There’s one final point I need to explore before I launch into a longer discussion of the events of last month, and that’s a debate I had in the comments about the difference between Islam as a religion and Islam as a political force. The former refers explicitly to Islam as I have described it up to now – the scripture-based, dogmatic, supernaturally-connected philosophy that all Muslims claim to be following (although arguably none actually do). The latter is the sense in which we have “Islamic countries” – a fusion of religion and politics and culture and history that is broadly referred to as “Islam”.
This difference is not semantic, and it is (I imagine) the latter type of ‘Islam’ that the most vociferous critics think of as they alight their soapboxes. That is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you – cultural criticism is important, even if it’s someone else’s culture you’re criticizing. The problem arises when criticisms of a culture fail to take all the relevant elements into account and fixate on a single one. So, for example, there are legitimate criticisms to make about “black culture”*, and black critics make them all the time, but when those criticisms focus on race and fail to factor in things like racialization, poverty, historical exclusion, and a litany of other relevant factors, the crticisms land far wide of the mark.
Indeed, it is usually this exact thing going on when members of majority groups complain that it’s only ____-ist when they do it. That’s maybe a conversation for another time, but the double standard is only true in a very superficial and inaccurate way.
As has been noted in many of the conversations that preceded this series of posts, when we talk about ‘political Islam’, we are usually talking about political systems in which the religion of Islam has infiltrated the political systems, and the secular institutions are subordinate to the religious ones. It is from this that we get the fear of ‘creeping Shariah law’, and the associated (and ridiculously paranoid) moves to ban Islamic law as being recognized by the formal court system. Many states that use some iteration of Shariah law do, in fact, see horrific abuses and blatantly unethical and brutally retrograde punishments for things like theft and adultery, and it is right to resist and criticize that. However, the question remains whether or not that is a problem with Islam.
When governing institutions are made subordinate to religious authority, problems inevitably arise. It is arguable whether these problems are in fact different from cases in which governing institutions are made subordinate to oligarchies or racial hegemonies or rampant nationalism, but that is a discussion for another time – a discussion that must include the ways in which those kinds of systems are often justified in religious terms.
It is certainly not my position that we should not criticize political Islam. It is basic humanist understanding that suggests that secular institutions must be strengthened, and that the inclusion of religious prescripts as codified laws is a terrible idea. Laws should be grounded in ethics and evidence, not invocations of the will of a mercurial and ineffable supreme being. To the extent that ‘the Muslim world’ is theocratic, we should absolutely make solid criticisms about the erosion or replacement of secular institutions, and about the use of faith as a substitute for evidence when deciding public policy.
There may be, in fact, a perfectly reasonable argument to make that Islam as a religious doctrine specifically and uniquely calls for the abolition of secular institutions. Some theological historians find the origin of the idea of separation of church and state found specifically within Christian doctrine – it probably goes without saying that I am skeptical of such an assertion. Regardless, it may be the case that while there is some recognition of secular authority in Christian scripture (for example) that is not present in Islamic scripture, that is almost never the argument I see put forward. Rather, it is that Islam uniquely or in some special way deserves scrutiny for its theocratic bent. Again, I am open to seeing that demonstrated, but I have not been presented with convincing evidence.
Indeed, when we examine the history of Europe, or even the actions of the ‘Tea Party’ in America (which is really nothing more than the evangelical Christian right-wing base with tri-corner hats on) and the fights over gay marriage in contemporary France, we see that there is a force of ‘political Christianity’ that is hard at work to enact many of the same regressive policies that we decry in ‘political Islam’. The difference between ‘political Christianity’ and ‘political Islam’ seems to be, for the most part, a difference of degree rather than kind, as most European and North American democracies have (relatively) strong and intact non-religious institutions that tamp down the more dramatic Christian theocratic urges.
If we, as atheists with no real scholarship of Islamic doctrine to speak of, wish to make criticisms of Islam on political grounds, we need to be similarly careful to identify and define what it is we’re talking about when we talk about ‘Islam’. Are we talking about the religious beliefs that people hold? Are we talking about the religious beliefs encoded in scripture? Are we talking about the actions of states with large Muslim populations or Islamic theocratic rulers? Or are we, as I suspect is most frequently the case, defining ‘Islam’ as a melange of all of the above, and then erroneously claiming that they are necessarily concomitant?
