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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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 Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 8:31 am Post subject: An Imam dares to say what Islam should be, etc. |
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Robert Fulford is one of the few writers that manages to be critical and respectful at the same time. Derrek, he's Canadian.
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An Imam dares to say what Islam should be
by Robert Fulford
(The National Post, May 4, 2002)
Muslims and Jews in the Middle East enact their struggle with such persistent bitterness that we could easily assume they are continuing an ancient and probably immutable rivalry. Those who even glance at history know otherwise, but as the battle rages, who bothers to glance at history?
Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, an Imam who serves as secretary general of the Italian Muslim Association in Rome, has recently been travelling across Canada, trying to persuade various Muslim, Jewish and academic audiences that Muslims and Jews once lived together comfortably and might do so again in the conceivable future. But as he sees it, that will require the return of Islam to its true principles, such as tolerance.
He's an unusual man with many unusual messages, and he delivers them (as I discovered while spending a few hours in his presence at the University of Toronto this week) with complete confidence, outlining the most unorthodox ideas in a tone that implies we will immediately agree with him and then wonder why we didn't see things his way all along.
Islamic countries were not always oppressive. In fact, Islam came early to the idea of freedom, earlier than Christianity. Three centuries ago, many Jews considered Islamic societies safe havens. Bernard Lewis, the great historian, wrote recently that Islamic countries in the Middle Ages "achieved a freedom of thought and expression that led persecuted Jews and even dissident Christians to flee Christendom for refuge in Islam."
Systematic hatred of Muslims for Jews is mainly modern. Before the 20th century, Muslims sometimes saw Jews in stereotyped form, but the stereotypes were more dismissive than suspicious or obsessive. Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories entered Arabia as European imports, spread through the Middle East by the Nazis. Even now, anti-Jewish books and pamphlets in Arabic are usually translations from European languages. The stereotype they introduced seven decades ago eventually proved convenient. After the Israelis won the war of 1948, leaving many Arabs humiliated, the idea of the Jew as (in Professor Lewis's words) "a scheming, evil monster" became satisfying, a case of losers denouncing winners for trickery.
Sheikh Palazzi accepts not even one of the standard political arguments that make up common attitudes toward the Middle East. The world judges Israel harshly, he says, and the world is dead wrong: "The right of self-defence is permitted to every country in the world except Israel." He thinks Israel deserves to exist, that the Koran mandates Jewish control of Jerusalem (so long as Islamic holy sites are respected), that peace will not come until the PLO is dismantled ("supporting the PLO is supporting massacres"), and that Yasser Arafat is a gangster. Why, Sheikh Palazzi asks, was the world not delighted when the Israelis pinned him down in his headquarters? In the Sheikh's view, people should have said: "Thank God Arafat is imprisoned. Now let us try him for 40 years of terrorism."
Sheikh Palazzi understands that these views are outrageous to many: He's a little like the Fool in a Shakespearean drama, stating truths that the rest of us are too timid to utter. His background has given him elements of both Islamic piety and European skepticism. Born in Italy 40 years ago, to a mother from Syria and a father who embraced Islam, he studied in the Arab world. When he took his doctorate in Islamic Sciences at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Islam was less rigid than it has since become. His main teacher had urged Anwar Sadat to make peace with Israel. But at Al-Azhar today, as Sheikh Palazzi says, those who were considered outsiders and radicals in the 1980s are now the leading scholars.
He's talking about adherents of the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam, which he sees as an apostasy. Rigid, politicized, and puritanical, Wahhabi sprang up in Arabia in the 18th century, created by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab. It won over vast numbers of Arabs, conquered large territories, lost them, and conquered them again in the first decades of the 20th century. With the help of the British Empire, Ibn Saud rebuilt his ancestral domain and named it Saudi Arabia, with Wahhabism as its way of religious life. The Saudis have since used their oil money to spread Wahhabism around the world. As Sheikh Palazzi has put it, "The Wahhabis first conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, transforming these two sanctuaries into places for propagating a primitive and literalist cult to Muslims coming from every part of the world." In his view, Wahhabism suffocates the humane and enlightened Islamic tradition with dogmatic uniformity. But it's wealthier than other forms. Its mosques are magnificent. Its network of agents has spread across the world.
For reasons Sheikh Palazzi cannot fathom, the world has decided not to think much about the fact that the Sept. 11 terrorists were mostly Saudis. In his view, "It is as if people said Japan had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. Imagine how the Saudi princes feel. They say to themselves, 'We kill thousands of Americans and now they welcome us as men of peace.' "
Meanwhile, most of Islam insists that the Jews are the problem. Eventually, in Sheikh Palazzi's opinion, that will change and even now is quietly reforming: "Many of us are now ready to admit that hostility for Israel has been a great mistake, perhaps the worst mistake Muslims have made in the last 50 years." |
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Why deny the obvious? West is best
by Robert Fulford
(The National Post, December 29, 2001)
Even as he drew his last journalistic breath, Anthony Lewis of The New York Times maintained his faith in moral equivalence, the ultimate affliction of the liberal mind. People like Mr. Lewis claim to consider one culture as good as another. They are embarrassed by the thought that the West, having accomplished much more during the last half-millennium or so, stands well above other contemporary civilizations.
On Dec. 15, writing his farewell Op-Ed column at the age of 74, Mr. Lewis said that Islamic fundamentalists threaten peace because they reject reason. We can imagine that one nanosecond after those words appeared on his computer screen, his political instincts kicked in, an alarm sounded, and he realized what he absolutely had to say next. So he began the following paragraph in ritual mode, with the classic "But ..." sentence that readers of today's journalism know so well: "But the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism is not to be found in Islam alone. Fundamentalist Christians in America, believing that the Bible's story of creation is the literal truth, question not only Darwin but the scientific method that has made contemporary civilization possible."
