Interludes

Hugh Fitzgerald had a great idea many moons ago on Jihad Watch, to post links to YouTube audio selections (many of which had video), usually harking back -- as was Hugh's wont -- to the music of yesteryear (not only the Big Band era of the 40s, but on back through the early 20th century clear back in a couple of cases to the 1890s).

I cannot articulate better than Hugh himself the reason for these "Interludes" of his (which, by the way, he continues unabated in his own nook of the woods since he left Jihad Watch) -- only to say that its gist is to offer not only a respite from the grotesqueries of Mohammedans and their Mohammedanism, but also a reminder of the depth and breadth of the superiority of the West, glimpsed or tasted in glimmers or morsels of various musical and cinematic examples.

In this spirit, then, I offer up my own today:

The great Tom Jobim doing a duet with the charming Brazilian singer Elis Regina, singing his ingeniously poetic composition Águas de Março ("Waters of March").

(English translation of the lyrics.)

Postscript:

And yes -- in case any reader gets a bright idea: Brazilian music is part of the West -- since the West colonized the rest of the world and endowed it with as much of the virtues of the Graeco-Roman Judaeo-Christian principles as could be sustained by the Other, and as much as could be upheld by ourselves; even as the Other in various ways enriched our world (not the least of which may be felt as a tickle in the trickle-up effect of the waters of March running from South to North).  

At any rate, there are two Souths -- the sinister South of Boumedienne's Islamic supremacism (scroll down to "1974" in that link, if you please), and the non-Muslim South whose peoples and cultures, it is to be hoped, may some day find in the West a clearer-eyed succorer and champion for the cruel oppression they have suffered -- and continue to suffer -- under the imperialistic fanaticism of Mohammedans.

New terms for political science

Introduction

Terms for the political demographics of the West often revolve around the triumvirate  Leftist, Centrist and Conservative (or more colloquially, "Left, Right and Center").

To this list may, of course, be added such intensifiers as "hard-core" or "radical" (for Leftist) -- in order to highlight their increasing distance from a putative Center and to characterize the directionality of that distance -- along with "far-" or "ultra-" for the Right (itself perhaps already an intensifier of the supposedly staid Conservative), along with the curiously perpendicular phenomenon of terms groping for a way to denote, and tar, the false Conservative ("neo-con" and "RINO" come quickly to mind).  For Centrist, one rarely hears any qualifiers: imagine a "radical Centrist"!  The point of the term, of course, is that it reflects an avoidance of such partisan permutations of the political process.

The Comfortably Apolitical

Today, we wish to supplement this formula with a fourth term to be added to the common triad of Left-Right-Center:

Comfortably Apolitical.

This would be a "new type" insofar as heretofore it has not, to my knowledge, been inducted into the terminology of political science; though of course, it reflects a kind of person who has likely been around as long as there have been societies.

This type reflects the paradoxical greatness of the West, for it is a peculiarly modern Western phenomenon.  This is not to say that one cannot find in Third World societies individuals who seem to exemplify it; however, to the extent that in such societies the individual remains to a sufficiently higher degree enmeshed within the family, the clan and the tribe -- which are in such societies cultural phenomena themselves enmeshed within, or dominating, sociopolitical existence -- such people rarely if ever attain the blithely insouciant indifference and individualistic freedom which their Western counterparts enjoy so commonly and relatively easily (unless they immigrate to the West and cut their familial ties; and even then, they may never quite rid their psyches of being culturally haunted).  Nor are their numbers anywhere as high and widespread as they are throughout the West.

Thus, the paradoxical greatness of the modern West has developed a society sufficiently successful, prosperous and orderly as to accommodate, and even encourage, the profusion of the lifestyle of those who blithely don't care about politics and just want to get on with enjoying their lives and doing their necessary pragmatic activities of daily living without bothering to think macrocosmically -- whether politically, religiously or philosophically -- much at all. 

Of course, various forms of mass popular entertainment help enormously in this regard, in keeping the attention of such individuals distracted from deeper and broader questions and obligations.  But, on the other hand, they are not to be so glibly slighted or mocked, as though they were clearly and automatically inferior to those others more politically educated, who lead lives more directly responsible for, and responsive to, various sociopolitical concerns, whether local, domestic, or international -- or perhaps in varying degrees, all three.

Nor are we implying that this type is exclusive to modernity.  No doubt there were plenty of comfortably apolitical individuals lounging around during the Middle Ages (not to mention the Ancient World, and on back to Ages of Bronze, Iron and Gold).  The point is that the modern West has, by degree, been the most conducive to their formation, to the general respect accorded them to lead their lives as they please without hassle, and has in turn been affected most by their presence and integration into the general society, in the negative sense (not "negative" necessarily in a bad way) that their lack of participation in politics, and their symbiotic parasitism upon the system, has real effects on ongoing political issues, decisions and movements over time.

Sociopolitical

I have often used this term, and I certainly didn't invent it.  But I do have certain uses for it that may be distinct from what may be normally assumed. 

The first thing someone may ask is: "Why not just say 'political'...?"  The reason is that in certain contexts, I want to broaden the discussion to include what may be termed the "cultural" dimension of human existence.  While in one sense, the term political should, properly, already include the social and the cultural dimensions, it may easily lend itself to a truncated sense in the mind of my reader, and so my use of sociopolitical is meant to gently nudge him or her as a reminder of the broad scope my discussion is reflecting.

