Posted on 03/15/2006 2:02:56 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
Is Islam compatible with a free society?
This is the key strategic question of our day.
In October, William Buckley wrote:
The moment has not come, but it is around the corner, when non-Muslims will reasonably demand to have evidence that the Muslim faith can operate within boundaries in which Christians and Jews (and many non-believers) live and work without unconstitutional distraction.
[h-t to a Belmont Club commenter]
Buckley is correct that this is a question demanding an answer, but he misjudges the timing of its asking and answering. The truth is that assumed answers to this question have been fundamental in developing our strategies in the war on terror, and that we have yet to answer it definitively.
Is Islam compatible with a free society? A 'yes' answer offers a far different set of strategic imperatives than a 'no' answer.
In his book The Universal Hunger for Liberty, Michael Novak notes the tone of discourse in the beginning of our war:
"Surely," the proposition was put forward, by many Islamic voices as well as by the president, "a modern and faithful Islam is consistent with nonrepressive, open, economically vital societies."
To say yes to our question, one assumes that there are aspects of being Muslim and faithful to Islam, that can coexist peacefully with liberty, tolerance, and equality. The strategy that follows is one of identifying the groups and sects within Islam that adhere to these notions of their religion, and then encouraging them, favoring them, propagating them, and splitting them off from the elements of Islamic practice that are all too incompatible with the portions of modernity that invigorate men's souls: free inquiry, free association, free commerce, free worship, or even the freedom to be left alone.
To answer no, one states that Islam itself is fundamentally irreconcilable with freedom. This leads to a wholly different set of tactical moves to isolate free societies from Islam. They might include:
-detention of Muslims, or an abrogation of certain of their rights;
-forced deportation of Muslims from free societies;
-rather than transformative invasions, punitive expeditions and punitive strikes;
-extreme racial profiling;
-limits on the practice and study of Islam in its entirety
And even some extreme measures if free societies find the above moves to be failing:
-forced conversion from Islam, or renunciation;
-colonization;
-extermination of Muslims wherever they are found.
These last are especially ghastly measures. But a society that thought Islam incompatible with freedom might in the long term slip towards them.
Since 9/11, the assumption of our government has been that Islam can be compatible with freedom. The Bush administration has been exploiting all manner of divides within the Muslim world, not to conquer it, but to transform it such that a type of Islam compatible with freedom -- and therefore the West and the US, the wellspring and birthplace of modern individual liberty -- will come to the front at the expense of a type of Islam that is irreconcilable. Every institution of government answers our key question with a resounding yes. The Pentagon, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, makes a distinction between "bin Ladenism" and moderate Muslims, our would-be allies. Bush makes speeches in praise of freedom in general and especially in the Muslim world. The defense establishment is addressing what it calls a 'war of ideas':
The U.S. government is also focusing more attention on the intangible but vital dimension of the "war of ideas" between radical Islam and moderate Western and Islamic thought. The Pentagon's September 2004 National Defense Strategy stressed the need to counter ideological support for terrorism to secure permanent gains in the war against terrorism.
It stated the importance of negating the image of a U.S. war against Islam, and instead, developing the image of a civil war within Islam, fought between moderate states and radical terrorists. This kind of imagery will feed into the broader debate beginning in the U.S. on how to win such a war of ideas and how to cultivate moderate democratic Islamic states.
A yes answer to the question requires Red State Christians in the US to tolerate an Islam that tolerates them. A no answer to the question requires an abandonment of belief in the universality of ideas originating in the west, because it becomes clear that a large portion of humanity -- a fifth perhaps -- follows an incompatible religion. A yes answer forces one to attack totalitarian elements within Islam. A no answer forces a clash of civilizations, a Great Islamic War, as it assumes that all Islam is totalitarian.
A yes answer might lead to the establishment of something like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as discussed in a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
The idea of the congress, however, grew out of a feeling among independent intellectuals on the non-Communist left, as well as American officials, that the West after World War II faced a huge Soviet commitment to propagandizing and imposing Communism, and might lose the battle for European minds to Stalinism.
So the congress — established at a 1950 Berlin meeting at which the writer Arthur Koestler declared to a crowd of 15,000, "Friends, freedom has seized the offensive!" — launched magazines, held conferences, mounted exhibitions, and generally sought to expose Stalinist falsehoods from its liberal position. At its height, according to Coleman, the CCF "had offices or representatives in 35 countries, employing a total of 280 staff members."
One principle of the CCF's founding document was, "Freedom is based on the toleration of divergent opinions. The principle of toleration does not logically permit the practice of intolerance."
A no answer might disparage the notion that Westerners can say anything of import to those practicing Islam. I'm not sure if Bruce Thornton would answer no to the key question, but he doesn't seem to like the idea of Westerners trying to convince Muslims of anything new about their religion:
If, then, you are in possession of this truth that you are absolutely certain holds the key to universal happiness in this world and the next, why would you be tolerant of alternatives? Why should you tolerate a dangerous lie? Why should you “live and let live,” the credo of the spiritually moribund who stand for everything because they stand for nothing? And why wouldn’t you kill in the name of this vision, when the infidel nations work against God’s will and his beneficent intentions for the human race?
