Are Muslims The Vipers In Our Nest?

Religious beliefs formed the foundation of the United States nearly two centuries before the country came into existence. We (sort of) acknowledge that fact with our continued celebration of Thanksgiving. The original celebrants of Thanksgiving were a group of religiously intolerant fugitives from the "blasphemous" air of Anglican polluted England.

Make no mistake about it. The Puritans saw themselves as the only "real" Christians. In their estimate the Church of England was as un-Christian as the hated Roman Catholic Church. Nor were they any more willing to accept any other "dissenting" groups such as the Quakers or the motley bunch assembled around Roger Williams in the Rhode Island Colony.

The Puritans came to New England to hold themselves "pure" and prepare for a return to the "world" in order to redeem it when God so directed.

So, they drank, fornicated, repented every Sunday and went back to drinking and fornicating with the occasional time out to hunt "witches." A nice Godly crew, right?

Religious intolerance continued well into our collective national history as shown by the anti-Catholic bias that continued through (and beyond) the Nineteenth Century. The Democratic Party was branded as the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" after the Civil War, and the distrust of Catholics continued into the Twentieth Century as seen in the campaigns of Al Smith in 1928 and John Kennedy thirty-two years later.

In recent years the Christian Right has brought back the fires of the Puritan witch hunts in at least metaphorical form with judicial and political litmus tests which subordinate economic and other considerations to an amorphous mass dubbed "values." These "values" whether a position on women's rights to control their reproductive lives, the relations between people of the same (or opposite) sex, or stem cell research have taken pride of place over such matters as the ways in which our tax money might be spent or even the issue of war and peace.

H. Rap Brown once said that violence was as American as apple pie. He might have more accurately averred that religious bigotry and myopia were as American as cherry pie.

Now we have to face the bedrock of religious belief and its perversion in a more concrete and potentially threatening way. We have to take a hard and long look at the position of Muslims in American society.

Muslims currently make up only a small percentage of the American population. However that percentage is bound to grow, perhaps significantly given immigration and the increased number of conversions, particularly among Americans of African ancestry.

Europe has already been faced with the difficulties of an increasing number of Muslims. We must not only observe--and learn, we must also examine how Islamic jurists define the responsibilities of a Muslim living in a non-Muslim country.

For a start, take a look at http://www.meforum.org/article/1761. The author gives a well-balanced synopsis of the state of play regarding the determinations offered by various Islamic clerics/jurists on the relationship between the Muslim and the non-Islamic society in which he lives.

Douglas Farah offers a less-than-positive stance on this article in his post (which is reposted on the Counterterrorism Blog) http://www.douglasfarah.com/article/278/in-some-ways-the-crux-of-the-matter.com. He emphasizes the duty laid upon Muslims to consolidate their position and seek the creation of a global Islamic state.

The creation of a new, presumably global, caliphate is the end goal of Islamism. Various Islamist writers from Qutb to bin Laden have made this clear. Further, whether Islamist or not, the assorted Islamic jurists and clerics have asserted that the corrupt, decadent West will and must accept Islam.

In a similar way, Islamic clerics and jurists of all stripes agree that the first loyalty of a Muslim is to Islam, not the state. This is not a restatement in updated terminology of the old canard held to be true for so long in the US that the first loyalty of a Catholic is to the Pope and not the State. The Islamic community is held to be an alternative to the nation-state, a superior option which can and will be brought into existence thus replacing the Western invention.

Politically articulate and aware Americans would be well-advised to study Islamic formulations regarding the relation of Muslim and state. Each of us must reach a well-founded position on this critical matter. Unless we do so we face two dangers. Each is as bad as the other.

The first is that Muslims who reject our view of separation of religious community and secular state will be able to use the liberties of our Constitution and political system to our ultimate disadvantage.

The other is that we Americans will dip deep into our well of religious bigotry and intolerance to make judgments and take actions which will do us long term harm.

It is a long, hard, and winding road between the idiocy of mindless, uncritical multiculturalism on one side and base bigotry on the other. Finding the road requires judgement based on knowledge. Keeping on it requires a clear awareness of who we are and what we are all about.