Another redundancy may be detected here as well:  why distinguish between social and cultural...?  This would be as good a time as any to palpate the subtle distinctions, and relations, among the three terms -- social, cultural and political.

Social denotes an organization of people which more often than not includes multiple cultures and subcultures.  The organization may be loose, or more consciously concerted, depending on various factors; but the norm is for the latter.

The specifics of the organization of society -- its structure, content and history -- insofar as it begins to convolve laws, are what we refer to as political (and thus, were we to deepen the details of this analysis, we would introduce yet another factor, the legal dimension).  Meanwhile, cultural may be loosely speaking synonymous with social, except that social could be said to be the cultural in its political dimension.  Thus any one of these three terms remains a somewhat abstract concept when treated alone, since all peoples are simultaneously and inescapable living existence in an interplay of all three modes of cultural, social, and political.  There is always a tension among these three vectors in any given society, and variation over time.  Islam perhaps reflects an ideal of the totalitarian fusion of all three more than any other society in history.

The Comfortably Irreligious

There have been times in history when a culture predominated, and in effect dictated how the society was formed and organized.  As the modern world has progressed (the modern world being chiefly a Western phenomenon, in turn superimposed upon the rest of the world in varying degrees), the trend has been toward society containing multiple cultures, and a unifying political organization keeping the society more or less coherent -- chiefly with the development of the nation-state beginning in the 17th century and increasing with each passing century.  This increasing coherence, in turn, has been dovetailed with an increasing cultivation of neutrality with respect to multiple cultures (and multiple religions, for religion is a cultural phenomenon).

Since indeed an important part of culture historically has been religion, the modern evolution of politics has seen the development and strengthening of a separation of religion and state, insofar as any single religion may be seen to dominate the organization of any given society. Since the human field of multiple societies has always contained multiple cultures and multiple religions, the modern West came to the conclusion that no single religion should dominate, for that would be unfair to the competing religions which co-exist.  This principle has been expanded more recently to include innumerable people who are either lax in their religion, or who have fallen away from its practice to one degree or another.  These would include the hard-core atheist on one end of the spectrum, to what may be termed, on the other end, the Comfortably Irreligious -- about whose formation and growth observations may be made similar to those we made above about its cousin, the Comfortably Apolitical. 

This category may include a whole motley aggregation of agnostics, atheists lite, lapsed Catholics, lapsed Christians in general, and those sorta-kinda Christians who may go to church twice a year (on Easter and Christmas, plus a wedding and/or funeral or two in between) -- all of whom share roughly the same attitude about religion: more or less pleasantly thoughtless indifference, unless cornered by an inquisitive pollster or neighbor or friend rudely demanding answers about "religion" and "what they believe" -- at which point the indifference may acquire some degree of annoyance and then avoidance, since the whole point of being Comfortably Irreligious is to remain as comfortable in their comfort zone as feasible, avoiding talking or thinking too much about the issue in their daily life.  (To avoid the threat of discomfort to their comfort zone, when pressed such a person might just blurt out responses that may sound superficially religious, agnostic or atheistic (depending on the stance of the questioner) -- just to get the inquisitors off their back.)  A subcategory in this regard worth noting is the "I'm spiritual I'm not religious" person who is comfortably indifferent to religion, but who may well un-self-reflectively (because of historical illiteracy and modern prejudices against religion) pursue one or another spiritual path calculated to appease a mildly gnawing existential need in the pit of his otherwise unexamined psyche.  (Needless to say -- or, alas, perhaps there is need to say -- the very specious distinction of spiritual and religious is itself a red flag signalling an illiteracy about the history of religion & philosophy.)

Laws

Finally, as we hinted above, a word may be said about laws.  The legal dimension of existence is the nuts and bolts, so to speak, or the very nerves and muscles of a society's organization (which, as we noted, is its political dimension).  A society cannot be organized without laws. And the sphere of laws, meanwhile, may be seen to extend from the physical -- their physical enforcement which includes physical punishment of those who break or resist them -- to the metaphysical: their moral underpinnings, which reach back in history into the realms of philosophy and theology.  

Thus, there is some complex tissue of contiguity between society, through its political organization structured by laws which themselves derive much of their noetic substance from philosophy and theology and not merely -- pace the materialist atheists -- from inanimate and animate matter (electricity and chemicals in human brains).  This unavoidable contiguity sets up a tension between the concerns of modern secularism, by which a separation of religion and state has become deemed to be an indispensable feature of optimal order and fairness among humans, and the claims of the religious, who rightfully point out the historical provenance of all human laws in various religions, even if some of those same religious people may seem oblivious to the problem of the multiplicity of concrete expressions of that provenance in the field of multiple cultures and religions -- a problem that has been, not without flaws (for nothing in this life is perfect), worked out through the paradigm of the "neutral umbrella" of modern secularism.

