Daniel Dennet
This is a tricky time for
defending secular values. It turns out that the ones who seem most concerned
about an apparent surge of religious fundamentalism tend to be extremists and
lunatics of their own sort. Secularization has suddenly found new unpleasant allies especially
in the Euro-zone, where the economic turmoil has triggered a renaissance of
conservative and xenophobic populism that tends to blame the decline of the
socio-economic welfare of the region on the attempts of multiculturalism and,
of course, on foreigners. Muslim Immigrants in Europe are arguably the
community most troubled by the reinvention of right-wing populism. It’s one of
the oldest tricks in the book: the easiest and cheapest way to explain the rise of
unemployment, for example, is the old fashioned "The filthy foreigners took
your job".
The effectiveness of this type
of xenophobic rhetoric is particularly alarming and surprising in countries
with a strong liberal constitutional tradition like France, where Marine Le Pen
manages to obtain a near 20% of all votes while saying on the BBC that the Muslims
praying in public places are carrying out
“an occupation with no tanks and no soldiers, but an occupation after
all”[1],
and where Nicolas Sarkozy gets away with saying in public that “French people
don’t like to see people praying on the streets”, making the issue sound like a
sort of esthetic problem that would only concern his glamorous wife.
But Sarko and Le Pen are not the worst interlocutors in this
discussion. They are opportunistic, populist and shallow, but those are illnesses
found in many other politicians. Being opportunistic, populist and shallow,
some say, is a pre-condition for becoming one. The worst participants in these debates are by far criminal lunatics like Anders
Breivik, who tend to suggest that cultural conflicts caused by globalization
should be solved by surrendering some of the most important and hard-fought achievements
of humanity: The recognition that life is paramount, the recognition that a
freedom to think and speak is inalienable and yes: the recognition of the
freedom of members of our species to worship deities and images.
Besides the terrible pain
caused to Norway, the atrocities of Breivik have made the task of promoting and protecting secular values,
what Max Weber once called “the disenchantment of the world”,
a much harder task to accomplish. Breivik’s cruelty has given new rhetoric
tools to those who pretend that religion and superstition must remain
uncriticized, unchallenged and unquestioned, lest we offend the people of
faith. He gave them new excuses for imposing comfortable political correctness
to a world that is urging for more and more critical inquiry.
And catering to that call for
acritical correctness are the contemporary uses of the word islamophobia and the
epithet islamophobe, constantly brought up to point fingers at people who raise
legitimate critical voices about Islam, portraying them as racist and xenophobe.
Regarding this issue, Dennis Prager suggested some years ago in the
conservative Townhall Magazine that fear of Islam is not the same as hatred of
all Muslims. That “one can rightly or wrongly fear Islam, or more usually,
aspects of Islam, and have absolutely no bias against all Muslims, let alone be
a racist”[2].
Roger Kimball, on the other hand, suggested that Islamophobia is a misnomer in
the sense that the word phobia mainly refers to irrational fears[3].
The question is, of course: How irrational is it to fear Islam?
But before answering such an
important question, please note once again that my last two quotes come from Townhall.com
and Roger Kimball (a conservative magazine and a renowned conservative commentator)
and that it seems at least counterintuitive that someone posing as a fierce promoter
of secularization relies so heavily on the say of conservative pundits. Such is
the ludicrous political landscape in the times of Breivik: it seems to make
atheists and conservatives come together in very unusual ways and, as Sam
Harris asserted some years ago in the Daily Beast, it creates a very
inconvenient dynamic in which well-intentioned liberals who question Islam are
easily dismissed as intolerant or racist because their criticism resonates with
the bigotry of not-so-well intentioned conservatives.[4]
That is not to say that all conservatives are bigots, but to point out the fact
that defenders of secularization are in a very tight spot: On the one hand
there seems to be a new wave of activist fundamentalism both among Christians
and Muslims, and on the other they are at risk of finding themselves in tacit
alliances with people like Nicolas Sarkozy, who claimed while still in office that
“France cannot welcome face veils”[5].
That is perhaps the biggest challenge:
If our generation wishes to take up the task of defending secular values
nowadays, it has to be careful enough to take a prudent distance from the
discourse and actions of opportunistic bigots like Sarkozy and criminals like Anders
Breivik. While carrying the banner of the emancipation of women (a cause that religious dogma impedes in so many ways) we must not forget the values we stand upon. Going back to the times when the
state dictated what citizens were allowed to wear would be a betrayal of those
principles. What would be the next step? Would we endorse the banning of Mohawks,
tattoos and baggy pants? Put in Nietzschean terms, in the process of fighting
monsters we must see that we do not become a very nasty one ourselves.
