Dean Esmay has a new post up explaining (somewhat) his new stance on Islamophobes, as well as a post directly addressed to me about his decision and my post on it.
He suggests – and I agree – that some dialog around this issue would be a good thing.
I’ll reaffirm: I think that the central problem of the current historical moment is the war within Islam. I think that war is between adherents of a traditional religion, and one that has cross-pollinated with some of the less-desirable features of Bad Philosophy to create an inherently dangerous and highly attractive response to modernity in the West and to oppression and hopelessness in much of the Arab world.
If the bad guys win – and they may – Islam will be transformed into what it’s enemies today say it is. And we’ll have some significant problems.
That hasn’t happened yet, and because it hasn’t happened yet it’s worth doing two things – 1) not treating Muslims as though they are automatically Bad Guys – even if they don’t like us and their interests are opposed to ours. Much of human history has involved the ways that cultures that disagree and compete manage to live together without mass slaughter…and 2) figuring out what, if anything, we can do from here that will weaken the Bad Guys and strengthen the good ones.
Yeah, that’s Western-centric and implies that we get to decide who’s good and bad…and that issue itself will be an interesting topic for discussion.
But I think that Dean is right when he says that Islam is not, itself the problem … today. And further, when he suggests that going down the path to Islamophobia today is dangerous, because it makes the ‘clash of civilizations’ more, not less likely. And he’s wrong when he fails to recognize that Islam is the locus of the problem, and that finding a way to deal with the changes Islam is going through – and to contain the energy those changes will release – is a central and legitimate task today.
Do I agree with commenter Jim Rockford here when he responds that the root of all our problems in the Middle East today is Islam? No. Do I agree with something I read into Dean’s posts (which may not be there) which suggests that it has no part of the problem, and that things in the ummah are hunky-dory? No.
So let’s discuss this.
So the question is…. *who* are the “bad guys”, and who are not? Where do you draw the line? If some angry father does an ‘honor killing’ of an estranged daughter, does that make him a “bad guy”? If the men of an Islamic village drag out a suspected adulterer and stone them (without even a trial), do we now label them “bad guys”? Or do you only mean supporters of AQ are “bad guys”?
And how do we handle, say, the cab driver who refuses to service a blind person because said person has an assisting dog with them? Are you telling me that is *not* a clash of cultures?
Mr. Esmay’s approach to me appears to be more of an _I don’t want to fight this problem_ method of handling the future of his blog and discourse. It is not really a solution to the problems that are indeed becoming apparent (again) in Islam vs. The West.
There is a parallel to (a type of) Christianity here, I think. Most agnostic/athiestic secular folk will be glad to tolerate Christians in their community, as long as Christians do not try to actively make a Christian society (e.g., by laws.) But when those Christians try to encode what they believe is truly a moral position (say abortion) then the secularists come out in force.
Do you, or Mr. Esmay, honestly believe that the sincere, believing Moslem will *not* try to build and explicitly Islamic society?
Going along with the first comment, finding a label for the people that we can all basically agree are ‘bad guys’, while simultaneously explicitly excluding as many as possible of the non-militant folk would be the goal.
You can slam the entire desire to ‘label’ things, but if you _don’t_ find a label, you end up having this exact same argument all the flipping time. (Which we’ve all been doing in endless circles since 9/11.)
I personally like *Jihadist*, or ‘militant Jihadist.’ They’re short and to the point – and the ‘bad guys’ actually self-identify with the label. Everything that includes the word ‘Islam’ in any form gets dragged off into the weeds arguing defamation of the entire religion.
Regardless of what the current, actual, denotation the term has, or any field-specific jargon already attached to the word, everyone can quickly grasp what the heck you’re talking about. Unlike ‘Islamist’, which is already pretty widely used, and doesn’t include any sense of militancy. Or anything involving ‘Fascist’, as the associated connotations lead immediately to discussion of the Nazis… ending the debate.
The examples above (Honor killing, adultery, etc.) are examples of people who the US should _oppose_, but who are not necessarily _enemies_. We oppose a long list of things happening inside a long list of countries. But we aren’t blowing up factories in China, or otherwise taking offensive _military_ action against them.
On the other hand: Every single person who is a Jihadist _is_ an enemy. It may seem circular reasoning, but anyone that says “I am your enemy” _is_ an enemy. You don’t need to psychoanalyze it completely to death.
I forgot to add the essential piece. 😀
By making your own label – whether by adding a new definition to an existing word, coining a new term, or piecing together a precise terminology from existing terms – you get to decide _exactly_ where you’re driving a wedge.
In conversation with (non-politcal mouthpiece) muslims, I seem to be able to come to “Yeah, there _are_ bad guys.” And yet, with these same individuals, I get ferocious arguments when discussing whether they should be seeking to convert the entire world to Islam – the goal of ‘Islamism.’
I think I’m happier with anything that puts the wedge closer to anyone willing to use violence. Driving this particular wedge home as much as possible _is_ a piece of fighting this War.
“If the bad guys win – and they may – Islam will be transformed into what it’s enemies today say it is. And we’ll have some significant problems.
That hasn’t happened yet, and because it hasn’t happened yet it’s worth doing two things – 1) not treating Muslims as though they are automatically Bad Guys – even if they don’t like us and their interests are opposed to ours. Much of human history has involved the ways that cultures that disagree and compete manage to live together without mass slaughter…and 2) figuring out what, if anything, we can do from here that will weaken the Bad Guys and strengthen the good ones.”
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AL — this is the usual PC Multi-Culti BUNK. It’s intellectually dishonest and a desperate attempt to avoid confronting reality. Islam IS evil and IS the problem of the modern world. How can places like Saudi (where Muslims behead Sri Lankans and display the bodies in public squares, or murder “foreigners” who didn’t “look Muslim” who were on the “Muslims Only” highway to Mecca?) be anything but proof of Islam’s incompatibility with the West. Or perhaps the 40% of Brit Muslims who want to impose by force Sharia Law on the UK? Or the honor killings, rapes, female genital mutilation of women?)
If it was NOT Islam how do you explain the bloody conflict of Muslims against the Chinese in Xianxing Province, or against the Russians in the Caucasus, or the Thais in Southern Thailand, or the Philippines? Wherever Muslims butt up against non-Musims there is violence. Wherever Muslims have control they perpetrate pogroms against non-Muslims (Copts in Egypt, Jews everywhere, Buddhists in Thailand, Catholics in Indonesia and the Philippines).
The problem with ISLAM is that it cannot by it’s very nature make the accommodations with modernity that Japan, China, and even haltingly India has made. You can’t be a Muslim and want better treatment for women, other religions, and most importantly putting religion “in a box” and living in world where Men and Women freely make the supreme laws based on a secular society.
ISLAM says all laws are handed down from God, unchanging, a perfect society forever held in Amber in the world of say, 620 A.D. That moreover Islam must “dominate” i.e. conquer the world to turn every place into say the Taliban’s Afghanistan. This is a recipe for conflict in an ever-changing, more connected world.
If Islam was NOT the source of all conflict, you’d see significant Muslim achievements in the commercial, cultural, scientific, and engineering spheres. Something akin to Godzilla, Honda, Anime, Opera, Ferrari, Nokia, or Johns Hopkins. What do I see when I survey the Muslim world? Ignorance, poverty, superstition, violence, tribalism, and the deliberate rejection of any material or social progress. At no time and no place do I see the embrace of modernism in the Islamic world.
The US was able to “live with” the Soviet Union because it was not fundamentally rejecting modern society various “deals” could be struck for temporary mutual benefit. Same with China today, or Japan, or India. The modern world shares fundamental goals which are avoidance of ugly violence if possible, material advances for most of it’s citizens, and a focus on secular technological advancement. Islam in all of it’s forms explicitly rejects this for Allah and Mohammed’s perfect certainty. Trying to distinguish “good” and “bad” Muslims or Islam is IMHO a fool’s errand. They are all fundamentally in conflict with the modern world.
The poorest Muslim nations know so little about the outside world and have so little contact (think Michael Palin visiting the deluded Imam in Timbuktu thinking that studying the Koran real hard will resuscitate Timbuktu as a medieval commercial center) that they don’t pose much of a threat. But any Muslim society that achieves even a modicum of wealth and thus contact with the West is thrown into violent conflict with us because of the fundamental clash of values. The Chinese office worker and Japanese Salaryman is not our enemy, but the Muslim always will be because of Islam.
To avoid conflict therefore we should not try to change Islam (a fool’s errand) but simply beggar it. Make as many Islamic nations as poor as possible, like Mauritania or Niger, and we avoid conflict. Sever their connections to the outside world through absolute poverty and let them live in the world held in Amber that Muslims so desire.
An example of what I am talking about are the Nigerian and Pakistani Muslim rejection of Polio Vaccinnes. They are decried as Un-Islamic and those who die or suffer paralysis are heralded as Martyrs.
You can see the Guardian’s coverage “here”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2013477,00.html
Consider this. If Muslims will reject Polio Vaccines, as un-Islamic, when the obvious benefits are so large and “no-brainers” to the rest of us, how can Muslims and non-Muslims co-exist?
Their actions go to the heart of the conflict. Muslims by definition put religion and “Islamic Purity” higher than the obvious benefits of science and technology. And of course superstition and idiocy run rampant.
If Muslims cannot even accept Polio Vaccines how can we not be in eternal conflict with them as long as we have contact?
