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.

The Nuttiness Race--Terry Jones vs Muslims

The Geek is probably not alone in pining after the good old days of the Cold War.  Sure, it was scary, even very scary on rare occasions such as the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It could even be bloody, the usually well-mannered Cold War did have its moments of heat, usually on the periphery and normally limited in duration.  The US involvement in the Wars of the Vietnamese and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were aberrations, not the norm.

The Cold War was also expensive.  Nuclear weapons and their evermore elaborate delivery systems did not come from the defense department equivalent of the Kindle Store. Nor did the elaborate, manpower extensive "conventional" forces come with a steeply discounted price tag.

Yet, there were a couple of paramount features which serve to distinguish the Cold War from the more recent "clash of civilizations."

First and foremost, the two major belligerents of the Cold War decades were conservative, rational actors.  Even the new kid on the Cold War block, China, was cautious and conservative in its international gambits.  The fact that the champions of both the "Imperialist Camp" and the "Communist Bloc" were cautious and risk averse assured that even the less controllable client states were kept on a short enough leash.  Proxy wars and sponsored pseudo-insurgencies as well as the direct duel between "wars of national liberation" and "counterinsurgency" were kept firmly under the control of the two Great Powers.  Vertical escalation across the nuclear threshold was to be prevented no matter what the short-term cost might be.

Both the Kremlin and the Denizens Inside the Beltway shared the same calculus of rationality.  Neither leadership echelon was even slightly interested in committing suicide.  Thus, no matter how frosty the winds might be, the Soviet Union and the US had a deep coinciding national interest--staying alive.  This coinciding interest provided a firm basis for agreements more or less honored by each side, which served to lower the potential of a globe destroying conflict.  Insults, taunts, and challenges might be hurled with reckless abandon provided only that the missiles stayed safely in their silos.

Conservatism, caution, risk aversion, rationality, a shared common value or two, all were defining and all too often under appreciated features of the Cold War.  Today, those terms cannot be applied with honesty or accuracy to the opponents of the US and other civilized states.  The advocates of violent political Islam as well as their numerous adherents can lay no claim to rationality, to caution, to being averse to risk, to sharing with those in the West an appreciation of life.

This is not to imply that all Westerners, all Americans, are paragons of rationality and the other defining features of the Cold War.  There are plenty of individuals in the US and elsewhere in the West who are quite irrational, given to fits of risky recklessness, and even bereft of a strong desire not to commit suicide.  But, the operative word here is, "individual."

In this context, consider the Reverend Terry Jones of the microscopic but grandly named Dove World Outreach Center in Florida.  The Reverend having backed away from last fall's intended "Burn-a-Koran-Day" following personal appeals from Messrs Obama, Gates, and Petraeus, got on with the incendiary job a few days ago.  Following a "trial" in which the defendant Koran was found guilty of being icky-poo, an associate of Jones lit up the accelerant soaked book.  It burned.  Yawn.

The exercise in controlled combustion was by and large ignored by the American media both conventional and new.  Ditto in Europe.  It was as it deserved to be, a non-event.

The Reverend Mr Jones proved his point.  He demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Reverend Mr Jones was a publicity hungry nut job.  That was it.  Nothing more; nothing less.

But as a direct and ever so easily foreseen consequence, Mr Jones' act proved something else: In mass, Muslims, especially Afghan Muslims, can be even greater, far more destructive, far more lethal nut jobs than the Florida pastor.  Lashed on by the sermons of a trio of clerics, a mob of umpteen thousand Afghan men took to the street in a usually calm town of Mazar-i-Sharif and, finding no Americans conveniently at hand, attacked the UN mission compound killing ten.

The national police made some effort to stop the crowd by firing in the air.  But, this was stopped when the commanders on the scene decided the shots only infuriated the mob making the situation worse.  That appreciation was probably accurate.

The lethal rage was accompanied by all the usual signs of Muslim disaffection--cries of "Death to---" and "Down with---."  And, the action in the street was joined by more official acts.  Elected parliamentarians in Afghanistan have demanded that the US government prosecute Mr Jones without delay and with the utmost of severity.  In less time than it takes the average copy of the Koran to burn, mobs assembled in cities far removed from Mazar-i-Sharif making the same denunciations and demands.  From Kandahar to Kabul and finally to Islamabad, the mobs were out in force.  Without exception the "angry young men" (to use a favorite MSM term) called for swift, condign punishment of the "blasphemer."

One angry man after another patiently explained to the assorted Western reporters that the burning of the Koran by Jones constituted an insult to all Muslims which could only be offset by spilling the man's blood.  To the Muslim making the explanation the matter was straight forward, it was a matter of duty.  Specifically the duty every Muslim has to punish any and all insults to his faith, its sacred writings, and its prophet.

Duty.  That is the key word.  It is the word and concept which underpins the deadly outbreak in Mazar-i-Sharif

The notion of duty is powerful in the West.  It is part and parcel of the institutions which define the US.  But, in the West, in the US, duty arises from the rights with which all are endowed.  Rights demand an equivalent duty.  The concept of rights and duties with the first preceding the second is so universal in the West that it even fully penetrated the Soviet Union providing an essential component of the shared values which allowed agreement even in the darkest days of very real global competition.

The Muslims in Mazar-i-Sharif were acting on a concept of universal duty without modification by rights.  The same applies to those Muslims who strap on suicide vests or those who stone women or those who lop off the body parts of purported thieves.  Duty is all in Islam.  All must bow in abject submission to the duties imposed upon them by the divinity which created all.

The focus on duty, the obligation of the Muslim to perform each and every duty with the perfect submission of the ideal slave assures there can be no meaningful discussion of rights between Westerners and Muslims.  There can be no understanding on the part of the Muslim bound up in a universe of universal duties that the Reverend Jones has a right to be a nut job.  That the Reverend has a right to communicate his views regarding the moral worth of the Koran by burning it.  That the US government has neither the right nor the duty to punish Terry Jones for exercising his rights of inflammatory communication.

The advocates of violent political Islam (and its non-violent cousin) as well as their adherents have a calculus of rationality.  It is based on duty, a spacious understanding of duty which places all under extraordinary obligations.  This calculus of rationality is totally antipodal to the Western one which is predicated on rights.

There is no point of coincidence between the Muslim ideal of duty and the Western one of rights.  There can be only conflict.  Not even the realty that Western ideas of rights demand mediation by companion duties alters this dismal intellectual conflict.  There is no capacious concept of rights extant in Islamic societies generally.  Within the social groups most affected by political Islam there is only one right which obtains to any and all people.  That is the right to be a dutiful slave of the deity.

Once an individual has exercised this one "right," there exists only a universe of duties.  Importantly, the duty owed by the submissive slave of the deity is announced not by the deity but by a cleric.  When the cleric states it is the duty of the believer to force the US to prosecute Mr Jones, then it is both lawful and required for the believer to run amok at the utterly innocent UN compound.  When the cleric states it is the duty of the believer to stone an adulteress, the submissive slave of the deity must pick up a rock and throw it with homicidal intent.

The roster of duties is literally without end.  The number of clerics who are willing to tell the crowd where duty resides is almost as limitless.  So, the potential for conflict extends into the future as far as one cares to look.

Unlike the good old days of the Cold War, today's "Clash of Civilizations" is absolute and typically irrational.  The opposition of duty defined as totalistically as is done by some Muslims with the Western concept of individual rights is total and absolute.  As the duties imposed by Islam are those of the slave obedient to the master and the master's driver are without limit, they cannot be inherently limited to the universe of the rational.

So, join with the Geek in yearning for the days of the Cold War--at least the motives and goals of the opponents were rational and understandable.  And, so they could be opposed with consistency and effectiveness.  The good old days?  You betcha!