Spell it out
John Carter Wood has a different take on Kelek, Buruma and the rest. He thinks Bruckner did a hatchet job on IB and TGA. Maybe so, but I have more reservations about their replies to Bruckner than John does. They’re somewhat elusive reservations though…a matter of sensing, or thinking I sense, implications, of fitting statements into an existing context where they seem to me to take on a significance they wouldn’t have without the context. See what I mean? Elusive stuff. I wonder if I can pin any of it down…
Try Buruma.
Having turned from devout Islamism to atheism, she tends to see religion, and Islam in particular, as the root of all evils, especially of the abuse of women. Cultural traditions, tribal customs, historical antecedents, all of which are highly diverse, even inside the Muslim world, are flattened into a monolithic threat. Islam, as practised in Java, is not the same as in a Moroccan village, or the Sudan, or Rotterdam.
That’s a good example of what I mean. That first sentence is a familiar kind of thing. Atheists get told that kind of thing a lot at the moment, and there’s usually an agenda behind the telling. And I’m not sure I believe his account. Does AHA see religion and Islam as the root of all evils? I don’t know, I haven’t read enough of her work to know, but I wonder if that isn’t just the same kind of canard that gets tossed at Dawkins a lot. So I’m suspicious, doubly suspicious (of the agenda and the accuracy), but I can’t be sure it’s flat wrong. The third sentence is also a familiar kind of thing, and it’s one that’s very popular with defenders of Islam and not terribly popular with critics of Islam, for the reasons that Kelek indicates: in some important ways Islam is ‘the same’ everywhere; that’s why there is such a thing as the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. There are reasons to think that fact should not be obscured by endless reiteration of the assumption that Islam differs from place to place. To put it another way, it may be true that the practice differs, but if the theory is 1) the same and 2) bad, it is still worth pointing that out. It’s much the same with the pope. Lots of Catholics ignore the pope; very good; that’s not a reason to think the pope is entirely harmless.
In Europe, even the issue of headscarves cannot be treated simply as a symbol of religious bigotry. Some women wear them to ward off male aggression, others because their parents insist on it, and some by their own choice, as a defiant badge of identity, even rebellion. Bruckner admires rebels. Should we only side with rebels whose views and practices we like? Or does living in a free society also imply that people should be able to choose the way they look, or speak, or worship, even if we don’t like it, as long as they don’t harm others? A free-spirited citizen does not tolerate different customs or cultures because he thinks they are wonderful, but because he believes in freedom.
Again – that paragraph seems more reasonable than it is. It’s sly. I’m sorry, but it is. It’s sly because it doesn’t say what ‘the issue of headscarves’ even is. It doesn’t say that the French ban is on headscarves in schools and government jobs, not everywhere, nor that even in a free society people can’t ‘choose the way they look’ in every possible situation and location. The paragraph is incomplete and manipulative and sly in a way that is all too familiar, and I don’t trust it. I don’t trust the intentions. And then in the last few sentences of it it’s all full of questions that desperately need qualification. ‘Should we only side with rebels whose views and practices we like?’ Well, yes, frankly. Depending of course on what is meant by ‘side with’ and ‘rebels’ and ‘like’ – but that’s just it. That’s another familiar ploy – rhetoric about freedom or tolerance or rebels or respect without specification of what is meant. But am I going to ‘side with’ ‘rebels’ who want to beat up women for refusing to move to the back of the bus or put on a niqab? I’m damn well not. Am I going to side with ‘rebels’ who would merely like to persuade women to do those things? No I’m fucking not. I choose my rebels, thanks, I don’t side with all rebels merely as rebels, I side with people I want to side with and I oppose people I don’t want to side with. Why wouldn’t I? Unless by ‘side with’ Buruma simply means something very minimal, but if that’s what he means he should say so. This is why I don’t like his article and why I think he’s being sly. And it’s all like that – full of innuendo and lacking needed specifications. John says it’s ‘carefully argued, well-written and – despite an understandable testiness – thoroughly reasonable.’ But I really don’t think it is. I think it looks that way on the surface, but that it’s terribly underspecified and elusive underneath. I think Buruma is trying to make his case while avoiding spelling out what he means by it – and I really do not trust that kind of thing. Bruckner may have been wrong, but I’m not convinced IB and TGA are right. I’m suspicious.
But then I sometimes overdo the suspicion, so who knows.
” ‘Should we only side with rebels whose views and practices we like?’ Well, yes, frankly.”
Well said!
•••
Buruma offers a really weird, even oafish take on Tariq in a recent interview; I will try to dig it up. (And btw I have in the past thought very highly of Buruma. But he is showing ‘dhimmitude’ and I don’t respect that.)