“If it was NOT Islam how do you explain the bloody conflict of Muslims against the Chinese in Xianxing Province…”
Speaking for just this one part of the question, I’d explain it as a function of China’s desire to have ready land access to oil-rich Central Asia. I think the Chinese are the aggressors here — the Muslims who live in Xinjiang (“New Frontier,” in Chinese — the Muslims themselves don’t call it that) are in the unhappy position of living on land China wanted for something else.
I missed the working definition of Islamphobia, what is it?
A phobia is an irrational fear, not a simple prejudice or distaste. I assume that fearing a mob of Muslims who are cheering for martyrdom and Jew-killing is not phobia.
AS “B” said on Haaretz Feb 19 07
ALL PEOPLE are poor who choose terror and hate and darkness. The arab and muslim street have no religious leaders. No leaders who can bring the twisted means of terror into goodness. Hateful ideologies and desire for domination and jihad do not fit into reality so terror rules the day and the people. A shame there is no submission or acceptance of Israel after all the lost wars, boycotts, hate-mongering by the arab-Muslim world. Only revisionism, replacement theory, violence, intimidation, terror, propaganda, duplicity. All losing paths for the people of the Koran and the world. I think “B” sums it up well…
THE WAR ON TERROR is a war against hate, and the problem is that many Muslims harbor dangerous levels of hate on many issues, which usually impinge on democratic thinking in some way. The key to democracy is the expression of tolerance, reciprocity, and mutual respect. Our constitutions, laws, social structures are all built around this. One cannot move to a democracy, while insisting on hating Jews, liberated women, renounced Muslims, etc., etc.
ONE REALLY MUST CHOOSE, and democracies have a right to insist that their citizens do not promulgate hate. Islam needs to rethink how it will integrate itself into democracies. Other religions are constantly remaking and re-interpreting themselves, and so must Islam. I like this approach because it is not anti-Muslim, it’s anti-hate.
I wonder if the question doesn’t require taking a very long view. Four points come to mind:
1. The modernization that began in the European world and now impacts the planet is at least in part a religious change. Even though the overt religiosity of the West has declined, the starting point of modernization (insofar as we understand what caused it) is the Christian notion of belonging to two different things, society and faith, at the same time, instead of a single indivisible identity. There is no such distinction in Islam.
2. The nature of the conflict between Islam and the West is also religious in a deeper sense. Eastern religions and philosophies regard time as cyclical; thus, the outcome of any given age is a purely transitory matter. Western monotheisms, however, see time as linear and the outcome of time as the final vindication of one faith. Secular modernization is also a faith in this sense; it rejects cyclical notions of time a priori just as fervently as any religion.
This linear view of time is what invests the progressive claim of Islam to be the last of the great monotheisms with its unique force. Islam was a socially advanced religion at the time of its inception and even today Muslims often speak of the rights of women under Islam as a step forward compared to what these rights were before Islam. The idea that the Christian or post-Christian West is in any sense superior implies that Islam is not the end-point on a linear timeline. We need to recognize the centrality of time to the special problem we face because it is also a problem with our own outlook.
3. Most notions of coexistence assume that Muslims will accept someday the rules that govern relations between most Christian denominations and that this kind of coexistence is the natural destination of all religions.
We may see a growing moderation in the Islamic world if we pull back from it and if fanatics who want to export radical theology turn out to have little support for a wider struggle. We should not underestimate the possible leadership of Russia, in which the tolerant Islam of the Tatars could blend with Orthodoxy in a religious and cultural fusion as Muslims become a much larger proportion of the Russian people. But given the facts in points 1. and 2. above, friendly coexistence between Islam and the West will require accommodation on a level much deeper than the peace that evolved within the Christian world, which had much more in common.
4. There are two things I would keep in mind as we survey the long run. Neither of these points may obtain wide assent but I lay them out anyway.
One is that our emphasis should be on the common humanity of all people and the idea of common rights and obligations. Many Muslims can be reached with an appeal of this kind if our own conduct does not contradict it. Most of the world does not want to be enslaved to a minority ideology or religious view; our challenge is to find common ground with this majority in the interval that still remains before our global power falls to our proportion of the world’s population.
The other is that science and technology may evolve in ways that challenge religious beliefs more directly. Western monotheisms have relegated the principal miracles in which they believe to the distant past. But other religions believe a number of things about the constitution of nature and human nature that might someday be verified by empirical testing. Science may also change the conditions on which religious claims rest. If people become able to regenerate themselves and cease having to die, nearly every religion will face a crisis, although some will be affected more than others.
The likelihood is very remote that the religious balance of the world will be upset anytime soon by scientific discoveries that overthrow basic tenets of religious faith. But it is a certainty that science will challenge notions about nature and what we can do with it that have long been taken for granted in a religious context.
Dean Esmay is a nasty, nutty, gutter-tongued, unreasonable attention-getter, who acts out regularly and should be ignored for that reason alone. He’s hit all the marks that would make it appropriate to say that about him no matter where on the political spectrum he fell. I do not think you can keep Dean Esmay in the conversation and then later consistently blast other bloggers as nutty, intolerant etc..
I agree with people setting the rules on their blogs, and I strongly support the Reverend Donald Sensing, whose rules are strict. I also think it’s OK to get rid of chronically angry, negative people who make you unhappy. If you want a “flowers and sunshine” blog you have that right, and you don’t have to empower mean mood-breakers. But Dean Esmay not being polite and asking other people to play by the same kid-safe rules that he does on his blog or anything like that.
I sympathize with people who thought they knew him giving him extra chances and soft treatment at first, not wanting to believe he could mean what he says. I was the same at first with Michael Fumento, till he made it clear that even the gentlest call to play nicely was not going to work on him. But even if you start off with a kid gloves approach and giving extra chances out of hope, at some point they are all used up, and I don’t see how Dean Esmay can have any chances left at all. He’s declared himself, and by reasonable, fair standards, he’s condemned himself.
Shall I quote again now from Dean Esmay’s potty-mouthed, intentionally rude and not-nice rants, to show he’s as bad as I say or worse, or can we spare ourselves that?
Will it do to say he has an explicit policy of being rude, and that he lives up to it?
(“I believe Islamophobia is real. I think Marc Danziger would agree that it is. Am I right, Marc? And if so, how do you identify it, and what do you do about it? I know what I do: I’m rude about it when I see it.”)
And by the way, Armed Liberal, if you persist in bringing Dean Esmay back into the room like this, I’m going to be strongly tempted to ask, later when you condemn others: are they better than, worse than, or about the same as Dean Esmay? And the only reason I would not do that is that the necessary and appropriate supporting quotes would use language nobody needs to read.
People to whom Dean Esmay owes big apologies, such as Robert Spencer, are obviously never going to get them.
And in a sense, they don’t need his apologies, as long as they and preferably others treat Dean Esmay as the trash he is, because with his nutty fixations such as HIV not causing AIDS, he should have no credibility. It’s just a question of not giving him a false standing by treating him as though he was better than he is.
I do not agree more dialog including Dean Esmay is appropriate. It gives him false standing, which is automatically to the detriment of people he smears.
Nobody is morally obliged either to get into Dean Esmay’s verbal sewer with him, or to discuss serious matters, turning the other cheek, with someone who acts like Dean Esmay has.
Dean Esmay is not the right starting point for a real discussion on anything, much less the very important topic of how the enemy in the Global War on Terror or whatever you want to call it should really be defined.
Blah blah blah, let’s continue the endless debating of finer points of whether Islam is bad or not, while the throat-cutters are busy planning their next huge attrocity. So how many millions of Americans will have to die before we don’t have this farce?
By the way, I didn’t like saying any of that, and I would not say it if
(a) the guy did not have a policy of being rude and nasty, or
(b) if this thread was not on a critical, serious topic, yet titled Dean’s World: Discuss, and taking as its starting point Dean Esmay, evidently on the assumption he’s OK after his having nailed his banner to the mast as anything but OK.
It’s like having a Rembrandt-and-Piss-Christ art exhibition. These things do not belong together, and it’s inappropriate to combine them.
SO basically I think we’re all in agreement – Dean Esmay is a fool and no one should visit his blog except for a chuckle in PC paradise.
Al;
I use the term ‘Caliphascist’ for the reason given in the original post — it really is a blend of Islam and Fascism (or “Bad Philosophy”) that is bent on recreating the Caliphate in a more modern, Fascist form.
Mr. Blue;
Isn’t it a bit amusing ironic, though, that Esmay is happy to treat doubters about Islam the way he complains that doubters of HIV→AIDS are treated? It is not the he believes these things of Islam (he may well be correct) but that he views these beliefs as not even doubtable, much less arguable.
I read Dean’s chain of posts and responded seriously and thoughtfully to his 5 points.
His subsequent comments in that thread convince me that he is not serious. I would respectfully suggest rephrasing the discussion to what you want to consider regarding Islam. It would be more fruitful to consider why Islamic cultures are in the fix they are in now, rather than trying to gloss over the differences or chastise people for noticing them.
If I subscribe to any one school of thought, it the Thomas PM Barnett Non-Integrating Gap theory. Here Islam, is only relevant as a vehicle for hi-jacking populations and taking them offline from the world’s ongoing globalization. There could easily be other doctrines used to apply doctrine and cohesion to the ‘struggle’. Communism might even undergo a revival. Barnett’s theory seems to be agnostic about historic Islamic clashes with the West. I believe there such a history, but its relevance to today is limited. At the same time, I consider the idea of Islam triumphing and achieving its global peace as anathema – I am pretty sure I don’t want to go back to medieval Christendom either.
