© 2009, UrbisMedia
When it comes to religions I always try to be ecumenical—I have contempt for them all, though probably not equally. I find myself being more contemptuous of some, and a little more forgiving of others. But all religions are about believing in things that cannot be sensed or known, so they all deserve to snickered at for their epistemological silliness.
But it cannot be left at that, because religions are not just about believing in the unknowable, they are also about people extrapolating from those spiritual beliefs and screwing up the secular world. And that takes me from passive contempt to rather nasty crusading mode.
I feel differently about taking on the delusions and dogmas of Christian denominations. I was “brought up” (indoctrinated) Roman Catholic. [1] That sort of gives me license to bitch because I have paid enough dues to that organization. So they are sort like “family,” make that “dysfunctional family.”
“The Chosen Ones,” the Jews, are indeed a special case because they choose to be with themselves. The non-evangelism of the Jews is perhaps their greatest blessing (after bagels and pastrami on rye with Russian dressing). One can almost forgive those side curls and silly hats of the Hasids; nobody is going to want to convert if you have to wear those outfits. [2]But I am straying from the faith of the moment—those pesky followers of the Prophet.
It should be said that, in addition to sharing Semitic origins, the Muslims suffer from a similar ethno-religious conflation as do the Jews. Most, but not all, Jews are also of the Judaic faith; and most, but not all, Arabs are Muslims. But Muslims have made it more complicated; many Persians, Indonesians, Malaysians, Pakistanis and other are also Muslims. These days, one finds people using Arab and Muslim interchangeably. This conflation is one of the things that makes how one feels about Muslims rather tricky. We’ve gone from Arab terrorist, to Muslim terrorist, to Islamo-Fascist terrorist. And so, because the extremists are the ones who get the most attention, we tend to associate Islam with terrorism.
This bothers a lot of moderate Muslims, but it also bothers non-Muslims that there does not seem to be a Muslim-Moderate movement of any audibility, visibility or consequence. We hear of moderate Muslims deploring terrorism, but maybe they are terrorized into not doing much about it. Iraq should be proof enough that there is a more Muslim on Muslim violence than any other kind. Other faiths have their counterparts in this regard, but the Muslims seem like a special case.
The reason that this seems to be the context in which we view Muslims owes something to their bad sense of timing. They come into our political consciousness when the West needs a new bête noire, a new rationale for pumping up those defense appropriations, a new basis for American right-wing politicians to operate the politics of fear. The damn Russians went and declared peace on us, and the Chinese decided to conquer is by owning us. [3] For many in the West (and this certainly includes George Bush) their first consciousness of Islam comes from contemporary events.
There was, of course, that great age of Arab/Muslim culture, when medicine, architecture, poetry and scientific instruments like the astrolabe, were products of a civilization at the time when Europeans were living like barbarians in their “Dark Age.” From the 8th through the 12th centuries, when the people, sometimes called the “Moors,” occupied much of Spain, then called Andalusia, there was considerable harmony among Muslims, Christians and Jews, as long as the area remained under the hegemony of the Muslims. Not that there weren’t wars, even among the Muslims. There were plenty, but there was unprecedented religious tolerance as well, especially in cities like Toledo, Seville and Cordoba. The arts flourished, especially architecture, and the Arabesque style produced magnificent Alhambra. The Great Mosque of Cordoba, and the magnificent gardens. Arab doctors were the leaders in medicine. The Arabs even invented the zero in mathematics, so they have a strong case for claiming that they helped invent the computer, or half of it. After all, what is a computer but just a language built of zeros and ones, right? Muslims could claim that they are owed a royalty—50%–for their half of every operating system or application ever created. That’s zillions of dollars! I think that the Christians better get at it and claim that they invented the 1; unless the Jews already have beat them to it. But I stray again.