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*The fact that there is no monolithic ‘black culture’ sort of belies that statement, I suppose
If you’ve had some time to research the subject, you’ll quickly find that Islam is not monolithic – there are many warring factions within it. The main divisions are Shia, Sufi, and Sunni, and there are sub-sects within those divisions. One of these sub-sects within Sunni Islam is known as Wahhabism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabi_movement) begun in the latter part of the 18th century, and this is the kind of Islam which is is predominant in the US and UK and perhaps Europe. Wahhabism is the religious backing for the Muslim Brotherhood, which coopted the Egyptian Revolution, and which exercises significant influence in the US Government – see http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/AAlexievWagesofExtremism032011.pdf and gatestoneinstitute.org/3672/muslim-brotherhood-us-government
So when you think of “Islam”, you’re probably thinking of Wahhabism, which incorporates significant elements of Sunni Islam but tends to act more as a totalitarian cult – compare with these criteria:
Ten warning signs of a potentially unsafe group/leader.
Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement.
Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.
There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances.
There are records, books, news articles, or television programs that document the abuses of the group/leader.
Followers feel they can never be “good enough”.
The group/leader is always right.
The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.
Ten warning signs regarding people involved in/with a potentially unsafe group/leader.
Extreme obsessiveness regarding the group/leader resulting in the exclusion of almost every practical consideration.
Individual identity, the group, the leader and/or God as distinct and separate categories of existence become increasingly blurred. Instead, in the follower’s mind these identities become substantially and increasingly fused–as that person’s involvement with the group/leader continues and deepens.
Whenever the group/leader is criticized or questioned it is characterized as “persecution”.
Uncharacteristically stilted and seemingly programmed conversation and mannerisms, cloning of the group/leader in personal behavior.
Dependency upon the group/leader for problem solving, solutions, and definitions without meaningful reflective thought. A seeming inability to think independently or analyze situations without group/leader involvement.
Hyperactivity centered on the group/leader agenda, which seems to supercede any personal goals or individual interests.
A dramatic loss of spontaneity and sense of humor.
Increasing isolation from family and old friends unless they demonstrate an interest in the group/leader.
Anything the group/leader does can be justified no matter how harsh or harmful.
Former followers are at best-considered negative or worse evil and under bad influences. They can not be trusted and personal contact is avoided.
Hey, we were just talking about this on Butterflies & Wheels.
There’s a Rebekah over there who seems to need to hear this post quite badly.
Thank you for this. The next time I encounter someone encountering me of religious apologia for noting that Islam doesn’t have a monopoly on “political religion”*, I’ll just refer them here.
* I wish I’d come up with this term myself.
Wes Alwan has written two interesting articles (here and here,), somewhat related to this theme but aimed a little more at criticizing some ridiculous claims Andrew Sullivan made (which isn’t in itself very interesting).
The concept of “political Islam” is a little slippery, I think. The idea that religions are non-political or anti-political or politically inert (or I don’t know what): that sort of idea just doesn’t seem psychologically realistic to me. People believe things and act upon them, and as people they’re not isolated from their societies, so there’s always going to be some political dimension to religious beliefs.
Anyway, however useful that distinction is for cultural criticism, people tend to jump way too quickly to some grand overarching narrative, without bothering to understand much about what’s happening at the individual level. That level is still important, even if the criticism would otherwise be spot-on in terms of larger cultural forces (as “religion” or “politics” or whatever category we’re inventing for it).
(I don’t want to strawman you with any of this, but the point is just that it can be confusing because it isn’t always clear how we can use these concepts appropriately. Even when we’re dealing with these complicated distinctions about different kinds of cultural forces to avoid unwarranted generalizations, there’s still the danger of oversimplifying or misapplying them when it comes to understanding specific events, like the Boston bombing, 9/11, etc., just to end up making a different kind of generalization.)
