The West and Islam
September 14, 2014 at 11:19 pm
(This post was last modified: September 15, 2014 at 12:14 am by StealthySkeptic.)
Original Question
*****
My Reply
I will attempt to give couple of answers to your questions from a Jeffersonian (secular and simultaneously respectful and critical of religions) perspective, as I have read English translations of the Torah, Bible, Quran, Kitab-i-Aqdas, Bhagavad-Gita, etc.
First, in my opinion as a student of history and anthropology, the authoritarianism present in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam came from the need of the group to place unity and security over individual rights, and from the perception that the god (which, in the earliest incarnations of what eventually became Judaism, was one of many gods that existed) that had chosen them could revoke their chosen people status for the transgressions of those who broke the rules, and would punish them along with the outsiders or allow their enemies to rule over them. Thus the strict laws of the Torah, the myth of Jesus the demi-god whose scapegoat sacrifice mystically washed away the sins of the world, and the sharia laws, which were, again, all about protecting the whole by the classic means of carrot and stick. You can also see this, for instance, in Chinese legalism and Confucianism, so the idea of unity at all costs was not strictly an Abrahamic idea. When it came to Islam, though, even its respect for Jews and Christians came with a catch that they were forced to pay a tax and that Islam had to be the state religion
Then along came, very slowly, the idea that the individual had important rights too. The earliest I can trace this off the top of my head (i.e. without doing hours and hours of research to refresh my memory) is the Magna Carta. This came about as a result of King John losing a war with his nobles in 1215 and is widely credited as the origin of the very notion of constitutional (as in properly codified and supreme) law, as well as the idea that government should only operate with the consent of the governed. Sure, it only protected the rights of the nobles, but it was a start.
And through several events over the next five centuries (including the English Civil War, where the monarchy was toppled for a brief period of time), the power of the kingship eroded. Not only that but the Catholic Church's power over England (and much of Europe) was broken due to the Protestant Reformation and King Henry VIII's declaration of the Church of England. At the same time, the entire Middle East was controlled by empires. The most prominent of these (since it claimed the caliphate and controlled Mecca) was the Ottoman Empire, which had the military might and the religious authority to reign unchallenged by its own subjects for the most part, so a similar movement for individual liberty didn't really come about for a long time.
Then along comes John Locke, who (along with other thinkers like Thomas Hobbes) in 1704 really solidifies the social contract theory by proposing, in Two Treatises of Government, that people at large (or at least, white, property-owning, free men, but that's a whole can of worms for another day) created societies for security and in return gave a little bit (but not ALL) liberty to the government and society. The one important liberty they did not give up was the ability to change the government by force if it became too tyrannical. This was going on just as Greco-Roman political thought was really being studied again (the Renaissance had more focused on their art) and all of this, as you can quite imagine, heavily influenced the Founders' thinking on American liberty. (Which started out, ironically enough, as the colonies petitioning for the rights of ENGLISH people to be represented.)
The Middle East, meanwhile, is still authoritarian, although after the failed siege of Vienna in 1683 the power of the Ottomans was waning over Europe and the Mediterranean.
When the American Revolution happened, the Declaration of Independence, Saratoga, the Constitution, all that good stuff, that was the beginning of the end for authoritarianism in the West. So that's where you get the idea planted into many people's minds that anything that even smelled of authoritarianism was bad. And as you so correctly point out, Jefferson, while he was probably a deist and did not agree with Islam, respected all religions along with the other Founders. Sure, Islam was (and still is in many respects) an authoritarian system, but Jefferson once said, "It does me no injury if my neighbor has no gods or twenty." This allowed for radical, for their time, statements such as this from the Treaty of Tripoli that ended the Barbary Wars:
"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
He also pushed, along with the Anti-Federalists (in one of the many, many examples for how aggressive, partisan political action, while initially seeming hurtful and divisive for the sake of being divisive, has made the world a better place), to codify freedom of expression, and particularly of religious expression, in a Bill of Rights so that people wouldn't become exactly what they hated (authoritarians) by persecuting religious minorities for applying strict religious laws to their own members.
Meanwhile, although the Ottoman Empire temporarily lost power over Egypt to Napoleon and was quickly becoming the "sick man of Europe," it and other Islamic states still imposed absolute sharia-based laws on the Middle East. No discussions of democracy, virtually no Bill of Rights, nothing.
You're starting to see the pattern here, I hope?
