Dope

A friend sent me this article from Salon. Since I don't pay for the premium articles, I was unaware of it. But reading it has made me feel, for a moment, positively Voltarian:


Islam: Religion of the sword?
Unlike Christianity or Judaism, Islam's religious history is inseparable from its conquests -- which is why the concept of holy war lives on today.


A certain Richard D. Connerney wrote it. He is credited with teaching religion at Iona College. What can one say? His students are obviously being fed a mixture of bigotry and error, poor guys. Connerney has an at best vague acquaintance with the history of religion. But he is eager to show it off, nonetheless.


The point of his article seems to be that Islam, being a religion of the book, is tied to the violent message within that book. That seems fair enough. It also seems to be true of almost all religions that have achieved political status. I don't know enough about the internicene disputes between the Daoists and the Buddhists in Imperial China, but I have no doubt I would find monks and advisors to one emperor or the other legitimating persecution, torture, expropriation of property, and murder. You can find this, also, in Japanese history, especially in the putting down of Pure Land Buddhism.
But this doesn't worry Mister Connerney. In fact, after pointing out how often the Qu'ran uses the word war, he gives us this astonishing piece of information:


"Fundamentalism, as a literal and nonhistoric approach to religious scripture, exists in every tradition, but only in Islam does it go hand in hand with widespread violence. Yes, Southern preachers occassionally get carried away, and yes, Hindu fundamentalists cause intermittent communal violence in the Deccan subcontinent. Neither of these two fundamentalisms, however, has produced the same types of problems as Islam. It is not Hindu fundamentalists or Southern Baptists that generally become international terrorists. What is the difference then between Islam and other wo! rld faiths? Is there something inherent in the history and texts of the religion that lead to this behavior? I think that there is."


Wow. The man seems to have misplaced 1400-1800 some years of Western history. I guess he feels like the fundamentalism thing gets him off the hook -- after all, if the Croatian bishopry, in World War II, felt it could bless the extermination of some 500,000 Serbians because they were Eastern Orthodox, that isn't exactly Southern Baptist fundamentalism. That Southern Baptists are "Southern" because of a certain unpleasant racial thing (you know, slavery and all) seems also to have escaped his attention. And surely the extermination of almost all native peoples, as a program of the European-Native encounter, justified throughout its history with multitudinous ireference to scripture, was a mere flyspeck on the vision of the Weltgeist, surely. I mean, who takes Judges literally?


People who have inherited the gains of past generations have an understandable temptation to blur the process by which those gains were made. But one thinks that a professor of religion would have poked around, perhaps, in the history of the religion. Connerney's potted history is really quite amusing to read:

"This [Islamic bellicosity] is in distinction from Judaism and Christianity, in which the religious community both predates and postdates the existence of a Jewish or Christian political state. Judaism already exists as a faith in the quasihistorical Age of the Patriarchs (circa 2000-1300 B.C.) before the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel, and Judaism continues to exist and develop as a religious community after the Babylonian Captivity, the Roman occupation, the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and throughout the Diaspora up to the year 1948. In a similar way Christianity, self-consciously apolitical in its origin, exists for centuries in a Roman/pagan context until the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D. This development of the religious community outside of the halls of political power gives both Judaism and Christianity the flexibility to adapt to the secular concept of the separation of church and state that come out of the Enlightenment, and to embrace ideas of modernity and sec! ular civil society. Put simply, neither faith requires the existence of a theocratic state to function fully as a religion because both their origins and endpoints exist above and beyond concerns of statehood. Not so with Islam."


Since Connerney devotes some part of his article to explicating the centrality of war in the Qu'ran, perhaps we should look at the gentle texts from the "quasihistorical Age of the Patriarchs". Our reading today will be from selected old Testament books.

The tone is set in Joshua, but I'm not going to be tedious. Here's a typical bit of the Lord's advice in Judges 21.

"For the people were numbered, and, behold, there were none of the inhabitants of Ja'besh�gil'e-ad there.

10 And the congregation sent thither twelve thousand men of the valiantest, and commanded them, saying, Go and smite the inhabitants of Ja'besh�gil'e-ad with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children.

11 And this is the thing that ye shall do, Ye shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man.

And here the Lord is, again, in 1 Samuel:
2. "Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Am'alek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Ex. 17.8-14 � Deut. 25.17-19

3 Now go and smite Am'alek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
Now the Lord's advice here - which is reminiscent, is it not, of Eichmann? Or your average Einsatzkommando unit commander - folds into an interesting story. For the Lord here is talking to Saul. Saul, unfortunately, fails the Lord. He fails, that is, to commit genocide.


9. But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.

10 � Then came the word of the LORD unto Samuel, saying,

11 It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments. And it grieved Samuel; and he cried unto the LORD all night.


The Lord's complaint has echoed down the centuries. How many soldiers have been commanded to utterly destroy a people and a place and have been miserably bought off with the best of the sheep, so to speak? This is known as not looking at the mission as a whole. This is known as not having focus. Because the mission is to extinguish a people. This was pretty clear to the quasi-historical Samuel, the Lord's prophet. And guess what? As this book shed its benificent influence through the Christian world, the message was taken up by many a Christian captain. Need I mention the Lord's work Cromwell did in Ireland? Or the Lord's broom, sweeping away the Tasmanian natives -- there's a very interesting chapter on this in David Quammen's Song of the Dodo. There good Christians, inspired by this most beautiful of religions, in contradistinction from nasty, nasty Islam, actually formed a small army and proposed, rather like beaters in a hunt, to spread from one end of the island to the other and advance, killing "every man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." They nearly succeeded -- a nice, jolly English slaughter, that. Their descendents, of course, prosperous New Agers and so on, can then make up simulacrum of native 'spirituality' and enjoy the healthiness of these past creatures, er, people, without the muss and fuss of actually having to confront them in the flesh.

But I'm forgetting! The WTC attack! It changed everything! -- apparently even history. Ah, the retrospective glow one feels over the West's benignant behavior, inspired by that coexistence "for centuries in a Roman/pagan context until the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D. This development of the religious community outside of the halls of political power gives both Judaism and Christianity the flexibility to adapt to the secular concept of the separation of church and state that come out of the Enlightenment." What though the Enlightenment comes 1400 years afterwards? And notice that we sort of skip, oh, skip lightly, over the effect of Christianity's adoption as the religion of the empire. Notice that the Roman/pagan context sort of, well, vanished? Think this was due to the sweet fluting of Bishop Athanasius? Or perhaps the dreams of Augustine, laid out in the City of God, that manual for ghettoizing the non-Christian?
This is an issue that deserves more than one post. Briefly, the question of how tolerance happens is one that is ill understood, and is, perhaps, connected to different causes in different societies. I'd argue, though, that Western tolerance did not arise from some proto-type in Christian organizations, but rather arose out of the exhaustion experienced by Europeans in the 17th and 18th century for Christianity as a political force. Or, to be fully dialectical about it - TOLERANCE AROSE OUT OF CHRISTIAN INTOLERANCE. I'll make that argument in another post.

Anyway, let's sum up this exercise in Ecrasez l'infame. There is an explanation for the commonly posed question, Why do they hate us? (although, as I have explained in an earlier post, I think this question is fundamentally stupid). It is because we are not only not taught history, we have such as Connerney teaching history. A man who can lightly skip over most of history in his pursuit of it, and who conveys an abbreviated and nonsensical melange of half fact to his students, can only be thought of as that worst of menaces, ignorance armed with a diploma.