Barnett thinks all will be well if we integrate the Gap. I, however, wonder. I think it would be more productive to discuss whether a wave of globalization arising from western cultural roots and with a growth directed economical imperative is going to be completely healthy. Do viable alternatives exist, or are we in a bus with no driver? Should there be legitimate resistance? Is the Islamic culture right to resist and what forms of resistance are ‘acceptable’? Is Islam alone, or does it have natural allies?
My belief is that Islam is only part of what is going on, I am not phobic about it, but I do not shrink from calling it out for what I think it is – a backwater heavily bypassed for 300 years and having a very nasty wake-up. I certainly don’t think Islam is the answer to the problems the world faces, but I have doubts about where we are headed. I hope their reformation goes swimmingly, but we have other pressing problems to deal with.
Pretty much.
We still have to discuss the enemy and the definition of the war seriously some other time (or rather many times) on a better basis. Not on this basis.
Armed Liberal, where is the circle of reasonable discussion drawn in regard to this war? If you tried to draw it to include Dean Esmay, who has and has acted on a policy of being rude to those on one side of the discussion, then I think you would be being unfair in a rather un-straightforward way. His policy is to be a stink bomb and drive once side out of the discussion. If you do that, you should be out, end of story.
I should have said I was responding to #13 from Manco_Dollars.
#14 from Annoying Old Guy: “Mr. Blue;
Isn’t it a bit amusing ironic…”
His policy is to be rude, and he is. He aims to be unpleasant and drive one side out of the debate, as much as he can. He is unpleasant. I don’t find him amusing.
I’ve said it before, but I have a soft spot for Michelle Malkin because she first came to my attention when Dick Cheney dropped an f-bomb on the floor of the United States Federal Senate, and she condemned him for it with no regard to whether he was on her side or to excuses like the Senate not being in session at that time. I think that’s the way you should judge these things. Have a standard, not just a side.
I appreciate your seeing the lighter aspect, and I think that’s good too.
But for myself, like Queen Victoria, I am not amused.
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#14 from Annoying Old Guy: “… Esmay is happy to treat doubters about Islam the way he complains that doubters of HIV→AIDS are treated? It is not the he believes these things of Islam (he may well be correct) but that he views these beliefs as not even doubtable, much less arguable.”
Well, this is how you go at it when you are playing a potty-mouthed version of the argument from a big stick, trying to win by inflicting unpleasantness on those who do not assent to your assumptions. Hypocrisy is unpleasant, and if your policy is to be unpleasant, that’s fine.
The best we can do is fight a holding action until a civil war breaks out within the Muslim world between modernists (products of a reformation/enlightenment) and existing atavists (holdouts for the legacy of patriarchy). I don’t know why people from all sectors of the political debate are claiming failure of the USA in the Middle East, I think the West (it would be nice if evderyone in the West would get together in this, but alas) is doing as good as it can get short of igniting this civil war… but there are problems with directly instigating the catalyst of what is essentially a conflict internal to Islam.
This is a war of attrition and what is eroding is our will to fight. To win, we have to be willing to defy terrorism for generations, forever, and ultimately I think we can and must do this. In the meantime, we can suffer devastating setbacks cued by the muddle headed amongst us.. but I predict that when that time comes –and it very well might– the West/we Moderns will fight for our lives and with a suprising horrific savagery that we are all too capable of.
Sorry not to have been in the thread today – packing for a trip East tomorrow morning.
A couple quick drive-by comments, and I’ll have more time at the airport tomorrow.
Jim Rockford (#4,5) – Jim, I’m not shocked at your response, but might I suggest that it’s not PC blindness that’s making me take this position, just a kind of squeamishness at killing a billion or so people – which is what happens when the religious wars you believe are here really show up.
I’ll do a lot to avoid having to kill a billion people, and I’ll suggest that you may want to look in the mirror and ask yourself how far you’d go. Because once you buy into the belief set you’re advocating, it’s “bombs away”.
Yes, there are deeply disfunctional attributes in much of Muslim culture. Yes, there are things that I find deeply repugnant. Conversely, there are things French people find repugnant about American culture – we execute people, for example.
I’m not triggering a world-wide war over that. More to follow.
David Blue (#10) – look, this isn’t a commentary on how Esmay runs his blog. I may or may not like it (or link to it much). But Dean has staked out a position (albeit a kinda silly rhetorical one) on a crtiically important issue, and if we can use that to trigger a good discussion on that topic, great – let’s do it.
A.L.
I would challenge this assumption:
One is that our emphasis should be on the common humanity of all people and the idea of common rights and obligations. Many Muslims can be reached with an appeal of this kind if our own conduct does not contradict it. Most of the world does not want to be enslaved to a minority ideology or religious view; our challenge is to find common ground with this majority in the interval that still remains before our global power falls to our proportion of the world’s population.
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Evidence of Muslims in Britain (40% or more want Sharia Law) says this assertion is false. Muslims who live in the West and have access to a “Universalist” law specifically reject that for Islam and Sharia which explicitly says men are not all created equal, Allah wants the Muslim to rule the infidel as chattel or at best a second class citizen subject to pogroms. This in the UK where Muslims are less than 10% of the population. In places like the Scandinavian nations, Muslims make up more than 75% of rapists and conduct rape as a campaign of terror aimed at the infidel women (and the men who cannot protect them) to submit to Islam (or be raped). Women in Sweden are now wearing “anti-rape” belts that take two hands to open. You can even see this in Australia where the harassment of Western girls (including girls as young as seven being called “whores”) on the beach is part and parcel (along with Imams calling rape victims “uncovered meat” and justification for horrific gang-rapes by Muslims against infidel women) of the attempt to inflict terror on the Universalist West.
It’s understandable that people cling to this broken fantasy of PC Multi-Culti nonsense, the tragically infantile notion that all people want peace, that all people live middle class suburban lives. Because the reality is dirty, ugly, horrible, and requires enormous amounts of money, sweat, blood, tragedy and worse to deal with. An ugly dirty job that will not go away.
“But other religions believe a number of things about the constitution of nature and human nature that might someday be verified by empirical testing.”
This statement makes my point IMHO. We can’t live interconnected with people who believe Polio Vaccines are a plot or anti-Islamic. It’s PC nonsense and harmful to us obviously if they transmit the disease to our people. A voodoo witch doctor might believe human sacrifice could cure AIDS. It’s still stupid superstition and should be treated and punished as such in the West, scorned as idiocy elsewhere and prevented from coming here regardless.
With (as Wretchard suggests) a huge spike in oil prices and various “deals” being made for long-term supplies to specific countries like China, and the break-up of the world oil market and perhaps world trade, it might be wise to move to alternative energy sources here in the US (shale oil, clean coal, nuclear, bio-mass, solar, wind power, etc), live with very high energy prices, and cut off the Muslim world from the outside world.
We were largely at peace with Islam when we had little do with it; that same can be had again.
I posted this a short time ago on the “old” discussion thread on this topic:
What astonishes me is how few people can just disagree with Dean’s approach without ripping into him. It tends to prove his thesis, in my book. It’s not, gee, why did Dean do this (which was how the above post put it) but, What an a-hole! What a dhimmi!
Come on [commenters!]. Think about the issue and debate it. That can include disagreeing with Dean, but what is it that makes everyone so sure-fire arrogant about their own perspectives?
Actually, I’ve seen many people try to politely engage in reasoned disagreement with Dean, only to recoil in disgust after being exposed to Dean’s method of rebuttal as demonstrated in this response:
(bold in original, asterisks added by me to reduce the vulgarity of Dean’s method of argumentation)
Dean has demonstrated repeatedly that he is not a rational actor capable of engaging in polite discourse.
…but be sure to keep in mind that disagreement reveals you as a deluded psychopath nutjob conspiracy theorist murderer.
Armed Liberal, you gave the thread this title: Dean’s World: Discuss.
#20 from Armed Liberal: “David Blue (#10) – look, this isn’t a commentary on how Esmay runs his blog.”
Look, you are having it both ways there. Look up and down a little. See?
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#20 from Armed Liberal: “I may or may not like it (or link to it much). But Dean has staked out a position (albeit a kinda silly rhetorical one) on a crtiically important issue …”
What Dean Esmay is doing is implementing a policy to be rude, to exclude, and generally to stink-bomb one side out of the discussion.
This policy implies a fight, and the stakes are: do individuals such you and I, holding different idea on whether Islam should be defined as an enemy, stand on a basis of equality and security in our good names when we argue this? Or, do I – and people I respect and largely agree with, such as Robert Spencer – have to argue from the weak position of Klansmen and people like that, where simply taking that side of the argument makes if legitimate for people to treat you like filth?
I won’t let that pass. I won’t tacitly agree to that.
The right counter to that kind of muck-throwing policy is to insist that the targets of this policy are not illegitimate, those who attack in that way are. And I do insist on that.
I like to think I would have disapproved of this kind of strategy and disdained the kind of advantage that comes from legitimating it, whichever side it struck.
I think you should find your way also to my policy. I think you should disdain the advantage to your side that comes from legitimating the befouling of the other side. Because I promise you, you will not have that edge unmentioned and uncontested in any case.
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#20 from Armed Liberal: David Blue (#10) – look, this isn’t a commentary on how Esmay runs his blog. I may or may not like it (or link to it much). But Dean has staked out a position (albeit a kinda silly rhetorical one) on a crtiically important issue, and if we can use that to trigger a good discussion on that topic, great – let’s do it.
A.L.”
The “position” he has staked out is a policy of lies, rudeness, calumny, stigma, purity test and purge.