It's not that Abrahamic religions in general always HAVE to be fundamentalist and authoritarian. However, they have been interpreted that way for a long time, and it was only when organized religious and governmental power began to give way to republican thought through revolutionary wars, the Enlightenment thinkers, and the American Revolution that Christianity and Judaism softened up (some would say watered down) in order to survive in a gradually multicultural West.
Sidenote- due to the evangelical movement, you can see a snippet of Christianity's former characteristics which mirror the thinking of the worst of sharia. Although Christians both used their faith to inspire abolitionism and support slavery, the fundamentalist (even dominionist) way of thinking was supported the character of the Southern United States long after the Civil War, and reignited in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement and a perceived eroding of societal morals (again, even though Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian preahcer- ironic.)
For Islam, because the power of Islamic governments was only broken in the 1900s, the people of the Middle East had been accustomed to authoritarian thinking for much, much longer. This is rightfully seen as archaic. In many places, such as Beirut, Dubai, and Damascus (before the recent civil war) people are only just beginning to experience Western-style freedom. For some, that means they are descending into moral license and a dangerous breakup of traditional families and structures as they are understood, but for the most part, my liberal Muslim friends from those areas balance a healthy tolerance of other perspectives with (somewhat) of an adherence to the Islamic laws that they agree with based on their interpretation of the Quran. (One girl I know is in an open relationship with her non-Muslim girlfriend in defiance of some of her relatives, whilst still wearing the niqab). Again, some may decry this as "cafeteria religion," but religion has always been a pick it and choose it affair (nowhere is this more true than in Catholicism!), chosen and interpreted by human beings to suit their needs, as it were.
Thus, it is not really the Islamic perspective (although there are core problems in my opinion, such as Mohammed's belligerence and marriage to nine-year-old Aisha, but again that's something I'll talk about another time) that is incompatible with the Western idea of individual liberty. It's Islamic fundamentalism that is incompatible, in the same way that the medieval Catholic Church was incompatible with those ideas once.
As globalization inextricably marches across the planet (barring a global climate change induced catastrophe), more and more fundamentalist remnants who believe they're still in 7th century Arabia and have every right to behead kaffirs will react more and more violently. The Baha'i Faith was one of the earliest attempts that I can think of to bridge the gaps between East and West, but there still more than enough angry Muslims to limit the influences of the Baha'is in the Middle East (who are often wrongly accused of being Western cronies because the religion is seen as too liberal). Meanwhile, there are more self-proclaimed Jedi in Britain and Satanists in the United States than there are Baha'is in either country. This is likely because the sexual revolution, the hippy movement, and the Internet (among other factors) have inextricably broken the tendency towards centralization in religion, and what disorganized spirituality remains will be more progressive. The Baha'i Faith is often seen (from personal experience talking to others about its ideas) as too conservative, and that perception will probably not go away. This, along with the opinion of some Christians that the Baha'is are too Muslim, limits the ability of the Baha'i Faith to act as a bridge between East and West in the United States.
Instead, in my opinion, capitalism, the Internet, international law- all these ideas and technologies will be the undoing of al-Qaeda and their ilk. Basically, the idea of the social contract is so infectious that it will steamroll the fundamentalistic portions of Islam until it becomes more liberal and peaceful (again, albeit "watered down" to the tastes of some) and a bridge is formed naturally. Of course this does not mean that Western hegemony will last forever. It hopefully means, at least in my opinion, that the West and the United States become first among equals and the excesses of capitalism will be restrained, that Western-style (and yes partisan) democracy without the media concentration will spread across the world, and that the beauty that I often see in Islamic cultures will sweeten the global melting pot.
This was a different reply to the same question that I found rather odd:
I'll answer the final one first: you probably can't. And I wouldn't put much stock into either one, since one is obviously composed to attack Islam, and the other appears to be an answer to that attack. I say this without having read either tradition.
As for the two ways of life... they can't. Neither will rest until the other has been "converted." (Literally or not.)
The religion known as Islam today is outdated. It became obsolete with the coming of the Báb. I don't say that lightly, nore do I mean it as an attack on Muslims. But having studied it, interacted with its adherents, and observed the needs of our world today... Islam just doesn't meet them.
The philosophy of the Founding Fathers of the USA is entirely man-centric. Yes, they mentioned God. But it was not the God of Revelation but "Nature's God", a Deist concept. That means God as human beings imagine Him/Her/It based on what they see in nature. They had no room for God's Law. Now, don't get me wrong. I love this country, and I think it has a better system than most. But it's man-made. It cannot compare to the system given by God in the Writings.
So, they will never be able to fully co-exist. Not until the Laws of God are followed around the world. But at that time it will be a moot point.