In the modern West, this latter problem has dwindled to a relatively mature (if sometimes annoying) field of discussions between individuals or groups with religious concerns, on the one hand, and those who reflect and/or represent the dominant secularism of the age, whose own values are massively respected in laws (and massively reflected in popular culture).  In the Muslim world, however -- which, increasingly, is interpenetrating into the Western world through immigration and aggressive (as well as slyly clever) Islamopologetics, and through the West's PC MC "respect" for Islam -- this latter problem has never been adequately worked out.  In fact, the worldwide trend among Muslims seems to be toward a revival of a particularly and substantively Islamic resistance to the modus vivendi achieved in this regard by the modern West.  

This modus vivendi, by institutionalizing a neutral umbrella which accommodates various differing cultures -- thus respecting their difference but not tolerating among any one of them any supremacist agenda they may harbor in terms of forcing their meaning of life upon others through laws or sedition -- has done more than any other time in history to accommodate the growing, amorphously abounding numbers of the Comfortably Irreligious and make them feel comfortable in society, rather than ill at ease (or worse), as they would under a more theocratic shadow. (Indeed, this modern secularist accommodation in terms of pop culture (movies, tv, celebrities, light journalism (think NPR podcasts and the like), music, and various vulgarized middle- and high-brow arbiters of the Arts) has become so rich and broad and massive, it is no longer the Comfortably Irreligious who feel ill at ease being themselves, but rather those who choose to be more unapologetically religious, embarrassed to admit that, for example, they may go skulking off to Branson, Missouri just to experience some wholesome Christian-friendly entertainment amid the seas-to-shining-seas of godless pop culture all around them, promoted out in the spanking sunshine of American, and Western, culture.)

Insofar as the Islamic revival resists joining the rest of humanity on its ongoing adventure of modernity, we have not so much a "clash of civilizations" as -- as George Will aptly pointed out years ago -- a clash of epochs.  And, for all the flaws and ills of Modern (Western) Progress, the answer to its defects is not the application of some Regress, according to the Fall of the Arabic Spring under Islamic Savings Time setting the clock back a millennium to a Winter of a Dark Ages all over again.

Further Reading:

A deeper analysis of the sociopolitics of the modern West

Secularism: The Neutral Umbrella

Those politically correct 1940s and 1950s!

A few months ago, thanks to the blogger Logan's Warning, I discovered information that fairly clearly indicates that even Eisenhower was PC MC about Islam (see Proto-PC MC: Those Conservative 1950s!).

In that article, I reported how on June 28, 1957, on the occasion of the opening of a new "Islamic Center", President Eisenhower

...praised the Islamic world’s “traditions of learning and rich culture” which have “for centuries contributed to the building of civilization.”

And if the reader reads the full article he will find additional affirmations equally, it not more nauseating, from Eisenhower.

It is apropos here to mention an important article which Diana West published on her blog almost three years ago -- Nation-Building in Afghanistan: It Didn't Work the First Time.

I hereby quote copiously from what West wrote in that article (the bold emphases are hers):

The United States of America has already tried improving Afghan safety and quality of life, and on a colossal scale, and it just didn't stick. And back then, between 1946 and 1979, there was no Taliban "insurgency" complicating the social work of nation-building.

This decades-long episode of US-Afghan history has been erased from our national consciousness, pricked only by the odd "remember when" news report. Such national memory loss is probably due to the fact that these US efforts to improve Afghanistan -- centered in Helmand Province, by the way, the Taliban-spawning, opium-growing region into which 4,000 US Marines "surged" this summer -- have themselves been erased from Afghanistan. Of course, for nation-building utopians such as McChrystal -- those from Right to Left who see different peoples and different cultures as interchangeable markers on a games board -- reality never tempers the fanaticism.

Back in 2002, Nick Cullather, a history professor at Indiana University, excavated our long-forgotten but long-sustained presence in "New York in Afghanistan," which was organized under the rubric of "the Helmand Valley Authority." The centerpiece of the massive project was an ill-conceived dam project-plus designed by none other than Morrison Knudsen, builder of Hoover Dam, Cape Canaveral and the Golden Gate Bridge. Cullather writes:

In late September 2001, while looking for lecture material related to the war that had just begun, I came across references to the Helmand project. It initially appeared to resemble rural development schemes I was studying in Southeast Asia, but closer examination revealed the project’s unusual scale and longevity... It came under American supervision in 1946 and continued until the departure of the last reclamation expert in 1979, outlasting the theories and rationales on which it was based. It was lavishly funded by U.S. foreign aid, multilateral loans, and the Afghan government, and it was the opposite of piecemeal. It was an “integrated” development scheme, with education, industry, agriculture, medicine, and marketing under a single controlling authority.

Money quote:

Nation-building did not fail in Afghanistan for want of money, time, or imagination. In the Helmand Valley, the engines and dreams of modernization had run their full course, spooling out across the desert until they hit limits of physics, culture, and history.
...

U.S. officials described it as “a major social engineering project,” responsible for river development but also for education, housing, health care, roads, communications, agricultural research and extension, and industrial development in the valley. The US ambassador in 1962 noted that if successful, HAVA would boost Kabul’s “earnings of foreign exchange and, if properly devised, could foster the growth of a strata of small holders which would give the country more stability.”

This billiard-ball alignment of capital accumulation, class formation, and political evolution was a core proposition of the social science approach to modernization that was just making the leap from university think tanks to centers of policymaking...