These days it is not uncommon to hear people (those who know of this istory) say “what happened?” How did this great civilization implode into 19 terrorists on airplanes, Osama, and the Taliban? Well, a lot of history, and not all of it fair to the Muslims, has happened. After the Spanish Reconquista, when Ferdinand and Isabella chucked them out of Spain in 1492, things seemed to go downhill for the Muslims in Western Europe. If you don’t think that Christians were the meanies at this time, try Googling Spanish Inquisition. A lot of the exiles ended up over in the Ottoman Empire, centered in Istanbul since 1453, but that empire, though rather long, derived and built upon a lot of the Persian and Roman civilizations. But there, too, there was some tolerance for the “people of the Book,” and the Ottomans can be credited with bringing coffee to Europe thanks to their failed siege of Vienna. That empire came to an end in 1922 [4] and the West, primarily the British, played Monopoly with the entire Middle East. [5]The Muslim states of the Middle East have felt aggrieved, threatened and disappointed since and, with wretched and autocratic governments, they have fallen back on their faith with a zealotry and paranoia. All their other social institutions are weak, and subordinate to Islam.
It is said that he first casualty of War is Truth. It might be that the first casualty of Terror is Tolerance. And probably nothing is more necessary for reasonably peaceful coexistence of different religions than Tolerance. Even without Terror tolerance of another man’s religion seems to have been a large order for most of human history. Sometimes the debates are over the purely imaginary dimensions of religions—what your god is called, Allah, Yaweh, Jesus, Shiva—of the imaginary characteristics of this or that particular deity.
But, alas, the silliness only begins there. Religious authorities are not content to leave it at that. No, they need sin and sacraments, circumcisions and infibulations, sacrifice, do’s and don’ts, halal and haraam. They need rules and regulations, relics, prayer shawls and rugs, churches, synagogues and mosques, their holy books, and a host of dogmatic and liturgical gadgets, gizmos ans gimmicks that bring the authorities, the putative holier than thou, their power, sex and money. And the Muslims, in these times, have some of the worst religious authority.
The danger is when someone so believes in their religion that their present life is entirely governed by their concern for their imaginary afterlife, when the achievement of that end governs— and justifies —all their actions. Such is person is not necessarily, but certainly potentially—given whatever slight or threat, real or imagined—for whom the slitting of throats, ethnic cleansing, purges, crusades and jihads are, in the defense of their faith and the holy cause of their afterlife, right and just. They have become, as I have written elsewhere,theopathic . [6] All, perhaps any, have this potency, and the Muslims happen to be, in these times, the worst of a bad lot.
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 8.30.2007)
[1] I got a good laugh from a Protestant Christian woman I saw on television not long ago I remember her saying that “Catholics are not Christians.” This from an idiot who has not taken her nose out of her King James version long enough to learn there was a Protestant Reformation in the early16 th C. Were it not for the fact that the Roman Catholic Church existed for a millennium and a half before martin Luther nailed his theses on the Cathedral at Wittenburg without she wouldn’t even have her own version of the Christian religion. I cannot abide such ignorance.
[2] There have, however, been converts, most famously Elizabeth Taylor and Sammy Davis, Jr. I have an image of Sammy, wearing his tallis and shuckling in his tap shoes at the Western Wall. And Liz would make one heck of yenta ; she’s been married what, eight times, already?
I count several Sons of Abraham among my longest, closest and dearest friends, despite the fact that they have not given me access to the international media and financial empires that they control. I have always especially treasured their sense of humor. One of them, now departed, was like a brother to me, as well as a great inspiration. He wasn’t religious, but loved joking about religion. He would tell great Pope jokes; the whole idea of the Pope seemed as ridiculous to him as it did to me. When he would tell one I would feign being insulted and bring up some stupid myth about the Jews. Christians use to spread the vicious rumor that Jews used to eat Christian babies. So I would say to him when we were ordering lunch “So how would you like your Christian baby today, sir, medium, or medium rare?” We always made fun of the silly aspects of all religions and save the serious criticisms for our own. The Jews have been through 2000 years of persecution and the Christians, Muslims, and Mel Gibson aren’t through with them yet. Their faith will get no more than good-natured ribbing from me, and I welcome any in return. [See, also, Archives 4.7 . . . and they shall be led into the land of the corn, and 15.4, The Passion of the Mel].
[3] There is a whole alternate theory that the problem with the Muslims is that they are blessed with oil, and we couldn’t care at all about them if they weren’t sitting on top of it.
[4] Kemal Ataturk created a secular government, if not society, out of Turkey (they also chucked out those Orthodox Christian Greeks), but that system seems to be in peril these days.
[5] WWII had proved that you can’t run a modern war without oil.
[6] Cf, DCJ Archives, 10. 2: The Theopaths 7.15.2004