This is precisely what the jihadists tell us, what fourteen centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence tell us, what the Koran and Hadith tell us. Yet we smug Westerners, so certain of our own superior knowledge that human life is really about genes or neuroses or politics or nutrition, condescendingly look down on the true believer. Patronizing him like a child, we tell him that he doesn’t know that his own faith has been “hijacked” by “fundamentalists” who manipulate his ignorance, that what he thinks he knows about his faith is a delusion, and that the true explanation is one that we advanced, sophisticated Westerners understand while the believer remains mired in superstition and neurotic fantasy.
A yes answer to our question might force us to reexamine the religious roots of our own conceptions of freedom, in order to figure best a way to help Muslims look for such roots in their faith. This might resemble the efforts of David Gelernter in his recent Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, "A Religious Idea Called 'America'"
The most important story in and for American history is the biblical Exodus; the verse “let my people go” became the subtext of the Puritan emigration to America in the seventeenth century, the American revolution in the eighteenth, and--in significant part by Lincoln’s own efforts--of the Civil War in the nineteenth. It became important, also, to the twentieth century Americanism of Wilson and Truman and Reagan and W. Bush--Americanism as an outward-looking religion with global responsibilities.
In the end we do need to know the real character of Americanism. The secular version is a flat, gray rendition--no color and no fizz--of this extraordinary work of religious imagination: the idea that liberty, equality, and democracy belong to all mankind because God wants them to.
A yes answer might say that if God gave Biblical antecedents for the freedom of all mankind, He might have put some in the Koran as well . . . A yes answer would try to figure how to play our own religion-based beliefs into a conversation with Islam, as Henry Jaffa seems to argue in the Claremont Review:
We [are], in short, engaged in telling others to accept the forms of our own political institutions, without reference to the principles or convictions that give rise to those institutions.
Unless we as a political community can by reasoned discourse re-establish in our own minds the authority of the constitutionalism of the Founding Fathers and of Lincoln, of government devoted to securing the God-given equal rights of every individual human being, we will remain ill equipped to bring the fruits of freedom to others.
A no answer, on the other hand, might first start with Islam as anathema to free society, then move to other religious creeds, seeing them through a lens of general suspicion.
Is Islam compatible with a free society? Like a Zen koan, this is the question that vexes us.
Our answer of course, might change. The Bush administration has been answering yes for five years. But, inhabiting a democracy, it is of course reflective of and responsive to public sentiment. Several commentators believe that sentiment may be shifting. A piece by Jim Geraghty on his National Review blog wonders if Americans' answer to the key question is changing:
This strikes me as the fallout of the Tipping Point™ - my sense that in recent weeks, a large chunk of Americans just decided that they no longer have any faith in the good sense or non-hostile nature of the Muslim world. If subsequent polls find similar results, the port deal is dead.
Perhaps the people's answer to the question is changing.
And what to make of the Manifesto from a dozen European intellectuals, Muslims or former Muslims many of them? How are they answering the key strategic question?
It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats . . .
Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others.
In Glenn Reynolds' podcast interview with Claire Berlinkski, author of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis is America's Too, she relates this story:
Reynolds: You have this wonderful scene in your book where you talk about this, this Englishman of Bengali descent, and he said that when he traveled to the United States, he saw all these immigrants who were US citizens being welcomed by the INS and told, "Welcome home!" And he said, you know, if I ever got that kind of treatment you know when I returned to England, I'd happily lay down my life for England right there . . .
Berlinski: I would have died for England on the spot, that's what he told me. If ever once, someone had said "welcome home" when I showed them my passport at customs and immigration, I would have died for England on the spot.
In a dissenting statement to the above-mentioned manifesto, Paul Belien in Brussels Journal quotes Dr. Jos Verhulst:
And now he stands at the dawn of the 21st century: the maligned individual, unsteady on his own feet after executing the inner breach with every form of imposed authority, uncertain, blinking in the brightness of the only god he is willing to recognise – Truth itself, stretching out before him unfathomably deep – full of doubt but aware that he, called to non-submission, must seek the road to the transcendent, carrying as his only property, his most valuable heirloom from his turbulent past, that one gold piece that means the utmost to him, his precious ideal of complete freedom of thought, of speech and of scientific inquiry. That is the unique advance that he received to help him in his long and difficult quest.
Meanwhile he is being beleaguered and threatened on all sides; from out of the darkness voices call him to submit and retreat; they shout that the gold in his hands is worthless, while the brightness ahead of him still makes it almost impossible for him to see what lies in store. In short: what this contemporary individual needs most of all is courage, great courage. And the will to be free and to see, which is tantamount to the will to live.
When I was in Iraq, one Iraqi told me he wished Iraq could be the 51st state in the union. Our experience in both Iraq and Afghanistan seems to indicate that there are many Muslims who would prefer that we answer the key question with a yes, saying to those Muslims who can find Islam compatible with freedom, "Have courage!" and once they've achieved their freedom, "Welcome home!"
To what fate are we assigning them if we answer no?
