You Can Be Anti-Islam AND Racist

I hardly want to imply that all criticism of misogynistic and generally anti-modern strains of Islamism among recently arrived immigrants in Europe is racist, but Abe Greenwald is wrong to say that the dark skin of these immigrants has nothing to do with the especially virulent reaction many conservatives have to them. Sure, Fitna, the Dutch anti-Islam film, despite being islamophobic trash, isn’t particularly targeted at at dark-skinned immigrants, but much of the anti-Islamist discourse emanating from these folks is.

When Mark Steyn is getting his Tom Buchanan on and worrying about Muslims outbreading whitey, or when non-liberals try to cover up old-fashioned xenophobia in defense of liberalism, it’s fair to say that the skin color of these recent immigrants is relevant. How about Oriana Fallaci saying that Muslims “breed like rats.” Has that type of language ever not been used in a racist way? Is it even possible?*

*Chris Hitchens reviewed Fallaci’s work and has some more loathsome excerpts.

Not My Kind of Secularism

Turkey is a weird country. Among Muslim countries, it is the most secular, which is good, but it also enforces it by having the military essentially act as an unelected, unaccountable supra-government who gets to remove/kill political leaders if they don’t match their brand of hard-core, state-enforced secularism.  This becomes a problem when the mildly Islamist government wants to remove the head-scarf ban in state schools, and not only does the military oppose it, but the chief prosecutor accuses the ruling party of violating the constitution and wants to remove the prime minister and much of his government from political power - permanently.

It’s really disappointing that this type of blatant illiberalism is not rightly condemned by observers like Anne Appelbaum, who mostly shrug it off and assume that the price of secularism in a Muslim country is having such an overbearing, undemocratic military to enforce it.   The thing is that, as far as problems in Muslim countries go, it’s been secular military dictators who have been especially pernicious, while it’s unclear if democratically elected, mildly Islamist parties are at all negative.  There’s an obvious trade-off, and since it doesn’t seem likely that Tayip Erdogan is about to be the next Khomeini, people who discuss the middle east should be telling the military to stop interfering in totally legitimate democratic decision making.

Well, In This Case, the Hijab Is Oppressive

Tracy Clark Flory’s video, defending her recent post taking a “maybe it’s oppressive, maybe it isn’t” line on the alleged hijab-inspired honor killing in Canada is fairly weak.  Her argument is, on some level, almost obviously true.  The hijab can be oppressive, and it could not be oppressive, and she would rather not make a judgment in this particular case because she’s a “shades of gray” type of girl.

But let’s take it as a given that this 16 year old was killed because she refused to wear a hijab, and more generally, refused to follow her families cultural strictures on proper dress and behavior for a young woman.  Then, we could perfectly confident in making the argument that the hijab is oppressive, as is the whole host of cultural mores that deem women to be the property of their family, and that their sexuality is dangerous.  I don’t really see why we need to recognize any shades of gray or why we need to hold out the possibility that the hijab could be empowering in some instances.  In instances where not wearing it leads to murder at the hands of one’s own father, it’s pretty unambiguous that, indeed, clothing mandates with the purpose of expressing ownership over women’s sexuality are, in fact, horribly oppressive.

The Teddy Bear Named Muhammad

President Bashir has pardoned the infamous British teddy bear teacher, Gillian Gibbons, after increasing international and British pressure.  Of course, it’s bizarre and backwards to put someone in jail, even for 15 days, for naming a classroom teddy bear Muhammad.  And it’s even more barbaric for there to be a  constituency demanding a harsher punishment likes lashes or a longer  jail term.  But shouldn’t a Western, female teacher in a conservative Muslim country know a little more about the culture she’s working in? Another thing that was strange about the story was that the students overwhelmingly selected Muhammad as the name of the teddy bear, which seems to indicate that this is more like parents freaking out about reading JD Salinger x 1000.  But we should all just be happy for Gibbons that her insane ordeal is over.

Arguing in Bad Faith

Christopher (I still love the irony) Hitchens’ latest column recounts a debate he had with Swiss born Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan. Too bad it wasn’t an actual debate. Instead, as Hitchens tells it, he crashed a talk Ramadan was giving to ask some obnoxious questions:

After sitting through this and much else, I rose to ask him a few questions. Wasn’t it true that the Muslim leadership in South Africa had actually endorsed the apartheid regime? Wasn’t it evasive of him to discuss the headscarf in France rather than the more pressing question of the veil or niqab in Britain? Wasn’t it true that imams in Denmark had solicited the intervention of foreign embassies to call for censorship of cartoons in Copenhagen? And was it not the case that he owed his position as an informal cultural negotiator to the fact that his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, had been the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist organization of which his father had also been a leader in Egypt?