You are mistaken to ask for a “good discussion on that topic” and not a challenge to the essence of it, which you actually have in the thread title.
What Dean Esmay is adding is not an argument (or not a legitimate argument) but a policy, or an enforced fallacy, the fallacy of “agree to the assumptions I lay down or I’ll make you unclean“. To have a “good discussion” you have to challenge the policy or the fallacy. If you don’t challenge the fallacy, it’s a bad discussion, because it’s crooked from the title on down.
#23 from Shad: “Dean has demonstrated repeatedly that he is not a rational actor capable of engaging in polite discourse.
Come on [commenters!]. Think about the issue and debate it.
…but be sure to keep in mind that disagreement reveals you as a deluded psychopath nutjob conspiracy theorist murderer.”
Enviably concise and dead on the mark.
OK, but let me suggest a difference between form and substance here, okay? I don’t know why Dean sputters uncontrollably when trying to have this discussion, but that doesn’t mean his rules are unreasonable per se. I left Dean’s World because I didn’t want to have to agree or disagree with his rules, but he has the right to have them, and I don’t think they’re so far out. I for one simply don’t want to make Islamophobia my life’s work, pro or con, and it was becoming and remains, at least for the time being, an obsession on the blog. If you take a magnifying glass to it, most of the argument here is about fine points of grammar or usage, the distinction between Muslims and Islam, and a lot of people including Dean unwilling to climb down from some rather overstated positions.
But notwithstanding that, I am at best agnostic about Dean’s propositions, and if asked I am pretty confident that he would agree that I am not a deluded psychopath nutjob conspiracy theorist murderer. For in his lucid moments, which is most of them, I think Dean’s a pretty good writer and runs a very good shop. I mean, believe me, I have no reason to say this at this point, do I? For all the fuss, I am one of the two people most affected by this. I think only two front-page contributors quit (somewhat to my surprise and, frankly, disappointment). (I don’t count Rosemary.) Unlike Kevin I’m not that knowledgeable a bout or interested in Islamophobia or Jihad, as you will, so I am not looking for a spot on a blog with that theme, which he has found satisfactorily; so no one has been more put out over this than Ron Coleman. Am I such a putz to still give Dean some semblance of the benefit of the doubt? I don’t think so, really.
I do reject easy analogies — both Dean’s, comparing people who have legitimate worries about a legitimate historical and cultural issue in world affairs to Nazis, and those who compare Dean’s analogizing to… Nazism. I mean how fast must we reach the Godwin Point these days?!
Mr. Rockford,
I wrote that many Muslims, meaning not all, can be reached by an appeal to a common humanity. Until I see poll data to show that most Muslims in fact want to subordinate the rest of the world in the manner you describe, I am inclined to treat that idea as a view held by a fringe of Muslim believers.
That is not to discount the very real threat of fringe groups armed with modern weapons or the need of the West to affirm its values of tolerance and freedom. But extremism will burn itself out if the great majority of Muslims do not give it effective support. A billion Muslims did not follow Bin Laden’s call in 2001 and until they do I think there are grounds to hope for a peaceful future between the two civilizations.
#26 from Ron Coleman (late of Dean’s World): “OK, but let me suggest a difference between form and substance here, okay? I don’t know why Dean sputters uncontrollably when trying to have this discussion, but that doesn’t mean his rules are unreasonable per se.”
It’s not sputtering. It’s an avowed policy of deliberate rudeness.
Since that deliberate rudeness is part of his system, built into the package on his own statements as to what he does, yes that does mean his rules are unreasonable.
Dean Esmay might be a good writer in general, but his attitude WRT Islam makes him irrelevant. Islam is the proverbial elephant in the room, and Esmay chooses to pout like a child, take his toys and go home. That makes him not serious.
Distinguish between those to tolerate threats to various cultures and those who tolerate threats to the fabric of society that underlies all cultures.
Include amongst those really bad guys those who, by their inaction, tolerate threats to all society. That includes, among the moderate Muslims who do not speak out against the fundamentalist extremists, those who see no threat to premature American withdrawal from Iraq and those who think the United Nations is functional..
#26
Speaking of lucidity, what does … deluded psychopath nutjob conspiracy theorist murderer mean? Is this someone who murders conspiracy theorists?
There have been several excellent expositions on this and the previous thread that address the 5 points Dean Esmay made. Why don’t you address those? Except for one person upthread describing definitions for Jihadists and legitimately mentioning the word Nazi as a type of term to avoid, the only use of that word here has been from you.
I disagree with Dean on many issues; on others, I don’t really care what he has to say. His manner is his manner, his vocabulary is his vocabulary. If you don’t like either, then they’re sufficient reason to stay away from his blog. Given the popularity of his blog, however, he’s of at least interest to many.
But I will back him up when he draws a line that will exclude those who would rather demagogue than discuss. I’ll back him up when he refuses to discuss an issue (whether Islam or not) with those who poison the discussion with their own, non-profane invective.
Anyone using the word ‘dhimmi’ outside of its historical context is such. Anyone who cannot bother to at least get the facts right (i.e. Jim Rockford) and instead absorbs only that which supports prejudiced views, is equally beyond the pale.
Those who consistently make category errors in assuming that the behavior and rhetoric of less than 1% of a population represents the other 99% doesn’t really have much of an armamentarium with which to argue.
So if he wants to exclude those from his blog… well, ‘his blog, his rules’.
I don’t think that’s totally productive, though. He draws readers because he usually has something of interest on his blog. He asks questions that provoke–in many–further questions. But many–including a number of the commenters here–equally quash argument through dictat, not further argument. They close off questions with assertion. That’s not the height of manners or reason.
I cite Rockford here because he blithely throws off comments ungrounded in fact. In his Comment #4, for instance, he asserts (repeating what he’s read and what confirms his view of Muslims) that the French who were attacked in Saudi Arabia last week were ‘on the “Muslims Only” highway to Mecca’. The facts are otherwise. They were, first, on the road to Medina. Second, having travelled on that road as a non-Muslm, I know that the road is not restricted to Muslims.
There seems to be a willful ignorance of that fact that Muslims are actively seeking reforms within their own cultures. There seems to be a willingness to suppress details about Muslim societies that do not fit the template.
Somehow, things like the condemnation of the killings of the French by the Imam of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina don’t seem to enter consciousness. That he said (in the mosque and as reported in Arabic media) that attack was “a terrorist act… which Islam repudiates and for which it prescribes the most severe punishment,” and that the perpetrators of such actions “have tarnished the honorable image of Islam… They are their own enemies and enemies of society.” doesn’t get picked up. Or if noted, gets dismissed as ‘taqqiya’. Or ‘just PR’.
How can one discuss anything when one side closes off discussion?
I think only two front-page contributors quit (somewhat to my surprise and, frankly, disappointment). (I don’t count Rosemary.) Unlike Kevin I’m not that knowledgeable a bout or interested in Islamophobia or Jihad, as you will, so I am not looking for a spot on a blog with that theme, which he has found satisfactorily; so no one has been more put out over this than Ron Coleman.
Ron, I wrote this post, Ideological purity, in an effort to mend fences between you and Dean. Not that it worked. I spent time that could have been better spent on other things and no one links to the damned thing. Everyone has suffered a bit here..
In any case, to save more time that could be better spent on a sunny Sunday, here’s my already-posted two cents about the Islamophobe vs. Islamophile argument: they’re both wrong.
Dean often says that we should ‘talk to Muslims’. Well, I have talked to Muslims, here and abroad, and from those discussions I’ve realized that one of our government’s biggest mistakes was to classify our current war against terrorism as an “ideological war.”
They call it an ideological war, but they are never clear about what ideology, and which exact holders of that ideology we’re fighting. How are we supposed to ‘fight’ this not-clearly defined ideological war? How do we know when we’ve won, or lost? Who knows? As 100 people anywhere, and you’re likely to get about 200 opinions.
As it on the internet and you invariably get a flame war. Somehow, this war has turned into the modern equivalent of ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’? If you ‘win’ the discussion, if you argue nicely or if you’re rude, what effect does this have on the price of tea in Waziristan?
Without clearly defined enemies or goals, all 6 billion people out there are left in the wilderness, left to provide their own definitions of what we’re fighting. Given that terrorists claim to be fighting in the name of Islam, it’s not surprising that both Muslims and non-Muslims define our enemy in the GWOT as Islam.
When President Bush said:
“From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
That was his FDR moment, his call for a clearly defined war against definable political and/or military organizations, a war that could be definably ‘won.’, a war based on established actions, not ideology or dogma. If he’d had the courage of his convictions, we wouldn’t be spinning our wheels discussing ideological and religious issues that, in the end, have little influence on whether the GWOT is a win, a loss or a draw.
In other words, why do they want to eat us? Because we taste gud. It’s tiring to make the same argument over and over, so, when people decide that they want to fight against any nation or organization that any nation that “continues to harbor or support terrorism”, then I’ll be glad to do anything I can to help.
One of those organizations that continues to harbor and support terrorism is the financier of global terror, the Muslim brotherhood, a billion-dollar network that supports al Qaeda, Hamas, most Islamist terrorism worldwide, leftist International ANSWER and many so-called liberal/moderate Islamist organizations like the Muslim American Society.
If you want to have a long and involved philosophical discussion, you might note that the whole fracas may have started with this post, written by Ron, criticising an article by Dinesh D’Souza, an intellectual who says that conservatives should embrace moderate MAS-style “pious” Muslims, in a shared struggle against the American left and the jihadists.
