Islam--Prejudice or Honesty?

Getting a grip on Islam and Muslims is worse than trying to take a firm hold on a flopping fish. Every time you think you've got a hold on the critter, it slips, slides and flips out of your hands.

The problem has two sources: The nature of Islam; the nature of tolerance and understanding in the US and throughout the Western world.

Islam is a deeply divided system of beliefs due to its origin as a political ideology with religious coloration as discussed in earlier posts. A major inconsistency exists between the earlier revelations when Mohammad was developing his movement and the later verses written after the violent conquest of the major cities of the Arabian Peninsula such as Mecca.

The early verses give rise to the oft-repeated portrayal of Islam as a religion of peace, harmony and human unity. In this Islam is no different from more recent ideologies, most notably communism.

Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro all spilled much ink and expended much wind on the proposition that desirable human virtues such as equality, individual development, the abolishment of poverty, disease and famine would accompany the success of the ideology. Ideologues, whether they cloak their wares in the will of God, or Historical Inevitability, all have the goal of attracting, retaining and mobilizing followers in order to achieve one goal.

The goal?

Power. Political power. The capacity to directly and significantly affect in a desired way the perceptions, beliefs and actions of a target population. The target population might be that of Russia. It might be the people of Cuba, or China. A long time ago it was the inhabitants of the desert wastes and the cities of Arabia.

Or the target population might be that of the world. The goal might be the enrolling of the entire human race under a single banner.

Of course history shows beyond even the most unreasonable doubt that sweetness and light, warm, fuzzy words might not do the job. The pen might not be as mighty as the cliche holds.

But, a pen backed by a sword is far more convincing. Unpleasant, but true. Take a grip on it.

The sword. It was the sword that won the Arabian peninsula for Mohammad and his Companions, his hard-core cadre. It was the sword which won so much more for Islam over the next century or so. It was the swinging of the red-edged sword which lurks behind the later verses of the Quran.

The later portions are the mother lode for fatwas, jihads, suicide bombings as well as the bodyguard of lies which can and does surround these overt hostile actions. It is the later verses which are the red meat for the fearful, the vengeful, and the authoritarians in the souk and the mosque.

Get a grip on this. Islam is a religion (or a politco-religious system, if you prefer) that is inherently authoritarian. It demands complete submission to the will of the deity as well as those qualified to instruct the mass as to the what the deity's will might be.

It is in the act of submission, the process of turning the course of a person's life over to the deity and the interpreters, that gives Islam (and, the Geek must point out if he's honest about it, other religious beliefs) it's appeal and power.

History and psychology agree on a few points. One of the most important is that most humans, most of the time, do not want to take responsibility for their own lives. Particularly they don't want to take responsibility for failure, bad decision making, or other negatives.

An authoritarian religion, any authoritarian social-political system or ideology for that matter, can relieve the individual of the unwanted burden of personal responsibility. It also can and does provide a suitable candidate, an Other, as the evil doer perpetrating all of life's miscarriages upon an individual. (For Nazis it was the Jews, for Communists it was the capitalists, and for Islamists it is the West and the apostates within.)

An authoritarian ideology whether religious or secular can, must, provide targets for frustration, failure, humiliation, for all the icky-poo components of life. To be really successful an authoritarian ideology must provide a vision of both paradise lost and paradise regained. It must blame the present situation on past failures of ideological purity and cohesiveness. It must promise that paradise will be regained if ideological purity and cohesiveness are practiced fully and completely.

An authoritarian ideology must play to fear, must harness fear, must insist that only through complete and absolute submission to the requirements of the ideology in belief, in speech and in action will the individual's fears be lessened.

Get a firm grip on this: Islam is an authoritarian religion, an authoritarian ideology, even a total institution as Goffman defined such nearly fifty years ago for many of its adherents. It plays to fear, encourages fear, stokes fear. At the same time it provides a message of hope, redemption and ultimate victory in both this world and the next. All that is required is total, utter submission.

A well known paradox of the human condition is that submission truly liberates. Surrender does make one free.

Another paradox is that enough fear makes an individual fearless. Fear God and dread nought is found in the Bible. An equivalent expression is in the Quran--repeatedly.

In Europe and the United States total wars of religious ideology are thankfully in the past. Westerners can afford to believe in the virtues of tolerance, open-mindedness, appreciation of cultural differences. We are quite used to the clamor of competing voices in the public square. We are by and large unbothered if churches, temples, synagogues and mosques border the public square.

Many of us who grew up in America during the worst days of the Cold War nonetheless believed that the attempts to limit speech, limit political action, limit the presence even of Communists and those close to Communism was wrong as grilled watermelon. We asked ourselves and each other, "If capitalism and democracy are so strong, so good, what are they afraid of? Why the censorship, the outlawing, the paranoia?"

There was never a good answer. There was never any real answer. None was possible. Now, more than ever, the generation of the Cold War's most frosty depths which now runs so much of the institutions in the US and the West doesn't want to be guilty of the same paranoiac closed mindedness as our parents and grandparents.

We don't want to think that 1.5 billion or so Muslims are all fear-ridden authoritarians ready to answer the call of jihad. We don't want to be seen as the moral and intellectual cripples that years ago we saw the older generation, "the establishment" to have been. We want ever so much to think as does Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in an article out in today's Salon www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/06/26/war_of_ideas/index.html? source=newsletter that Muslims are not uniformly wearing black hats. We want to believe that most Muslims reject the fatwas, the bombings, the jihad as much as we do.

The Geek is personally eager to accept the proposition that the vast majority of Muslims are peace loving and peaceful; that those who live among us share our basic values, orientations, hopes and fears. But, his cynical historian's mind wonders, "Is desire enough?"

After all, the Geek recalls, it was Lenin who observed, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them."

Are we selling rope today?