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a follower of Shaykh Feiz Muhammad who he met up with when he travelled to the USSR and Chechnya/Dagestan in 2012. I saw his Youtube page before it was taken down and it had lots of Feiz Muhammad videos on it as well as others.
“FIREBRAND cleric Sheik Feiz Mohamed’s defence of his comments on a DVD calling children to jihad has been undermined by revelations, the video also urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.
In the DVD, which runs for almost four hours, Sheik Feiz describes inmates of Guantanamo Bay as better Muslims than those in Australia, who would would not forsake their lifestyles for martyrdom.
“The brothers in Cuba are better than us,” he said. “They are being examined through the best examination (a reference to God’s judgment) and the like of them worldwide.”
The sheik, who left Australia in 2005 to live in his father’s homeland, Lebanon, exorts his followers to seek the honourable death of the believer, quoting from narrations about the prophet Mohammed.
“They fight in the cause, they kill others – the enemies who fight Islam and they themselves are killed as martyrs,” he said. He gives the example of a mujaheddin who fought in Bosnia in the 1990s who spoke of nothing but jihad and was killed on the battlefield. “What a beautiful person to be associated with. Would you not like to be an associate of this person?” (source: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/04/boston-jihad-bombers-youtube-page-features-videos-by-sheikh-feiz-mohammed-who-called-on-muslims-to-kill-enemies-of-islam.html)
I don’t think most people referring to “political islam” are using “political” to describe islam itself (therefore not saying religion X is political or non). Rather, they are referring to the application of islam to politics, to differentiate it from practices of islam that do not interfere with the government. As of yet, I haven’t been disabused of the use of the term “islamism” to describe the political belief in islamic theocracy. The xtian equivalent would be “christianism” or “political christianity,” and a specific brand of that you might be familiar with is “dominionism.” I’ll dog on all that crap equally, and the terminology is needed to distinguish it from harmless stuff like the call to prayer or church bells or praying to Mecca or confession.
Unless I misunderstood your meaning there, which is totally possible.
Steam, if the “you” in your first post is Cromm, I’d suggest you didn’t bother to read the post here for comprehension. Throughout this series and especially in this post, he has called for people to be critical of what they think when they say the word “islam.” Therefore, he is not thinking of any branch of islam in particular, and your post seems highly weird and irrelevant.
But if the “you” is more of a “royal you,” referring to people reading this, then your post could be taken as supplementary information, and makes a little more sense in that light. What did you mean?
Probably more the latter, although I was reacting to his use of the word Islam alone without further qualifying it. Most Americans don’t know the difference between Sunni, Shi’a, and Sufi Islam, but it’s the case that leaders in each branch have declared the other branches to be murtad – apostasy from the True Faith – and punishable by death. The same sort of conflict appears within the various branches of Islam, so that many Sunnis treat Wahhabis as heretics. Most people talk about radical Islam without having a clue about what they’re saying.
As for a comparison between “dominionism” and Wahhabism by a previous commenter, I’d say it’s a pretty spot-on comparison, except that Wahhabis have Saudi oil money and armaments to back them up – but the two groups certainly have the same goals – and are fairly close to each other in their stances on moral issues.
But the Wahhabis are intensely political, they are pushing for theocratic states much as the Dominionists are doing, but they’ve got a lot more people, a lot more money, military forces, willing apologists amongst the Left and a well-oiled propaganda machine (That’s the Da’wah part of jihad). The Sufis and Shi’a tend not to have imperialistic aspirations as do the Wahhabis.
I said it at reddit.com/r/atheismplus but I will say it here too.
Thanks for these Crom. Like you, I have been feeling significantly conflicted about spending >50% of my time as an advocate for SJ defending Islam. There are more important things to talk about, and this should be 101 …
but since it isn’t, thanks for taking the time and putting in the effort. These posts are already well stored in my quiver of links, to fire at will.
Any religion is inherently political if it interacts with the rest of society. There’s no fundamental difference between the flavours of Islam and flavours of Christianity in that respect.
What we do have is a sliding scale of how serious believers are in attempting to apply those beliefs.
