A confusion of calumny
By Paul J Cella Posted in National Security — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Some months back, the reader will recall, old Colonel Calumny (Ralph Peters) was hurling every species of invective he could lay his hands on, at unnamed critics of Islam. This in a column remarkable for its concentrated slapdash of unhinged vitriol. Now we find him adopting a very different guise indeed. Noting the “crudeness of Arabian Islam,” he endorses a view of the Sunni Islamic majority as “a barracks religion,” and goes on to talk of the “intolerant Bedouin faith of Arabia, with its fascist obsession on behavior.” Meanwhile, he praises Shi’ism for its descent, according to him, from the rich and varied Persian civilization, which “absorbed and transformed Islam.”
Read on.
He writes,
The Prophet’s attempt to discipline Arabian hillbillies produced a faith ill-fitted to Persia’s complex civilization — or to Mesopotamian Arabs, who despised the illiterate desert nomads. Islam was bound to change as it occupied this haunted real estate . . . [This] is an old and endless struggle between the desert and the city, between civilization and barbarism. Long oppression may have made Shi’ism appear backward, but it’s inherently a richer faith than Sunni Islam. With its End-of-Times vision, founding martyrs and radiant angels, its mysticism and wariness of the flesh, Shi’ism is closer to Christianity than check-list Sunni Islam ever could be.
Now this may well be a valuable point and fruitful line of inquiry. But it is precisely the sort of inquiry that the Colonel’s convulsive vituperation on other occasions would preclude. Today’s Colonel Peters, dilating thoughtfully (though, it must be admitted, with occasional departures into the same crude sophistry) on the divisions within the Islamic religion, would, logically, be subject to the anathemas delivered by Colonel Peters of six months ago. He (the current Colonel Peters) would be among those (according to Colonel Peters circa Sept. ’06) “discrediting honorable conservatism” by “insisting that Islam can never reform” — i.e., when he refers to the “Bedouin fanaticism gripping so much of the Middle East” and “Arabian hillbillies” and despicable “illiterate desert nomads.” It is no real flight of fancy to imagine Colonel Peters of Sept. ’06 banging the table with a clenched fist and thundering at Colonel Peters of Feb. ’07: “I’ll never sign up for your ‘Protocols of the Elders of Mecca.’ You’re just the Ku Klux Klan with higher-thread-count sheets.” And since Colonel Peters of Sept. ’06 never took the basic step of actually naming the men he undertook to slander, why, we cannot foreclose the possibility that in his confusion he has indeed slandered himself.
A charitable interpretation for all this perplexity is that the good colonel has been asked to write too much. Lord knows this is a temptation for us all in the blogging age. When Colonel Peters delivered his first screed against critics of Islam, I quoted Cardinal Newman’s remark that some men “are so intemperate and intractable that there is no greater calamity for a good cause than that they should get hold of it”; and I worried of the dangers should Colonel Peters get hold of “the good cause of thinking critically about the enemy.” In today’s column he make a solid attempt at this; and it is all the more reason to be wary of his less savory instincts as a rhetor.
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A confusion of calumny 5 Comments (0 topical, 5 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
the ultimate source for truth in Islam is the Koran. Our enemies make simple and straightforward interpretations of the Surahs that promote violence, racism, and hatred as they are written. That certain scholars can do mental gymnastics, and attempt to excuse and creatively interpret these Surahs is admirable, but entirely beside the point when dealing with societies that have in upwards of 40% illiteracy. Those, “largely ignorant Arabian hillbillies”, or “illiterate desert nomads”, as the case may be, that can read learn to do so at the Madrass. They read the Koran, are taught and believe it to be the actual words of Alah (not by men inspired by God, mind you). They are taught what those words mean, and they believe that those words mean what they say. Not so difficult to understand.
The problem with islam is not one sect or another. The problem (from the perspective of an infidel) is what the Koran says, and what it commands the faithful to do. The principal of abrogation renders the problem intractable, and I do not know of a sect that does not teach this principal.
The whole thing looks like a blind alley to me. I welcome anyone who disagrees to set me straight, because I do not want to believe the conclusions I come to. I would rather believe almost anything else.
"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem." - President Ronald Reagan
Re: the ultimate source for truth in Islam is the Koran.
But it is just as true for Christianity that the Bible is the basis of religious doctrine. Yet look at the astonishing and dewildering variety of interpretations, some of which are daimetrically opposite one another (to say nothing of the very different apporoach of the Jews to the OT). So it's not clear that having a Sacred Book of Revealed Truth somehow sets Islam apart from all other religions.
says something to the effect that all the verses have both literal and metaphorical meaning, and the reader will not necessarily know which is which without deep reflection.
In any case, the real problem is people who won't (or can't) read scriptures for themselves, and who trust their preacher to tell them what the scriptures mean and what they should do.
No, not really, but the president did mouth the cliche (and falsehood for translation purposes let alone historical reasons) "that Islam is the religion of peace" so many times in the aftermath of 9/11 that the Ralph Peters' of the world bought into it. Now that Peters has realized that, yes, there are differences among sects, regions, and even people within both, he also must examine his embrace of certain other aspects of the faith.
For example, as you and others have pointed out, "jihad" is a concept that is part and parcel of Islam. There is great disagreement on what that means in the modern context, although early Islamic jurists usually used it in the context of war. I remain open to what it means today to most or many Muslims.
I hope that Peters' transformation doesn't make the full circle from uncritical sheep to messianic wolf, although I would say the potential is there.
Stephen Schwartz makes the same case. There is a kernel of truth to it, to be sure, and the gravest long-term problem in the region is the Saudi's use of petrodollars to spread Wahhabism and elbow out idiosyncratic interpretations of Islam that tended to be more amenable to material progress and peace. But when such an interpretation inflates the Saudis and their progeny to the status of bogeymen worthy of all attendant blame and simultaneously looses Shiism and even Islam as a whole from any responsibility for the ongoing violence it becomes extraordinarily counterproductive.