Development, economists Walt W. Rostow and Max Millikan of MIT assured the CIA in 1954, could create “an environment in which societies which directly or indirectly menace ours will not evolve.”

___________________

Yeah, right.

Surprise me for a change

Introduction:

I haven't checked the Jihadica website in about a year, and it's always a treat to see it evolving predictably (i.e., not really evolving at all) along its self-imposed paradox of a vector which combines a sincerely concerted and talented attention to real details about "Islamist extremism" around the world, with an axiomatic prejudice rendering impermissible certain interpretations of those details -- to wit, the metastasizing data of the problem of Islam around the world which that attention otherwise notices quite clearly, and studies quite diligently.

Before I get to what I found there recently, the reader might wish a little background on what the Jihadica project entails.

In an essay I wrote here two years ago, Another particular mechanism of the PC MC template, I described the Jihadica project thusly:

The folks at Jihadica focus their study of rebel militant violence on Muslim groups. A curious tension is generated by such analysis, a tension between two poles:

1) a prejudicial axiom guiding the analysis that resists unifying all the complex disparate data of various jihad groups under the umbrella of their common motivator, goal and blueprint: Islam

and

2) a genuinely and intelligently pursued scientific analysis that does not ignore or suppress the real data of these various jihad groups.

The more that the folks at Jihadica engage in their analytical project (#2), the more they amass a mountain of dots that positively scream for connection; but their eternal loyalty to the prejudicial axiom (#1) forces them to refrain from the one most rational way of connecting all those dots: Islam.

In an earlier essay which I wrote in 2009 -- Jihadica: pulullating mosquitoes, the swamp, the camel, and no cigar -- I went into somewhat more depth examining this fundamental tension at the heart of the Jihadica project:

Jihadica is an amazing website. Its contributors, from what I can gather, seem to be remarkably intelligent and learned analysts who can read (and understand) one or more of various relevant languages in the sphere of terrorism analysis—including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and probably several others.

They probably also work for various think tanks and/or government agencies, and Jihadica represents a kind of moonlighting venue for their work, as well as perhaps a useful storehouse for the fruits of their labors possibly even pragmatically related to their “day jobs”.

And yet, for all their amazing work, one gets a sense, after spending some time reading through some of their archives, of something rather odd, and monumentally misplaced about their whole enterprise...

However, because they have their “extremism detector” set on high and are apparently willing to notice a massive and globally widespread array of data indicating such “extremism”, they themselves put a paradoxical strain on their guiding axiom....

The tensional juxtaposition of Jihadica’s guiding axiom with the sheer quantity and quality of data increasingly conflicting with that axiom leads its theoreticians to resemble madly industrious taxonomists trying to catalogue and organize an explosion of data dizzyingly complex and exponential in its mutations, pullulations, variety, causes, effects and dispersal. A considerable relief of their exhausting industry could be gained by simply rejecting their guiding axiom—namely, that Islam itself is not the source of all this massively myriad data they are studying.

Their taxonomy thus acquires the burden of a great deal of needless protean complexity by their implicit insistence that Islam itself is not the problem, and that the problem is really “extremist perversions” of Islam reflecting implausibly explicable and seemingly randomly generated epidemics of “radicalization” of otherwise ordinary—and therefore of course heretofore harmless—Muslims.

Discussion:

So what did I find about a week ago when I decided to check up on Jihadica after a year?

Same old same old -- though they have got a new look, vaguely resembling a post-modern artist's impression of the rough, battle-scarred underside of a submarine or perhaps a metal military bunker; perhaps to add a bit of gritty no-nonsense "on-the-field" panache to their otherwise quasi-academic and intellectual endeavor.

At any rate, in what could have been an interesting essay examining the "scope" of the problem of Islamic terrorism ("Countering Violent Extremism, Pt. 2: Scope"), the writer, Will McCants, pretty much from the get-go makes a wrong move.

If the folks at Jihadica just stuck to their day job -- dutifully collecting and cataloguing the bewilderingly complex and ever-metastasizing taxonomic data generated by Muslim "extremists" around the world -- that would be one thing. But when they insist on supplementing that important but perhaps menial task with interpretation and analysis of what that data means, they invariably start edging out onto thin ice. This happens because, as I noted above, they tend to delimit their attempts at interepretation and analysis by an artificial stricture they impose upon themselves -- namely, the stricture that assumes, without a shred of evidence proferred to support it, that mainstream normative Islam cannot be the substantive direct source of the data about worldwide terrorism which they are meticulously amassing, organizing, interpreting and analyzing.

So in the article I mentioned above, the Jihadica analyst McCants is examining the phenomenon of the "scope" of Islamic "radicalism" and in doing so, within his first paragraph, slips on the thin ice of his paradigm. All of us concerned about terrorism wonder about its "scope" -- which, in a nutshell, means:

How many Muslims around the world are actually enabling such terrorism, and what kinds of enablement are we talking about, and how can we distinguish these aiders and abetters of terrorism from the supposedly harmless Muslims we assume must exist in large numbers (else we would be forced to face the horrible conclusion that over one billion Muslims are our deadly enemy)?