Hairy Chris: the personal is indeed political. The problem here is that you’ve read “political Islam” and assumed what’s being talked about, when it’s fairly clearly defined that “political Islam” is “secular authority being suborned to theocracy” in this context. Which has largely nothing to do with what you’ve said there.
Want another swing?
Please address these:
1. It all starts with Mohammed, who embodied absolute political and religious authority in one person, as allegedly authorised by god. That notion has been carried forth in both the wider concept of the Caliphate, but also the local theocratic nature of Arabia, the cradle of Islam.
The closest equivalent to Mohammed I could think of is Joseph Smith and Mormonism. But Mormonism is a tiny religion on the world stage, which willingly capitulated to democratic rule over a century ago. The Caliphate had to be destroyed by force by one of the non-Muslim civilisations it had attacked in the years after Mohammed’s death.
2. The House of Peace and House of War concept, the People of the Book concept, dhimmi concept, etc. show the way religion creates the political and social landscape in Islamic societies. Many Islamic states still put one’s religion on their national ID cards and will not allow one not to have a religion.
Also many claim that the Qur’an and Haadith reflect a notion that it is Islam’s destiny/right/obligation to control the entire world. Even Christianity, which has been a more aggressive proselytiser, does not explicitly make such claims and was of course totally disempowered in its early centuries.
3. Within that concept lies another Islamic peculiarity, the ‘invitation to convert’ before invading, as offered to the Byzantine Empire, Sassanid Empire, Tang China, Hindu states, etc. in the early decades of Islam. Again religion and the secular phenomenon of warfare are inextricably linked.
Lest you think that is a moribund practice, Osama bin laden made this same offer to the U.S. before launching his jihad. The concept of a new Caliphate is also present in Islamist and Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric.
4. The fact Muslim nations have and continue to form their constitutions with the explicit codification of Islam as the ultimate source of law. A telling example is that ‘moderate’ Malaysia takes the time in its constitution to define “Muslim” in a manner that perpetually binds an ethnic Malay to the religion (as upheld by recent court rulings), both tellingly racist and a shock violation of the separation of church-and-state.
5. Even ‘secular, moderate’ media darling,Turkey, the government supervises all mosques and controls education of imams.
6. The constant majority support for (some variant of) sharia law in opinion polls of Muslims, including large minority support in secular non-Muslim nations with low-corruption, properly-functioning legal systems.
7. The fact non-Muslim governments with Muslim minorities more often than not face some form of militancy. Just make a list of countries where non-Muslim majorities find themselves in violent conflict with the Muslim minority. The list is startlingly long and startlingly diverse in the cultures, religions and political systems which just do not seem to suit the needs of Islam. I will start you out:
China
Thailand
The Phillipines
Burma
India
Sri Lanka
Nigeria
Uganda
Kenya
…
You can fill in the rest of Africa, Europe and North America on your own. You can end the list with Sweden.
8. Islam has its death penalty for apostasy, widely agreed upon across the various schools of fiqh that creates a deadly enforcement mechanism against liberalisation. Now Islam is is not alone to ever have such a penalty, but I know of no other religion where a) that policy has stood for such a long period and b) where its application is still openly spoken of with approval, even by a measurable minority (again see Muslim opinion polls).
Muslims, like all people are naturally apathetic and complacent and inclined to be reasonably decent if not kind to others by nature. I take the view that the real face of “Islam” and all religions shows in its fundamentalists. I know it is very popular to pretend that liberal variants of religion, however welcome in practical effect, are just as legitimate, but they are called “fundamentalists” precisely because they represent the fundamentals of what the religion is.
***
Any one of these may not be “convincing” in and of itself, but the gestalt effect is telling of Islam’s ethos. While again I wish liberal Muslims the best of luck, the fact they are such a small percentage of Muslims and Islam is so far behind Christianity in terms of relative influence of secular politics and liberal theology speaks for itself. The entire problem of “Islam” is that it creates a mindset that problems are either due to being insufficiently Islamic and/or due to external agency. Hence you get the constant allure of both fundamentalism and a sense of victimisation that plagues the Arab world in particular.