Many “pious” MAS-style Muslims are currently defending D’Souza. Why is D’Souza so important to them, and to the Islamophobia Watchers? I don’t have the time or effort to write it out, because it is a sunny sunday, but it’s easy enough to figure out.
#9 David Billington
Very interesting points. Are you classifying Islam as a ‘Western monotheism’? I think it was Bernard Lewis that stated that Islam and Christianity because of their similarities as revealed religions are bound to clash. When two religions met in the Mediterranean area, each claiming to be the recipient of God’s final revelation, conflict was inevitable. “I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Go To Hell” from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200305/lewis
In point 3 you are perhaps leaning toward containment? Wouldn’t this be difficult to impossible in an increasingly global economy where Islam’s crescent is parked on so much of the worlds oil?
As to point 4, I don’t think you have much hope unless you physically wrest the megaphone away from the hate spewing Imams. The people of the Middle East are at base probably no better or worse than any others, but they are being indoctrinated thoroughly to hate and dehumanize others (this their problem, not ours) and it will take decades to undo this. We may not have decades, what with Iran and Pakistan forming a technological base that can resist the efforts of the big four (EU, US, Russia, China) assuming the four could even work in concert against them.
While science might eventually nudge Islamic society towards a reformation, there is no reason that I can see why they can’t have huge amounts of technology without having the same love of reason that gave birth to Western science. After, all once the breakthrough is made, it can be copied.
I would add a point 5. It comes from simply reading and believing what many of their leading imams say. What is wrong with the West and the reason for conflict is very simple, it about what the West is not: Islam.
Addendum: There are Muslims trying to start some reformation. They should be encouraged – they are few and they face real death threats. Here is one you may not know:
http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/
Dean: _I’m curious to know if Marc and the fine folks at Winds of Change find all that reasonable._
Apparantly according to Dean I’m not a fine folk. I agree with Marc’s comments though.
One of the big problems with Dean’s purity test, I mean, editorial policy (whatever) is that he apparently refuses to acknowledge that there are people engaged in a 1,400 year struggle with the West. And they can cite the verses and the rulings, which may not be enough to raise an army, but enough to keep the peace-loving sheep quiet. What can be done about this will not be discussed at Dean’s World.
OK, hanging at the airport, (free wifi, I love Jet Blue…) and a few more thoughts.
Re Dean as a censor/censurious blogger – look, I think he’s flatly wrong to have a litmus test about belief. I want people with a lot of beliefs to come and participate at Winds – how else will I learn anything?
I’m more concerned about style or behavior – and on those counts, Dean would be less-welcome as a Winds poster or commenter. How do you encourage dialog, rather than shut it off? Dean wants to shut it off, and that’s a mistake.
But those of us who are concerned about the jihadi threat need to look carefully at the world, and decide for ourselves three things:
1) is it really a threat, or just unpleasant and scary?
2) if so, is the locus of the threat a series of political movements or a religious/ spiritual one?
3) if it is a religious/ spiritual one, is it embedded deeply in Islam or is it a small branch that can be cut back?
Now, I’ll answer “yes” to #1, “maybe” to #2, and “not yet” to #3.
But as Jack Black points out in High Fidelity – “not yet” can mean “soon”.
But it’s not enough for me to look at this and draw my own conclusions. We need to have a clear agreement within America and the West about these issues, and it isn;t useful for us to sit in corners muttering to ourselves.
We have to make convincing arguments on all three fronts.
A.L.
A.L., I think that’s at the core of Dean’s post, which begs the question “What is Islamophobia?”
Now, Dean posts the following in an attempt to avoid the thicket into which that question leads:
bq. “I will not engage in lengthy parsings and arguments over exactly what that means. If you cannot tell the difference between “I believe Islam is a false faith” and “I believe Islam is the cause of terrorism and repression in the Middle East and wherever else it goes,” then you don’t belong here.”
bq. “If you think the problem in the Middle East is primarily a Muslim Problem rather than a problem with a region plagued with a legacy of fascism, communism, and brutal dictatorships stemming from the Cold War and colonial eras—along with the ethnic strife and of course the religious matters that usually add to such things–then you do not belong here.”
That seems reasonable, but it puts me, as a reader, in the uncomfortable position of basing my reading of everything that transpires in the Dar al Islam (and yes, I know that includes more than the Middle East) on the assumption that every single statement of religious motivation on the part of every single terrorist group there is a cynical falsehood.
Why “cynical falsehood”? Well, if _they_ believe it, then the fact that it actually stems from the legacy Dean mentions strikes me as relevant only in a historical sense. In other words, what was a secular issue in that case has become a religious one. The environment would have perverted the religion, and we would be forced to figure out a way to un-pervert it if we want to fix the problem. Theoretically, we could un-pervert it by fixing the environment without engaging the religion, but that assumes that the religion will be a non-actor in our attempt to fix the environment…a poor assumption in the case of any religion.
Out of the many problems this poses, I think two in particular merit our attention. First, why should I believe that Dean, me, or anyone else in the Blogosphere knows Islamic Culture well enough to make that generalization? That strike me as both arrogant and extremely dismissive of that culture.
Second, it assumes that, every time Osama, al Zawahiri, or anyone else makes a call to Jihad, they’re really just doing it for the Western cameras. That seems both unlikely and empirically unsupportable.
Overall, I just don’t think we can realistically expect to deal with this without engaging Islam in some sort of cultural dialogue, a dialogue that must center on the violent, expansionist elements in that culture (as well as our own, although those tendencies are IMO less pronounced in ours).
Oh, and one more thing. I categorically reject the following statement:
bq. “Medieval, anachronistic, obscure terms like “dhimmitude” or “taqiyya” are suitable for intellectual discussion & analysis. They are not and never will be appropriate to slap in the face of everyday Muslims or their friends.”
Dhimmitude, at least, is anything but “medieval” and “anachronistic.” I studied Islamic law in law school, and I can trace step-by-step the way in which traditional Dhimmi laws inform modern Egyptian laws dealing with religious minorities. With a little research, I suspect I could prove that the same lineage exists in every Muslim state that today has laws dealing with the rights and privileges (such as they are) of religious minorities. Sadly, Dhimmi laws are nowhere near a thing of the past.
A Steve, I think Dean is objecting to the use of “dhimmitude” as an insult, not in its suitable use in intellectual discussion or analysis. Insults are not good, but I’m not sure why some insults are worse than others. I’ve been called a multiculturalist and implicitly by Dean an Islamaphobe. One moves on.
I do think “taqiyya” can be an insult that is particularly unproductive to rational discussion. It has the effect of removing speech from consideration on the basis of the religion of the speaker, not on the basis of an attempt to evaluate the credibility of the speaker.
I find Dean’s “editorial policy” similarly misguided. He doesn’t want speech from certain ideological viewpoints.
P Dhimmi, the commenter previously known as PD Shaw
#34 jdwill,
Yes, I see Islam as a Western Eurasian monotheism, although one could argue that seven to eight centuries ago Islam was torn between east and west and opted in the end to be somewhat more eastern.
Whether Christianity and Islam are bound to clash depends on more than beliefs that are mutually exclusive. For almost a millennium (c. 732 to 1683), Christians and Muslims were intermittently at war. But the conflict was truly a religious war only in the first three Crusades. Historically, Muslims have fought more wars with each other than with Christians, and Christians have certainly fought each other more than anybody else. We could be entering another period of inter-religious strife but my sense is that strictly religious motives for war do not sustain themselves for long.
Containment can only work against governments and societies that are willing to contain themselves. After 1945, the USSR tried to expand where it could, but when faced with opposition it did not seek all-out war as Nazi Germany did in 1939. An Islamic superstate under the control of extremists might or might not become a status quo power in the Soviet sense. But I think the Middle East is more likely to turn inward than outward once we are gone.
A larger Sunni-Shia war is set to explode to Iran’s west, and the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan will create a hostile front in the east. The Iranians do not have much time to strike a deal to keep us in the region if they do not want to be isolated. The Arab states for their part do not want sectarian tensions to worsen either and would like us to be offshore. If both sides decide that they each need us, tensions could subside. Forces for peaceful change that we could encourage might then have a new opening. But if we go and tensions worsen, they are more likely to bring rival Muslims into conflict with each other, not with us.
The United States does not need oil from the Persian Gulf; we could make up for its loss by keeping the oil we export to Japan. Doing so, however, would repeat what we did to Japan in 1940-41, set off an arms race in the rest of Asia, and probably force the European Union to close ranks and federate. How long the American people are willing to export their domestic oil and intervene on the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere so that Japan, China, India, and Europe can get oil from the region will determine how long the present situation continues. The world hasn’t seen what could happen if America really becomes unilateral, and the consequences of US isolationism ought to be weighing more heavily on public opinion and government thinking in other countries than seems to be the case.
Regarding hate speech and indoctrination in Islam, the best way to counter this is to support modern secondary education in Islamic countries so that ordinary people don’t have only the madrasas to choose. Irshad Manji is enormously courageous and I hope she inspires more Muslims to ask questions and examine their own tradition. We could help disseminate a wider range of Islamic thought to encourage this self-study.
The selective appropriation of foreign technology was the aim of imperial Japan and later of the USSR. The reasons why it failed in Russia in the 1980s matter here. Modernization earlier in the twentieth century was more a matter of brute force industrialization. By the late twentieth century, the key drivers of Western productivity were much less tangible: they were things like complex knowledge, ability to network and exchange information and ideas, and the ability to innovate. A society that is ideologically rigid cannot do this as well as a society in which there is freedom. Fundamentalist Islamic societies can buy technology but may have difficulty sustaining modern life on their own.