Needless to say, McCants doesn't approach the problem this way; for that would be to think outside the box (in which, alas, he is firmly and comfortably ensconced). He writes:

In my previous post, I proposed a minimal definition of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) as reducing the number of terrorist group supporters through non-coercive means. I also suggested that the spectrum of support ranges from those who are vulnerable to becoming supporters to those who are engaged in criminal activity. There are pros and cons associated with intervening in each group. The three groups at the far right of the spectrum are the easiest to identify because they have either consistently voiced their support for a terrorist organization or taken action on its behalf. Although they are extremely difficult to dissuade, focusing on them risks less blow back from the broader communities of which they are a part. There is also less risk of straying into the policing of thought crimes. Conversely, the two other groups, “vulnerable” and “radicalizing,” are theoretically easier to dissuade than the others but they are far, far harder to identify. Because they are harder to identify, focusing on them risks alienating the broader communities of which they are a part and can easily stray into the policing of thought crimes.

I lodged a comment on their website (which no one bothered to reply to, of course), responding to this attempt by McCants to deal with the problematic reality of Islamic terrorism through his curiously roundabout and surreal methodology dictated by the axioms under which everyone at Jihadica, apparently, labors. I hereby polish up my comment to make my point at this juncture:

Concerning the two layers of the onion labeled “vulnerable” and “radicalizing,” McCants writes that "they are theoretically easier to dissuade than the others but they are far, far harder to identify. Because they are harder to identify, focusing on them risks alienating the broader communities of which they are a part".

This means that we have yet another group to add to the Escher-like spiral of the problem of "Islamism" (that is, the problem artificially generated by avoiding the problem of Islam proper): namely, that apparently broader and apparently more innocent category of the all too easily alienated Muslims who resent the measures we have to take to protect our societies from their deadly fanatical brothers and sisters.

The harmlessness of this broader category is, of course, apodictically assumed by McCants without a shred of proof. After all, they must be harmless; for they number too many. The prospect that these millions and millions may be actually enabling the extremism at the heart of Islam that radiates out into the manifestations which Jihadica analysts notice on their delimited radar screens is, quite simply, unthinkable. So it is not thought. And in fact all thought is concentrated, under the Jihadica paradigm (which is just a more intense and professional version of the general PC MC that continues to addle the hearts and minds of most Westerners today) upon finding elaborate and complex ways to avoid thinking it.

And yet, although assumed to be harmless, McCants can't help but factor them in as a relevant factor in the problem of the pullulation of Islamic (sorry, "Islamist") extremism around the world. That's the unremarkable, and incessantly repetitive, paradox at the heart of the Jihadica project. reflecting the incoherently nougaty center of PC MC in general on this issue. For, being good taxonomists, as dutiful and otherwise talented students of Islamic (sorry, "Islamist") extremism, they can't help noticing the minions of dots of data that keep multiplying in dizzyingly copious ways like perpetually exploding kaleidoscopes under their lens. They notice them indeed, and they meticulously catalogue them. Then, unfortunately, they start to think about them and analyze them, under the rules of their impaired and bankrupt paradigm.

Thus, the "broader communities of which they [the "extremists" and the "potentially radicalizable" Muslims] are a part" reflects a vast population of Muslims that constitutes a broadening of the "scope" of the problem which McCants can't help but notice.

He notices, but is too afraid to venture out onto this broad terrain where, deep down, he knows its ground is riddled with holes from which will pop the multitudes of moles which our Western governments will continue to have to whack in order to keep just barely one step ahead of another 911 -- or another several 911s. McCants is timid to venture out because, deep down, he knows that it will lead him to the unthinkable conclusion: Islam itself is the problem, and thus also, as it inexorably follows, are all Muslims who support and enable Islam. I.e., McCants has glimpsed the broader horror: hundreds of millions of Muslims spread out in a diaspora all over the world in nearly every country on Earth, may be seriously part of the problem of which terrorism is the fiery flare-up popping up in various places all over the world.

So McCants shrinks back and redoubles the Escher-like complexity of the Jihadica methodology whose very raison d’être is to protect Islam, and most Muslims, from culpability.

P.S.:

An example of the subtle paradigm under which these Jihadicisits seem to be working:

In his essay on Zarqawi, "A Portrait of the Terrorist as a Young Man," another Jihadica analyst, Joas Wagemakers (praised, incidentally, by McCants in the latest essay there, "Joas' Oeuvre"), mentions two of Zarqawi's ideological idols, al-Qayyim and Ibn Taymiyya of the 13th-14th centuries, and writes this:

Although Ibn al-Qayyim is generally a favourite among radical Muslims for his uncompromising and strict views on various issues – like his teacher Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) – the fact that he was persecuted and imprisoned because of his ideas may also have inspired al-Zarqawi.

The way Joas phrases this he makes it sound as though Taymiyya's and Qayyim's ideological rivals -- scholars of the Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria at the time (early 14th century AD) -- were by apparent implication not themselves "radical extremists" and were rather persecuting Taymiyya and Qayyim for being "radical extremism". Joas gives no proof of this insinuation; it is subtly and subliminally indicated by the closely related assumptions that

1) mainstream Islam cannot possibly be intrinsically extremist itself, and that

2) any Muslims or Muslim group who persecute ostenible "extremists" (such as Taymiyya and Qayyim) must ipso facto by logical contrast, be not "extremists" themselves -- a logical conclusion that does not necessarily follow and for which proof would have to be adduced to be persuasive.