Western liberals can paternalistically blame colonialism, imperialism, etc,. for Islam’s retarded liberalisation, but the cradle of Islam itself, Arabia, has never been under non-Muslim rule and its use of its oil wealth to spread Wahhabism again speaks volumes.
Further East Asian nations have risen in the same period from ruinous war, past American support for dictatorships, etc. in the 20th century to impressive ranks on the HDI index (South Korea is ahead of many European nations now). Yet Islamic states like Pakistan, Somalia and Niger actually are managing the disturbing feat of become worse as time goes on.
At some point you have to stop with the postmodernist tendency to go blind by seeing shades of grey and admit that “Islam” is a problem.
Islam was much less political until a certain superpower decided it would be a neat idea to give a certain other superpower “its own Vietnam”, started stirring up trouble in a small, very poor, adjoining country loosely allied to that other superpower, and began promoting “pan-Islamic” activism to motivate international cannon fodder to seek glorious martyrdom as its unwitting pawns in that small, very poor, adjoining country.
Thank you so much for 9/11/01 and everything that followed from it, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and all your accomplices!
Islam has sought empire from the outset: “Thus, as Karsh points out, Islam is an imperial political religion that seeks to extend its worldly law over all humans in the present. In other words, as the nation-state with its interaction between church and state is the political form proper to western Christianity, so the empire is the political form proper to Islam. Not surprisingly, this leads to a militaristic approach to non-Muslims and against other Muslims. It is this innate militarism that Karsh sees operating throughout Islamic history. He traces it through the three great empires of the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Ottomans, and he notes both their strengths and their weaknesses. And here again, Karsh does not simply accept clichés. He does not accord with the common academic interpretation to the effect that Islamic empires were all sources of toleration and civilization. Like all political entities, they could be both tolerant and oppressive. The Umayyad dynasty in medieval Spain stands out for both its openness and its civilizational achievements. But there were problems as well, and Karsh quickly picks up on these. Most notable in this regard is the problem of internecine fighting. The Muslim empires were often beset by palace intrigues within as well as by threats from those on the fringes of the empire who were not incorporated into its political life. Islamic empires are not unique in this, but they have tended to endure significant violent challenges to authority. According to Karsh, this occurs because, on the political level, each would-be ruler is seeking sole imperial dominion. The imperial drive imbedded in Islam makes it very difficult for its political rulers to settle for anything other than universal authority. The outcome is ongoing and often violent discord whereby one must fight to reach the top and then fight to stay there, not to mention the difficulty of a smooth succession between rulers.” http://c2cjournal.ca/2009/06/islamic-imperialism-or-a-political-history-of-islam/
streamfortyseven @ # 15 – I suspect the Karsh you cite is Efraim Karsh, Israeli Defense Force major, Zionist propagandist, and as reliable a source as, say, Rupert Murdoch’s minions.
Though it could be his son and sometimes co-author, Inari Karsh, a loyal walking echo chamber for his dad.
Pffft.
How much does AIPAC pay you for each cut’n’paste job?
It’s amazing to watch leftist intellectuals bend over backwards to support the Islamists in their battle for empire and hegemony – the same sorts of regimes which would exterminate them en masse once established. I could cite tons of Islamic sources for the same thing, but I’m not going to waste my time. It doesn’t take a lot of research to find this out, actually.
streamfortyseven:
Yes, please stop wasting our time by posting apologia for bigotry and violence.
streamfortyseven @ # 17 – uh, if you intended that as a reply to my comment and questions, you failed. (Was it my 3rd paragraph that exposed me as an intellectual?)
Pls re-read and try again.
Or better yet, don’t.
Rebekah-
I don’t think you’ve shown that is the geopolitical fortunes were reversed, judaism and christianity wouldn’t be precisely as bad. There are christian death squads and child armies and the whole nine. All judaism would need to be as bad is a different history.
Every tenet of islam you’ve stated can be found worded slightly differently in judaism and christianity, and HAS been used to justify imperialism, warfare, mindless obedience, etc. forever. Find me an Amalekite to say otherwise.
@great1american1satan
In other words, if the reality were different, other things might be different too. What a profound admission.