On this matter we can learn a
lot from the Norwegians. Deeply hurt by the inenarrable cruelty of a psychopath
who claims to be a templar knight (a knight of a bloodthirsty and long
disbanded Christian order, by the way) they still decided that the right path
to choose was the path of tolerance. In what seemed to be a vivid example of
the amazing things that human civilization can achieve, up to 40.000 Norwegians
gathered last April to sing Children of the Rainbow, a song about multiculturalism,
as a sort of symbolic punishment to the man who killed more than 77 people in
Oslo. Amongst them was Harald Foesker, who lost 80% of his vision and suffered
facial injuries due to the bomb on the government building but still claimed “he
was proud to live in a country that treated criminal defendants with dignity”[6].
That is the example that we
have to live up to. Our cause is not a crusade, we are not inquisitors nor
crusaders. Anyone who wishes to defend secular values needs to understand that
the pretension to drive religion out of the world must be abandoned. If we
embark in such an enterprise we would be betraying ourselves, we would be
effectively becoming Nietzsche’s monsters. Some of our tasks are to question
religious nonsense, defend the separation of church and state, reveal the
inadequacies of religious morality and make secular law prevail in the face of
god-given law and ancient scripture. But we must do this while keeping a
peaceful coexistence with the people of faith or our efforts would be
self-defeating. Our tools: education, secular culture and science are not
weapons. Our key responsibility is to educate and raise secular children,
children who are not abused in their infancy with ludicrous ideas about eternal
damnation or supernatural beings that take sides in wars. Our right is to
demand that our children receive secular education and that the religious keep
their religion to themselves. In these times of unemployment and economic
turmoil, whenever and wherever Salafi or Evangelic fanatics offer the youth to
invest their lives with meaning by offering them the word of their scriptures[7],
we must meet them with secular cult-ure: cinema, poetry, literature, science, philosophy.
If they are to call our cause a cult, let it be the cult of the mind.
And then we come to the issue
of Islamophobia. Whoever coined the term was probably smart enough to understand
its potential for deterring any critical inquiry of Islam. The fact is,
however, that there is no such a thing as a mental illness called islamophobia because
there are legitimate reasons for fearing and distrusting Islam as a religious
creed. Equating the fear and distrust or even the dislike of Islam to racism or
xenophobia is a fallacy in the sense that there are Muslims from virtually all
races. I don’t dislike and fear Islam because I hate brown people (like myself)
or their cultural expressions. I dislike Islam in almost the same way I dislike
Christianism: I find both to be very powerful enterprises usually led by
fanatics and puritans with an expansionist totalitarian drive and a reactionary
political agenda.
It goes without saying that not all Muslims are reactionary fanatics, but it seems hard to deny, I insist, that
it is completely reasonable to fear and distrust Islam in the year 2012. Islam,
or at least a faction of Islam, has shown to imperil the core of free speech,
as when a British writer was sentenced to death by a despotic cleric in the Middle
East for the terrible sin of writing a novel, or when a Danish cartoonist was
almost axed in front of his daughter for the unforgivable mischief of drawing a
cartoon[8].
Islam has shown to be a powerful catalyzer of organized acts of terror, as when
a group of men hijacked planes and flew them into buildings or planted bombs in
Spanish trains. Sharia, on the other
hand, seems to enshrine and foster the subordination of women, taking it to
extreme levels in countries with Muslim majorities. Aren’t these reasons to fear or at least dislike Islam in all
honesty? The moderate Muslims would respond to such a question by saying that
the fear of Islam is a consequence of negative stereotypes created by ignorant
Westerners, that we overlook the fact that there used to be Islamic science,
for example. We are told that our fear for Islam is an uninformed reaction to the
acts of extremists who have distorted their faith.
A simple look at the holy books,
however, suggests that the God of the Quran is as bloodthirsty and cruel as the
God of the Bible. One ordered the slaughter of
the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the
Hivites and the Jebusites leaving no one (not even children) alive[9],
while the other commands their worshipers to slay the infidel until all religion
is for their God[10], suggesting
that dying a martyr in the Holy war is the best of fates given the generous
rewards for martyrs in heaven[11].