There is a real danger in the short-to-medium term from new states that acquire nuclear weapons, but these states will threaten each other more than us. Whether they can sustain modern economies and defenses while driving their best people into exile and repressing freedom of thought is much more doubtful. I think we will be much more challenged by the Chinese model, which restricts freedom in important ways but has enormous dynamism.
I find much to expand on in Dennis’s point that this is “essentially a conflict internal to Islam.” Certainly this is true for the most part. But unfortunately it’s a little too clean. There is and will be a huge conflict going on in the nexus of Islam and the West.
OK, what do we do about it? Dennis’ comment does point to where the evolution must take place—within Islam. The religion itself informs the psychological makeup of a quarter of the world’s population. It’s useless to identify this as the enemy—unless you are willing to identify them as the enemy.
Pace David Billington, there is nothing in our body of science that precludes us from doing so and choosing war and extermination, nor quarantine or “beggaring” the enemy. What’s preventing that is the evolution of our religious and ethical culture, the very thing we hope will occur in the collective psyche of the Islamic world.
Face it: the conflict of Islam and the West is an existential one. We don’t know how it will come out. The West has a hell of a challenge on its hands, minimizing the damage from the cultural conflict, while allowing the Islamic world to deal with its own need for evolution. To do less is to surrender; to do more would be self-defeating in the extreme.
I like the discussion of the term “Jihadist,” but I would place the wedge a little differently: (1) within democratic institutions, where actions spurred by Jihadist thought violate the law, and (2) elsewhere, where the antipathy to the West reaches some critical mass that becomes a material danger to us. The first one is easy; the second is the province of foreign policy, and will necessarily be provisional and situational, like struggle with totalitarianism always is. This will be an art, not a science. It will entail plenty of tragedy for us in the best-case scenario, and we will get it wrong sometimes, too.
I assume most blog readers are political animals, and thus suffer under the illusion that we in the liberal west have a lot of dissonance about who we are. Not really, it’s just our favorite pastime. The real dissonance—the impetus for cultural evolution—exists in the Islamic world. There is plenty reason for us to be hopeful about the outcome.
#39 David Billington,
Thanks for the response. I disagree about your statement that only the Crusades were religious wars. They are given a religious connotation by us in their name, but only the first was that pure in its religious motivation. But how are we to judge the Islamic conquests? Did they call any of these pushes Jihads? Is our history silent on this? It may be they simply considered the West as barbarians and there for the taking and that converting the lands to Islam was doing Allah’s work. It’s easy, you grab some land and booty, and tell youself you are making the world a better place. All the best elites did it.
But in any case, most wars have multiple components in their causation. Economics and taxation are usually big factors but don’t have to be the prime or only ones. For example, the Thirty Years war that devastated what is now Germany had strong religious components with Protestant princes trying to shake off Catholic influence from the Hapsburg empire. Sure there was a geo-political struggle involving Spain, France, Denmark, and Sweden, but it is risky to apply only our modern secular humanist viewpoint to how these people thought. Because of the deeply religious nature of art and literature from this period, I think it is better to allow that most of the wars before the 17th century between Islam and Christendom were at least highly exacerbated by religion, if not completely caused by it.
I also am dubious about the idea that we could find an alternate energy source (we could) and then walk away from the Middle Eastern and its oil. One of the points I keep trying to integrate into the discussion is how the rapidly globalizing economy is changing how we must look at nations and for that matter, at the Islamic problem. Where does China’s interest leave off and ours start if our economies are deeply entwined? BTW this site: http://www.gravmag.com/oil3.html#ak says the oil export to Japan is trivial. I am thinking oil is so fungible that you can’t really think of it as a discrete export that you can direct.
I don’t think the indoctrination to intolerance problem is directly due to madrasas. I think it is more about Saudi funded missionaries over a 40 year time period. I expect it could be countered over time, but the seeds have been sown and we must attend to the harvest.
Fundamentalist Islamic societies can buy technology but may have difficulty sustaining modern life on their own.
This may be just fine with their elites. Further, I don’t think you can ignore the periphery of Islam. Over the last 30 years, VS Naipaul – “Among the Believers” and “Beyond Belief”, has given us a priceless strobe of the effects of Islamization in Iran, Indonesia, Maylasia, and Pakistan. He notes the submerged cultures there and some disaffection with the revolution. Who knows what synergy may arise? It would seem likely that rigid dogma from the center would be softened and reshaped somewhat at the edges. This is true in all empires. Or maybe not.
… but these states will threaten each other more than us
Again, a global economy that is lifting many populations out of subsistence living is also increasing those populations and their dependency on the global economy. I am becoming more and more certain that we can’t have a big war that disrupts oil, thus energy, and thence food without triggering a global calamity. Of course, this can be made into an argument for a new detente, but with whom? The world will get a lot more dangerous. I guess if you tell Iran and Pakistan behind closed doors that any nuclear terrorism will automatically have them as the return address you might succeed in some form of stand off.
I intend to go way out on a limb here. We should take a good hard look at the cost in dollars and human suffering of another cold war where large chunks of humanity are locked in squalor. Look at the conditions in North Korea. Look at the costs of German re-integration and the relative position of Eastern Europe. Once an isolated regime is locked in with enough military threat to ensure stand-off and remain in power, but without a system that enables a decent economy, the ideology doesn’t really matter anymore – you have a time tested recipe for misery. This new cold war is probably where we are headed and it is what I think the neo cons were trying to avoid with their PNAC. Trouble is, we don’t seem to have the consensus or will for what it would take to smother the nascent Islamist empire in its crib.
China is a concern, but I don’t see the same level of desperation.
I think what David Billington leaves out of an otherwise excellent comment is the prospect of those same Middle Eastern states transferring WMD technology to non-state actors. This may be because of corruption or ambivalence or idealogy. As David points out the Middle East is severely divided internally, but in the past it has dealt with these divisions and their potential for violence and chaos with pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism, both of which legitimize violence against “the other” and seek to externalize dissatisfaction with petty, corrupt backwards regimes that export only oil and scientists.
I think the real danger of these states gaining WMD is not from them using against the U.S. directly, but either in the above sense or in the manner jdwill discusses. Someone nukes the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, the world is thrown into a Great Great Depression and history suggests that’s when the real violence starts.
David Billington,
“Islam was a socially advanced religion at the time of its inception and even today Muslims often speak of the rights of women under Islam as a step forward compared to what these rights were before Islam.”
So you’ve bought into the propaganda that Muslims treated women better than the thousands of other cultures of their day that they subjugated? Please provide sources and remember that the victor writes the history. According to Mohammeds child bride Aisha the Muslims treated their women worse than the few examples they had on the Arabian peninsula. She complained about it and it is recorded in their religious texts.
Armed Liberal,
“it’s not PC blindness that’s making me take this position, just a kind of squeamishness at killing a billion or so people”
Not PC blindness but just belief that we are limited to only two courses of action, submission to evil or genocide? Is that what you mean to be saying? Cause that’s what your writing. You are aware we forced the Muslims to give up the open slave trade without killing ever last one of them?
John Burgess,
“Anyone using the word ‘dhimmi’ outside of its historical context is such.”
Question, does the beating of Nasir Ashraf give you a historical context.
“Those who consistently make category errors in assuming that the behavior and rhetoric of less than 1% of a population represents the other 99% doesn’t really have much of an armamentarium with which to argue.
So if he wants to exclude those from his blog… well, ‘his blog, his rules’.”
This has absolutely nothing to do with what is going on over a Dean’s site. You are in fact totally uninformed on Dean’s behavior. He in fact resorts to such intellectually dishonest tactics and blows up precisely because he is getting trounced in the comments section.
I do not proceed from watching what 1% of the population is doing and then assume it represents 99% and yet I got banned at Deans. He wasn’t even honest enough to inform people that he had banned me.
_So you’ve bought into the propaganda that Muslims treated women better than the thousands of other cultures of their day that they subjugated? Please provide sources and remember that the victor writes the history._
In general, the advent of Islam brought an enormous improvement in the position of women in ancient Arabia, endowing them with property and some other rights, and giving them a measure of protection against ill treatment by their husbands or owners.
Bernard Lewis, _The Middle East_
John Burgess,
“I cite Rockford here because he blithely throws off comments ungrounded in fact. In his Comment #4, for instance, he asserts (repeating what he’s read and what confirms his view of Muslims) that the French who were attacked in Saudi Arabia last week were ‘on the “Muslims Only” highway to Mecca’. The facts are otherwise. They were, first, on the road to Medina. Second, having travelled on that road as a non-Muslm, I know that the road is not restricted to Muslims.”
Isn’t this nit picking? At least his mistake is honest.
News reports were that ” Saudi TV said the victims were part of group of French nationals, some of whom were Muslims heading to the holy city of Mecca on a pilgrimage.” also “General Turki said the group had stopped by the side of a road typically restricted to Muslims about 10 miles from Medina when a car pulled near them and opened fire.” and “But Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad built a Muslim state and is buried, is strictly forbidden to non-Muslims.”
So he mixed up Mecca and Medina. So what the NYT seems to think Medina is off limits too. So if there is an error it’s shared by the Islamophobes over there. So he also mixed up the fact that it was the area of the side of the road was muslims-only with the road itself, so what.
