Rushdie and Islam

I was asked by a reader to comment further on the Rushdie excerpt from a previous post. I had mentioned there that I didn't entirely agree with his argument.

In the original Washington Post article, Rushdie said,

"The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots in these young men's objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but the closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are places in which young men's alienations can easily deepen. What is needed is a move beyond tradition -- nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.

It would be good to see governments and community leaders inside the Muslim world as well as outside it throwing their weight behind this idea, because creating and sustaining such a reform movement will require above all a new educational impetus whose results may take a generation to be felt, a new scholarship to replace the literalist diktats and narrow dogmatisms that plague present-day Muslim thinking."

This seems to be the gist of Rushdie's claim -- that the problem with much of Islamic culture is that it is traditionalist, anti-liberal, and based in a supernaturalistic Islamic religion. His political point is that Tony Blair ought not to cozy up to radical Muslim leaders in Britain, but rather force their hand: they ought to become modern Britons.

So, some interrelated thoughts:

First, okay, shake up tradition. But towards what? Rushdie uses metaphors -- "throwing open the windows," etc. -- but apart from this simply says Islam ought to go "modern." It's not clear what he means here. Individualism? Liberal marketeerism? Naturalism? Education... but in what? I'm all for a naturalistic account, and think people like Thoreau and Emerson and Dewey were pretty much right on (see Dewey's A Common Faith) -- but all theistic religions are essentially supernaturalist. A lot of Muslims are non-traditional as opposed to Rushdie's fanaticist sense of traditional. A lot of non-Muslims are supernaturalists (e.g. depending on the source, 60-80% of non-Muslim Americans).

Second, in the US there are plenty of rightist Christian groups who hold what we "moderns" would call extremist ideas who nonetheless cause no harm to others. We tend not to worry too much about them, even when some of their members do commit violent acts in the name of their God. And there exist other non-modern religions/cultures such as the Amish or Shakers -- we can call them extremist in their traditionalism. Yet, we worry about traditionalist Muslim groups, even when they do not commit violent acts and preach against violence. Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn't do something about any group that preaches hatred of others and takes their beliefs so far as to kill others -- in this case, whichever ostensive religion it comes from doesn't matter at all.

The double-standard, however, is in the call for Islam to modernize. It is a complex double-standard because, although race and certain kinds of extremist beliefs don't overlap entirely, there is still often a racial element to the distinction between traditionalist, extremist Christian groups and traditionalist, extremist Muslim groups. If nothing else, this is the public and political perception. Many of the beliefs of American conservatives ought to be brought up to more modern snuff. They ought to throw open the windows too. But the question remains, towards what? In my view, those beliefs I think are more thoughtful, appropriate, fecund, pragmatic, etc. But try telling that to an American conservative extremist or even many of our daily media figures.

Third, Rushdie is basically making a demand for the liberalization of a religious tradition. Liberal modernization for many of us moderns seems like a pretty good thing, even if we often don't live up to its more noble principles. But there's also a loss many moderns bemoan in modernization and liberalization -- the "loss" of tradition, community, values, and so on. Modernity has been rejected by many. Much of 20th-Century philosophy took this direction in very sophisticated ways. Many cultures today worry about the ravaging effects of liberal modernization on the very things that give those cultures and their members' lives meaning. And there is good reason to be concerned. But, also, culturally, this worry is ever-present at the margins of American public dialogue and public consciousness. It can be found in different variations and degrees: in some anti-globalization thought and activism, much of the American Christian right's anxieties about values, progressives' worries about the destructive properties of capital, concerns about the global loss of languages, and so on.

Fourth, as roughly a liberal myself I generally think that openness, genuine choice, individual rights, avoidance of dogma, experiment, transparency, accountability, freedom of thought and speech and worship or non-worship, pluralism, human rights, "a healthy respect for the opinions of mankind," are things worth pursuing for a society and/or culture, including religious ones. But these are values that my upbringing instiled in me and that my education developed. Now that I've been teaching and writing for some time and have lived around the globe learning other languages and cultures, I know how much these liberal values are fraught with nuances, vagaries, and contradictions, as well as how both abstract thought and lived context matter and provide content for what are otherwise empty rhetorical, philosophical, or regulative shells. Like any values worth their salt, these liberal ones require an investment or meaning through lived, historically funded experience in order to have meaningful content. That is the communitarian's point. But the same goes for more traditional values -- they can often be built out of a history of pragmatism and thoughtful experiment but also out of ostensive revelation, mindless repetition, and brute authority. They help to invest lives with meaning, but they can also serve to stultify and oppress. Fundamentalist Islam hasn't cornered the market on the latter. The US has its own Taliban arising from or perhaps involved in a historical struggle against modern liberal society.

Again, I'm not saying all values are relative (blah, blah, blah, go the rightist anti-academics). Human beings have to live with each other, and increasingly with very different others. That's what the fundamentalist often can't handle because he or she is absolutist, regardless of cultural and religious background. But the modern also ought not to make the mistake of automatically thinking that a failure on the fundamentalist's part to live up to the modern's ideal of healthy values and ways of life entails anything other than the modern's failure to live up to his own ideals (of experiment, openness, pluralism, etc.). Not everything goes. Violence and torture and oppression can't be tolerated. But "throwing open the windows" just isn't enough of an answer for a subculture that, in some ways, has earned the right to be pissed off. In a globalizing era, we moderns also can't run away from the devastation upon which modernity has been built, and that includes all of our Janus-faced beliefs and those which have turned away from shining modernity towards darker medieval terrain.

I don't have an answer about fundamentalism and I think it's one of the toughest questions liberal moderns face. But I do know that saying the answer is that fundamentalists ought not to be fundamentalists and we liberal moderns ought to do our best to make sure they become more like us is simplistic and ultimately antagonistic. It's neither realistic in regard to the nature of fundamentalist beliefs -- indeed, it's blind -- nor mindful of the experimentalist ideas of liberalism.