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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.
Peaktalk via Dilys
Posted by CrankyProfessor at July 12, 2005 7:11 PM
Comments
Thanks for the visit and link, c-p.
There was a good deal of discussion at, I think I remember, Winds of War about the attack on the Beslan school as documentably intended to be toward the creation of a Baltic caliphate.
Not happy thinking, but denial only gushes a river of grief.
Posted by: dilys at July 12, 2005 10:55 PM
It's not a Reformation that's lacking... the Muslims had a reformation in the 18th C, with people like Abdul Wahab taking the lead, though it was also occurring in Egypt and Raj India.
What is lacking is an Enlightenment, where the worth of the individual, regardless of his relationship to a deity, is considered.
Posted by: John Burgess at July 13, 2005 10:34 AM
So the history of the Roman Catholic church reads like a legend of murder, greed and hypocrisy, but that's okay because the catechism says it was wrong . . . Okay . . . and, Baptists are worse off because if Baptists were to engage in terrorist bombings then there would not be a catechism to tell people that it was wrong? Ummm, the Baptists seem to handle this by encouraging its members not to commit terrorism and any number of confessional statements.
If you don't believe evangelicals oppose the modern divorce because there are lots of divorced evangelicals, do Roman Catholics oppose sin given the large number of sinning Roman Catholics?
P.S. please keep spewing your anti-evangelical bile; some evangelicals believed Roman Catholic words about having a catholic spirit focused more on the gospel than hierarchy. Your honesty about your focus is refreshing and rare.
..........I'm sorry to have offended you; I didn't mean my words to sound bile-filled. I've added a Catholic example to the first paragraph to balance the Evangelicals.
..........My point about Baptists isn't that they're bad, but that there's no one *in charge* (even of the SBC), just as there's no one in charge of Islam. Who would you go to for a *definitive* statement about Baptist beliefs? What kind of "Baptist." In what sense are the "confessional statements" binding on congregations? There's something there, but it's damn hard to pin down. --MCT
Posted by: Pensans at July 16, 2005 7:28 PM