Your ommission on the other hand is not so innocent. They were in fact shot down while in an area muslims only restricted area. You wrote that paragraph as if his statement was totally unfounded. Shame on you since you have good reason to know your statement “I cite Rockford here because he blithely throws off comments ungrounded in fact.” was deceptive and you supporting paragraph also.
Your statement “(repeating what he’s read and what confirms his view of Muslims)” paints him as having some dubious motive for bringing it up. What do you expect? Sure it confirms his view because it’s factual and it supports his position. Do you expect him to bring up facts that disconfirm his position? Your the one hiding facts here. So using your reasoning can I therefore assume that it is you who is repeating what you’ve read and what confirms your view of Muslims?
Shame on you also to your total blindness to the mere issue of having Muslim-only areas, let alone killing them in these areas. What do you think the penality is if an non-Muslim refuses to obey such a double standard law as this. You think they get a pass to Disney World as compensation for being discriminated against. Islam has all sorts of de-jure rules like this sanctifying the belief in the unworthiness of the non-muslim. Here you are complaining about the historical nature of Dhimmi status. It’s right here in front of your eyes.
Saudis are not only religious bigots but also racists to boot. Despite the fact that much of their foreign labor is legally there for generations yet they keep them in a second class citizen state.
PD Shaw,
“A Steve, I think Dean is objecting to the use of “dhimmitude” as an insult, not in its suitable use in intellectual discussion or analysis.”
You are being much more gracious with Dean than he is with his commenters. He doesn’t use “slap in the face” the way a normal stable person would. To bring Dhimmitude up outside of Dean’s limited understanding of its historical context is a slap in the face. Thus Steves post would have been a slap in the face when he says that,
The metric is whether a “moderate Muslim” would find it offensive not whether it’s factual or not. Goes with his whole misguided concept of “Shut up, I’m trying to run a war here and your screwing up my alliances”. He’s an intellectual pragmatist in the worst sense.
P Dhimmi,
Didn’t answer the question did you? The claim about Islamic treatment of women is made with regards to other cultures and not merely their own culture. Burgesses claim was that it was a socially advanced religion, but that leaves open the question of ‘relative to what’. Christianity and Judiasm were already ancient religions at the time of Mohammeds invention of Islam. As were Confusianism and many other religions. Not all of them disallowed property rights for women.
In fact this whole argument rest on a fallacy that the demagogues who are screaming Islamophobia are complaining about. Even for any particualar religion like Christianity in the ancient world there wasn’t any uninform cultural pattern. Hell even in little countries like Greece their were vast differences in how women were treated from city to city. If anything cultural differences were more varied back then than now.
Notice also that in the full quote he speaking of the Arabs.
Besides according to Islam itself this statement by Lewis is wrong. Mohammeds first wife owned property and was a shrewd business woman. How could she have done this if women couldn’t own property? Why is she remembered as Khadijah the wife who financially supported Mohammed on his mission if women were not allowed property. Apparently some of the tribes in the area allowed property ownership by women. Mohammeds own in this case.
Isn’t this just all based on broad brushed assumptions, religious propaganda and Paganophobia? 🙂
My reason for rejecting such arguments is they are belied by Mohammeds own actions. He was only using those social issues as a diversion to justify his conquests. The communists did the same thing as have many other despotic rulers. Hell the Spanish invaded South America on the pretext of saving souls. Venezuela and Chavez come to mind. So do the pre-death hagographies of Castro as helper of the poor.
For me it is a total non-issue whether Mohammed ended one of a multitude of bad practices of the time in his narrow local. As a matter of fact he backslid on many others even by local norms. The moral authority claimed by Muslms is broader than that. They are claimin be better than every other religion. This is falsified on a more broad framework by the fact that Mohammeds ethics are pre-Christian and even pre-Confucsion.
#41 jdwill,
I agree that wars have had a mix of motives. Thank you also for the correction about US oil exports to Japan; I was out of date and didn’t realize that we were now keeping it for ourselves. The oil market is indeed fungible in the sense that price is determined by global supply and demand. But I believe we can substitute for Middle East oil if we are willing to pay the price of doing so.
Other major economies may not be able to shift as easily and it is more true than ever that trouble in one part of the global economy has repercussions on all the rest. But I’m not sure that the economic and social risks are strong enough to restrain the pursuit of politico-military interests that make the world less stable, and that is my concern.
I agree that Saudi missionaries and funding have turned many of the overseas mosques toward Wahabism, and there has been a conservative trend in the Islamic world itself. I don’t think there is very much we can do directly about this; we can’t tell Muslims how to interpret Islam. Only they can do that. But we can make their heritage more widely available (the Library of Congress is the largest Islamic library in the world).
Support for modern secondary education, which most parents in Pakistan want for their children and cannot get locally, would provide an alternative to the madrasas. The future of Muslim Asia will be shaped in large part by the quality of education, and we have enormous assets that could be helpful.
P Dhimmi,
I agree with your point about the danger of WMDs falling into private hands, to which I would add the case of killer viruses becoming possible for private groups to develop. My sense is that these dangers are going to get worse over the next several decades. In the near-term of the next few years, the main danger will come from states that acquire nuclear weapons for deterrent purposes. But it is certainly possible that a nuke could enter the black market from existing inventories.
The question about the Saudi oil fields is whether the US or Israel will strike the Bushehr reactor in Iran before it goes hot. Once it goes hot, blowing it up will rain fallout over the oil terminals in the western Persian Gulf.
Mary,
I at least read ideological purity. I asked for his advice on some writing about Muslims I planned. (after he wrote me about a post I made – saying I should contact some moderate Muslims he knew). Well we went around in circles for a few days and finally they figured I was sincere.
Any way I wrote my pieces without reference to them or the discussion (it was useless) and the piece got linked by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt to I Found A Moderate Muslim.
Dean is a hot heat on the subject and immediately goes paranoind if he even thinks you are bigoted towards Muslims. It really takes effort to bring him to the point of rationality on the subject. The internet is a big place. If I can’t get help I can help myself.
Brian Macker,
I apologize for some imprecision in the post on Islam that has triggered your exchanges above. All of the religions at the time of Islam’s founding had aspects that we would regard today as unprogressive, including Islam itself. However, I think the point can be defended that Islam was at least in a basic sense (if not in every detail) progressive in relation to pre-Islamic Arabia, ie. the five pillars as universals and the creation of a universal society around them. I did not mean to make a broader judgment of Islam in relation to the other universal faiths of its time or to imply that paganism had nothing positive to be said for it.
In referring to the rights of women, I meant to refer to what Muslims today believe in relation to the rights of women in pre-Islamic Arabia. Whether that belief is historically correct is of course a separate question that you may properly raise.
Let me see if I can turn that last one into coherence:
Mary,
I did read “Ideological Purity”.
I asked for Dean’s advice on some writing about Muslims I planned well before this latest kerfluffle. (after he wrote me about a post I made – saying I should contact some moderate Muslims he knew – around Jan. of this year). Well we went around in circles for a few days and finally they figured I was sincere.
Any way I wrote my pieces without reference to them or the discussion (it was useless) and the piece got linked by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. Why was the Muslim Brotherhood interested? Well the title was: I Found A Moderate Muslim.
Dean is a hot head on the subject and immediately goes paranoid if he even thinks you are bigoted towards Muslims. It really takes effort to bring him to the point of rationality on the subject. The internet is a big place. If I can’t get help I can help myself.
=======================
BTW we had a nice discussion about religion there the other day. A number of folks commented that it wasn’t a poo slinging festival.
OTOH whatever we are fighting, Islam seems to nourish it.
I also did another piece No Word For Liberty.
Islam took a wrong road when it disconnected itself from cause and effect.
I compare the Koran to Mein Kampf at The Word Is Father To The Deed.
I think I found the trigger:
Muslims Abandoning Islam. Dean thought that showed predjudice against Muslims. I tried to point out that it was good not just from the point of abandoment of Islam, but that it also showed that tolerance for apostates is possible. At least in some places at some times.
A. Steve,
We have wars to settle cultural/economic differences. There will be a planet wide culture. Right now what is on the table is America vs Islam. America is by its very nature the most seductive thing on the planet. Why? Americans have been so seduced for so many decades that we are immune to all but the most potent seductions.
So you come from a culture that is not used to this fierce seduction and it is overwhelmed.
Islam can’t win if we can hold on for 20 or 40 years. American culture seeps through every cell phone connection. Television. Internet connection.
Imagine Qtub overwhelmed by a 1948 church social. Now move him forward 59 years.
Why is it that the middle and upper classes are the ones at war with us? Because it is easy to resist temptation if you have none. What we see is a people intolerant of themselves. Self hate, due to inevitable humasn weakness.
Think of what we are fighting as a prohibition movement.
#34 jdwill:
“As to point 4, I don’t think you have much hope unless you physically wrest the megaphone away from the hate spewing Imams.”
One other possible solution is to convert both the imams and their megaphones into highly ionised plasma.
Re: #50 from Brian Macker…
I’ve been leaving aside the discussion of Islam in this thread, because my point here is that Dean Esmay’s policies of deliberate rudeness and silencing one side of the debate are a bad starting point for discussion on anything but the wrongness of such policies; but that is too good a post to ignore. So: well done.
As usual, I’ll pick on differences, not agreements.
“For me it is a total non-issue whether Mohammed ended one of a multitude of bad practices of the time in his narrow local.”
That’s right, as long as your question is something like: “Is Islam morally and pragmatically better than all other religions, or as good as most other religions?” In that context, abolishing a few local abuses counts for little in the context of Islam’s bad record overall.