*****
My Reply
I will attempt to give couple of answers to your questions from a Jeffersonian (secular and simultaneously respectful and critical of religions) perspective, as I have read English translations of the Torah, Bible, Quran, Kitab-i-Aqdas, Bhagavad-Gita, etc.
First, in my opinion as a student of history and anthropology, the authoritarianism present in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam came from the need of the group to place unity and security over individual rights, and from the perception that the god (which, in the earliest incarnations of what eventually became Judaism, was one of many gods that existed) that had chosen them could revoke their chosen people status for the transgressions of those who broke the rules, and would punish them along with the outsiders or allow their enemies to rule over them. Thus the strict laws of the Torah, the myth of Jesus the demi-god whose scapegoat sacrifice mystically washed away the sins of the world, and the sharia laws, which were, again, all about protecting the whole by the classic means of carrot and stick. You can also see this, for instance, in Chinese legalism and Confucianism, so the idea of unity at all costs was not strictly an Abrahamic idea. When it came to Islam, though, even its respect for Jews and Christians came with a catch that they were forced to pay a tax and that Islam had to be the state religion
Then along came, very slowly, the idea that the individual had important rights too. The earliest I can trace this off the top of my head (i.e. without doing hours and hours of research to refresh my memory) is the Magna Carta. This came about as a result of King John losing a war with his nobles in 1215 and is widely credited as the origin of the very notion of constitutional (as in properly codified and supreme) law, as well as the idea that government should only operate with the consent of the governed. Sure, it only protected the rights of the nobles, but it was a start.
And through several events over the next five centuries (including the English Civil War, where the monarchy was toppled for a brief period of time), the power of the kingship eroded. Not only that but the Catholic Church's power over England (and much of Europe) was broken due to the Protestant Reformation and King Henry VIII's declaration of the Church of England. At the same time, the entire Middle East was controlled by empires. The most prominent of these (since it claimed the caliphate and controlled Mecca) was the Ottoman Empire, which had the military might and the religious authority to reign unchallenged by its own subjects for the most part, so a similar movement for individual liberty didn't really come about for a long time.
Then along comes John Locke, who (along with other thinkers like Thomas Hobbes) in 1704 really solidifies the social contract theory by proposing, in Two Treatises of Government, that people at large (or at least, white, property-owning, free men, but that's a whole can of worms for another day) created societies for security and in return gave a little bit (but not ALL) liberty to the government and society. The one important liberty they did not give up was the ability to change the government by force if it became too tyrannical. This was going on just as Greco-Roman political thought was really being studied again (the Renaissance had more focused on their art) and all of this, as you can quite imagine, heavily influenced the Founders' thinking on American liberty. (Which started out, ironically enough, as the colonies petitioning for the rights of ENGLISH people to be represented.)
The Middle East, meanwhile, is still authoritarian, although after the failed siege of Vienna in 1683 the power of the Ottomans was waning over Europe and the Mediterranean.
When the American Revolution happened, the Declaration of Independence, Saratoga, the Constitution, all that good stuff, that was the beginning of the end for authoritarianism in the West. So that's where you get the idea planted into many people's minds that anything that even smelled of authoritarianism was bad. And as you so correctly point out, Jefferson, while he was probably a deist and did not agree with Islam, respected all religions along with the other Founders. Sure, Islam was (and still is in many respects) an authoritarian system, but Jefferson once said, "It does me no injury if my neighbor has no gods or twenty." This allowed for radical, for their time, statements such as this from the Treaty of Tripoli that ended the Barbary Wars:
"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
He also pushed, along with the Anti-Federalists (in one of the many, many examples for how aggressive, partisan political action, while initially seeming hurtful and divisive for the sake of being divisive, has made the world a better place), to codify freedom of expression, and particularly of religious expression, in a Bill of Rights so that people wouldn't become exactly what they hated (authoritarians) by persecuting religious minorities for applying strict religious laws to their own members.
Meanwhile, although the Ottoman Empire temporarily lost power over Egypt to Napoleon and was quickly becoming the "sick man of Europe," it and other Islamic states still imposed absolute sharia-based laws on the Middle East. No discussions of democracy, virtually no Bill of Rights, nothing.
You're starting to see the pattern here, I hope?
It's not that Abrahamic religions in general always HAVE to be fundamentalist and authoritarian. However, they have been interpreted that way for a long time, and it was only when organized religious and governmental power began to give way to republican thought through revolutionary wars, the Enlightenment thinkers, and the American Revolution that Christianity and Judaism softened up (some would say watered down) in order to survive in a gradually multicultural West.