While true, that has no valid connection to what came before. It's pure intellectual reflex. He jammed zealots who employ murder and zealots who employ rhetoric into the same category, a perfect example of the way devotion to inadequately considered ideas produces intellectual dishonesty.
Even so, Mr. Lewis was edging toward what will surely be the central argument of this historic period. In the year 2001, an unprecedented atrocity reopened the subject of Western civilization's nature and role. Sept. 11 was an attack on the West, and the counterattack was vigorous. Still, questions remain. Do the people of the West, having taught themselves to question all doctrines (a uniquely Western habit of mind), now retain sufficient belief in their own way of life to defend it?
Since Plato and Aristotle, the great thinkers have assumed that their principles have universal value. Do we still believe that, or have we been so influenced by multiculturalism that we consider the West's philosophy no better or worse than others? There's a profound difference between a culture that possesses Western characteristics (free speech, democracy, independent judges, economic freedom, scientific independence) and a culture that doesn't. But in our schools and universities this point has ceased to be obvious.
In 1999, an article in the Library Journal in the United States expressed surprise at the appearance of some interesting books on Western civilization. After all, the widespread opinion that courses on this subject were "parochial, racist and sexist," as well as celebrations of "capitalism and the bourgeois pathology of greed," had been discouraging the teaching of Western Civ in universities for some years.
The Library Journal's surprise was understandable. In the 1990s, post-colonial theorists focused academic attention on everything that is vicious in the West and ignored the rest. No one claimed there was a superior way of life elsewhere, and there's no record of a post-colonial theorist abandoning the West for life in the Third World. Nevertheless, moral relativism had infected the study of societies, and (before anyone really knew what was happening) had come to dominate much of what was thought and said.
Can we legitimately compare Islamic and Western civilizations? Yes. A few hours in a museum of Islamic art may well convince you that no designer in North America today approaches the visual sophistication of Islam at its height. But Islamic political life remains a scandal. Islam has spawned no democracies, and no Islamic countries have joined the developed world. Half a century ago, South Korea and Egypt had the same standard of living. Today, South Korea's is roughly five times Egypt's. South Korea accepted the methods the West offered while Egypt rejected them.
This process of denial dominates the intense controversy described in "The Crash of EgyptAir 990," a memorable article by William Langewiesche in the November issue of the Atlantic Monthly. On Oct. 31, 1999, EgyptAir's New York-Cairo flight nosedived into the Atlantic, killing all 217 people aboard. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Washington, asked by both governments to find the cause, concluded after a thorough study of the data that the co-pilot had, for whatever reason, intentionally plunged the plane into a fatal dive. EgyptAir's executives denounced that finding as offensive. They have since spent two years fighting it by all political and economic means. For reasons of diplomacy, the U.S. government forced the NTSB to withhold its report and consider every alternative explanation suggested by the Egyptians, no matter how outlandish.
Mr. Langewiesche, an experienced pilot, sees this as a question of competing cultures. He thinks the Egyptian officials, many of them sophisticated pilots, don't believe a word they are saying. They are fighting the truth because it hurts them emotionally. The result of an independent scientific investigation seems to them an insult to Islam. They live in a dream of defensiveness and self-righteousness.
Like many Islamic countries, Egypt suffers terribly from the refusal to absorb Western knowledge and build upon it. Those who embrace multiculturalism in the West often say that we should not attempt to "export our values" to other societies. All to the contrary. If the West hesitated to share experience and knowledge with the world, that would be cruel, thoughtless and bigoted. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 3:58 pm Post subject: |
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Two interesting articles.
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Robert Fulford is one of the few writers that manages to be critical and respectful at the same time. Derrek, he's Canadian.
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But the acid test is: Can he do that when he writes about the US?  |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 10:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Those who embrace multiculturalism in the West often say that we should not attempt to "export our values" to other societies. All to the contrary. If the West hesitated to share experience and knowledge with the world, that would be cruel, thoughtless and bigoted. |
I agree, but even as we recognize that exporting Western values may be a moral imperative, we need to be cautious about our behavior on the loading dock and in the marketplace. |
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The Bobster
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 6:21 am Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
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| Those who embrace multiculturalism in the West often say that we should not attempt to "export our values" to other societies. All to the contrary. If the West hesitated to share experience and knowledge with the world, that would be cruel, thoughtless and bigoted. |
I agree, but even as we recognize that exporting Western values may be a moral imperative, we need to be cautious about our behavior on the loading dock and in the marketplace. |
I agree as well, and more so with Kuros' caveat above. Few liberals, in my experience, oppose the spread of Western values around the world - this is partly because liberalism itself is an outgrowth and expression of uniquely Western values.
Export our values? Sure, though we can never impose them, or we do so at our own peril. This is a large part of the mistake we are making in Iraq, by the way, the same one we've made elsewhere and at other times. The word "export" implies that someone wants to buy what we have to sell, a free choice made without coercion, and it implies there is value seen by others in what we have.
I have sometimes been heard to mutter something like despair when I see how little in Korea remaikns uniquely Korean - they have "modernized" their own identity so far into the background that it takes effort to actually find Korea sometimes ... but it was a choice made by Koreans, by and large, and in the end, there is no good reason to fault them for it.
By the same token, and for the sake of consistency, it behooves me as well to allow Islamic countries to make the choice as well, even if they reject it. |
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