It is, in fact, a logical conclusion that is spasmodically generated when one assumes as a given the PC MC paradigm about Islam -- that Islam itself is not extremist, and that anything we deem extremist which happens to be seen to be practiced by Muslims and defended by them as Islamic, cannot in fact be Islamic, but must be non-Islamic extremism.

Who is to say that Taymiyya and Qayyim's Mamluk punishers were not themselves extremists? It's not as if we do not see every day violent clashes among different Muslim extremists the world over. And who is to say that either the Mamluk scholars, or Taymiyya and Qayyim themselves, were not simply extrapolating normative mainstream baseline Islam?

Has anyone at Jihadica actually laid out in thorough detail -- with corroborating evidence from all the relevant texts in the Koran (sorry, refuse to spell it correctly), Sunna and Tafsirs -- all the ways in which Islam differs from "extremist Islam"?

If they haven't yet done this, they are making rather sweeping assumptions as they continue assiduously their taxonomic project that ignores the Tree for the Forest as it pursues the ever-elusive species of butterfly (Latin name, the Muslimica Extremica Non-Islamica), and leaving the ground for our never-ending all-too deadly game of Whack-a-Mole.

But I suspect that Joas and his colleagues and agreeing readers at Jihadica are so deeply inculcated with their paradigm -- to wit, that mainstream baseline Islam is not extremist and that "extremism" is rather, and only, a "twisting" or "hijacking" of it -- they neither notice such insinuations when they read them nor when they themselves casually regurgitate them by dashing them off as parts of their analyses of the problem of "radical extremist Islamism" as opposed to the problem of Islam proper.

Thus we (i.e., the folks at Jihadica and by extension all PC MC Westerners) are telling the Muslims whom we label extremists what Islam is, and what the, by definition, un-Islamic extremism is which they are practicing. Indeed we are telling Muslims what Islam is, and isn’t. And, of course, under certain propagandistically opportune circumstances, many Muslims (including many Muslim “extremists”) are only too happy to let us continue this enterprise — as long as it leaves Islam qua Islam smelling like a rose.

Islamic conferences

— members of a Methodist conference, posing for a photo

What goes on at various Islamic conferences around the world?

Not, apparently, what one would expect at, say, a conference of Methodist ministers and laity (e.g., take a look at this document of the proceedings a 2011 Methodist conference in Louisiana: mostly, the activities detailed in unremarkably thorough fashion are mind-numbingly banal and boring minutiae of procedural bureaucracy; and otherwise involve efforts to help the poor through charity and outreach). 
At Islamic conferences, on the other hand, there are apparently more important things to discuss -- such as the fine points of who is the Enemy and in what contexts and under what textual pretexts is it licit to fight and kill the Enemy.

As documented at Memri.org, (which regularly translates from Arabic into English key documents out of the Muslim world), Shaikh Qaradawi presided over a discussion at a major conference among Islamic clerics (held in 2003 in Stockholm, Sweden, of all places -- Allah help us) in which he supported the following statement articulating the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in the context of the justification for terror attacks: 

It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb is not protected. Because they fight against and are hostile towards the Muslims, they annulled the protection of [their] blood and [their] property...

As we know (or should know by now), "Dar Al-Harb" is the entire non-Muslim world; and "the people of Dar Al-Harb" are all non-Muslims of the world.

I.e., the lives and property of all non-Muslims are licit for Muslims to take -- on the vague pretext that we "fight against" and/or "are hostile towards" them.

Notice too that Qaradawi doesn't say "If they fight against Muslims..." but rather he says "Because they fight against Muslims...". I.e., it's already assumed that the natural state of non-Muslims is to be fighting against Muslims and/or to be hostile towards them. 

This is a clear legitimization of terrorism by Muslims against any Unbelievers anywhere in the world where it is perceived by Muslims that those Unbelievers are "fighting against" and/or "are hostile towards" Muslims -- couched of course by Qaradawi in phraseology providing sophistical wiggle room for loopholes by which he could try to argue that he does not support terrorism against "innocent" people; etc.

Conclusion:

Take a look at the tafsir (= exegesis) of Ibn Kathir, one of the most respected and authoritative and mainstream of all Koran commentators, and read what he has to say about Koran verses 5:32-33, where he argues that the unbelief of Unbelievers is tantamount, if not equivalent, to "waging war" against Muslims.

I.e., according to this Islamic conference at which Qaradawi presided, following the mainstream logic of Islamic tradition as represented, for example, by Ibn Kathir, our very existence as Unbelievers -- as people who do not submit to Islam -- is itself, ipso facto a casus belli for Muslims to wage "defensive" war against our offensive nature as non-Muslims. For, as non-Muslims, we dare to continue to live our lives without Allah's guidance, and to organize our societies by setting up polities and laws that ignore the laws as set out by Allah in the Koran and by His Last Prophet, Mohammed, as documented in the Sunna -- and as clarified by Islamic scholars throughout the ages, from Ibn Kathir in the 14th century, to Shaikh Qaradawi in the 21st century.