Buruma writes:
“The question is how far secular society should be pushed to accommodate Islamic principles. “We are in favor of integration,” Ramadan says in a recorded speech, “but it is up to us to decide what that means. … I will abide by the laws, but only insofar as the laws don’t force me to do anything against my religion.” A Muslim must be able to practice and teach and “act in the name of his faith.” If any given society should take this right away, he continues, “I will resist and fight that society.” There is some ambiguity here.”
“I will abide by the laws, but only insofar as the laws don’t force me to do anything against my religion.”
I don’t see much ambiguity at all.
But then we (or some of us) admire war resisters who defy the government who wants to draft them — even the Jehovah’s Witnesses who, despite their general daftness, won a significant Supreme Court case in the U.S. because they resisted saluting the flag. So I don’t think one can say that everyone who resists authority for religious reasons is entirely wrong.
Unless, of course, you want to argue that doing *anything* for religious reasons is wrong. So the war resisters are right for the wrong reasons — they should be resisting war for secular reasons. (And not just any war, of course — the WW II resisters were wrong, because the war against Hitler was right. My, it’s all so complicated, this morality business.)
I think you’re being too harsh. Everyone who reads that knows what the headscarves issue is. If we had to define everything we talk about, we’d be writing books, not articles. Your discussion of “siding with” is odd. You can be read as claiming that you will not defend anyone’s right to expression if you don’t agree with it. The rebels in question are clearly women who choose to wear headscarves. He is asking “do we not support them just because we don’t think wearing a headscarf is a good thing?” You seem to be saying, no we don’t, because we only support people whose causes we agree with. It’s odd that fighting fashionable nonsense leads so readily to intolerance, but I suppose it is bound to if you are simply defining whatever you don’t agree with as “nonsense”, as more and more these days you seem to do.
“The rebels in question are clearly women who choose to wear headscarves.”
Ah no, that’s not clear – that’s part of my point. And it’s also not clear what “choose” means in that context. In short there are complications.
“You seem to be saying, no we don’t, because we only support people whose causes we agree with.”
Yes indeed – that is exactly what I’m saying. I support only people whose causes I agree with. I don’t support people who want to subordinate women or gays or dalits, for instance; I don’t support union-busters; I don’t support Nazis; and so on. I support only people whose causes I agree with. Unless you mean – as I said of Buruma – something very minimal by ‘support’ – but again, if that is what you mean, you have to spell it out. ‘Support’ usually means a lot more than, say, ‘think should have free expression within the law.’
“It’s odd that fighting fashionable nonsense leads so readily to intolerance”
But there again – what do you mean ‘intolerance’? Do you mean ‘not agreeing with’? Or something narrower? This is exactly the problem with all these words, people deploy them as if their meaning were transparent and self-evident when they’re not at all, and these discussions become absolutely riddled with ambiguity and fog. I really don’t know if you and I disagree fundamentally or not at all, because you haven’t specified anything, you’ve just deployed some buzzwords. That’s exactly what both TGA and Buruma do. It’s very unhelpful, indeed worrying, because it provides cover for some very unprogressive and indeed ‘intolerant’ ideas and people.
“I suppose it is bound to if you are simply defining whatever you don’t agree with as “nonsense”, as more and more these days you seem to do.”
That’s interesting (really). Can you give an example?
Yeah, true. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? The coalition of states does put these things forward, and, sadly, people do heed them – less in some places and more in others, but right now the tendency is up rather than down. Places that were sharia-free are getting it imposed on them; northern Nigeria for example. So there is a universalist internationalist aspect that at least for the moment is very powerful. I think that should be made clear, rather than occluded and denied the way Buruma and TGA do.
Also, part of the point of all these ‘wedge’ issues is to get sharia imposed on everyone. That’s the point of the fights over niqab and the bilbab, the segregated beachs, the Islamic hospitals – the hard-line Islamists are working to get everyone (in the ummah at least) signed up. Therefore it really is important to be clear about what they’re working to get everyone signed up to.
Thank you Ophelia …
The hard-line islamists are trying to impose their own version of fascism on everyone in their “control” are.
THEN they can start on the rest of us.
At least SOME people outside our web-discussion groups have started to notice this.
Dr. Zen (I’m sure I saw that movie…)seems to confuse defense and support in exactly the way that the idiots at Clare College do. Just because I don’t agree with someone e.g. a supporter of headscarves in schools or a publisher of cartoons, doesn’t mean that I want to stop them saying their piece. But it also doesn’t mean that I have to be all submissive and pomo and ‘whatever’- I can feel free to tell them that they are talking rubbish.
And Ophelia does it even better than I do.