Swords and pens: the morning email

The morning e-mail. An old friend has sent on a religious screed forwarded by a mutual friend, with the comment, "Makes for some good Religious Sci Fi"? I loaded the attached URL and read "Sword without Leniency: The West Must Scuttle Arrogant Materialism and Take Jihadists at Their Word," and somewhere about the following passage my blood heated, as we say here in Morocco:

Even though some in the Islamic world, when dealing with Westerners, will tactically repeat such ideas [about readiness to discuss, or negotiate, or stage a truce], the true believer sees in them nothing more than ignorant insults reflecting our own materialist prejudices, and signs of our spiritual bankruptcy. He sees our spiritual sickness manifested not just in our philosophical and economic materialism, but in our self-loathing, our groveling guilt over presumed imperialist and colonialist sins, our flabby tolerance, and our multicultural idealizations of dysfunctional cultures.

I started dictating a response to my friends and, at about the point I was interrupted by a Skype conversation with a friend here and started describing my feelings to him, it began to seem I should try to express myself to a larger audience. The segue from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent letter to George W. Bush seems a little forced, as I reread it, but I realize that it grows from my own dismay that this is just what has been happening of late in discussions of particular Middle East/North African/Arab/Muslim political issues: the actual details of each different crisis, the literal content of what was said and the likely connotations thereof for listeners in the writer/speaker's country and elsewhere, and the relevant history of international relations among the antagonists are often overlooked as we are treated to grand generalizations about Jihadists and Crusaders, Arabs and Jews, believers and infidels. Herewith, what started out as an e-mail response.

I hadn't paused to find the Ahmadinejad letter, the current target for a good deal of rage and ridicule in the mainstream media, when it was first mentioned in the press; and I did so only after a blogger friend referred to it with such a casual disdain (appending a parody that had nothing to do with the actual content of the letter) that I wondered what the despised president of Iran had actually said. I finally bothered to track the letter down a couple of days ago, and I think it's worth doing so before you get enmeshed in Bruce Thornton's or anyone else's sermon about it, and about the large topics of Muslim character and intentions. Ahmadinejad is a politician, one nurtured in a very different school than ours, and like many others in power today he has much to answer for -- in his case the hostage-taking in Iran in 1979 and his un-readiness to take responsibility for his country's support of Hizbollah and of dangerous nuclear technology, as well as some very bad gender politics and abuses of personal freedom, from the point of view of this Western observer. His letter was intended for public consumption by a large international community including, to be sure, millions of Muslims concerned about US policies in general and about the ghastly prospect of a major military attack on Iran -- perhaps using nuclear weapons -- as the next battle in our "war on terror." Had he wanted to influence US opinion, Ahmadinejad should have taken the advice of some of the many Iranians educated in the States and written a much shorter letter focusing on Iran's reluctance to abide by a nuclear non-proliferation treaty we have not applied with any consistency or moral firmness toward our Israeli and Pakistani allies, or our North Korean enemies, or ourselves. I wish Iran were not developing nuclear weapons, as I believe they intend to do, and I believe it's long past time we took this risk seriously. The two real points, however, are (a) will we proceed by saber rattling and a military attack that will likely produce exactly the result we do not wish -- radical movements around the world convinced that they must acquire the weapons that will frighten us away from attacking them, and (b) will our policies be guided by a tendentious (mis)reading of religious history or by a complex assessment of the actual situation in the developing nations of the Middle East and elsewhere in a globalized 21st century world? It would be nice, too, if the Western press included a couple of non-committal paragraphs about the history of US dealings with the petroleum-producing Middle East in general, and with the Irans of Mossadegh and the Shah in particular.

Ahmadinejad’s letter, read in English or French, will sound awkward and rambling here in Morocco, as elsewhere. I suspect it flows rather well in Farsi, and I can imagine how easily it can be rendered into persuasive Arabic. The real point is that most folks over here will find much of the argument he makes plausible: the self-styled Christian leader who favors representative democracy as a universal human goal should be behaving differently than the Bush administration -- and most American administrations in the past half-century -- have in fact behaved for the Middle East, where our major allies tend to be pseudo-Democratic authoritarian regimes riddled with corruption and hypocrisy (Egypt is a fine example) or theocratic states (think of the very different examples of Saudi Arabia and Israel) that are hard to reconcile with any American model of democracy. The recent Palestinian elections were in fact closer to an adequate expression of democratic voting than the elections in our client and newly-liberated states. The Taliban are back in Afghanistan, and only Cheney and Rumsfeld sound convinced that what's going on in Iraq is not the preface to its collapse as a state.  The Palestinians elected Hamas because (a) they were completely fed up with a corrupt Palestinian leadership that has spun them into an endless cycle of violence, corruption, and increasing Israeli control of the West Bank, (b) they had actually seen Hamas deliver social services in the form of education and food to neighborhoods where neither PLO administrators nor Israeli occupiers had seen fit to do so, and (c) they did indeed want to send a message to the world that they will not simply acquiesce to their eradication as a society. Some of those voters support suicide bombing and deeply wish that Israel would disappear. A large majority, as near as I can tell, believe that suicide bombings are contrary to human decency and to Islam and are at least resigned to living side-by-side with the Jewish state, if only they can have a viable one of their own.