Operation: You Gotta Be Kidding

A recent report on Jihad Watch, about some Iranian book making the claim that Leonardo Da Vinci had taken the Shahada (and had therefore become a Muslim), but that this historical bombshell had been suppressed by the West for centuries, had me spill my coffee and fall off the ceiling.

That takes more chutzpah and horseshit than even Dan Brown is capable of.

Then it hit me: how to explain one of history's persistent mysteries:

Rumor has it that Da Vinci was having a difficult time getting just the right facial expression from his subject, and she had several sessions in his art studio with him over several days during which he continued to feel uninspired by the Muse; until one day, almost by chance in passing a bit of badinage with her, he happened to mention on a facetious lark:

"Signorina, penso che si convertono all'Islam e di viaggio per Istanbul dove vivrò tra i turchi..."
("Miss, I think I shall convert to Islam and travel to Istanbul, where I shall live among the Turks...")

-- at which point Mona could not help but unsuccessfully stifle a smirk.

"Perfettissima! Non muovere nemmeno un muscolo...!"
("Absolutely perfect! Don't move even a muscle!")

Understanding Islam anthropologically

Someone recently noted in a Jihad Watch comments section a common phenomenon among Muslims:

Islam's inability to withstand criticism is damning and telling in the extreme.

That person then rhetorically asked

What is Islam afraid of?

The Western mind will never fully grasp the pathology of the Muslim mind, but we can certainly do better than to Occidentalize it (the sociopolitical equivalent of the anthropomorphization of God), which only tends to lead us further astray, even if it may comfort many among us who still retain residues of PC MC with the thought that, somehow, Muslims are more or less like us.

(A further tip to that commenter whose rhetorical question I quoted above would be to please try to avoid the habit of personifying Islam as though it were a human agent -- e.g. "What is Islam afraid of?" -- which only adds silly padding to insulate the questioner, and his audience, from the direct confrontation with Muslims which is the cogent point here.)

So, rather than scratch our heads and try, through psychology or common sense based on our experience, to fit the Muslim into the mold of the model of Western Man, we should pull out the theorization of our modern anthropologists. While, alas, the discipline of modern anthropology has been significantly corroded with the irrationality of PC MC as seen in the excessive neutrality and/or "respect" and even admiration for the various forms of backwardness among the primitive cultures its practitioners have been studying -- cf. that excellent study in this regard, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony -- nevertheless, there are a handful of more intelligent analysts among them (not all necessarily accepted in the proper pigeonhole of academic Anthropology) who did not tend to reduce the Other to the egophanic Western I.

First off, then, it will be helpful to note that Muslims are not recoiling from, and lashing out at, criticism of Islam on an ordinary mental level, but on the level of the pre-frontal-lobe sympathetic limbic system: the level at which the primitive polytheist shudders in the dark at the gods and demons in the shadows cast by fire in the night; the level at which he regards his totem or his fetish to be "sacred" or "taboo" and thus to be cordonned off from all "impurity".

Islam, Allah, Mohammed, the Koran (among other things) are thus in the Muslim psyche to be an inviolable circle of sacred objects to be protected from anything perceived to be negative, whether it's a physical attack or a critique or mockery, or even thoughts. Anything perceived this way is physicalized as an enemy, and the response is biochemical, pre-rational defense.

With Muslims and their Islam, we are thus not dealing with a rational mind here, but with the pre-rational mind.

Now, while other religions retain this pre-rational admiration and awe for the numinous -- see The Sacred and the Profane (Mircea Eliade), The Symbolism of Evil (Paul Ricoeur) and The Idea of the Holy (Rudolf Otto) -- they have also (par excellence, the West) long ago learned to integrate and develop noetic illumination of same, which opens up the mind and its wondrous capabilities to apply reason to pre-rational and para-rational experiences thus sublimated as "existentialism" and "mysticism".

An important by-product of reason in this regard is the evolution of mankind from being and behaving on the level of a ring of monkeys protecting their stone-&-mangoleaf shrine from Outside Attackers, to theologians and a well-educated laity (indoctrinated would be the proper, and deliciously incorrect term to use here for an intelligent religious pedagogy by which followers of a religion become relatively reasonable) who while suffering the pain of indignity at any mockery or attack on their religious symbolisms, nevertheless have learned to respond in an enlightened way -- at worst by dialing 911, at best by having pity and compassion on the mockers and praying for them.

This is why, incidentally, debates with Muslims are doomed -- unless their sole purpose is as demonstrations of exploitation of Muslim behavior by us as spectacles for the benefit of the non-Muslims among us who remain illiterate about the dangers of the fanatical and fundamentally primitive pathology of Islam. To take seriously a debate with any given Muslim would be like taking seriously a debate with a raging monkey protecting its Green Coconut God (which a Margaret Mead, Dian Fossey, or Jane Goodall would have lovingly encouraged).

The only point, and problem, of such debates, is to make sure the primate behavior of Muslims is coaxed to the surface so that the spectacle of the pathology of their sick society may have a better chance of getting through the dense skulls of our fellow Western idiots who persist in "respecting" the sick societies of non-Western culture -- with Islam being the #1 Poster Child of all Non-Western Cultures To Be Respected: if only because they are the most under the spotlight (because, of course, they keep calling attention to themselves by continuing to behead and explode).

