Posted on 09/25/2001 1:18:32 AM PDT by JasonC
The old adage has it that disorders in the world follow disorders in the heads of the dons by one hundred years. I think it has been a somewhat faster process in recent times, but still something about like that. It took 67 years from the time Mises published "Socialism", which came right after the Russian revolution, until the Berlin wall fell. Rahman published "Islam and Modernity" in 1982, right after the Iranian revolution.
That's frighteningly true, especially considering the "hegemony" of post-modernism in our universities.
Another thought. What happened to Muslim rationalism? Thomism has ebbed and flowed within Catholicism in relation to other contemporary philosophical movements. The West in general fell from the Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason through rationalism, unitarianism, agnosticism and finally materialism, although the process finally seems to be reversing.
Could it be that Islamic scripture and tradition can't be reconciled with reason?
Okay. In those 67 years, the world endured tens (hundreds?) of millions dead in gulags, purges, great leaps forward, etc. A world war in between, a cold war afterward for forty-odd years. A couple of "minor" wars costing U.S. lives (Korea, Viet Nam).
Your thoughts please, on the issue of whether, given that experience, even if the cycle can be quickened, we can endure even 6.7 years of further (escalating?) terrorist activity? I.e. would the world have been better off had we stamped out socialism in a bloody, brutal conflict at the outset?
To wit, can we wait for the trickle down of moderate views to all of Islam, or should we launch a massive anti-terror campaign right now to "incent" orders of magnitude quicker moves to moderation in those states practicing more extreme versions?
But by the time of Averroes, Muslim theologians had come to distrust that whole rationalist tradition as moving toward secularism. And Al-Ghazali basically ended that tradition, with his attacks on previous Islamic philosophy (cf. his book "the incoherence of the philosophers"). He did so on the basis of a general skepticism about the capabilities of human reason, later echoed in the west in the arguments of Hume. And in its place, he urged a literalism about texts received as revelation, against any human interpretation of them tainted by such a weak instrument (reason), which was later echoed in the west by Protestant literalism. He was more sympathetic to mystic claims about religious experiences, later echoed in the west by romanticism and existentialism.
We in the west have had the same spectrum of reactions to scholastic philosophy, but it made a difference whether those came from within or from outside religious tradition. They had all of these at once, effectively from within. To ward off rationalism, it was the religious authorities themselves who undermined the authority of reason, in medieval Islam. In the west, though some who don't know the history assume the same relation between reason and religion, the story was quite the other way around. Here it was the secularists who attacked reason, with various brands of skepticism and various forms of irrationalism. They still are, in the case of the postmodernists you mentioned.
Here, because religious authorities claimed to be able to reason about metaphysical topics, secularists set out to undermine man's claims to knowledge about such things. While in Islam, it was the relatively secularist philosophers (especially when you get to Averroes, who is much more secular than Avicenna) who upheld the claims of reason, and the theologians who attacked it.
Secular skeptics may drift, but eventually they are governable by reason, because even those who do not recognize an ability to arrive at real truth by reason have no alternative standard to appeal to. Various forms of fashionable irrationalism aren't formed enough to have a direction; they soak up ambient influences instead (from politics, the arts, etc). And religious authorities who recognize the power of reason can always be reasoned with. But a religious authority that does not recognize any human ability that can come near the authority ascribed to revelation, is bound to the literal text of whatever its traditions hand on as revealed. Means of adaptation are closed off, and with it advances in established justice.
If the political principle informing such an attitude is individualistic, as with some types of literalist Protestantism, even that can be not much of a problem, because people will each make their own modifications and adaptations to the times, willy-nilly. And there are some texts it is doubtless safer to be literalist about than others - the Sermon on the Mount is sounder moral ground, and more timeless, than Leviticus, for example. These mitigate dangers that are nevertheless still recognizably present, and were seen in early modern religious authorities within Christendom, as well as in Islam.
Religious tolerance is of relatively recent date even in the west, and had to be learned by states through harsh experience, long after it had been taught in theory by a few. What is missing in the Islamic world is an authority to recognize such changes in practice as religiously legitimate, because reasonably just. There are plenty who support such changes in the Islamic world. But they are usually determined secularists, hostile to religion in general; or inconsistent eclectics who paste together ancient and modern without any justification or system. Neither has any specifically religious legitimacy.
The result is that decent people who see value in their religious traditions, and thus are not willing to side whole-heartedly with the secularists, are thrown into the hands of extremists. Religious legitimacy seems to be monopolized by those who want a 7th century society, and who are determined in their hostility to modernity and the west. Those who will not side with either, seeing impiety on one side and injustice on the other, "lack all conviction". (In Iran a woman who does not wear a veil commits a crime; in Turkey a woman who wears one does; in neither is she free to do so if her conscience tells her to, or not to if it does not).
What they deserve and need is a defense of the authority of their conscience in such matters, against a raving criminal literalism on one side of them, and a persecuting unbelief on the other. The former need to be told that they are not the final word on what constitutes piety, and that obvious injustice cannot be the will of "the Merciful and Compassionate". The latter need to be told that piety itself is not their enemy, and that freedom means freedom of conscience, thus also of religion, and even the right to be wrong (if some of the secularists would have it that way, and some will), without being coerced for that alone.
The US has already been the dominate outside power in the Moslem world for 45 years (dating it to Suez), and the Iranian revolution first brought Islamic ideologues to power 22 years ago. Which last I checked, we somehow managed to survive that period. If 22 or 45 years from now we have rolled back and reformed movements on that scale, we will be doing well. If instead the movement has by then grown and polarized the Islamic world, so that half its population are our determined enemies, then we will be doing badly. That is realism; being mad enough about it will not change the reality of the thing.
That said, my question for you, perhaps inelegantly stated, is whether you believe that swift, wide-ranging, brutal execution of a war against known terror-sponsoring states will have a polarizing (i.e. strengthening of the radicals) or unifying effect (defined here as strengthening of the moderates)? In other words, will it further the cause of "reforming a civilization"?
What changed on 9-11 is that the guys who have been shooting at us for years hit something. And hit it hard enough that most Americans really noticed. That is a change, here, in political will and in understanding of the importance of the overall conflict, which too many had flippantly dismissed as irrelevant to themselves before. Now they know better, and are awake. Some of us knew as much after Iran.
It also means a lot of johnny come latelys get to spout off about their preferred silver bullets about a subject they know precious little about, while those of us who have been studying it for decades because we realized its importance long ago, get to be treated as weak kneed because we understand anything, when obviously howling for blood will reverse the heavens if only the howling is loud enough. Which is incredibly frustrating, I can assure you, since the whole point is to direct the entirely new willingness to actually do anything, toward courses of action likely to make any long-term difference.
These folks blew up a few hundred Marines in Lebanon, and the Iranians mined the Persian Gulf, and they were at war with Iraq for a decade - a war that killed a million people, just like the war in Algeria did before it, and the one in Afghanistan for that matter - and then Iraq was at war with us, and then they tried to knock down the WTC with a truck bomb but failed, and they blew up a barracks in Saudi, and they blew up two cities in Africa and killed hundreds, and then they blew up the Cole, not to mention a few hundred thousand killed and a few million starved in Sudan.
But heck, those were all servicemen (except they weren't under the WTC) or foreigners, and the KIA only ran 3 digits per pop (except the wars that ran 6 and 7 digits, but "thems ferreigners"), so obviously they were really selling girl scout cookies, and nobody could be bothered until 9-11. Don't even get me started about the stuff Israel puts up with and gets lectured for being persnickety about.
It did not start last month, OK? And if you think it did, then it just means you haven't been paying much attention. A lot of Americans haven't been. The whole country has been on an escapist bender about since 1992, blowing off steam from 45 years of pressure cooking. They wanted the world to just go away, and some still do, or think they can opt out of it by staying home and bleating peaceably.
The latest attack occurred at a time when the US defense budget was at its lowest percentage of GDP since Pearl Harbor, with even the Republican hawks unwilling to contemplate as much as a 10% increase, despite campaigning on the slogan "help is on the way". Then people wonder why the air raids are shy a digit on the number of systems being used.
And we get pundits "confused" about what "Bin Laden wants" after listening to his propaganda broadcasts, which incidentally every journalist considers it his duty to spread as widely as possible, at the same moment our air force is trying to knock Afghan radio off the air. I'll tell you what Bin Laden wants, he wants to rule the world, or for someone who entirely agrees with him to rule the world; he is no more finicky on that distinction than Lenin was. And we are in his way, so he wants every one of us dead. Not "out of the Middle East", dead. Not "to cease support for Israel", dead. Not a few interventionists or a few capitalists or a few military, every single person in this country. Some things you'd think would be clear enough by now.
Then there is the second half of your question, what can we do with conventional military to help. Obviously, kill the right people and break the right things. But in order to do that effectively, the political nature of the conflict has to be understood, along with the strategy employed by our enemies. And that strategy is closely tied with their own political methods and goals. That strategy is based on the political-military techniques of guerilla warfare. Every attack is a recruiting poster, and every retaliation is another recruiting poster.
The critical skill that is strained by an enemy employing a guerilla strategy is the discrimination of his opponent, in this case us. The political skill with which we divide adversaries from neutrals and friends, and the care with which we target those already politicized against us and avoid hitting those who are not.
Guerillas employ small forces and claim to speak for enourmous multitudes, who as a fact have never given them any mandate. They count on the response hitting enough members of their pretended mandate group, to radicalize some of its members. And they hope the number so recruited exceeds the number directly taken out by the retaliation. They don't care how many they lose if the net number of radicalized people who side with them increases. 100 of their own dead but 120 new recruits is to them "gaining ground", no matter how high the pile of dead grows.
You fight such a strategy by reducing the inflow of recruits as much as possible, at the same time you hit the old radicalized enemy forces directly. The more carefully you hit only the right people, the easier this is to do. More, the single best way to do it, whenever it can be managed, is to get them to suspect and off each other, because nothing damps recruitment more than disloyalty. And to reduce the recruits coming in, you have to understand why they are coming in, and what the practical alternatives are for as many of those motivations as possible.
Some will join because of the blackest unreformable hatred, and the only thing one can do about those types is to get them before they get you. But there are a thousand fellow travellers for every one of those, and a guerilla movement can't live without them. They are the recruitment base. The way you seperate the fellow travellers from the hard core nutjobs is with political and spiritual weapons, with a semblance of justice in their own countries and with ideas, not with merely physical weapons. Physical ones are obviously needed for the nutjobs. They are nothing remotely like sufficient on their own, because courage is not scarce in the world, and there are plenty of ideas that men will kill and die for. You fight an idea with an idea. You fight an unjust idea with a just one.
That said, if you think things didn't change on 9/11, then I'd venture to say you haven't been paying attention. I don't mean to be argumentative (after all, I was asking for your opinion), but the whole point is that now we have 90% of the public, instead of 30% or less, in full support of a full response militarily. So there is a window of opportunity, and I wondered if you thought taking that opportunity would shorten the timeframe to a lasting solution to this "problem". I thank you for your responses.
Gee, who said that? Oh, I said that. I have to quote myself to be heard. Nobody is ignoring political realities.
And if you'd paid any attention to the cultural and civilizational arguments the thread is supposed to be about, you'd already know that the reason I posted it is I think Rahman's ideas can help counteract Osama's, as Hayek can help counteract Marx.
If you have anything to add to the discussion of the cultural points, by all means share it with us. If the level of your thought about the subject is "hey, let's blast 'em; even popular right now" then forgive me if I doubt that adds anything to the discussion.
A link to this thread turned up today http://pakistaniat.com/2007/04/16/muhammad-mohammad-mohammed-asad-message-quran-koran-road-mecca-pakistan/comment-page-7/
Thanks Admsmith.
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