|
|
|
Nation-Building and Islam
 “If
anyone denies a
verse of the Koran,” says a verse of the Koran, “it is
permissible to behead him.”  Not
exactly promising for interfaith understanding, is it?
I came across that in a book by a Jesuit priest published in 1963,
long before today’s tensions between Islam and the West. When I cited
it to a liberal friend, he commented that it may be due to Islam’s early
struggle for survival against heavy odds, not applicable to Islam today.
Well, that may explain the origins of such verses, and for most
Muslims they may be mere vestiges, as the fiercer passages of the Old
Testament are for most Jews today. But whatever gave rise to them in the
first place, they were written into the sacred text and there they still stand.
And more than a thousand years later many believers still take
them very literally. It’s no use explaining to such folk that the Prophet
may have written them when in a foul mood. Whatever he wrote is, according
to Islam, eternally true. If it seems savage to unbelievers, well, the will of
Allah is inscrutable. Sentimental (Western) public opinion and human reason
mean nothing. The believer regards them with utter contempt.
Some people still take the Old Testament’s more
problematic words literally too, though, oddly enough, they are more apt to
be Protestant Zionists than Jews. Holy books are always subject to explosive
interpretations, never more so than now. The Middle East has many states,
but few of them seem to be blue states.
Even to call Islam a “religion” may be misleading,
because the modern West separates the sacred and the secular so
completely that hardly anything remains sacred. Religion has become a mere
compartment of human existence, excluded from public life. Islam recognizes
no such separation. Everything belongs to Allah, and woe to the unbeliever.
![[Breaker quote for Nation-Building and Islam: Good luck, George!]](2006breakers/060815.gif) This
is a formula for mutual incomprehension and endless conflict. Western
policymakers and diplomats have traditionally left religion to theologians, so
recent developments have caught them flat-footed.
You can’t reduce something as huge as Islam to a few handy
quotations, but we had better recognize that its view of the world has little
in common with, say, Anglicanism. To take only one symptom, we seldom
hear of Anglican suicide bombers. If such creatures exist at all, they
aren’t normative for their coreligionists, and they find little
encouragement in even the most incendiary parts of the Book of Common
Prayer.
The West’s response to militant Islam tends to be alarm and
horror. It hardly has categories to describe it, so it falls back on such
inadequate terms as terrorism and Islamofascism, which
make about as much sense as Islamovegetarianism. In fact, such
words don’t get you very far at all. Fascism was a brief and
superficial thing compared with the vast and ancient thing that is Islam; it
flared out after a few violent years, in a way Islam is most unlikely to do.
How, then, to deal with the faith of a billion people, which we have
only recently paid any attention to? More cautiously, obviously, than our
rulers have done so far, barging into the Middle East with plans of conquest,
alias “democracy” (complete with equal rights for women!). We
offer to supplant their old traditions with our latest fads, and then we are
disappointed when they resist.
Back in 2000, candidate George W. Bush scoffed at nation-building,
in the wise realization that a nation isn’t something you
“build.” The Communists used to speak of “building a new
society,” but they succeeded only in destroying most of the old one.
How did Bush manage to forget what he once knew?
I have no idea, but forget it he did, and his “global democratic
revolution” is (or was; he has muted this theme lately) a close
equivalent of the Communist project that survives, after a fashion, only in
Cuba. If you would see his monument, go to Baghdad and look around you. The
Iraq war has made the Vietnam war look like a smooth operation.
Bush and his team have failed to distinguish between the superficial
evil of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, which was easily toppled, and
the abiding reality of an Islamic society, which doesn’t welcome
reform by unbelievers. By now they must be learning the difference.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |