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Let’s Leave Islamic Theology to Actual Muslims
Over the weekend, a British aid worker named David Haines was beheaded by ISIS. British Prime Minister David Cameron was appropriately outraged by the murder. Slightly less appropriate was his decision to use the incident as an excuse to play mufti for a day. From Cameron’s remarks reacting to the Haines’ beheading:
“The fact that an aid worker was taken, held and brutally murdered at the hands of ISIL [ISIS] sums up what this organization stands for,” Cameron said in an address to the British people. “They boast of their brutality; they claim to do this in the name of Islam. That is nonsense. Islam is a religion of peace. They are not Muslims, they are monsters.”
That last sentence, with its suggestion of mutual exclusivity, is perhaps the most telling of all: whatever is Muslim can’t be monstrous. Whatever is monstrous can’t be Muslim.
This echoes President Obama, who, in his speech to the nation last week pronounced:
ISIL is not “Islamic.” No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.
“No religion condones the killing of innocents?” This is the great Empirical President, right? (And, by the way, this is not an exclusively liberal phenomenon. Rand Paul echoed the Presidents’ sentiments and George W. Bush was also fond of the “religion of peace” formulation).
All of these public figures are playing fast and loose at the intersection of “is” and “ought.” Their interpretation of Islam is that any version of it that veers into violence is necessarily heretical. That’s fair enough (though not by any means self-evidently true), although one suspects that it’s a conviction born out of a need to fit Islam into a multicultural groove rather than out of any real engagement with the faith’s intellectual tradition.
It’s also superfluous. Whether Islam as practiced by ISIS conforms to the faith’s metaphysical essence is a question for theologians. For Western statesmen, all that’s relevant is that the bloodthirsty, imperialist version of Islam practiced by ISIS is accepted by a critical mass of self-identified Muslims who see it as a license for murder on a scale limited only by imagination and resources.
I suppose the point of these rhetorical exercises is to attempt to delegitimize the radicals. But whom are we trying to convince? The extremists themselves? They couldn’t care less about our opinions. Moderate Muslims? Do we think there’s a contingent out there who were still on the fence after the beheadings but were nudged over to the side of reason by the religious expertise of Barack Obama and David Cameron? Are we trying to convince our own citizens? Is the assumption that they’re too dim to recognize that not all Muslims are barbarians without putting it in bold print?
I don’t recall Franklin Roosevelt feeling the need to say that Nazis weren’t true socialists. This is a moment for Western resolve, not for after-school specials. Let the Islamic world sort out its own theological disputes. For those nations in ISIS’s crosshairs, the focus needs to be on defeating them, not on working out where they fit in their faith’s taxonomy.
Published in General
And where (not whee) did the edit function go?
I’ve been having nightmares for months now about Islam and the hold Muslims seem to be gaining on our society. Thanks, Dave, that last sentence will ensure I will not sleep too well tonight! :)
I know, Mis! I have a concern about that.
All religions are in some times and places violent. Islam today is particularly so in many places. It is simply blanket jackassery to say “no religion condones the killing of innocents” unless you exclude from the category of “innocents” anyone who doesn’t share the faith.
Yes. It makes no sense to talk about what is the true form of something when someone doesn’t believe it is true in the first place. As a non-Muslim, I see all versions of Islam as equally untrue. I makes as much sense to talk about who the true Batman is. You might prefer the Adam West Batman or you might prefer the Christian Bale Batman, but both are equally fictional.
If I believed there was a true form of Islam, I’d be morally obliged to join it, wouldn’t I?
I understand the Moslems deem the “holy Koran” to be literally true. So, we should take it as they must: that is, as a clear and unambiguous directive to propagate their faith through war and conquest. That, after all, is the actual history of the religion and its adherents, except for the periods when its agents and agencies have been beaten down and brought to heel.
Obviously there are individuals and groups who profess to be Moslems but who do not, as a day-to-day matter, follow the directives of the Koran to advance the religion through force of arms. But if they are not violent people they are so for reasons divorced from their faith. Islam is NOT a “religion of peace” and calling it that is nonsense. Nobody but those willing to deceive themselves can think that it is.
We are, in their terms, the “House of War” and I think that we ought to accept that and respond accordingly. And, we ought not let another adherent into the country.
I have it on good authority that the Klingons are peaceful beings…
I don’t think this is right. A religion is/becomes, in the world, what its adherents make of it by their words and deeds. “It is our choices, Harry, that show us what we truly are, not our abilities.” Islam has a billion adherents, who express a multitude of different “true Islams” in their individual lives — true to each of those individual adherents, in any event. That multitude doesn’t demonstrate a unity of the faith called Islam. To the contrary, it demonstrates the diversity of the beliefs and practices that adherents call Islam. Yes, an ancient holy book with a central place in the history and theology of the faith carries some weight, but to rely only on it, and condemn the entire faith because of its worst passages, while excluding of the vast contemporary evidence of a vast and varied culture is reductive and blind.
Fwiw, from wiki:
Also – Cameron is rallying the troops. Since these include British Muslims and hopefully alliances with Muslim majority countries in the region he absolutely said the right thing.
The alternative would be the equivalent of seeking alliances in Latin America while mounting a spirited criticism of the cult of the saints as non-biblical idolatry. Even if that’s what you think, sometimes it’s better not to say it. jmho.
Terrorism and barbarism are not *the* genuine manifestation of Islam. But it is pretty clear that they are *a* genuine manifestation.
Left wing atheists like B H Obama, centre-left Anglicans like David Cameron, and Catholic conservatives like Tony Abbott should not be taken seriously as authorities on the meaning of what is genuinely Islamic. I would be amazed if they were so regarded by any non-trivial proportion of actual muslims. (I would also be somewhat surprised to learn that these western politicians personally believed the assurances they are articulating). The pronouncements of these and other western politicians on what Islam really requires or forbids is solely for domestic political and foreign diplomatic purposes.
CURSE this broken edit function.
I guess it boils down to what is gained and lost by making these statements, but for milquetoast sissy fellas like Barry it’s all political loss or gain, and nothing more. I’m quite confident he doesn’t care about the real-world consequences of his actions, except as they harm or help him politically.
Rationally, stating something that is sort of obviously true is a waste of calories and time. Big deal, not all Muslims want to cut the heads off of people. I knew that. The fact that many, many Muslims actually do cut heads off, and openly profess their desire to cut more heads off, and openly profess their desire to destroy Western culture in its entirety, does matter. It matters a great deal.
So if you have to make a statement about the beheadings, leave Islam out of it. Call these things what they are – murderers, terrorists – and call it a day.
And then call in the Hellfires. If they’re that interested in visiting Allah personally, speed them on their way.
BINGO!
Yeah, you missed part of that quote:
“According to Abu Hanifa, considered to be the originator of the concept, the two requirements for a country to be part of Dar al-Islam are:[3][4]
So the US, for instance, would not be included.
The fact that we still have to pretend that Islam is a religion of peace says it all. I’m surprised more people on the left aren’t getting sick and tired of this line! 9-11, Benghazi, etc etc just weren’t enough, PC thinking still trumps it all.
WC makes a great point: don’t you DARE question a leftist’s religion or values, but it’s fine if they decide about the validity of other peoples’ religion and values as it suits them.
Executions of criminals after a full trial are not the same as executions of minorities or other non-criminal civilians. The problem with ISIS is not that it murders through beheadings (which it generally doesn’t; most are shot), but that it murders.
Because you talk to more non-Muslims. There are plenty of Muslims who have said that Salafists, AQ, and/ or ISIS aren’t Muslims. Much like many Christians debate whether Catholics and Mormons are Christians (and a reasonable number of Ricochetti assert that Orthodox aren’t). I agree that there’s a plurality that would consider ISIS to be Muslims, although relatively few would say that they weren’t heretical Muslims; even Al Qaeda thinks that.
I’m not a fan of Obama taking sides on the debate, but I suspect that he has to; his use of the word Islamic to describe them would argue the other way. Given the choice of supporting those who support us or supporting our enemies, I can forgive him supporting our allies.
Yes, but I wonder what the reason for this common frontier rule was.
Clearly, a desire for Muslims to conquer and found a non-contiguous empire, such that it would look more interesting on a map than a giant splodge.
Seriously, most Iraqis I’d talk to about Islam had never heard of the Dar Al Harb or Dar Al Islam, including some quite serious scholars; they’re a big deal to many of the jihadis, but you won’t find them in the Koran or Hadith. Of those who do use the concepts, most drop the requirement for a common frontier and many make extensive use of the Dar Al-‘Ahd (that portion of the world that is not Muslim but that has treaties with parts of the world that are; today, obviously, this is essentially the entire non-Muslim world). I’ve read a fair number of definitions by various scholars, medieval and modern, and I’ve never seen the common frontier requirement appear outside Abu Hanifa’s formulation.
They are pretty useful explanatory concepts, though, synthesizing other doctrines that are found in the Koran, and particularly in the Hadith (in particular, Mohammad not attacking places where the call to prayer was issued, which would include the US).
When one looks at the actual practice of Muslims through history, though, they don’t behave terribly differently to Christians in this regard. When Christians fight Christians in the face of a non-Christian foe, rhetoric of Christian brotherhood is often used to encourage unity and alliance. This rhetoric is often somewhat effective; alliances are moderately often formed on this basis, but is not so effective that there is a radical difference between the way that Christian countries have treated Muslim and Christian neighbors. Islam is similar; even during the Crusades, which were more self consciously sectarian than most wars, you find Muslims allying with Christians to fight Muslims allied with Christians. Like the Christian verses telling us not to have fellowship with the sexually immoral, it’s easy to make too much of the theory and if you believe that modern Christians will mostly refuse to eat with remarried people, or single non-celibates, you’ll not have an accurate sense of the typical office cafe.