Sidenote- due to the evangelical movement, you can see a snippet of Christianity's former characteristics which mirror the thinking of the worst of sharia. Although Christians both used their faith to inspire abolitionism and support slavery, the fundamentalist (even dominionist) way of thinking was supported the character of the Southern United States long after the Civil War, and reignited in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement and a perceived eroding of societal morals (again, even though Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian preahcer- ironic.)
For Islam, because the power of Islamic governments was only broken in the 1900s, the people of the Middle East had been accustomed to authoritarian thinking for much, much longer. This is rightfully seen as archaic. In many places, such as Beirut, Dubai, and Damascus (before the recent civil war) people are only just beginning to experience Western-style freedom. For some, that means they are descending into moral license and a dangerous breakup of traditional families and structures as they are understood, but for the most part, my liberal Muslim friends from those areas balance a healthy tolerance of other perspectives with (somewhat) of an adherence to the Islamic laws that they agree with based on their interpretation of the Quran. (One girl I know is in an open relationship with her non-Muslim girlfriend in defiance of some of her relatives, whilst still wearing the niqab). Again, some may decry this as "cafeteria religion," but religion has always been a pick it and choose it affair (nowhere is this more true than in Catholicism!), chosen and interpreted by human beings to suit their needs, as it were.
Thus, it is not really the Islamic perspective (although there are core problems in my opinion, such as Mohammed's belligerence and marriage to nine-year-old Aisha, but again that's something I'll talk about another time) that is incompatible with the Western idea of individual liberty. It's Islamic fundamentalism that is incompatible, in the same way that the medieval Catholic Church was incompatible with those ideas once.
As globalization inextricably marches across the planet (barring a global climate change induced catastrophe), more and more fundamentalist remnants who believe they're still in 7th century Arabia and have every right to behead kaffirs will react more and more violently. The Baha'i Faith was one of the earliest attempts that I can think of to bridge the gaps between East and West, but there still more than enough angry Muslims to limit the influences of the Baha'is in the Middle East (who are often wrongly accused of being Western cronies because the religion is seen as too liberal). Meanwhile, there are more self-proclaimed Jedi in Britain and Satanists in the United States than there are Baha'is in either country. This is likely because the sexual revolution, the hippy movement, and the Internet (among other factors) have inextricably broken the tendency towards centralization in religion, and what disorganized spirituality remains will be more progressive. The Baha'i Faith is often seen (from personal experience talking to others about its ideas) as too conservative, and that perception will probably not go away. This, along with the opinion of some Christians that the Baha'is are too Muslim, limits the ability of the Baha'i Faith to act as a bridge between East and West in the United States.
Instead, in my opinion, capitalism, the Internet, international law- all these ideas and technologies will be the undoing of al-Qaeda and their ilk. Basically, the idea of the social contract is so infectious that it will steamroll the fundamentalistic portions of Islam until it becomes more liberal and peaceful (again, albeit "watered down" to the tastes of some) and a bridge is formed naturally. Of course this does not mean that Western hegemony will last forever. It hopefully means, at least in my opinion, that the West and the United States become first among equals and the excesses of capitalism will be restrained, that Western-style (and yes partisan) democracy without the media concentration will spread across the world, and that the beauty that I often see in Islamic cultures will sweeten the global melting pot.
This was a different reply to the same question that I found rather odd:
I'll answer the final one first: you probably can't. And I wouldn't put much stock into either one, since one is obviously composed to attack Islam, and the other appears to be an answer to that attack. I say this without having read either tradition.
As for the two ways of life... they can't. Neither will rest until the other has been "converted." (Literally or not.)
The religion known as Islam today is outdated. It became obsolete with the coming of the Báb. I don't say that lightly, nore do I mean it as an attack on Muslims. But having studied it, interacted with its adherents, and observed the needs of our world today... Islam just doesn't meet them.
The philosophy of the Founding Fathers of the USA is entirely man-centric. Yes, they mentioned God. But it was not the God of Revelation but "Nature's God", a Deist concept. That means God as human beings imagine Him/Her/It based on what they see in nature. They had no room for God's Law. Now, don't get me wrong. I love this country, and I think it has a better system than most. But it's man-made. It cannot compare to the system given by God in the Writings.
So, they will never be able to fully co-exist. Not until the Laws of God are followed around the world. But at that time it will be a moot point.
Luke: You don't believe in the Force, do you?
Han Solo: Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen *anything* to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. 'Cause no mystical energy field controls *my* destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
Han Solo: Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen *anything* to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. 'Cause no mystical energy field controls *my* destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