But none of this really expresses the mixture of anger and sadness that I feel when I read yet another testament to the thesis that the world of Islam is in the grip of a unitary, duplicitous, violent, and implacably hostile empire against which we must engage total global war; and that this state of affairs is somehow intrinsic to Islam as a religion, and revealed by history to be the inevitable character of its relationship with non-Muslim regimes, with modernity, and with democracy. It takes a while to absorb the 1400 years of Muslim history, particularly in the context of its relations with the 2000 year history of Christianity. Much of that sanguinary history might indeed convince one that God spreads his message on rivers of blood -- whether the sword is forged in Christian Burgundy or Muslim Damascus. I was surprised just now to learn that there were nine crusades, the first of which [I did know this] massacred the civilian population of Jerusalem. There are also, however, non-negligible historical periods, both in Jerusalem and in the 700 year Muslim history of southern Spain, during which members of the three major religions seem to have gotten on rather well. I believe, though, that this is not what's at issue with the text to which you pointed me, or with its counterparts in the East. Millions of militant Christians, and equal numbers of militant Muslims, and a fair percentage of the supporters of Israel, are now itching for a fight. Some of them are more less well-informed opponents and defenders of globalization, and some of them can make academically respectable arguments about why neoconservative or neoliberal policies are, or aren't, likely to create a peaceful and prosperous future for everyone.

The ones who scare me most have a much darker picture of the immediate future, in which apocalyptic destruction of the earth proceeds along lines deduced from tendentious readings of the Book of Revelation and the Qur'an. On this view, the last 20 or 30 centuries of human history have been the inevitable working out of a "divine" plan by which humans will be given a chance to be tested by an immensely powerful -- yet curiously human in its jealousy and propensity for road rage -- extraterrestrial force that is about to appear in our skies and sort us out into a few goodie-twoshoes types who get to live forever in a sort of Epcot Center with infinite credit and perfect plumbing while the rest of us are quite literally in deep shit. That's not what this convinced Quaker believes. I think the "that of God" in every human is manifest in the many acts of kindness and understanding that every religion with legs has helped most of its believers to achieve in much of their daily lives, to teach their children as a value, and to imagine as a given in an Earth freed of hatred and hypocrisy. You can get there from the Gita, or the Torah, or the Gospels, or the Qur'an -- or you can figure it out on the playground and in the boardroom and call yourself a secular humanist, or a Bokononist. I don't care, as long as you don't do to other people what you wouldn't want them to do to you and are willing to open yourself to the better angels of your nature, whatever you believe those entities to be.  And I still believe -- most mornings -- that Homo sapiens sapiens could figure that out collectively, and that we might and yet begin to experience a future worthy of being called Divine.

In the meantime, I'm here to tell you that the good people of Morocco -- the old friends in Sidi Kacem and Rabat with whom we've shared the same joys and sorrows we've gone through back in the USA these past 40 years, the drivers of the taxis that spare us the road rigors of Morocco who express their pleasure at our Arabic and our obvious affection for their country, and the students to whom we speak about our years of work here and our hope that we can all get past this current bad patch in international relations and start learning each other's poetry -- are not swaying hypnotically in some mosque as they drool at the prospect of a great Jihad. They're shaking their heads at the day's headlines -- whether those are about the corruption of the Ministry of Education under the previous regime or the pictures of yet another Baghdad or Jerusalem or Paris neighborhood filled with the smoke of burning cars and the bloodstained bodies of fellow children of Adam -- and then they're getting the kids off to school, chuckling over a bit of dialogue from last night's satellite-viewed soap opera or the joke their cousin in Belgium just e-mailed, wondering if the guy with the moped would really sell at that price, or hoping that mom's really committed this time to keeping her blood sugar down. They are praying a bit more these days, but mostly at home, and mostly for children and parents at home and abroad, for a little more strength to get past these current worries, and for a little more faith that things are going to get better.  And those guys in the pulpits and minbars with their gleaming eyes and their delight in the pain the folks on the other side of town or river are about to experience when God gets on their case? Dubru-riyyushom: let them look to their own selves, and let us get on with our lives.

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Note: The "sword and pen" allusion is to Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddimah, (1377 AD/ 778 AH) analysis of the clash of civilizations it might do today's religious totalitarians well to read.