Andrew C. McCarthy is a former Federal prosecutor who dealt with the Blind Sheikh case among others. His view of Islam is more negative than my own in pronounced ways, but I respect the way in which he came to it. It is the sort of thing we ought to take seriously, even if in the end we reject it. Indeed, I think the onus is probably on my side of the debate. He is clearly right that traditional Islamic theology points this way. What people like me have to show is that there is any alternative, a project I am not prepared to undertake this afternoon.
UPDATE: An interesting development out of London.
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I think his formulation is absolutely correct. I know individual Muslims who are fine people, and good Americans. But the Islam as described by the Western governments is NOT the Islam that the Islamic world and its scholars hold. The "fundamentalist" Islam is the majority interpretation, and the "religion of peace" is the minority. Now, that's not to say that most of the world's billion Muslims are terrorists, but that the terrorists are not "perverting Islam". They're just acting in accordance with the plain language of the Koran and Haddiths. Most Muslims will not join ISIS or the terrorists, most just want to be left alone and live their lives. But they will also not condemn ISIS (at least, those who are not directly threatened by ISIS won't), because ISIS is not violating Islam. They are NOT apostates. And no major Islamic scholar will call them such.
Islam DOES need it own Reformation. But that is not something the West will EVER be able to impose upon the Islamic world. They simply would never accept outsiders dictating how they should practice their religion. Imagine if there was an outcry from the Islamic world that Christianity needed to change, and they helpfully offer how we can change it to meet their needs. No Christian would accept such a thing. And it is equally arrogant for us to believe that they should accept a Western imposed Reform Islam either. So what can we do?
Well, I am a firm believer in the idea that people will never change their behavior unless you make it painful for them not to. This is not just in regards to religion, but indeed any human action. Have a troublesome middle manager who constantly escalates all problems to senior management in order to "get it fixed"? He will never stop doing so until you make it worse for him to do so than following proper procedure (and I suffer through this ALL the time, and no one ever corrects such back-channeling). Want to make Muslims reform? Refuse to trade with them until they do. If they wish to immigrate, that's fine, but they must conform to Western cultural standards and assimilate. No honor killings. No forming separate community enclaves. They must embrace the world they are moving into, else they cannot move here.
The simple truth is that he has the facts on his side. I've read the great philosophers of the Islamic tradition, and this interpretation of Islam is completely non-controversial among thinkers like Avicenna (who devotes the last part of his metaphysics to it) and Averroes (who was an Islamic law judge).
He wants to say that people like me are arguing that Islam can be read another way, and that's probably the best that really can be done. Well, maybe a bit stronger: that it should be read another way. But that's about interpretation, as he rightly points out. It's not about whether or not the troublesome scripture exists; it's about how to read it.
Still, the same might be said for the Book of Joshua. I don't think of Judaism as a faith commanded to eternal war, even though they were indeed commanded to a particular war -- indeed, to genocide, in a particular moment. That's a hard problem, but it doesn't seem to have prevented Judaism from becoming a very decent faith.
How about the proposition that many, many, Muslims are like many, many, Christians: practical atheists, or 'non-observant', or selectively observant?
I think they're a non-issue. People who don't really believe in anything aren't dangerous, except insofar as they are 'going along' with those who do. The issue is whether you can really believe in Islam without going sideways with regard to Western-style governments.
That, and people sometimes suddenly become more devout at some point. That seems to be what happens with "radicalization" of second-generation Muslim immigrants: their families report that they started doing the prayers more regularly, and going to mosque a lot instead of occasionally, and doing a lot of religious reading. And then, the families say, a few months later their son started talking about the duty to wage jihad....
Still, the same might be said for the Book of Joshua.
That's historical, though. It's not framed as a commandment to all Jews, and it's never been interpreted as one. If the Koran contained historical accounts of battles—but no injunctions to "kill the kaffir wherever you find him", phrased as an unqualified commandment to all Muslims—then we'd be looking at a very different picture of the religion. But the book is filled with injunctions to warfare, and rules for such things as the treatment of sex slaves taken in war, and those are framed as general obligations to believers.
This matter would be much easier if we could argue coherently and believably that warfare in the name of God is a misinterpretation or perversion of Islam. But we live in the world as it is, not the world we'd prefer to live in.
I admit that it's a very difficult problem. Islam has a mode of resolving disputes about the meaning of conflicting verses, for example, that the Christian churches do not have. It takes the latest-to-be-revealed verse as binding in case of apparent conflicts. (There is a fascinating metaphysical discussion of God's relationship to time that I am here omitting.) Unfortunately, Muhammad's life was peaceful more in the early part, and violent and warlike more in the latter part.
So the binding verses are the warlike verses, the sex-slave verses. And there's no way to address that without undoing a thousand years' theology. That's a problem, no doubt. It's a huge problem.
I'm just not walking away from the idea that it can be done: that these verses can come to be interpreted like Joshua, if that's what Muslims choose to do.
I have said that the region is intensely tribal and violent, and Islam a partial softening of that by imposing order and li8mitations to violence. I have been moving away from that idea over the last few years. My thoughts are much like jaed's. While it may be true that there are (to our eyes) terrible events which the Bible describes and God seems to quite approve of, they are not general, but local. There is no command going forward of entire groups we are always to be at war with. It matters.
A Battle for the Soul of Islam by Zuhdi Jasser was mentioned on Ace of Spades, and might be of interest and/or relevance. I haven't read it yet, but have taken a look at it via "look inside".
The author is a Muslim American who offers arguments along the lines Grim suggests, that there are possible readings of the Islamic texts that can be harmonized with American-style values of freedom and tolerance.
Zudhi Jasser is a good man. I can speak for him with confidence, whatever you make of his faith.
That's good to hear. I liked the little I read of the book, in terms of its attitude and feeling.
Having heard Zudhi Jasser many times on various radio programs, in particular Dennis Prager, I'd concur that he is a good man.
I'd also concur with Mike, that I've had Muslim friends close enough to watch their kids when they went out of town (even though they had blod relations in town as well). Wonderful people I like very much, and the exactly the sorts you'd call 'moderate'- but, get far enough into discussion and they won't condemn in absolute terms the jihadists. When the world is divided into only two parts, 'the house of Islam' and 'the house of war', it doesn't leave much room for tolerance or Western values.
Like you Grim, I resist closing the door on a chance for Islam to reform, but if I were a betting man, I'd give it very, very long odds.
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