Pastor Pyro And The Afghans--A Story That Refuses To Die

Perhaps it is the sheer disproportion between stimulus and response.  Perhaps it is the wanton barbarity of the Afghan slaughter of UN personnel.  Perhaps it is due to the utter inability of Americans and Westerners generally to wrap their minds around a mentality which urges murder in response to a perceived insult.  And, perhaps it is caused by a general inability to recognize how irrelevant the concept of free will is when discussing the willingness of Muslims in Afghanistan or anywhere to resort to violence when confronted with a word, a deed, a policy that somehow in someway offends some sensibility or another.

In any event the story of Pastor Jones, the cremated Koran, and the Afghans refuses to die.  Even today, several news cycles after the all-but-ignored provocation and the widely reported Afghan response, the story lives on.  Throughout most of the coverage--from Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch to the MSM both here and in Europe--the question of free will has played a leading role.  Typically the observer/commentator has taken the position that the Afghans who stormed the UN compound and killed seven were not automatons, not agents remotely controlled, but rather actors possessed of free will who determined their own actions and could be held "accountable" for the murders they committed.

This American/Western perspective is fully expectable.  Free will is so deeply embedded in Western thought, so much the warp and woof of Western history, that is quite literally inconceivable that others in other cultures, coming from other religious and ethical traditions, might see life differently.  Similarly, it is difficult if not totally impossible for Westerners today to conceive of life in which rights do not predominate or where rights do not bring specific duties in their wake.  The notion that life consists of duties alone without rights serving as the predicate is foreign to Western understandings.

We have to all get a grip on a simple and quite basic truth: The Islam of the Koran and the other sacred writings as well as the classic works of Islamic law prescribe a life of duties, a life in which rights and free will are both notable in their absence.

In principle, the Islam of the sacred and traditional writings of the religion as well as in more recent, even contemporary interpretations, describes a belief system comprised of duties in which the highest aspiration of the individual believer is a perfect submission to the will of the deity.  Of course, the will of the deity is interpreted by clerics, men specifically trained in the fine art of teasing specific duties in specific situations from the writings of the past.  Islamic law in essence is a description of all the myriad duties imposed upon the believer by the will of the deity to whom is owed perfect obedience and total submission.

The entire panoply of rights which is central to Western law, Western government, Western norms, values, traditions, history, and aspirations is absent.  Free will is extant only as a faded, residual memory of earlier prophetic traditions which came long before the revelations given to the Prophet.

In practice, the interpretations offered by many clerics, particularly those of the Salifist and Wahhibist streams, limits free will and rights to the sole choice of accepting or rejecting submission to the will of the deity.  Once the decision to submit has been made, nothing remains except duty.

The clerics of the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif argued that the actions of the incendiary pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center were blasphemous.  The penalty for blasphemy is death.  The death of any infidel would be sufficient or at least such was the collective impression of the mob.

The actions in that remote Afghan town were not unique.  Rather they were commonplace.  Time after literally bloody time, one cleric or another has defined the words or deeds of some person somewhere as blasphemy. The mob has understood this as a call to duty, a command to do the will of the deity.  When duty calls, the believer must respond accordingly--or risk the displeasure of the deity.

Given this dynamic there is no place for free will.  To turn one's back on duty is to turn one's back on the deity--and everyone knows what that means, right?

Well, not exactly.  As is the case in all belief systems there exists a gulf between principle and practice.

There is room for free will even in a religion which prohibits it in favor of duty.  The individual Muslim can choose which cleric he listens to.  He chooses which cleric will define the will of the deity and thus duty.  As there is no central authority establishing orthodoxy, this gives clerics a broad swath of acceptable interpretations, of acceptable forms of duty.

In the real world this freedom to choose has given rise to severe competition between differing schools of interpretation.  In short, not all Islam is the same in either the interpretation of the will of the deity or the prescription of duties.

In areas such as Pakistan or Afghanistan where a particularly severe understanding of Islam has taken firm root, the latitude for differing interpretations is narrow.  It is this fact which has made the rise of Salifist and Wahhabist schools so disturbing to the good order of so much of the world.  Insofar as these severe, austere versions of Islam have displaced older, milder, more humane modes such as Sufism, the choices available to believers have shrunk.

As choices have become more and more limited, the demands of duty have become both more raucous and extreme.  Duty, in the estimate of adherents of the severe interpretations, all too often involves killing someone.  Other schools see duty in less lethal if no less demanding ways.  It is, for example, no easier to be a follower of Sufism than Wahhibism, but it is a lot less likely to lead to violence.

When the realities of the environment preclude authentic choices between differing voices of different schools of interpretation, it is fair to characterize the believer as lacking free will.  When a specific, severe understanding of the purported will of the deity and concomitant duty exists unchallenged, the believer has no "right" of dissent, he is caught in a reality of to-hear-is-to-obey.  The believer in this situation is a sort of spiritual automaton.

To the person raised in the totalistic environment offered by the severe interpretations of Islam to shirk the call to duty issued by the cleric is to invite one's immortal soul to enjoy the torments of hell for all eternity.  If that is not sufficient inducement, the believer who turns away from the clerical call invites his own persecution as an apostate, or, equally evil, an apostle of division (fitna) within the community.

In this situation it is ludicrous to impute free will to the person who takes the course of joining the mob, of rioting, of burning, of killing.  The man who responds to duty's call by joining the mob is but one small step removed from the martyrdom seeker.  The difference between the two can be seen in motivation: The man who joins the mob is moved by a fear of persecution and eternity in hell; the martyrdom seeker is after the pleasures of paradise.

The takeaway is simple.  Islam is far less monolithic than often feared.  It has numerous divisions and fractures of interpretation and notions of duty.  While it is fruitless to call for free will, it would be profitable to do whatever can be done from the outside to promote the growth of those understandings of Islam which eschew violence, mob action, martyrdom seeking, and murder.

There is a second, equally simple takeaway.  It is not worthwhile to hector Muslims about the priority of "rights."  It is worthwhile, however, to urge upon the Muslim community the desirability of one specific right--the right to choose, to choose between more or less severe and violent forms of understanding the faith and its requirements.

Not to put too fine a point on matters, in so much as kinder, gentler, more mystical understandings of Islam, such as that of the Sufis, prospers, the harsher, more severe, violent forms such as Wahhibism must lose.  And, that, bucko, is in the collective interests of all, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.