But, some people – not many in my experience – are now quite angry about Islam, and therefore say harsh things that can’t logically be supported. In that context, the question might become: “Is Islam uniquely and thoroughly wicked?”
Islam is not entirely wicked. It has good bits, mainly the abolition of female infanticide for petty economic reasons in ancient Arabia. That was genuinely good, and as far as I can see, genuinely moral. It is presented in the Koran as a pure moral issue, and it seems to have nothing to do with the underlying proud, rapacious and expansionist dynamic elsewhere pervasive in Islam. I’m sure it helped Islam thrive, but as far as that goes, good: it’s a good thing that moral policies sometimes pragmatically advantageous. As far as I can see, Muhammed (pbuh) just didn’t see the female babies being done away with as a challenge to him in anyway, therefore he was free to pity them, and with no reason not to, he did the right thing. He was not the worst of men, just a bad and bloody one overall, and I think what goes for the Muhammed (pbuh) goes for Islam.
Why is it that the middle and upper classes are the ones at war with us? Because it is easy to resist temptation if you have none. What we see is a people intolerant of themselves. Self hate, due to inevitable humasn weakness.
Think of what we are fighting as a prohibition movement.
That gives them more credit than they deserve. I think we’re fighting a bunch of gangsters. Why is it that the middle and upper classes are at war with us? Because they’re greedy pigs who resent anyone who has more money, power and influence than they do, and they’re willing to manipulate and kill people to get it. Same reason these types always wage war. The fact that they’re using morality and religion as their cover makes them even more vile than most who have gone before them, but that doesn’t change their actions indicate that they really only respond to violence and force – ideology is irrelevant.
Any way I wrote my pieces without reference to them or the discussion (it was useless) and the piece got linked by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. Why was the Muslim Brotherhood interested? Well the title was: I Found A Moderate Muslim.
The gangsters in the Brotherhood do understand the value of money, which explains their current ‘moderate Muslim’ spin campaign. After 9/11,Americans began seeking ‘moderate Muslims’ who could help them deal with the extremists. I don’t even think there were any people calling themselves ‘moderate Muslims’ before 9/11…?
Like all good capitalists, the Brotherhood understands the laws of supply and demand. If money and status were being offered to ‘moderate Muslims’ then they’d give us ‘moderate Muslims’.
At some point I’ll bet the Muslim Brotherhood trademarks the phrase “moderate Muslim”.
Now there are a bunch of ‘moderate, pious Muslims’ jumping on that particular gravy train. Many probably aren’t directly connected with the Brotherhood, but the pious ones rarely deviate from basic Brotherhood marketing guidelines – they always downplay the fact that the Brotherhood is a billion-dollar underground financial empire, they pimp the popularity of the Brotherhood and its members and they respond to criticism by saying that the brotherhood is a large and varied organization.
It may be large and varied, but the money all goes to the same place, and that money is used to fund groups like al Qaeda and Hamas.
We think that moderate Muslims will help us fight terrorism. The Brotherhood sells us moderate muslims and they use the profits to fund terrorism. As scams go, it’s a pretty clever one.
#60 Mary,
I based the first premise you discusses on Mo. Atta and Qtub. I don’t think the points are mutually exclusive to your position. Our ability to deal openly with so many subjects they can’t is a humiliation and a rage inducer. Atta’s last days seemed to produce rage not joy. They went to the flesh pots to get angry.
On your second point: that is what Michael Totten said when I asked him. I thought it was a hoot. I’m not particularly Islam friendly and the Brotherhood links. Dean should have as much tolerance as the Muslim Brotherhood. LOL.
The Brotherhood has a very smart PR thing going.
If a blog not generally friendly to Islam has some decent things to say about moderate Muslims they wish to be associated with it. That is very sophisticated.
In a way I think that is Dean’s complaint. He does not see such sophistication on our side. Except what I wrote is a prime example.
It is there. D’Souza is another prime example. Unintentional I’m sure.
From: “I Found A Moderate Muslim”
“So the Jeffersonian ideal of the separation of church and state is to be rejected. In a pluralist state like America this is going to lead to religious wars. The very thing the separation of church and state was designed to avoid. Not very moderate at all.”
I go on like that for several thousand words or more.
Rather than erasing differences I am sharpening them. I hope a few jihadis read my piece. Or wavedring Americans or Euros.
On a cultural level our enemy is insha’allah. The idea that man makes no difference.
In the West, Man is a Free Agent (godless athiests) or an Agent of God (you must do your best to assist God’s Plan). In Islam we are just Allah’s puppets. Which gets confusing re: crime and a lot of other things.
Joe, A.L., et. al,
Bring pack the preview button.
================
The Brotherhood has a very smart PR thing going.
If a blog not generally friendly to Islam has some decent things to say about moderate Muslims they wish to be associated with it. That is very sophisticated.
In a way I think that is Dean’s complaint. He does not see such sophistication on our side. Except what I wrote is a prime example.
It is there. D’Souza is another prime example. Unintentional I’m sure.
From: “I Found A Moderate Muslim”
“So the Jeffersonian ideal of the separation of church and state is to be rejected. In a pluralist state like America this is going to lead to religious wars. The very thing the separation of church and state was designed to avoid. Not very moderate at all.”
I go on like that for several thousand words or more.
Rather than erasing differences I am sharpening them. I hope a few jihadis read my piece. Or wavedring Americans or Euros.
On a cultural level our enemy is insha’allah. The idea that man makes no difference.
In the West, Man is a Free Agent (godless athiests) or an Agent of God (you must do your best to assist God’s Plan). In Islam we are just Allah’s puppets. Which gets confusing re: crime and a lot of other things.
_P Dhimmi, Didn’t answer the question did you? The claim about Islamic treatment of women is made with regards to other cultures and not merely their own culture._
I beg to differ. You asked for support for Billington’s statement that “Islam was a socially advanced religion at the time of its inception.” Bernard Lewis is on point to this and I think you dismiss him way too lightly without supplying your own authority. For one thing, the Koran’s version of the story of Adam and Eve is certainly more friendly to women than the Judeo-Christian version.
There was a debate earlier this year between Daniel Pipes and the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, which I think sharpens some of the issues discussed here. “Transcript”:http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4254
They were both debating the Clash of Civilizations thesis, to which Pipes rejected the implicit notion that civilizations can’t change. For one thing, Huntington predicted in 1993 that U.S. / European relations would improve and U.S. / Japanese relations become more tense.
On the other hand, Pipes rejected Livingstone’s plea for multiculturalism, which the mayor defined as “the right to pursue different cultural values subject only to the restriction that they should not interfere with the similar right for others.” Pipes pointed to the effect such multiculturalism has had on London, which is becoming more of a staging ground for radical Islam. He argues that radical Islam is ideology of aggression that cannot simply be appeased, but must be defeated. He called for support of “the emergence of Islam that is modern, moderate, democratic, humane, liberal, and good neighborly. One that is respectful of women, homosexuals, atheists, whoever else. One that grants non-Muslims equal rights with Muslims.”
In effect, there are three groups. One are the *culturalist* that have decided that a clash of civilizations is taking place and must be won. The second group are the *multiculturalist,* which Dean seems to exemplify, who stress respect for different beliefs. The third group stands somewhere between the two.
The Brotherhood has a very smart PR thing going
M. Simon – No kidding. The Brotherhood commented on my post about their branch office in the United States, the Muslim American society.
I got a comment from a “Fared Mohammed” who basically cut and pasted the Muslim Brotherhood’s FAQ page into my comments box.
The funny part is, if you google Fared Mohammed, you’ll see that he’s done the same thing on a whole lot of blogs, pro-Brotherhood blogs like Juan Cole’s, and anti-Brotherhood ones like, well, mine.
The Brotherhood is spamming the blogosphere.
Terrorism and spam. We all knew they have to get together sometime.
#58 Fletcher,
This thread is getting old, but I do want to respond and say that is a spectacularly bad idea.
I mean, the people that you want to free from the hateful influence are going to be standing close by said megaphone and imam. You do want to free them, don’t you?
What we have is an immune system problem.
How to decide between useful gut bacteria and harmful virus?
jdwill:
The people who really wanted to be free have already left.
Actually, I don’t give a damn whether they want to be free or not, or whether they kill each other; what I do care about is that the infection doesn’t spread and that the barbarians don’t kill civilised people.
Cautery is quite good at stopping infections.
P. Dhimmi,
Busy last night building a new computer, adding tie-downs to my trailer and such. I’ll reply when I have more time.
That’s the whole point since I didn’t ask that question. I was already aware of claims that Mohammed put an end to infanticide in his own tribe. The bad assumption is that the other religions all practiced this. It’s a shell game otherwise, since there were hundreds if not thousands of religions.
Lewis made a claim and I showed it to be a half truth. Mohammed’s first wife owned property and actually acted as his employer. That’s all I need to do to discredit Lewis on that one claime. Furthermore, Lewis was only referring to improvements on the Saudi Penisula (with regard to those polytheists). Big fish in small pond.
Did Lewis bring up the issue of the Garden of Eden or is that you speaking. If so then why don’t you follow your own rules on authority figures?
@Brian Macker
That was, and it should be utterly obvious to you, pre-islamic. Another indication that islam has killed women’s rights instead of added to them.
You see mohamed first became sick, then started seeing things, then his first wife convinced him and a few others he was hearing “allah’s” word, then she died, he moved, and 2 years later he started preaching.
If you wish to use stuff from their “holy” texts, please read them correctly. The behavior of Khadija is seen, on a number of points, as very incorrect for a muslim.