| Thursday, June 20, 2002 |
21:06 - What to do, what to do...
http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_06_16_armedndangerous_archive.html#77964879
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Okay, so Eric S. Raymond's blog (pointed to via Cold Fury) is turning out to be pretty linkworthy-- well, as long as he's not talking about Linux-- "A reader complains that Linux is difficult to install. Answer: Get thee to the Linux user group near you, who will be more than happy to help you get liberated". This week he's got a series on Islam and its history that is both sobering and enlightening-- I hadn't realized, for instance, that purdah is not in fact required by the Koran.
But, unfortunately, it doesn't much dispel the suspicions that have been gnawing at me over the past several months, regarding the idea that Islam is a religion that is uniquely, inherently, by its very nature, harmful to the rest of the world-- and what is therefore in store for it in the years to come:
This drama keeps getting re-enacted because, in general, these charismatic fundamentalist looney-toons are correct in their criticism of `soft' Islam. The Koran, the actions and statements of the prophet Mohammed, and the witness of the lives of his immediate followers are pretty clear on what the religious duties of a Muslim are. Long before the 9/11 attacks, I read large portions of the Koran (in translation) and more than one history of Islam, because I collect religions. I learned about the Five Pillars and the hadith (the traditional sayings of Mohammed) and the ulama. The picture is not a pretty or reassuring one.
Moderate Muslims trying to argue against the latest version of Islamic fundamentalism are in a difficult situation. All the fundamentalists have to do to support their position is to point at the Koran, which is much more authoritative in an Islamic context than the Bible is in most Christian ones. Moderates are reduced to arguing that the Koran doesn't really mean what it says, or arguing from hadith that qualify or contradict the Koranic text. Since the Koran trumps the hadith, this is generally a losing position.
The grim truth is that Osama bin Laden's fanatic interpretation of Islam is Koranically correct. The God of the Koran and Mohammed truly does demand that idolatry be purged with fire and sword, and that infidels must be forced either to convert to Islam or (as a limited exception for Christians and Jews, the "Peoples of the Book") live as second-class citizens subject to special taxes and legal restrictions. The Koran really does endorse suicidal martyrdom and the indiscriminate killing of infidels for the faith.
So the inevitable question, the one that people have been dancing around but not really asking for a while now, is this:
Does there come a time when a religion must be declared "evil" and incorrigible, and must be therefore stricken from the planet?
Or, more bluntly:
Should we in fact be considering wiping out Islam?
I hope not. And I wish it weren't true that Islam, unlike pretty much any other religion that's big enough to matter, is so dead-set upon these fantasy-novel concepts of Arthurian warriors and Caliphs and carrying sword and fire into the land of the infidels for the glory of Allah. But as Jamie Glazov and others continue to illustrate, Islam has at its core the codified exhortation to subjugate and convert the infidels, and that cannot be changed without involving changes to Shari'a Law and to the Koran itself-- Bida, a new (and therefore unholy) idea. Modern Islam has demonstrated both the will and the ability to attack the secular, Western world-- Quixotic it might be, but that's all part of the romance. And so there's no hope that they will simply get tired of it and give up. If anything, the more desperate their cause appears, the more fiercely they'll fight, and the more extreme techniques they'll employ, because they have less to lose.
How does one wipe out a religion, anyway? It's like banning an idea-- something that we've been very vehement (with the shoe on the other foot) in claiming to be impossible to eradicate or suppress completely. You can't wipe out democracy by burning the Constitution, and you can't erase Christianity by burning Bibles. The ideas live on regardless of whether they're endorsed by the local government, or whether they're declared subversive. And in any case, we've been vociferous in the blogosphere about the nature of randomly developed ideas as being the ingredients in the rich stew of an open culture-- if we truly feel confident in our thought system, we not only do not declare any idea to be blasphemous, we welcome it into the common discourse to be discussed and accepted or rejected, as appropriate, on the popular level. So thinking about attacking the Muslim religion does rather go against the very grain of our creed, as it were.
But as luck would have it, Islam isn't just a set of ideas: it's a set of ideas with actual physical components, relics that exist in the modern world which are said to play a part in the mythology of the past, present, and future. To wit, the Ka'aba-- the black meteoric stone in the square building in the middle of the square in Mecca. The object of the hajj, the pilgrimage that constitutes one of the Five Pillars of Islam, central to the contemporary practice of the faith as well as its storied founding and its prophesied future. For a bellicose and arrogant religion bent on taking on the entire world, it's founded on a remarkably exposed and vulnerable piece of physical reliquary.
So: What would actually happen if we were to put a cruise missile into the Ka'aba?
Would that finally put paid to the idea that everything in the Koran is an unequivocable script for the future of the world-- if the Ka'aba is destroyed, how can it be moved to Jerusalem in the End Times? How can such a thing happen without being mentioned in the predictions in the text? Would that be enough to dissolve Islam's fanatical core, and the Koranically correct notions that keep attracting Muslims back to strict fundamentalism in a way that no other religion does?
And is there any action we can take short of that, that can result in the modern world remaining safe from attack from that quarter in the future? After all, going to that length would be an act of cultural and historical barbarism worse than the Taliban's destruction of the cliffside Buddhas, which they undertook because... uh, because they were threatened by the influence of a competing religion.
One of our big tenets is "freedom of religion"-- we don't tell you what to believe, as long as you don't tell us what to believe. It's that second bit that's important. Self-determination, and the mind-your-own-business attitude that is fostered in the United States, is not an absolute concept; it is tempered by the clause of "As long as such freedom does not threaten our own survival". There haven't been many-- or indeed any-- immediate and direct threats on our country's ideals in our history, on our own ground, until now. And we're still unwilling to believe the magnitude of the decisions we're going to have to make in defense of what we believe to be right and just.
The point where we must all make that decision is coming, and soon.
Wait, I've got an idea. How about if we send into Mecca a cruise missile that's not armed-- instead of blowing up its target, it simply explodes on contact in a shower of Arabic confetti that reads, "The next one won't be corked"? Because just maybe, the knowledge of such chilling vulnerability is all that it would take...
Response from Mike at Cold Fury. Looks like this idea is becoming more than just a guilt-ridden murmur.
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