My (earnest, irate) thoughts

A couple of years ago, when I was a lapsed Protestant considering anarcho-communism as a worldview, I wrote a rant deriding the neocon geniuses who say, ‘The terrorists hate freedom, democracy and truth’™. Since converting to Islam has not meant abandoning liberalism, feminism or any of my other dear -isms, I’m going to write another one.

Author William Dalrymple writes what I wish I had. He smacks down this underlying belief that all good ideas (freedom, etc.) were first created by, have seen the greatest expansion in, and are held the most dear by the West. He writes about our sense of superiority — our smugness — that is not only false, but dangerous.

The complaints change — a hundred years ago our Victorian ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for sodomy; now Martin Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass sexual frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority remains the same. If the East does not share our particular sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told that it is wrong and we are right.

Yeah!

What a contrast to columnists like Suzanne Fields, who picks and chooses which parts of history serve her agenda:

The strength of democracy rests not only on tolerance for many beliefs but a tolerance for no belief. It’s precisely this tolerance that radical Islam detests. For radical Muslims there is no separation of religion from anything else. They use intolerance to dominate and destroy everything that deviates from oppressive religious law.

Can’t you just picture the look on her face: pinched, scornful, frowning as her editor adds the ‘radical’ before Islam and Muslim. ‘But all Muslims are nuts,’ she complains to her editor. ‘Do we really have to add the ‘radical’?’

To say ‘radical Muslim’ is a contradiction in terms — kind of like ‘warlike Buddhist’. Islam is a religion that is decidedly un-radical, striving to find truth between the extremes of asceticism and hedonism, and carve out a place where people can be fulfilled. The ‘radicals’ she speaks of have about as much to do with Islam as Opus Dei extremists have to do with mainstream Catholicism.

As we ought to know from looking at history, political radicals spring forth in places where regimes are oppressive, and religious fundamentalists erupt in places where rulers prevent people from practicing religion normally. It is not scholarship to glance at the crazies on the fringes and denounce mainstream participants. In The Kite Runner, a novel by Afghani immigrant Khaled Hosseini, we Westerners got a glimpse of the real Taliban — and exactly how un-Islamic its leadership was.

But no, it’s not enough for Fields to say the radical Muslims are the thorn in the fragrant bloom of the secular West. Now she must make an offering to the atheist scholars — how about these ‘Islamists’?

For their part, atheists would do better to dissect the Islamist rationale than to pick on the religious folk whose faith guarantees not only freedom of religion, but the freedom from religion enjoyed by atheists, skeptics and other nonbelievers. This is the freedom the Founding Fathers regarded the ultimate secular gift of God.

Christianity guarantees freedom of religion? Really? But I could name hundreds of atrocities committed against non-Christians ‘in the name of Christ’. And yet, I would never play that game… Because any idiot can find an example in history where leaders used religion for political gain. Any idiot can write an argument around an out-of-context verse from the Bible to say “God commands us to destroy [insert group here].” These arguments are ultimately full of treachery, and do not invalidate the faith of normal people. But I like how she encourages the atheists to start attacking the Muslims, rather than the Christians. Pay attention. The underlying idea here is that Christians have more in common with atheists than with Muslims. Now there’s a divider if I ever saw one.

It’s all Us vs. Them, West vs. East, we-evolved-into-the-best-civilization-on-earth-without-any-of-their-help-thank-you-very-much. Many are convinced of the dichotomy, and try to convert us to their belief in the secular West’s superiority. And you want to know why? Because if Muslims and Christians were to actually speak to one another, one-half of the world might actually get along. That’s terrifying if you’re hell-bent on trying to divide (and conquer) the globe.

I have grown weary of the rhetoric that gives the West all the credit for its current dominance. In college, a history professor pointed out that the Renaissance was the result of European exposure to the brilliance of the Middle East. Then a polisci professor showed us how the British industrial revolution (and all its results) was practically an accident. Reading these pundits’ nonsense, you’d almost believe God Himself said, ‘The English are the most perfect race on earth. To ensure their ultimate success in the Western world, I will make their Navy defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588.’ Holy cow.

And let us not forget the dark side of Western history, the embarrassing part we don’t like to talk about: ideologies based on social Darwinism that cultivate indifference and even hatred for poor people with dark skin; colonialism and imperialism; dictatorships and genocide, right into the 1970s and ’80s in Western Europe, the Perfect Civilization®; and the neoconservative messiah, George W. Bush. Why do we act like we have all the answers?