Cultural slavery is far more harmful than political domination. Yet in practice, they are inseparable.
-- Ibn Khaldun
Consistently brilliant, Paul Wretchard of Belmont Club was never more so when he noted on January 13 how
Middle Eastern warfare, beginning in modern times from the Franco-Algerian war in the 1960s favored a strategic withdrawal by its militarily weaker forces into social redoubts, defended not by concrete fortifications but by nearly impenetrable barriers of kinship, language and religion. America might deploy a million men to Iraq and physically control every inch of ground, but unless it could reach into this social fortress it could never successfully engage the enemy.
Bullseye, Mr. Wretchard. Mabrook.
Today across the globe, we witness Muslims erecting "social redoubts" wherever their culture is under stress. In places like Falluja, Samarra and Baghdad, leaders utilize the politics of grievance and the terror of assassination to prevent their followers from participating in Iraq's democratic future. In working-class neighborhoods across Europe, first-generation immigrants and alienated Muslim youths are refusing to assimilate, even as they increasingly demand that the majority culture tolerates their beliefs--or else. In madrases across the Middle East, students receive education in religious studies rather than science and world literature (this is a culture, let us recall, that in a millennium has translated less books into Arabic than Spain translates into Spanish each year), even as wild and irrational conspiracy theories further limit and sequester their imaginations.
"Muslims everywhere live in slavery to fundamentalist Islam," says Hasan Mahmoud, a member of the Muslim Canadian Congress. "Their leaders force them to live in an unreal world where they are told they are the greatest nation on earth."
As Wretchard notes, the Muslim Redoubt is a deliberate--if not always articulated and conscious--strategy of non-cooperation, or as little cooperation as possible, with unbelievers. Its enforcers are clerics, academics, politicians and family patriarchs; its ideology is fundamentalism, shari'a, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, "honor" codes and misogyny. Its symbol is the cave, that magical space of concealment and defense, which appears in multiple forms in Islamic culture: from the inner glories of mosques to the proverbial "hideout" of Osama bin Laden to the linen dungeons of hejab. And its goal is to regiment, isolate and preserve the strength of Muslims for the inevitable triumph of dar-al-Islam over those who dwell in jahilliya--darkness, ignorance, sin.
Most Muslims do not subscribe to this weaponized passive-aggressiveness--indeed, Islam's history of cultural interaction has bestowed incalculable benefits to mankind. But we cannot ignore the spiritual introversion and defensiveness spreading across the umma. "It is like a virus, spreading throughout world Islam, sickening and corrupting it," remarked Senad Agic, a Bornian cleric now living in Chicago.
Indeed, the main, the great exception to those who would imprison their hearts and minds in social fortresses are, of course, believers in North America. As I talk with Muslims who are interested--indeed, desperate--to rescue their beliefs from fundamentalism and archaic tradition, I am struck by the hope they place in this continent. Here, they tell me, the revolution will begin. Here, amidst a confident, free, intellectually curious and spiritually adventurous Islamic community will they find their faith revitalized by the energies of modernism. Here, as writer Irshad Manji said last fall during a talk at New York's 92nd Street Y,
at no other time can Muslims say we live in a place where we can speak freely without fear of state reprisal or torture. I ask other Muslims, what in God's name are you doing with that freedom?
But even here, where the shining medina on the hill beckons Muslim hopes, clouds gather. According to the great Sufi moderate Sheik Hisham al-Kabbani, 80 percent of the mosques in North America have fallen under the sway of Wahhabism, the puritanical form of Islam that is Saudi Arabia's second fossilized export to the world. Recently, Asra Nomani, writer of Tantrika and the up-coming Standing Alone in Mecca, told me how, over the last quarter-century, she has seen American mosques change from easygoing places where men and women intermingled, to increasingly segregated and spiritually insular religious camps. A member of the Muslim Student Association at Princeton related how the president of his organization is demanding that men and women sit separately during meetings, and is pushing for a curtain to divide the sexes.
Worse, progressives must endure non-Muslim "allies," who, in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism refuse to criticize Islam--and even yield to its harsher, more irrational and dangerous elements. Thus we have school textbooks that elide the concept of jihad (while slamming Israel), and national feminist organizations more concerned about Wal-Mart, silicon implants and the Bush inauguration than hejab, honor killings and the 70 percent illiteracy rate of Muslim women. We have nine states that allow Muslims to appear veiled on their driver's license. And most shamefully, Canada now allows shari'a courts to adjudicate certain issues between couples--a concession that outrages even Islamic groups and other Muslims.
"When I look at shari'a law and how it treats women, I cry," confides Mahmoud. "These are laws that men have framed for their own women, sisters, mothers. How can men be so cruel--and with such cheerfulness?" Even worse, he continues, is the message Canada is sending to progressive Muslims in other countries. "Where Islamic culture is engaged in a life and death struggle against political Islam, this will demoralize the moderates, and set back their efforts. 'Look what Canada is doing,' fundamentalists will say. 'If it they accept shari'a why shouldn't the Muslim world?"
As Manji writes in The Trouble With Islam.
Non-Muslims do the world no favors by pushing the moral mute button as soon as Muslims start speaking. Dare to ruin the moment.
Unlike an actual fortification, however, the Muslim Redoubt cannot be taken by storm: direct assaults will only cause its battlements to grow higher, narrower, its inhabitants more prone to self-destructive behavior. I quail when, during radio interviews for In the Red Zone, hosts jocularly refer to Islam as "the religion of hate," or callers ask me how can anyone can believe in a "terrible god like Allah." That sort of talk only benefits fundamentalists, Muslim and Christian alike.
Nor will sentiments of "tolerance" and multi-cultural piety dissolve the Muslims' ideological ramparts: appeasement leads only to further demands from the aggrieved, as the citizens of Amsterdam discovered to their shock. Rather, in the social struggle that confronts us, we must engage "hardened Islam" as we might an individual whose alternating projections of aggression and victimhood conceal feelings of deep inferiority co-existing with a barely-restrainable power complex. Our approach must include, along with knowledge of Islamic and Muslim history and tradition, concepts of the fetish, the cult, psychic grandiosity and malignant narcissism.
In short, we must balance knowledge and admiration of Islam with a clear understanding of its many weaknesses, and an unyielding commitment to our own imperfect traditions of democracy, human rights, individualism and scientific thinking. There are allies who exist behind the walls of the Burning Crescent and the All-Seeing Eye; it is they who will open its gates to the world. But only if they are assured that we who stand beyond the ramparts will welcome them with respect and understanding of their beliefs and an equal respect and understanding for our own.