For, perversely, according to the perverse logic of PC MC, the more the Muslims are held up for the criticism and ridicule (not to mention the condemnation) their Islam so richly and unquely among all other cultures deserves, the more our fellow Western idiots tend to resist the point of the pedagogical spectacle of such debates -- if only because such data the Muslims themselves exhibit through their words and deeds illuminated by our critiques is a force opposing the pull of the force of PC MC "respect"; and the PC MC in his increasing tensional discomfort tends to go into contortions and spasms of denial, and digs in to continue to defend the indefensible, even as the primary cause of the latter continues to metastasize all around him. 

I continue, nevertheless, to have hope (as threadbare as it seems to be getting) that enough exposure to Islam over time will have the effect of a slow stillicide to break through the irrationally thick heads of the PC MCs our our Western mainstream.

Note:

"PC MCs" include not only Leftists, but also the vast majority of Centrists, Conservatives, and the Comfortably Apolitical who abound in the modern West. Without these latter three significant proportions of the modern West's demographic, Leftists would have long ago been marginalized on this issue. And, closely related to this, the ethnicity of Muslims (however wondrously diverse it may be around the world with more colors and hues, including a couple of sticks of chalk white, than a jumbo pack of Crayola crayons) would long ago have been seen to be the irrelevant datum it is for the problems pertinent to Islam and to the seditious words and deadly deeds it generates from among too many of its followers all around the world.

The shortest sentence in the Bible.

 

The Gospel of John recounts how early in the morning while it was still dark, on the "first day of the week" (i.e., Sunday), Mary Magdalene took a walk to see the cave where the Romans had allowed the wealthy Jew Joseph of Arimathea to deposit his body; and she saw that the giant stone which the Romans had put to block the cave entrance (in order to prevent the followers of Jesus from stealing the body and then claiming that some miracle had occurred) was gone.

Mary immediately ran back to tell Simon Peter as well as the "disciple whom Jesus loved" (whom scholars assume is John himself). Peter and John went there to see for themselves. They ran there, in fact, and John in his eagerness to see, outran Peter and arrived at the mouth of the cave first. He peered in, and saw the burial linen clothes lain, but no body. He did not venture in, however, perhaps out of timidity. Peter, a little bolder, went past him and entered, and saw on closer inspection the linen clothes and the napkin for the head folded and placed apart. John followed him in, and confirmed the fact: the body of Jesus was gone.

It is at that point that the text mentions that Mary had accompanied them, and apparently had merely stood outside of the cave all this time. Peter and John at that time hied home, while Mary lingered, and wept. Soon enough, she looked into the cave, and she saw two angels sitting at places where had been lain the head and the feet of the body of Jesus.

The angels asked her why she was weeping, and she answered that "they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where to". At that moment, she turned around and saw a man behind her, but didn't realize it was Jesus himself. The man also asked her why she was weeping. Assuming the man was just some local gardener or upkeeper, Mary pleaded with him that if he had taken the body, to please tell her where he had taken it.

Then comes the shortest sentence in the Bible: one word, the most personal word, a person's given name, or what has come to be known as one's Christian name.

In response to Mary's pleading, the man she thought was just a gardener or handyman simply looked at her and said:

"Mary."

And that's all he needed to say, and she knew.

He didn't say, "It's me, Jesus! I've risen from the dead!" He merely told her, in effect, I know you by simply speaking her name -- personally, directly and familiarly.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

(Source: John 20:1-16.)

There are no seasons in the Muslim wasteland

“How can it be an Arab Spring when people are being killed every day?”

This was the recently reported rhetorical question of the Christian Patriarch of the Maronite Church in Syria.

That's Syria, where pro-Sharia Islamic supremacists are gaining a foothold.

Syria, where an Islamic cleric supporting the rebellion against Assad has issued a ruling that it is "permissible" to kill the men, women and children of the Alawite minority (a minority, this cleric adds, which all the Muslim sects "hate").

Syria, where Christians fear worse persecution from the "liberators" who wish to topple the Assad regime.

Somehow, I doubt that the Patriarch really knows the answer his rhetorical question poses, for one senses, even in his sincere dismay, a hint of the psychocultulural residues of an inveterate dhimmitude in him (e.g., when in the same article, he is reported to add: “We are with the Arab Spring but we are not with this spring of violence...”).

His rhetorical question is, thus, not ruthless enough. And that is what the wages of Islam wreaks on the minds of those it has conquered: an ultimate passivity, and an anxious hope for some form of conviviality with what is assumed, in a bleak, semi-conscious fatalism, to be an endless co-existence with Muslims.

At any rate, the answer which the Patriarch has not fully digested in all its horror we could imaginatively pen not in the words of a Thomas Edward Lawrence ("of Arabia"), but of a horribly imagined Thomas Stearns Eliot in Arab garb:

The Wasteland of Islam
by T.S. (Taslim Sarwar) "Tom" Eliot

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Jihad out of the dead land, mixing
Sharia and Shaheed, stirring
Dull skulls with spring blood.