What force structure would that look like?
'Good Question' PING
Moreover, the disturbing answer is CLEARLY found in the Koran.
Cannoneer No. 4 is doing his/her best to convince us Islam, aka the "Religion of Peace," (ahem, parroting that other famous statesman) actually IS, while morphing all Muslims into political martyrs and and doe-eyed innocents EVER SINCE THE PORT UAE DEAL WAS SQUELCHED.
Barf.
I sure hate it for ya.
We will be in Iraq for a long time, but not at the troop strength we are now.
Depending on where you get your news, Phase IV is finally going right. Maybe some Americans paid attention to Brigadier Alwyn-Foster.
All these genocide advocates think their safety is worth putting making good soldiers SS-Oberschützen.
Interesting read, thank you.
You're welcome.
I must be doing good work. People feel the need to lie about me.
Thanks for the motivation. I was getting tired of the subject.
The religion itself with the false prophet himself as it's spiritual leader IS the problem!
What do we think about a man who has his detractors killed and then "mercifully" FORGIVES the killers?
Personally I choose Jesus. WAY better prophet and role model. I believe He would call out the sins of the REAL infidels..and yes they would kill him again.
Indeed. EXCELLENT work. Congratulations. /sarc
I didn't say it wasn't, what I said was that Phase IV was going to be the hardest and the longest part.
Also we still have a long journey ahead of us.
The reason we are starting to see some success i.e tribal groups turning against the foreign terrorists is because we concentrated on winning there hearts and minds while the terrorists were only interested in causing destruction and mayhem.
You aim, too, please. Pilgrims with short muskets should stand closer to the target.
All we do is repeat what any Saudi imam would say.
Any Muslim imam anywhere would tell you that the jihadis are saints and martyrs fighting the 'crusaders and zionists'. Muslim history has these repeating patterns of 'back to the desert' purists. The Almohads, the Almoravids, the Wahhabis, the Senussi, etc.
To believe in 'moderate Islam' for no higher reason than greed is the purest wishful thinking.
My solution: 1.) As a People, a Nation and as a government policy, crack down on Muslims and stop making excuses for their incredibly bad behavior. A religion that preaches violence is not a religion, rather it is a cult and we should not be ashamed to confront its evil nature.
2.) Stop welcoming them to our universities and giving them a platform to spread more hate.
3.) Act as a nation at war, which we are. Not believing our enemies' sworn promise to destroy us makes us too vulnerable. We have a right and a duty to protect ourselves. Instead, we invite the enemy into our midst and attempt to show them how tolerant we are. Bad tactic.
4.) Make a distinction between U.S. Citizens and those who are here illegally and stop subsidizing their crime, and their drain on the system.
5.)Stop telegraphing our every move to defend ourselves, and really do it by tightening our borders, especially our immigration weaknesses.
6.) When someone commits a crime (such as running over students) make the punisnment swift and furious and don't photograph their smirking face and give them a platform to preach their insidious hate!
7.) Congress needs to be called to account for the way they behave.They are too busy crabbing among each other, peeing away our treasure on selfish pork projects attached to other legislation, they pay little attention to our defense on all levels. Each piece of legislation should cover only one subject, NO amendments about other items. (The Line Item Veto will NEVER pass because neither party can stand the thought of a President vetoing some silly selfish amendment they wish to cram up his butt!) The great two party system whom so many love is the biggest reason nothing gets done in Washington. It's adversarial rather than cooperative and most legislation is screwed up due to the egos of the legislators rather than what's right for the Nation.
It's hard to believe that less than five hundred and fifty people that "we've elected" can screw things up so horribly for the many millions of us who call this wonderful country HOME! We go dutifully to the polls each year and pretend we're in control. Sad!
Even knowing how wimpy we've become as a citizens, I think our Founding Fathers would be appalled at our willingness to endure such poor "leadership". The system is simply not responsive to the citizens any longer. (If one believes the "polls" maybe that's a good thing.)
I cringe at the notion that we might return the House and Senate to Democrat control just to experience a change from what we've got now. The guarantee they promise is that they have no better solutions nor the courage to effect reasonable or meaningful change.
8.) Don't know how to stop it but the screaming march to Globalism by the rich and powerful who control our money supply has caused us to embrace too many backward nations and ideologies that are not spiritually evolved enough to join with us. We may want their bodies and their labor and their potential purchasing power, but their problems and weird beliefs come along with that package. Too expensive!! Too idealistic!! We can't afford to partner up with everyone. We too easily have lost big chunks of our National Identity. Globalists hate Nationalism. I prefer call it National Pride and too much innocent young blood was shed for it to be bartered away so easily by rich, powerful people who "know best"
It's a nice fuzzy thought that if we are all tied to each other economically, that we will all learn to "get along". Ain't gonna happen. Can't be forced. People can seem to get along, but governments do a really crappy job for some reason.
(/Disjointed Rant, /Cynicism, /Frustration)
There are plenty of unfree countries that are helping us with the War on Islamofacism, and plenty of free ones that aren't. France anyone?
Strategy and freedom are orthogonal.
Excellent point.
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