conflicts during the 1990s. If the legacy of European colonialism is one
part of the picture, and the question of the Palestinians and Israel another,
there remains something more: This is a fighting faith, not everywhere
willing to live peaceably in a world of many faiths.
None of this remotely describes
the gentle family that runs the laundry down the street from me -- Muslims
who emigrated here from India -- or my friend Rahim Ghassemian, an accomplished
translator and journalist who moved here from Iran six years ago. He is
not a practicing Muslim, but knows the Koran even more intimately than
he knows American films and loves both.
Individual Muslims are of course
no more venal than anyone else. Americans can be self-satisfied in our
own goodness, forgetting that we've had God-fearing terrorists of our own.
But the church deacons who moonlighted as torch-bearing Klansmen were never
so organized or so clever as those who now wage war on us. More to the
point, the Klansmen and other native terrorists were always outside the
American intellectual inheritance, some of them innocent of any education
at all. Their world is dead. The American South, though loud with detestation
of "liberals," is happy to be part of a liberal democracy.
"I disagree with everything you
say, but will fight to the death for your right to say it," the impious
Voltaire is celebrated for declaring. In point of fact, as Gay tells us
in "Voltaire's Politics," the philosophe said nothing of the sort and was
intemperate toward those who did not embrace his every opinion. The larger
point, though, is that Voltaire and other writers and statesmen of the
day created a climate of open debate and established the legitimacy of
doubt. Science already had undermined the Church's authority in matters
it knew nothing about -- the revolution of the planets being one. After
the Enlightenment (whose heirs included many of the Founding Fathers),
the political life of the West looked forward and not back. Not only were
men endowed with certain inalienable rights, as the Declaration of Independence
avowed, but every opinion, however contrary or cockeyed, deserved its chance
to fly.
The Islamic past has known no such
intellectual transformation, and nothing suggests it will any time soon.
Its most liberal revolutionaries, men such as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938),
the secular-minded father of modern Turkey, are little honored outside
their own lands. (It may be just as well: Ataturk thought religion a superstition
anyway.) Islam pays tribute instead to dictators -- from Abu Bakr, Mohammed's
son-in-law and the first caliph, to the Ayatollah Khomeini -- whose cruelty
met no opposition from Islam's holy men.
For all the Koran's pious homage
to equality, it is an equality in submission, and none are more in submission
than Muslim women. In America, blacks were in bondage for more than two
centuries, and women did not win the right to vote until 1920. But women
and blacks won full rights as citizens because the soil had been tilled
and readied.
The Islamic world, by contrast,
was content to remain in its torpor, locked in rigid orthodoxy, fearful
of freedom, achieving little except what it could achieve through fear
or force.
"I believe with [Voltaire]," Gay
has written, "that the world is a shipwreck and that it is our duty to
save ourselves and one another; that love is better than hate, but that
we must hate some things, especially fanaticism, for the sake of love."
In such a world, the values bequeathed the West by the Enlightenment --
reason and tolerance, generosity and doubt, most of all the autonomy of
the individual conscience -- are humanity's best, indeed its only, hope.
Michael Skube is a critic and essayist
based in Atlanta.