When you are reduced to peddling your false equivalency between religions* in the context of hypothetical scenarios, as opposed to actual reality, then you are tacitly admitting I am fully correct about the state of affairs in the world. You failure to contradict even a single point I raise with evidence speaks further volumes in that regard.
*As for Judaism, less than one percent of humanity practices it. If it were not for the general obsession with Israel and prominence of Jews in media fields, it would scarcely even come up in conversation, much like Mormonism.
Being “worse” has quantitative and qualitative aspect. I am sure some cults have existed that make Islam look positively liberal. The real debate is between religions that have a few hundred million adherents, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, everyone else is a minor player.
Didn’t find any Amalekites, did you?
You start talking about specific tenets of islam as if that makes them distinctive when there are equivalents in all the other Abrahamic faiths. Why is it important for you to single out islam as especially evil?
Are many of its most highly visible exponents horrible bastards? Yes, but I can find a Christian to match each of them if I try. What purpose does differentiating this religion as worse serve? What can be gained by that? Essentially, that is the assumption underpinning the West’s prevailing attitudes and policies right now, and it doesn’t seem to be working very well, does it?
It’s leading to hate crimes in the US and UK, that’s for damn sure.
@great1american1satan
“I can find a Christian to match each of them if I try.”
Find me an example where the state-sanctioned non-Muslim morality police forced girls back into a burning building, as the Islamic morality police did in Saudi Arabia the previous decade.
Find me a nation where the constitution defines along racial-linguistic lines the concept of being [non-Muslim religion] as does Malaysia with Islam.
Find me an example of a non-Muslim nation jailing large numbers of women who have been raped for being guilty of ‘fornication’ as has Pakistan until recent years.
@ Rebeka, °̩ can find u many , satanism permits human sacrifice and sexual intercourse within the cult with every single member of the cult as ª form of ª ritual. Yet here we are hating and discriminating religions that prays to god. God in any form or whatever name he is called is definition pure and clean, there’s is no evil god only Lucifer that I’ve come across but there are evil people ,the wrong acts of one evil person shud not be placed on ª whole nation or ª religion. Y shud muslims have to bare the burden of all ª crime that’s committed by one man. Evil does not exist in ª religion where God is concerned. °̩ hate the fact that so many people are quick to generalise and justify an act as form of it being righteous religious act. If ª christian man committs mass murder shud we just assume that its what the bible teaches. Our quraan our divine book contains our teachings , ª book with scriptures unchanged and altered for the past 1400 years ,does not state to inflict harm or enforce fear, what do know bt Islam Rebeka other then what the mind controlling media has brain washed u with ? Do u know ª muslim or had ª conversation with one ? Y wud we jail our females that had their “izzat” (dignity and rights) stolen, where our quraan teaches of protecting of women. Do u think that the veil muslim weare is to show the world how oppressed she is ? Let •̸Ϟξ educate u ..ª veil that covers ª women’s face protects her from creating lust of man, we call this Zinna, and its against Islam for ª man to stare at ª women, which prevents us from committing adultery, her dress shud not be tight or show her female form, to protect her from being preyed on by shameless men. ª muslim women shud always be accompanied by ª male whom she is married to or her brother or father to protect her from harm. Our.god states in the quraan ,[30:21] Among His proofs is that He created for you spouses from among yourselves, in order to have tranquility and contentment with each other, and He placed in your hearts love and care towards your spouses. These are just ª few points to enlighten ur so call views and rapes u so confidently seem to know abt my religion. Where malysia is concerned °̩ guess geography wasn’t ur strongest subject or u wudve known that Malaysia is the largest Islamic country in the world where the minority is christians and chinese..Its unrealistic to make ª statement u have no proof of and criticise sumthing u know nothing about. Muslims have been criticised and mocked for centuries, and yet the united states had has the most mass killings and sexual crime rates in recent years , °̩ don’t see ª website criticising them. So does my quranic verse I’ve just quoted for u show any indication of voilence or oppression, °̩ could quote the quraan if u’d like and maybe then u cud make ª better judgement of muslims