It becomes immediately obvious that Hitchens (surprise, surprise) had no intention of having a good faith exchange with Ramadan. Two the questions are seemingly irrelevant gotcha questions that don’t actually call into question anything Ramadan professes to believe ( the South Africa and the Britain Niqab questions) and most importantly, the last question is the dead giveaway that Hitchens did not go to Mantua to actually engage with Ramadan. Did Hitchens really expect to have any good discussion or debate with a man who he had just accused of attaining his prominence through nepotism?

Are we surpirsed by this deliberate jackassery? Hithchens doesn’t respect religous people, especially those who make political arguments based in their faith. And thus he can’t understand how Ramadan who dare to make arguments against the most extreme villianous actions justified with Islam from actual Islamic texts:

Indeed, on everything from stoning to suicide-murder to anti-Semitism, he argues that the problem is not with the “text” itself, or with Islam, but with misinterpretation of it. How convenient.

In Hitchens-world, Muslims will simply ignore their holy texts and long established traditions and instead turn into Hitchens clones and convert to drink, secularism and the Bush Doctrine. Hitchens can’t seem to accept that religious people, and especially many Muslims, think that their texts are holy, authoritative and a guide for their existence and every day life. So, we can warily accept, or at least be open, to those like Ramadan who try to explain how terrorist killing or stoning is not permitted under Islam, or we can wish that Muslims will just stop being Muslims. I put extremely low odds on the latter scenario coming to pass. I imagine Hitchens does as well, but for him, orthodox religious people just can’t be engaged with, so he’ll take his chances on the latter.

Islamists and Jews

Sullivan does a nasty job of implying that Islamism — political Islam — is not only anti-semitic, but eliminationist.  And while many Muslim countries seem to contain large anti-Semitic populations, the record of political Islam relations with Jews, compared to secular regimes tells a different story.  Where there were mass expulsions of Jews in Muslim countries — Iraq, Iran and Egypt are a few examples that spring to mind — they were done by secular governments, with the exception of Iran.   Sure, the quote Andrew is referring to is from Osama, no fan of the Jews, but the larger point is that certain Westerners on-face rejection of anything but secular Muslims coming to power in the Middle East is naive.

As I’ve written before, at the moment, secular Muslims are too small and lack influence to leverage any sort of electoral success in most countries. So maybe we shouldn’t be tarring “Islamism”, which is distinct from Wahabbism, Qutbism, fundamentalism, terrorism or any other sort of violent, noxious Muslim ism, with the broad brush of eliminationist anti-Semitism, or just the general sense that Islamist parties are irreconcilable with the Western world or impossible to work with.  Especially considering that Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party, who currently govern Turkey, have done nothing to indicate that Islamism and anti-Semitism are necessarily linked, especially anymore than secular authoritarian regimes have been linked with particularly repressive anti-Jewish policies,

Conspiratorial Minds: Muslim Brotherhood Edition

Rod Dreher, who’s usually my resident Favorite Religious Conservative™, seems rather conspiratorial on the supposed threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, not in Egypt, not in the Greater Middle East, but in the United States.  They apparently have a strategy document outlining their long term plan to take over American Islam “with the long-term goal of instituting a sharia state in America.”  One small problem, the memo is from 1993 and there’s very little indication that the Muslim Brotherhood is either trying to implement this far-fetched plan or is having any sucess at doing so.

His dire warning of Sharia on our shores is very reminiscent of the Bircher jeremiads of the 50s: communism is imminently ascendant in America, unless we were vigilant on all fronts.  Surely, the American Communist Party and/or the Soviet Union had similar documents — every expansive ideological group does — but documents and grand aspirations do not a Sharia state make.  Surely the ELF has similar documents floating around, hell, there’s the Unabomber Manifesto, but I’m not worried about an imminent anarcho-primitivist breakdown of industrial society.   It’s also worrying that Rod conflates the Muslim Brotherhood with the much more extreme and worrying Wahabbi’s from Saudi Arabia.  Wahabbism actually has intellectual and international reach due to support from Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Whabbism isn’t the Muslim Brotherhood.

Our main engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood is supporting Egypt’s continual repression of them, since they are the main political organization in Egypt outside of Mubarak.   Shadi Hamid has the goods on why this probably isn’t the best strategy for engaging with the most potent democratic force in the Muslim world — political Islam.  Surely Rod, himself a religious conservative, can appreciate how religious questions are, for the seriously religious, inseparable from political ones.  This is certainly true in large swaths of the Muslim world, and so if long term democracy promotion is our goal in the Middle East and Islamic world, we probably shouldn’t be calling our best hopes for independent democratic movements “extremist” and conflating them with Al Qaida and Wahabbis.