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July 12, 2005
Why We Fight
Does anyone believe that there's not a culture war on? And I don't mean the self-styled civil culture war (which I put very little stock in -- there are far too many Catholics getting abortions and divorced then remarried Evangelicals for me to take any top-down "culture war" activity very seriously) -- I mean Modernity versus Islamism? Go read this blog while he's covering the trial of Mohammed Bouyeri, killer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Bouyeri's direct address to van Gogh's mother is especially awful.
Yes, "Islam" has to deal with this. When people commit horrific crimes explicity in the name of a religious system the religious system must respond to the murderer's claims. A serious problem here is that there's about as much central authority in Islam as there is in, say, churches with the word Baptist on the signboard; there's not much of anyone to do the dealing. For instance, one may believe that the Catholic Church (and especially its hierarchy) is filled with hypocrisy about the priestly scandals so prominent in the past few years, but in the face of the Catechism it would be difficult to say that official Church teaching was in favor of the bad behavior. If you wanted to discuss "what Catholics believe" and try to get an official statement it's remarkably clear-cut (not easy, just a clear organizational structure). It's very easy to figure out who to sue in the Roman Catholic Church.
It would be nice to read statements against bombers from the imams at al Azhar, but they're far too closely linked to the Egyptian government for any jihadi to take them seriously. The Saudi Grand Imam? Hah! The final problem, though is that the professors at al Azhar and the Saudi religious leaders have no real authority. Lots of the violent want an authority, a caliph, and the fact is that there isn't one.
The establishment of the caliphate (whether the initial or a "renewed caliphate") is an intractable historical problem (and one well-worth reading about -- I'm sure the khilifally-inclined among the suicidal bomb-wearers wouldn't be happy with this recommendation from my summer reading: God's Caliph : Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam, Crone and Hinds), but I find it worth remembering that some of our enemies want a caliph. People who talk about the need for a Reformation in Islam are not well-read.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at July 12, 2005 7:11 PM