Friday, October 20, 2006

An Infidel’s Enchiridion: A Proposal

At this late stage of the game—five years after 911 and after countless assaults, physically and philodoxically, by Muslims on the lives and liberties of Infidels—the state of our arsenal with regard to the very important War of Ideas is, frankly, in pathetic disarray.

What we need, desperately, is some kind of pedagogical and rhetorical compendium of critical facts about Islam, so that these facts can be at the fingertips of any Infidel who finds himself in a situation where he needs to make a point about the Problem of Islam—whether this point is an unsolicited criticism of Islam, or whether it would be an informed response to someone else’s apologetic, or naively misinformed, defense of some feature of Islam.

Today’s blog essay, then, will attempt to provide at least the skeleton of such a compendium—or, as I would like to call it, An Infidel’s Enchiridion.

First, a brief note about that name: enchiridion is an old-fashioned word for ‘handbook’, from the Latin (ultimately from the Greek) meaning “something in hand, handy”.
(The word figured in the title of one of the most well-known manuals for Christian theology in modern times, the Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum (literally, Handbook of Symbols, Definitions and Declarations), also known as The Sources of Catholic Dogma, of Heinrich Denziger, published 1957.)

Felicitously, an enchiridion was also the name for a dagger. Indeed, should An Infidel’s Enchiridion be successfully completed and employed effectively in our current War of Ideas, we could aptly say, at least in some small but meaningful way, that “the enchiridion is mightier than the sword”. As for the ‘Infidel’ part, I tend to agree with Hugh Fitzgerald, the talented colleague of Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch, who proudly adopts this moniker for all of us who are not Muslim Believers—a moniker that, of course, in the hands of Muslims has always been a hostile and intolerant label, but which, in our hands, becomes a defiant elucidation of the line that is drawn in our day, not in the shifting sands of a perennial Arabic legerdemain that too often can hoodwink us Feringhee with deceptive oases of a ‘peaceful and tolerant Islam’, but rather to be set in the stone of our grim and solid education by which our enemy is known.

The Proper Nature of a Critical Handbook on Islam

What exactly should this Infidel’s Enchiridion be? How can we describe it’s general nature? We can begin by saying what it should not be: it should not be another book, another blog, or another website, about Islam, insofar as these simply present poorly organized and/or incomplete yet luxuriant excesses of information. We already have too much information about Islam out there. What we need is a lean and mean, tightly organized reference for all the main criticisms of Islam, and counterpoints against defensive apologies for Islam.

When I have questions about a particular point or counterpoint in Islam to use in a debate, and I have Googled to get some information, more often than not what I uncover is a far too complicated and rambling and disorienting surplus of information. I usually end up having to spend inordinate time researching and plowing through mountains of irrelevant (though important and interesting) information just to piece together the pertinent stuff I need. It shouldn’t have to be this difficult. It should be at our fingertips. There is virtually no end of hard-copy books, as well as web articles, about Islam; which, of course, is a good thing—a good thing for the general pedagogy of our Infidel populations. However, in addition to this increasing mountain of literature, we also need a streamlined ‘just-the-facts-ma’am’ type of handbook.

The Proper Structure of a Critical Handbook on Islam

In light of the above description of the nature of the Infidel’s Enchiridion, its structure should present the content in a format as unadorned and fat-free as possible—without, however, sacrificing necessary informational substance. Basically, the structure should be as follows:

I. Overall two-part structure:

1) Unsolicited criticisms of Islam.

2) Counterpoints against --

a) unsolicited apologetic defenses of Islam

b) reflexive apologetic defenses of Islam triggered by 1 (the unsolicited criticisms of Islam), as well as by 2a (the counterpoints against the points or counterpoints of the apologists).

II. Capsule Presentation

Each unsolicited criticism (in Part One), and each counterpoint—against and for Islam—(in Part Two), should begin with a terse capsule presentation of its gist.

III. Adumbration in Bullet Points

Each capsule presentation and each counterpoint should be followed by an adumbration of evidence that backs up each component part of that presentation. Nothing in the follow-up adumbration should be excluded from the capsule presentation, though it can be more or less hidden as an implication. The adumbration should be a list of bullet points of primary source quotes.

IV. Primary Source Quotes

Each bullet point should consist of a terse introduction to representative quotes from the Qur’an, Hadiths, Islamic law, Islamic history, and Islamic news today.

V. Sources

The sources for the quotes should be noted in abbreviated form (e.g., “Q 4:34” for “Qur’an Sura 4 Aya 34” or “SB 1000” for “Sahih Bukhari hadith 1000”—with the abbreviation codes explained elsewhere), and also given footnoted reference numbers which will refer the reader to more reference information and surrounding context.

VI. Extra quotes & additional translations

If more quotes are relevant for the bullet point (and there will usually be several quotes useful for each bullet point), they should be footnoted along with the source citations. Only one quote per source in a given bullet point! Additional translations of the same quote should also be footnoted.

(For V. and VI. above, the Internet version should utilize a mouse-click reference, where the hidden information pops up as a little window beside the text at the click of a mouse. If this is not technically possible, the sources and extra quotes should simply be related to another page/link.)

That’s it: nothing more is needed—for An Infidel’s Enchiridion.
For all other needs in the pedagogy of our War of Ideas with respect to the Problem of Islam, there already exists a mountain of literature out there, growing larger every day.

Postscript:

Some regular readers of Jihad Watch had taken the time and labor to attempt the construction of a handbook, although unfortunately their work-in-progress has recently been
suspended, due to the closing of the website that hosted their effort, as well as the more important fact that their labors were completely unremunerated and unsupported by more influential people in the anti-Islamic movement.

I was a part of their team at the beginning of their project; however, I found their methodology to be far too florid for my taste. Although they have developed a structure in some respects similar to the one I propose above, their exuberant styles, in my provisional estimation, sufficiently outweigh and overpower the benefits of such a structure.

Their handbook, in my estimation—given what I have seen of it thus far and given their repeated defenses of their methodology—will end up being virtually indistinguishable from the mountain of literature that already exists out there in the form of thousands of hardcopy books and website articles, and will not be an enchiridion in the truest sense:

A handy arsenal with ready-made, compact, streamlined ammunition to be fit into the guns of our ordinary interactions with the plethora of sugarcoaters and whitewashers of Islam we jihadwatchers encounter on a near daily basis in one form or another.


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