But yet when a casual reader of the holy
books points out this terrible scriptural cruelty, she is once again labeled an
uninformed interpreter and told that the issue is a matter of exegesis. It
takes an expert to interpret all this, they say, an expert like Khomeini,
perhaps. The fact is that we are not simply depicting a biased caricature of
Islam, as Harris very eloquently puts it:
“When one reads the
Koran and the hadith, and consults the opinions of Muslim jurists over the
centuries, one discovers that killing apostates, treating women like livestock,
and waging jihad—not merely as an inner, spiritual struggle but as holy war
against infidels—are practices that are central to the faith”[12].
By 2001, polls in
the Middle East suggested that 75% of people favored the doctrine of martyrdom[13]
and a more recent Poll by the PEW Research Center has shown that despite its
tendency to decline, the percentage of Muslims who think suicide bombing is
justifiable is still around 70% percent in Palestine and around 40% in
countries like Nigeria[14].
But yet what we fear the most about Islam is perhaps that whenever their
clerics issue a disproportionate and cruel sentence (as in the Rushdie Affair) the
moderate and righteous Muslims seem to have a hard time condemning their
intolerance. Why is it so hard to find unanimous self-critical spirit about
these issues in the ranks of Islam and so easy to be labeled an Islamophobe? As
Luther King would put it: The strident clamor of the bad people is not nearly
as tragic as the appalling silence of the good people. Instead of denial, moderate
Muslims should offer the world a constructive discussion about the doctrine of
Martyrdom, about the scope and reach of the sources of Sharia and also a recognition that something must be done to
mitigate the impact of maverick fatwas that
conflict with western secular law and fundamental rights like Free Speech. That
would be a real step towards the end of fear. The other option, as suggested by
Harris, is that mainstream Muslims simply try to persuade new generations that
the true Islam is peaceful, tolerant, egalitarian and compatible with a global
civil society, but the Holy books will remain unaltered and the most belligerent
and barbarous passages “will remain forever open to being given their most
plausible interpretations”[15].
In his column, Prager suggested
that the term islamophobia and the rhetoric that surrounds it, are in part to blame for disparities such as a Pace University student accused
of felony for taking a copy of the Quran to the toilet, while the man who put a
crucifix in a jar of urine continues to have his work displayed in galleries
and museums. Both are despicable acts of poor taste, but Prager’s observation
is brilliant if we consider that some time ago, the Catholic Church would have
probably sentenced the abovementioned artistic provocateur to death (to put it mildly). Our task with Islam is
perhaps to find the most benign way to reach an agreement in which it
surrenders, like the Catholic Church, the most of its violent character. The Islamic
community and its cleric should understand the fact that Free Speech in the
form of caricature and critical inquiry of their faith and even their prophet is
here to stay. Such scrutiny is extremely necessary and worth the risk of
islamophobia accusations. After all, if the Roman Church had not been challenged
at a certain point in history, it could still be burning apostates everywhere[16].
[1] A part of
the interview may be seen in Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO8vJvhOa7Y
[2] The full article
by Prager can be retrieved from: http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2007/07/31/why_islamophobia_is_a_brilliant_term/page/full/
[3] Kimball’s
article may be retrieved from: http://web.archive.org/web/20060103053941/http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/24/01/after-the-suicide/
[4] I nearly
reproduced Harris’ phrasing as I find it so eloquent. A full version of his
article can be retrieved from: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/08/13/ground-zero-mosque.html
[5] A very
interesting look at the issue and the divergences between Sarkozy and Obama
about it can be found in this Time Magazine article: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1908306,00.html
[6] A video of
the gathering and a story about it can be retrieved from The Guardian Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/26/thousands-sing-anders-breivik-hates
[7]Salafi
fundamentalists recently planned to distribute 300.000 copies of the Quoram
in Western European cities, perhaps with the intention of "investing the lives of the youth with meaning". Here is a story in the Economist
about the issue http://www.economist.com/node/21553078
[8] These two
incidents, Involving the writer Salman Rushdie and the cartoonist Kurt
Westergaard are widely documented in International media.
[9] As in
chapter 7 and 20:17 of the Deuteronomy.
[10] Examples of
these divine commands are to be found in: (2:191-193; 4:76).
[11] The
heavenly rewards are promised in (47:4-6).
[12] In the case
of the Christian Bible, it is hard not to agree with Colombian writer Fernando
Vallejo, who wrote with a hint of his characteristic Black humour that the
worst enemy of the Bible is the Bible itself.
[13] This piece
in The Guardian adresses the issue: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/aug/28/comment.israelandthepalestinians
[15] This is
once again a direct quotation from Harris’ brilliant article about the Ground
Zero Mosque, referenced above.
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